It’s actually been a year since I started these ramblings, and I take this opportunity to thank my legion, (or maybe it’s just a dozen, but I can dream) faithful readers that have brought me to this point. Not quite Hemingway, but it’s a start. With the new Fall season, it seems appropriate to comment on the magical, joyful changes that nature brings.
For example, I had my first pumpkin spice coffee just the other day. I’m late, I know. The pumpkin spice season has been in full swing since Labor Day, but I’d been putting off the tingling sensation as long as I could. We also had some pumpkin spice coffee cake. Weekly special at the supermarket. Now that the weather turned a little cooler and I’m getting out my flannel shirts, it’s time. Few of us still remember a time when pumpkin meant the orange thing on the front porch. At Halloween, we’d carve a face – everyone knows that’s what pumpkins are really for. At Thanksgiving, it would provide its last service and become a pie. Now everything is pumpkin. All day, every day, streaming live. Breads, ice cream, muffins, donuts, lattes, candles. Pumpkins are everywhere. We used to head to the farm stand to buy a couple of beauties for the front steps. Many still do as a local stand was jammed with people – mostly with small children in tow – last Saturday. Those big orange beauties look majestic and bold out front until the squirrels and chipmunks discover them and reduce them to what looks like surgery gone horribly wrong. I was walking by a display at a discount store of “foam” pumpkins. I thought it might be rather funny to put out a couple of those, but the squirrels around here have enough emotional scars. Anyway, now you can buy real pumpkins large and small at the grocery store – right next to the bales of hay. Wait – when did that start happening? The Great Pumpkin will never come now, and Linus will be deeply disappointed once again. Of course, we have “great pumpkins” everywhere. Someone brought a 2,500 pumpkin to a local county fair. It was in the newspaper, so it’s a much bigger story than Supreme Court hearings. The grower won the title of “Pumpkin Master” or “Emperor of Pumpkins” or something appropriate like that. Perhaps a cabinet level appointment is in the offing – Secretary of Pumpkins and Other Fall Vegetables. He has, and I couldn’t believe this part either, a special fertilizer he’s been developing for years for growing these massive pumpkins. And I’ve been wasting my time with “organic compost”. What do you even do with something that big? Put it on display in the front yard, or bake like, 10,000 pies? Or sell it to a coffee company and extend the Pumpkin Spice season to Valentine’s Day. No, that won’t work – we’ll have a flavor overlap and a “Game of Thrones” struggle with peppermint and cinnamon swirl.
Fall is also a time to honor the apple. Or should I say, the infinite variety of apples. Here in the land of orchards, apples too are going viral. They take up more real estate in the grocery store than the meat section. You have beef, chicken, pork, and fifty kinds of apples. Apple spice everything, going neck and neck with pumpkin. Every year, I look forward to “apple cider” donuts. I think it’s the name that sounds so magically Fallish. The donuts themselves never quite reach expectations, because the flavors are, shall we say, muted at best, and they seem to dry out like the Dead Sea Scrolls after a day or two. Never mind, I buy and eat them anyway, just so I can say I’ve had them. My daughter and I, on a trip to the farm stand, bought a bag of Mackintosh. I’m told they’re the best for Apple Crisp and Apple Brown Betty. I’m not exactly sure how Brown Betty came by her desserts, but she’s done a fine job. Well done, BB. (I do hope I’m not saying anything culturally insensitive here.)
Throughout the summer, we get a variety of fruits and vegetables that come in and out of season – strawberries and blueberries, corn-on-the-cob, tomatoes. Can’t wait for the “native” tomatoes to appear. They’re always big, intensely red, and you have to check them top and bottom to make sure they didn’t drop and the insects got them. That’s why I don’t grow my own. There’s that nanosecond window when they fully ripen and then fall on the ground or some little beasty takes a bite. I tried them in containers on the deck one year. That merely brought our winged and furry visitors a bit closer to the house, so that didn’t last. But fall brings out the remarkable as the squash family struts grandly onto the produce runway. There are big blue ones, smaller greens, browns, and oranges and tans. Some gourds are so colorful and interesting they look almost artificial. Hold it – did I say that? In print?
Fall is, for many of us, that last true burst of color before everything fades to white and grays. The trees here in New England put on a vivid display. That’s probably why Columbus selected October for his holiday. He must have been deeply into vibrant colors. It’s the first opportunity for people to over-decorate their houses since Easter. Stalks of corn, more bales of hay, and chrysanthemums are everywhere. As a gardener, it saddens me when, in mid-August, I see rows and rows of mums appearing in the nurseries. I don’t particularly like them, and gravitate more to asters, which at least have the advantage of coming back next year. Mums look spectacular for about a week, then you have to keep picking off all the dead blossoms to keep them looking ok. Unlike other flowering plants, each mum has like a bazillion blossoms, and they wilt by the hundred. Who has the time to pick them over? They also have tender stalks, so repotting them means you lose the entire outer perimeter in the process.
There’s a mixed feeling of sadness along with the joy. Coffee and my newspaper on the screened porch won’t be a “thing” again until May. The outdoor plants are looking sad too – straggly, brown around the edges, almost begging for the compost heap. It’s a time that we put away the patio umbrellas, the wicker chairs, the porch rockers. I delay this as long as possible – and some years, I’m brushing snow off everything. As I “mature”, I’ve bought winter covers for much of the furniture so I don’t have to carry it to the basement. It’s the season for putting out mousetraps in the basement, putting down the storm windows, lots of squirrels become road pizza as they desperately gathered winter provisions, flocks of geese are honking on their way south, turning on the heat, hunkering down. Many from around here head south to enjoy the last few weeks of hurricane season.
We met a school teacher friend in the grocery store one time a few years back. It must have been late August, because she spoke of her “oh s@$#” plant. It turned out to be a Rose of Sharon. She didn’t know its name, but it was her harbinger of school starting again. She’d been in getting her classroom ready. Remember that office supply store ad that was hilarious – “they’re going back”? The father is dancing down the aisle with the shopping cart, while the kids walked zombie-like behind him, shell-shock on their faces. If memory serves, “The Most Wonderful Time of the Year” was playing in the background. Let’s face it. Fall’s wonder is not for children. It’s tailor-made for us older folks. The roads are less traveled and we can get into restaurants for breakfast without an hour wait. There’s a world of color for us to explore – at 35 miles per hour, our preferred speed, in the Grand Marquis that we bought to replace the Oldsmobile. There are more of us now, and we’re all out looking at the leaves at the same time. We really should split it up. We could make a schedule for Fall Leaf Watching by state that would alleviate overcrowding, and everyone needs to stick to it. Or, we could employ our summer deterrent, road construction. We’ll just tear up every road in New England that wasn’t being mauled by a backhoe over the summer. There must be four or five somewhere that weren’t touched. The power companies could make their yearly contributions too by cutting down or trimming trees of anything remotely colorful.
So, sit back and munch an apple cider donut. Pop over to your favorite big chain coffee shop for a fresh pumpkin muffin baked in New Jersey. Put an Apple Crisp in the oven, savor the aroma, and say a quiet memorial tribute to Brown Betty, in the great beyond of baking. Hang some Native American corn on the front porch. The birds will have it stripped in no time. Or better still, whip up a batch of Native American pudding. Enjoy a Pumpkin Spice Latte, because Peppermint Mocha is bearing down on us like a tractor-trailer on the interstate.
I'm Thinking...No! 