Pumpkin Spice coffee has been out on the shelves and at the local coffee shop for a while now, so although we’re still technically in summer, it is creeping up on the time that I write my incredibly popular “Ode to Fall”. In this writing, I like to celebrate all of the seasonal delights that make us happy to be alive. For example, in just a few weeks or so, the leaves will turn their beautiful colors. The harvests are coming in, with lots of vegetables fresh in farm stands and grocery stores. I could write an “Ode to the Squash”, but that would be playing favorites. Over the years, we’ve had to limit squashes in our household because the Princess doesn’t like them, at least the native ones. She also doesn’t like bacon or whipped cream either, so her pallet is highly suspect, but I digress.
This has been a tough year for agriculture here in the Northeast with severe droughts, as it has in most of the country. Either way too much rain or not nearly enough. I suppose it could be worse. The West is again going up in flames, as are southern France, Spain, and Portugal. That means, if you’re an economist, that because apples will be in shorter supply, the price of gas will go up. I know – I don’t see the connection either, but just you wait, it’ll happen. Londonderry is apple country, despite the reported shortages this year. 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. But 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 just around the corner from us) and bought a bag of local apples. I’ve never really been a “pick your own” kind of person. As a child, my mother would take us out blueberry picking. I’d eat a few of the better-looking ones, and then just pick enough for show. A friend of mother’s wanted me to pick raspberries for her to take to market. She was offering 15 cents a quart, which given one could pick three quarts an hour was, even for a twelve-year-old, less than minimum wage – in Haiti. I realized early on that I’d have been pretty poor in the “hunter/gatherer” period. My hunting and gathering works best in the supermarket aisles. Back to local apples, I’m told they’re the best for Apple Crisp. Imported apples aren’t quite the same. My great uncle Herbert would tell of the glorious past, when they’d uncover a barrel of apples and the whole house would be filled with the aroma. My mother would point out that, a) we haven’t bought apples by the barrel since the 1920’s, and b) just maybe as he was in his mid-eighties, perhaps his sense of smell had diminished. No, he was sure that wasn’t it.
Several years ago, I wrote in detail about the evolution of the pumpkin. The experts tell us that pumpkin essentially has little 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. That, of course, was many years ago and civilization was in its prime. Now everything is pumpkin. The market is flooded with pumpkin. All day, every day, streaming live. Breads, ice cream, muffins, donuts, lattes, candles. It’s everywhere. We used to head to the farm stand to buy a couple of good ones for the front steps when the Princess was little. 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 comical 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 – the front pages of the local newspaper are all over this. At a local county fair, someone brought a 2,000-pound pumpkin several years back. It was, as I said, in the paper, with a picture, so it must be real. He won the title of “Pumpkin Master” or some such impressive title. He used, and I didn’t believe it either, a special fertilizer for growing these massive pumpkins. I keep asking myself, how practical is a pumpkin that requires a tractor to move it about? And who would spend time developing a fertilizer for growing massive pumpkins? To put it on display in the front yard, or bake like, a thousand pies? I don’t know if these giant pumpkins fell victim to the pandemic because they disappeared for a year or two, but perhaps they’ll make a comeback this fall, along with county fairs. I’ll keep you all posted if there’s something in the paper or on the internet.
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 flavorful, and you have to check the top and bottom to make sure they didn’t drop and 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 ants invade. I planted a small peach tree in one of my gardens four years ago, now. 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 trophy for a few days. This year, I didn’t see either blossoms or fruit, possibly a victim to the summer drought, but the tree has grown considerably taller, so perhaps that’s the trade-off. 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 almost look like something from a factory in Southeast Asia. Oh, wait – no. We’re still not importing those.
Fall also brings a true burst of color before everything fades to dark browns and eventually grays and whites. 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. First there’s Halloween. Then, as the cobwebs and skeletons disappear, the 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 by the dozen every day. Who has the time to pick them over? They also have tender stalks, so repotting them means you lose big chunks of plant.
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 has roots like iron, and it spreads. I’m not sure why it hasn’t been deemed “invasive”. Coming soon will be 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, although as we’re now down to one car, and it sits snuggly in the garage for the winter, I don’t often use the 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 usually a time for exuberant joy for children. School, that traditional benchmark of fall, is a vast uncertainty. Most everyone is back in school full time, so the “hybrid” guesswork is pretty much over. Charitable groups are giving out backpacks, and retailers are closing out the “back-to-school” sales. Cases of facemasks arrive, but we’re not really using them full scale as we were last year. For teachers, it might be slightly less anxious than past years, but there’s a severe teacher shortage, as with every other profession. Who knows what adults will be standing in front of classroom across the country. Fall traditionally was tailor-made for us older, retired folks. The roads would less traveled (which is good because they’re all still under construction), and we could get into restaurants for breakfast without waiting an hour. Now, of course, many of those restaurants aren’t open – they sadly couldn’t survive the pandemic. And those that are seem to be understaffed too. There’s still a world of color for us to explore – at 35 miles per hour, our preferred speed, in the twenty-year old Buick, but we can’t go far because gas is, well, exorbitant, thank you very much Exxon/Mobil, Shell, and Sunoco. It’s really essential that we have heavy equipment dispatched to every highway and byway and keep the orange cone factories humming and the folks that make the “Road Work Ahead” signs really, really busy.
As the fall embraces us, savor an apple cider donut or enjoy a pumpkin spice latte while we can. Peppermint mocha will be just around the corner.
I'm Thinking...No! 