Guest Post by Hardscrabble Farmer
There it was, without a doubt the single most beautiful day of the year, the absolute peak of Autumn, of fair weather and clear blue skies. If there were ever a moment that marked the line between what was an what was coming this was it, Nature’s clarion call, the demarcation as triumphant and immutable as full blown high noon solar eclipse on the solstice with better lighting and mind-blowing psychedelic color, this was it.
Everyone says so, it is the first thing out of the mouth of everyone you stop and speak with even if they’ve lived here eighty years, right after the ‘hello, how are you’ there is the childlike excitement of ‘have you ever seen such beautiful color?’ falling from their lips like the drift of chartreuse leaves falling in sync with the soft southerly breeze, fluttering, canting, dropping with a papery rattle on the blue-green lawns around the house.
There are as many explanations for the intensity as there are leaves on the trees- it was so dry this year, it was so warm so late, it was colder longer in the Spring than last year and the rain was especially heavy last month. It was a year good for apples, the boughs bent double like willows, of berries fat as your thumb and blue-back or crimson red, sweet corn as perfect as a child’s smile, three cuts of hay, swollen pumpkins more red than orange and still in the fields, Winter squashes the size of medicine balls, Summer calves over a quarter of a ton and still at their mother’s teat.
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