Three years ago, I started these ramblings insightful bits of writing. I can’t believe it’s been going on this long. In this Year of the Pandemic, the coming of autumn is not quite like any other since, well, the last worldwide pandemic. Adding to the mix is widespread unrest and, of course the great fun of a presidential election. With the new season, it seems like an appropriate time to comment on the changes good and not-so-good that nature brings.
In a departure from my usual procrastination, I ordered a pumpkin spice coffee when it started appearing in mid-August. I know what you’re thinking. Wait at least until Labor Day. That makes it special. Well, guess what – it’s not that special any more, and Labor Day is really late. I grow impatient. The coffee masterminds have contributed to my unrest by making seasonal coffee changes a blur. The weather hasn’t really turned chilly yet either, but my flannel shirts and fleeces stand ready to ward off temperatures plummeting into the fifties and sixties.
Fall is still a season for apples. Londonderry is apple country, but apples too are suffering some overexposure. Apple spice everything, bravely taking on the big pumpkin lobby. Every year, I look forward to “apple cider” donuts. I think it’s the name that carries the mystique. The donuts themselves never quite reach expectations, because the flavors are, shall we say, muted at best, and they seem to dry out in a matter of hours. Oh, well. I buy and eat them anyway, just so I can say I’ve had them. My daughter and I were out at the orchard store (it’s a huge farm store and bought a bag of local ones. Truth be told, I not really a “pick your own” kind of person. I’d have been lost in the “hunter/gatherer” period. My hunting and gathering is best done at Market Basket. Back to local apples, 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 fine work for us all.
Last year, I wrote in detail about the evolution of the pumpkin. The experts tell us that pumpkin essentially has no flavor of its own – it’s only when mixed with spices that it shines. I can live with that. At Halloween, we’d carve a face – in all honesty, that’s a pumpkin’s real purpose At Thanksgiving, it would provide its last, best service and become a pie. Now everything is pumpkin. All day, every day, streaming live. Breads, ice cream, muffins, donuts, lattes, candles. They’re everywhere. We used to head to the farm stand to buy a couple of good ones for the front steps. They’d look majestic and bold until the squirrels and chipmunks laid waste to their orange glow and turn their insides into a gooey mess. I was walking by a display of “foam” pumpkins at the dollar store. I thought it might be rather funny to put a couple of those out just to toy with the wee beasties. Anyway, now you can buy real pumpkins large and small at the grocery store these days. They’re right next to the bales of hay. Wait – when did that start happening? The Great Pumpkin would traditionally fail to appear and Linus would again be deeply discouraged. Of course, we have “great pumpkins” everywhere. At a local county fair last year, someone brought a 2,500 pumpkin. It was in the paper, so I kid you not. He won the title of “Pumpkin Master” or “Pumpkin Ruler” or something noble title of that sort He used, and I didn’t believe it either, a special fertilizer for growing these massive pumpkins. And I’ve been wasting my time with “organic compost”. What do you even do with a pumpkin that size, that needs a tractor to move? Put it on display in the front yard, or bake like, a million pies? The county fair, and possibly giant pumpkins too, are probably casualties of the coronavirus this year, and the local newspaper will be forced to feature actual news on the front page.
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. We usually 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 but before they fall to the ground and some local animal or swarm of insects invade. I planted a small peach tree in one of my gardens two years ago. Last year, I had three bits of fruit about the size of walnuts. Two fell to the ground, where ants fully enjoyed them. The third I brought inside as a sort of trophy for a few days. This year, I don’t see much on it, possibly victim to the summer drought. 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 like something from a factory in Southeast Asia. Oh, wait – no. There’s a trade tariff on those.
Fall also brings a true burst of color before everything fades to white, dark browns, and eventually grays. The trees here in New England put on a vivid display, which is of course what we pay them for. 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. Most of the time, asters will come 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 even passable. Unlike other flowering plants, each mum has thousands of blossoms, and they wilt dozens a day. Who has the time to pick them over? They also have tender stalks, so repotting them means you lose big chunks of flowers.
Mixed with the excitement, there’s also a time of sadness, or longing. Coffee and my newspaper on the screened porch won’t be a “thing” again until May. The outdoor plants are looking pathetic – straggly, brown around the edges, almost begging for the compost heap. My predecessors in this house planted Lily of the Valley. It sprouts nicely in the spring, looks quite presentable until late July. Then, it turns brown and rather ugly as it dies back in August. You can’t take it out because it roots like iron, and it spreads. I’m not sure what it hasn’t been deemed “invasive”. Now is the time to put away the porch and deck furniture -umbrellas, benches, chairs. I delay this as long as possible – in some years, I’m brushing the first snow off everything. In recent years, I’ve bought winter covers for much of the furniture so I don’t have to lug it down to the basement. It’s the season for putting out mousetraps in the basement, while flocks of geese are honking overhead on their way south. I’ll have to restock the de-icer, and figure out where I put the windshield scrapers. Many seniors from around here head south to enjoy the last few weeks of hurricane season. They do a seasonal commute, get sick of packing and move down year-round, get bored with the lack of seasons and move back.
Let’s face it. Fall is not a time for children, in particular this year. School, that traditional benchmark of fall, is a vast uncertainty. “Hybrid” used to refer to cars, but how it’s school schedules. What days do they go in, and which days can parents not use the computer? Some parents are struggling to remember trigonometry, and wish they’d paid more attention twenty five years ago. Cases of facemasks arrive. How far apart is six feet? For teachers, it’s a “worst nightmare” scenario. Fall traditionally was tailor-made for us older, retired folks. The roads are less traveled and we could get into restaurants for breakfast without an hour wait. Now, of course, many of those restaurants aren’t open, or just taking small percent of their normal capacity. There’s still a world of color for us to explore – at 35 miles per hour, our preferred speed, in the Grand Marquis, and gas is cheaper. We could employ our summer deterrent, road construction to encourage social distancing. We’ll just start repaving every road in New England that wasn’t being mauled by a backhoe over the summer. And once they’re back in service, we can block off lanes randomly to dig up the shoulders. It’s really essential that we have heavy equipment dispatched to every highway and byway and keep the orange cone people busy.As the fall embraces us, savor an apple cider donut or enjoy a pumpkin spice latte while we can. Peppermint mocha is bearing down on us like a trailer truck in the onramp.
I'm Thinking...No! 