Dana VanderLugt's Blog
March 10, 2023
Origin story: Enemies in the Orchard
For most of his life, my grandfather managed an apple orchard.
We called it Grandpa’s Orchard, though technically the 200 acres of apples (plus 50-some acres of peaches, cherries, and plums) never really belonged to us, never belonged to Grandpa. My dad and his siblings were raised on that farm, and in many ways, I was, too. It’s hard to separate our family history from the trees that are now gone, from the acres of rolling land where we picked apples, took tractor rides perched on Grandpa’s lap, and built forts and played with our cousins.
While an undergraduate writing major in college, I interviewed my dad for a family history proejct I was writing focused on the orchard. My dad mentioned to me a story that had been passed on to him by the orchard’s owners: during World War II, a decade before Grandpa and his young family came to live on the farm, German POWs had been hired to pick apples.
Though that detail provided just one paragraph of material in that college project, it stuck with me and provided the seed that has grown to become Enemies in the Orchard.
We called it Grandpa’s Orchard, though technically the 200 acres of apples (plus 50-some acres of peaches, cherries, and plums) never really belonged to us, never belonged to Grandpa. My dad and his siblings were raised on that farm, and in many ways, I was, too. It’s hard to separate our family history from the trees that are now gone, from the acres of rolling land where we picked apples, took tractor rides perched on Grandpa’s lap, and built forts and played with our cousins.
While an undergraduate writing major in college, I interviewed my dad for a family history proejct I was writing focused on the orchard. My dad mentioned to me a story that had been passed on to him by the orchard’s owners: during World War II, a decade before Grandpa and his young family came to live on the farm, German POWs had been hired to pick apples.
Though that detail provided just one paragraph of material in that college project, it stuck with me and provided the seed that has grown to become Enemies in the Orchard.
