I’m a city person, but there’s one bit of rural cosplay I can’t resist | Emma Brockes

The temperatures fall, and the kids and I - as if hypnotised - find ourselves driving out of town for some ritual apple-picking

It was a long weekend in New York last week, where the schools closed for the Jewish New Year and New Yorkers reckoned with an annual tradition. Let's go apple-picking," someone says, and every year you insist you'll resist. The 80F (27C) heat; the dust; the bumper to bumper New York plates; and the task itself - picking sodding apples you will never, ever make into a pie (when, in your entire life, have you ever made a pie?) - none of that matters. Like a trigger from a hypnotist, hear those words and you, a city person, are compelled by some law of physics to rent a car, identify a farm and drive out to fulfil your autumn quest in a jacket too warm for the day.

This year, we tried to at least use our years in the trenches to make the experience less onerous. Drive 45 minutes out of town to a field in New Jersey and you'll find yourself less in a farm than a giant car park. (This is the same, semi-metropolitan zone that three months hence will offer ski slopes with 3cm of snow, warmed by the heat of 8 million New Yorkers). This year, we would do it properly and drive two and a half hours north west into rural Pennsylvania. We would stay with friends who knew what they were doing. We would find the one apple-picking experience that, unlike that of all the other cosplaying city folk, would bring us convincing insights into rural life.

Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist