AUTUMN LOVE

I’ll be honest – this is just going to be a love-fest of all things autumn.  Warning –shameless fanaticism.
 
Each early autumn, I talk a friend or two in visiting the apple orchard south of my small town. I make them walk the dirt-avenues lined with squat trees with me, plucking a different apple off of the low twisted branches. A dark shiny red here. A pale speckled one there. A green and round one there.  We aren’t sure if it is allowed, but we sample as we go—chucking the apple to the back of the orchard after a bite or two. I also like kicking the fallen apples and stomping hard on the half-rotten apples. With each foot-fall, there comes a pleasant crunch or pop of fruit-flesh. And I don’t even mind sharing the place with the greedy bees.  I never actually pick and buy the apples off the trees;  we head inside where they are captives--neatly bundled and labeled. But I still like walking the rows, feeling a connection to where the apple begins.
 
The last couple of years, I’ve bought my pumpkins at this orchard too. It seems a bit early. Usually I don’t like to mix my apple celebration with my pumpkin celebration – wanting to give each some of its own time. But this year it just made sense. I tend to gravitate towards the stranger, less-traditional pumpkins, and load them in my wagon (with the man at the weigh-and-pay informing me that all my picks are really gourds and not pumpkins. Duly noted.)  White, squat, yellow, multi-colored, striped, etc.  They have now found a home huddled and stacked in the corner of my side porch.
 
We also stop by a local mum farm to pick out bushy flower pots of orange, and yellow, and scarlet.  We barely can fit our “harvest” into the car. Gallons of cider and jars of apple butter begin rolling around the floorboard.  While I’m not sure where we would fit them, I find myself regretting my decision to skip buying the baby gourds.  In the past, I could spend an inordinate amount of time at the baby gourd bins. I like to pick each one based on their uniqueness. But there are so many!  And they are all splendidly deformed, misshapen, warty, swirled – like mutant vegetables. The children of one of my friends play with her gourd collection as if they are strange aliens in an intergalactic battle.  So later that week, I pick up a bag at Target – letting them choose the assortment this time. And my home feels a little more ready for autumn. 
 
It’s not just the sights of fall that bless me. I love the smells too.  Walking the trail by my house kicks up a scent that reminds me of the Montana mountains. Not sure why.  But there is something earthy, gritty, decaying, that reminds me of that summer in Glacier Park.  And inside, a mixture of cider and spices gently bubble on my stove. Call me wasteful, but half of the reason I buy cider is for simmering.  And then there is the taste of fall.  Like a pumpkin-glutton, I gobble up anything and everything spicy-orange.  What can pumpkin be mashed into -- lattes, ice cream, bread, muffins, soup, dip, rolls, butter—give it to me!
 
It cracks me up that everyone evaluates the leaf-color show each fall—judging one to be more brilliant than the last. But I never see the big difference. It always seems spectacular to me. On my semi-regular walks, I veer left or right if it means walking through dry, crunchy leaves. And have you noticed that the blue of the sky is so much richer and deeper than any May-or-June-blue could be. It seems like the slant of the afternoon sun is lusher as well. I stop in front of someone’s house the other day to take a picture of their tree – it was a perfect mixture of orange, yellow, and shiney brown leaves—all trapped in the same multiple-personality tree. (I really hoped they were not at home.)  I also keep a collection of brown things in a box to put out on the coffee table every year.  Pods, nuts, dead spikey blooms, seed balls, -- ok so I’m not really sure what they all are. But they are “fall” to me. I search for things to pick up on my walks and stuff them in my pockets. Nothing thrills me more than the glossy shell of a buckeye in my pocket that I can rub with my thumb– like a magic lantern of sorts.  It never seems to lose its sheen.  And if you are a lucky treasure-hunter, you happen upon those weirdly bumpy hedge-apples scattered along the ground. But it’s not brown, orange, yellow, or red so I don’t pick it up. But I do wonder how it would look hanging out with my baby gourds inside or on the porch with the adult gourds-who-disguise-themselves as pumpkins.

I don’t even mind that night starts dropping its darkness earlier and earlier each day. It only emphasizes the warmth of home. As a college student,  I remember driving home from college late on Friday nights and turning the corner and seeing the kitchen window lit up from the inside – usually steamy from whatever food was being boiled, roasted, sautéed, or fried.  I had the same warm feeling about golden windows last year when I trick-and-treated with my nephews. (First of all, do neighbors enjoy each other like this at any other time of the year?!?!?  I love Halloween for this reason – people are opening doors and greeting each other throughout the evening.) And as the festivities progressed, and the sun dipped low, each house looked even more inviting with windows aglow.

 
I’m sitting here and writing this on a sunny but chilled afternoon. The assertive wind is sweeping up the already brown and curled and deceased leaves. They scurry, scuttle, scrape the front sidewalk in sudden stampedes. Love that sound! Stay a little longer fall. I want to draw you out for months and months. Thanksgiving is the cap, I know, for all of the abundance of the season.  But I won’t wait until then to give my God thanks for all that blesses me and draws me toward Him-- the Creator and Provider and Artist in this great world. Thank you!