Falling for Fall

Farm Stand on the Way Home

As I write this, there’s a tropical wind full of Gulf Coast moisture, soaking into the brown dogwood leaves outside my window. It’s late September, so hot and steamy that the fire alarm went off at 6:20 this morning, and a metal picture released its tenuous grip on the bathroom wall and clattered to the tile floor.

I’m overdressed in long-sleeved top and short skirt and baggy pants, stompy shoes and socks. Almost-October should look and feel like this photo I took along Boughton Hill Road last week headed for a short visit to my hometown of Honeoye Falls, New York.

It should call for light sweaters and jackets, at least a couple of layers, definitely real shoes and not sandals or flip-flops. I should be hungry for butternut squash and wild mushroom soup, baked potatoes, black walnuts, and anything made of apples. The white lace curtains should come tumbling down. Ditto for the screen doors. It should be getting along to fireplace weather, and I should be done once and for all with mowing the grass.

And while it’s true that the impatiens are spindling and the petunias look somewhat introspective, late September here on the Cape is remarkably summery. I know it’s fall though because the grocery store has pots of violet and golden mums by the entrance, and the drug stores are full of candy and costumes, but if I never ventured out of my village, I’d think it was late summer with evening crickets and a quieter Main Street.

Upstate New York is another story. The seasons there are more defined, more intense, highly colored. Weather there is Weather: winter is cold and biting with snow upon snow; summer is hot and relentless, punctuated by thunder storms that heat up over the land and crack your ears open; and autumn is this picture: brisk and chilly with watercolor gray clouds over endless fields of rustling corn and big tangled rolls of hay.

I grew up there. It’s almost October. I want my jacket and a pair of old motorcycle boots, a long flannel skirt. I want meatloaf for dinner. Poetry by the fire. Smoke in the trees. A bare wind circling my knees. Fall.