Yes, I know. It’s that time again. There are bright spots – the young folk are back in school. The nights (and days) are cooler. The summer traffic is easing. And the trees are turning color. Out come my fleeces and flannel.
I’m now into my third or fourth pumpkin spice latte. I’m late, I know. The pumpkin spice season began in mid-August, but I’d been putting off the tingling sensation as long as I could. Elizabeth, when she’s home, picks us up some pumpkin munchkins, and there are weekly pumpkin specials at the supermarket. Few of us still remember a time when pumpkin meant the orange thing on the front porch – now it’s in everything from doormats to napkins. At Halloween, we’d carve a face – everyone knows that’s what pumpkins are really for. At Thanksgiving, it would provide its last measure of devotion and become a pie. Now, it’s all day, every day, streaming live from pumpkin patches across America. Breads, ice cream, muffins, donuts, lattes, candles. They’re everywhere. We used to head to the farm stand to buy a couple of beauties for the front steps. They’d look majestic and bold until the squirrels and chipmunks discovered them and reduced them to what looked like an orange version of ER. I was walking by a display at a discount store, featuring a display 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 corn stalks, door wreaths, and bales of hay. Wait – when did that start happening? We don’t even need the catalogs for Fall accessories. Pretty soon, Walmart is just going to start dumping Fall stuff on our doorsteps to reduce inventory. The Great Pumpkin will really fail to appear and Linus will be deeply disappointed once again. Of course, we have “great pumpkins” everywhere. At a local county fair this year, someone brought a 2,500 pumpkin. It was in the paper, so I’m not making this up. He won the title of “Pumpkin Master” or “Pumpkin Ruler” or something appropriate like that. He has, and I didn’t believe it either, a special fertilizer for growing these massive pumpkins. And I’ve been wasting my time with “manure and organic compost”. What do you even do with pumpkins or squash 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 also is a season for apples. Here in the land of orchards, apples too are going viral. 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 has such cache. The donuts themselves never quite reach expectations, because the flavors are, shall we say, muted at best, and they seem to dry out faster than homemade cookies. Never mind, I buy and eat them anyway, just so I can say I’ve had them. Elizabeth and I were out at the orchard store (it’s a huge farm store attached to the largest orchards in the area) and 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. I do hope I’m not saying anything culturally insensitive here. Last fall, she asked me to pick up a bag of Honey Crisp apples, because they rumor has it they are superior for, well, whatever she’s baking, she’s assured me. I picked up what I thought was a smallish bag. I got to the cashier, who smiled pleasantly at me and said, “That will be $21.55.” In disbelief, I pulled a twenty from my pocket and realized that wasn’t enough. Who knew that apples are roughly the price of uncut diamonds?
Throughout the summer, we get a variety of fruits and vegetables that come in and out of season – strawberries, raspberries and blueberries, corn-on-the-cob, tomatoes. Can’t wait for the “native” tomatoes to appear. They’re always big, intensely red, intense flavor, 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 for some little beasty to take 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, along with colorful gourds, 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 with bumps and spots that they look almost artificial. Hold it – did I say that?
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. Now, he’s been supplanted by Native Americans, which I judge to be only fair as we read what he did to them when he got here. But in his favor, Columbus, 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’re sure to lose the entire outer perimeter.
Mixed with the excitement, It’s also a time of longing. Coffee and my newspaper on the screened porch won’t be a “thing” again until May. The outdoor plants are looking truly sad – straggly, wilted brown around the edges, almost begging for a merciful trip to the compost pile. It’s a time that we must 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. I’m putting on fleeces over jerseys, so you know the weather is turning. I went to replace a white jersey the other day, and there’s nothing in the stores. What is left is either jumbo extra. extra, extra large or something that would fit a toddler. Dang – I missed the sale window. Flannel shirts and sweaters won’t be far behind.
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 fall. 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 is not a favorite time 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. Except that there are now more of us, 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. The state police would have the power to cite drivers for illegal leafing. 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 make their contributions too by cutting down or trimming trees of anything remotely colorful.
So, make sure you sit back and munch an apple cider donut. Pop over to a favorite coffee shop for a fresh pumpkin muffin baked and trucked in from New Jersey. Put an Apple Crisp in the oven, savor the aroma, and say a quiet prayer to Brown Betty, patron saint of fall baking. Hang some Native American corn (with a nod to political correctness) 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 snow blower sales at the hardware store.
I'm Thinking...No! 