Naches Heights in the Yakima Valley is just east of the Cascade Mountains, the part of Washington state where the lush green of the mountains gives way to a more barren, arid landscape that has always struck me as uniquely western. This is also apple country, where neat rows of apple trees are framed by canyons and ever-bigger brown hills that lead eastward to the Columbia River. And beyond that, the great expanse of the wild west, the empty wildness of the frontier.

I’ve often thought about this terrain while standing over apple bins in Boston and on the Vineyard, inspecting the fruit for the little Washington apple sticker. If the sticker is there, the apple may have come from a tree in Naches Heights. Maybe a tree planted by my great-grandfather, Houk Erbine Newman.

Washington apple country. — Laura Brown

Erbine was a Washington apple man through and through. In 1923, he started an apple orchard in Naches Heights, where the soil is good for apple growing. He established irrigation canals and spent his days “setting the pipes,” moving the aluminum irrigation pipe system around the orchard.

Erbine is remembered as a man who lived up to his awesome name. He was disciplined and hard-working, and he met his wife, Lucy, in an ice cream parlor. He visited the Middle East and, finding the apples there mealy, made it his mission to get Washington apples to that part of the world. He hiked to the top of Mount Adams when he was 85.

Erbine died when I was a few years old. But he lived on through his orchards, which I came to know well, thanks to cider weekend.

Every October since the late 1970s, Erbine’s children, their children, and so on down to a fifth generation of Newmans have come to the orchard and hauled out the cider press to turn bins of leftover apples into the freshest, sweetest cider you can imagine. My family moved to the Seattle area when I was 10, and that fall I went to my first cider weekend. That year everyone was wearing bright green shirts celebrating an anniversary — Keep On Pressin’ On! the shirts said.

I loved everything about cider weekend. I loved the work to be done in the crisp fall air, apples to be chopped with the old-fashioned, hand-cranked machine, the resulting mush pressed, then the cider filtered through a cheesecloth into bottles and jugs that everyone had been saving for months. I loved the ever-present springer spaniels that chased apples instead of tennis balls. I loved seeing my grandmother in the orchards where she grew up, surrounded by her two brothers, each of them kind and funny. I loved the ubiquity of apples, the rows and rows of trees, the apples on clocks and light switches and art around the house, and the feeling that this was part of my heritage. We are apple people.

Six summers ago, after years of cider weekends, I drove east over the mountains and kept going, straight across the country to graduate school in Boston and, ultimately, to work on Martha’s Vineyard. I haven’t been to a cider weekend since, though the Newmans kept on pressin’ on. The old-fashioned cider press was replaced with an automatic one, sore muscles not worth that particular tradition.

Almost two years ago my lovely, funny grandmother died, just a few months after her older brother. As we gathered at the funeral I studied family pictures with a new intensity: my grandmother posing in the orchard with one of the early generation spaniels, Erbine wearing overalls and watering the trees.

A few weekends ago my mom and my sister and the rest of the Newmans gathered again for cider weekend. Mom called me afterward and gave me the report. They pressed a bin of honey crisp and a bin of Jonagold, her cousin Randy went rogue and made cider with some Granny Smiths, which was declared too tart by some and delicious by others.

Then she told me that the Newman orchards had been sold. The apple industry is tough, she said. My grandmother’s younger brother and his son had taken on the business, but it was difficult and time for them to move on. Most of the trees Erbine planted have been replaced, she added. Cider weekend would go on, because there is never a shortage of extra apples in Yakima Valley.

“Isn’t this kind of sad?” I asked my mom, knowing the answer. My mom loves the orchards as much as anyone, had just told me about watching the sunrise over the trees. It is sad, she said. The end of an era.

I mulled over the news, aware that it was easy to be sad about this change when I wasn’t actually trying to make a living on the apples.

But there was more to my sadness. Guilt and regret that I missed my grandmother’s last few cider weekends, homesickness, the complicated feelings that often come with living 3,000 miles away from my immediate family, our 17-year-old cats, dear friends, those apple trees. Living so far from home, I find myself wanting everything to stay the same back home while I’m away. I want to feel that there is something to come back to, something I have been a part of. As I make my way alone in a new and faraway place, it becomes more important to feel like I’m still rooted somewhere.

I don’t know what Erbine Newman would tell me about this, but I can learn from what he did. He created a life doing what he loved in a beautiful place. He took a risk. Apple trees take time to grow, and they are vulnerable to frost and bugs and disease. All these years later, the orchard is still there, no matter who owns it. The family still gathers. And the view from the orchards, those hills, is the same as it always has been.

If I close my eyes, I can still see that sight from anywhere I happen to be. I can see Erbine back in his overalls, pruning his trees to allow for new growth.