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20 | SUN LAKES LIFESTYLES | SEPTEMBER 2016 | Welcome September! Summer certainly is not gone, but it is time to make each day count as cooler weather and shorter days will be on their way. As promised, the committee has added titles in the audiobook section and the large print section. Please be aware that the lowest stocked shelf in the right bay of the large print section is large print westerns. We also now have a most current inventory of audiobooks on the Sun Lakes web page. Go to sunlakescc.com, click on "committees," click on "Library Advisory Committee," click on "Audio book availability." Note: you must be registered on the web page to get to this section. Did you meet or exceed your reading list for summer? I read some interesting books. I have my Dad now looking at books in the large print section, although his favorites are history. Sept. 16 is POW/MIA Appreciation Day. We have many veterans at Sun Lakes and we thank them for their service. But we also must remember those who never came home, some of which are POW/MIA. Sept. 26 is Johnny Appleseed Day. I just finished a book At the Edge of the Orchard that included Mr. Appleseed as a character, his actual name being John Chapman. Born 1774 in Massachusetts, he decided to leave the family at 18 to go west. The frontier then was anything west of Pennsylvania. After living a nomadic life for about 10 years, he apprenticed as an orchardist with nurseryman Mr. Crawford in Pennsylvania. In the Ohio territory in the early 1800s, homesteads of 100 acres were offered to settlers. To prove their intention of permanence, the families had to have planted 50 apple trees in three years (apple trees can take five to 10 years to mature to fruiting). Johnny Appleseed planted his first nursery south of Warren, Pennsylvania. Many more followed. It's estimated he traversed 100,000 square miles in his life selling apple seedlings and saplings to settlers. This included Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and northern West Virginia. He gave away apple seeds, recovered from cider pressing, for free. Being an entrepreneur, in Ohio and later Indiana, he also bought land, planted orchards, and sold it to settlers. He was also religious, belonging to The Free Church. This church espoused an austere life with few material things. John Chapman is depicted in contemporaneous drawings as traveling barefoot, wearing worn pants and a burlap sack with holes cut for head and arms, held up by a rope. He was also a vegetarian, as the church taught not to harm animals. It is said that in his travels he hummed or sang the Swedenborgian hymn from his church ("The Lord is good to me, and so I thank the Lord…"). John Chapman was known in his lifetime, but really became part of popular culture after his death in 1845. He is buried in Fort Wayne, Indiana. There's a Johnny Appleseed museum in Urbana, Ohio. One of the last apple trees planted by Johnny Appleseed still grows in Nova, Ohio. Enjoy your summer reading! Library Committee

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