In late September sugar occasionally coalesced out of the kiln-baked soil in my grandparents’ plum thicket, suffusing the fruit with just enough sweetness to fend off puckers and spitting. The plums were the size of cheap green olives, plenty hard for sling-shot ammo until fall, when the first adventurous winds tobogganed down the mountains and playfully knocked them down. A presidential administration might come and go before any survived till edibility. But when the marauding frosts lurked above 6,000 feet for a precious extra couple of weeks, a slippery fermenting mass of ripe purple bon-bons enticed mule deer down from the hills to get plum drunk, silly as kindergartners at an all-you-can-eat cotton-candy buffet.

Grandma Bell kept canned foods in the dark recesses lining her dirt-floored cellar, where a pump always in need of Grandpa’s tinkering stayed half a step ahead of the ditchwater that seeped through the walls. Although Grandma had a Tibetan monk’s sense of frugality, I don’t remember that she ever made preserves from her plums – they may have been just too fickle – but Mom remembers a year when their pig gorged on so many it nearly reenacted the exploding-glutton scene in Monty Python’s “The Meaning of Life.” This pig sparks another memory of Mom’s, of a year when she and her two brothers rescued a pair of orphaned mallard ducklings on the ranch and fed them so many earthworms they couldn’t close their greedy little bills. They survived the experience, still lean and coursing with enough wildness to quack up into the southbound migration that fall.

Walking home during the first comfortable weeks of autumn, Mom meandered through the apple grove, where beckoning mottled-red fruit bent the branches so low they almost touched the tall grass, more dusty yellow than gold in the brief interlude before the snows pounced. Maybe they were a hardier variety of pioneer cowboy apples, or maybe her memories are filtered through the perfecting lens of time, but Mom doesn’t recall them having worms, only sweet juice as dessert to a one-room-schoolhouse day in the austere 1930s. They may well have been planted in the 1880s by some veteran of Antietam, thirsty for the magical elixir that a perfect hard cider can be.

Johnny Appleseed was a real man, John Chapman, who traveled the young nation from the 1790s creating fenced apple nurseries. These were in effect operated as some of America’s first agricultural cooperatives, selling trees to neighbors on shares. In an era when contaminated water was a relentless killer, hard cider was a pure, mildly inebriating beverage that also provided a way to package and preserve many of the nutritional benefits of apples. Cider mills were scattered across the country, and provided Chapman with free seeds to encourage the planting of orchards.

The 20th century brought more immigrants from Germany, with that nation’s beer cult. And then Prohibition became the final blight on the cider business. Today, if people think of cider at all, it is as a less refined form of apple juice, an autumn novelty of no consequence.

There is a sensation like biting into a crisp, tart apple when you sip a great hard cider, a rapturous transportation into an idyllic fall morning – perhaps my grandparents’ orchard where I can still imagine the frost evaporating off into white vapor, a bright crescent moon looking close enough to touch still floating high above the sage- and pine-clad mountains. Like a good wine, a well-made cider encapsulates the best of its birthplace – I think I first could imagine England after my first taste of Woodpecker, a medium-sweet cider available from importers such as internetwines.com.

Most mass-market ciders available in grocery stores have far more in common with wine coolers than legitimate cider, being a carbonated concoction of apple juice and other ingredients. Thank heavens, we’re lucky here in the Pacific Northwest to be near the world’s most celebrated apple-growing region and several new artisan cider makers. We even have one well-regarded maker, Ford Farms Cyderworks, operating on nearby Sauvie Island, qualifying as local for those of us who aim to buy our food from suppliers within 100 miles of home. Another, Wandering Aengus Ciderworks, produces three ciders ranging from dry to medium sweet near Salem. Links to both can be found on the Web site of the Northwest Cider Society, www.nwcider.org.

Mom made applesauce this month, another way to preserve and enjoy the essential goodness of fall. Weeks from now, as the rain pounds down, we’ll open a jar and relive these perfect weeks of starry nights, dewy dawns and shirt-sleeve afternoons. I know my daughter, spending an afternoon learning at Grandma’s side, will always keep a perfect apple in her heart.

Matt Winters, editor of the Chinook Observer, lives in Ilwaco.