Lagusta Yearwood remembers her mother with her latest innovation at Commissary, a vegan oasis in New Paltz. Here’s where the mitzvah wall (the word means “good deed”) comes into play: A customer can purchase a treat of any sort for anyone who may be short of cash or merely in need of a pick-me-up. The customer can describe someone as imaginatively as they wish – a lonely vegan, a kilt-wearing Scot yearning for a good cup of tea, a blue-eyed dog-lover – and post their offering in a note to the wall. When someone matching the description comes along, they can claim their iced coffee or pickle plate or macaron.

It’s a classic of its type: a Silk City Diner, known in its day as the Cadillac of diners. Roughly 1,500 of them were turned out by the company between 1926 and 1966. The counter’s original Formica top bears the dark wear marks of hundreds of thousands of elbows bent over as many cups of coffee.

The way he grows his trees, gathers his apples and makes his cider recalls the vital role that the apple once played in American life, when it was known as “the drink of patriots.”