Apple picking time

Holly and I went apple picking last weekend, just as we do nearly every fall, only this year we got a jump on the apple season. Normally we forget to go until Columbus Day weekend, which is the last weekend most orchards are open, and then we scramble to find one whose website confirms it still has apples available for picking.

This year, we thought of it early, and we had our choice of locations. I’d never even gone in early October before, let alone late September. We felt so organized, so ahead of the curve.

And somewhat to my surprise, it was markedly more fun than usual because the apples, while plentiful, were less abundant than they are in mid-October. So we had to actually search a little bit to find our bounty, which made it more like an Easter egg hunt, more adventurous. In mid-October, apple picking is the proverbial low-hanging fruit. Also high-hanging fruit, mid-hanging fruit, and fruit all over the ground. It was fun to go at a time that the task still required a little expenditure of effort.

Actually, any kind of intrigue or challenge makes apple picking more fun. In general, it’s one of those things you do because it’s seasonally appropriate but not really all that interesting a way to spend the afternoon. I love being outside in the fresh air and sunshine of an apple orchard on a fall day, but I’d much rather be hiking than standing around collecting apples. And it takes so little time before the bags get so heavy. I also have a guilty little secret in that I have what can best be described as pedestrian tastes when it comes to apples. I like soft, sweet apples, whereas New England orchard apples tend to be crisp and tart. Intellectually, I know that’s what sophisticated apple consumers favor, but I like the round supermarket Macintoshes with the almost squishy pulp.

While I wandered amidst the trees trying to convince myself that surely I must be getting at least a modicum of physical exercise, Holly filled two bags, one with Cortlands and one with Macouns. Back home with dinnertime approaching, Holly made an apple crisp. I cut up the apples for her, wondering as I do every year while making apple crisp whether Los Angeles street gangs make a dessert they call apple Crips, but Holly did the rest of the work: mixing the topping, melting the butter, blending in the egg. Emerging from the oven an hour later was a hot, fragrant, spicy apple crisp, a perfect way to end the weekend.

Holly and I each had one serving; Rick, who avoids desserts, tried just a bite; and Tim ate the rest. Holly mildly scolded Tim for eating so much of it, but I think she was secretly flattered. If she wants to make another one, we could always go again. There’s still nearly three weeks left of the season. And surely I can manage one more afternoon of apple picking, even if I still maintain that as leisure time activities go, it’s more picturesque than fun. It’s a decent way to spend an autumn afternoon. And the apple crisp – or apple Crips, if you’re a gang member – makes it all worthwhile.

November elegy

I wish November could last forever.

But then, almost every year I wish November, or at least the first two weeks of it, could last forever.

This month in particular, though, it’s increasingly obvious that we are in the midst of the most perfect few weeks of the whole year. October impresses with warm days and blazing colors, but in November, the pale gold sunlight streams through the bare branches and slants across the burnished dying grass on the fields. Mild days like we’ve had this week seem like a remarkable gift this late in the season, especially after the snowstorm with which October ended. I’ve gone running in temperatures in the mid-50’s the past few mornings, and it seems like such an unexpected bonus.

This is a quiet time of year, a time for in-gathering. Fall sports are wrapping up. The school year is well under way; the kids are comfortably established in their classroom routines, but it’s still too early for major projects or productions. The report cards, conferences and concerts that mark the end of a term are still several weeks away.

And just as far away, mercifully, are the holidays. Well, not quite. Thanksgiving is next week, and I should already be planning the menu and table settings, but it feels like even that can wait a few more days, maybe ‘til the weekend. As for Christmas and New Year’s festivities, I won’t even think about that until we’ve finished cleaning up the kitchen after Thanksgiving dinner.

This is a quiet week. I’m immersed in work and community events, and fitting in as much time outdoors as I can while the weather is still so mild. With the early sunsets, the filtered November daylight seems all the more vital.

Next week, I’ll start thinking about Thanksgiving, and then figuring out the December schedule with all its parties and events, and then Christmas itself. This week, I’m just savoring the quiet and peace and beautiful days of mid-November.

Summer fruits

I’m eating one last plum. One small, soft, juicy, purple-black plum, its pulp sweet and cold, its skin tart and fibrous. One last plum before the summer fruit season ends.

Many of my friends talk about the mixed feelings of changing over their wardrobes from summer to fall: the end of cotton skirts and sleeveless blouses; the ushering-in of wool sweaters and blazers and suede boots. This year, with warm humid temperatures extending into the beginning of October, some of them have sounded more eager than wistful about saying goodbye to bathing suits and sandals and reaching for their autumnal wardrobe.

For me, the wardrobe turnover isn’t all that meaningful. It’s in the fruit crisper that I mark – and lament – the change of seasons.

Goodbye to sweet white peaches, tangy yellow peaches, intensely flavored apricots, red and purple and black plums. Goodbye to complicated cherries, delicious despite their tangle of stems and messy pits, and nectarines, the fruit that seems to have an agreeable disposition, neither as sloppy as peaches nor as mealy as apricots.

Goodbye to summer vegetables as well: plump sweet corn kernels lined up along the cob; dark flavorful tomatoes in blobby irregular spheres.

I’m not adamant about locavorism, mostly because I can’t imagine forever giving up bananas, avocadoes and coffee. But the very best of the summer fruits and vegetables simply aren’t available in the supermarket off-season. And even without being proactively locavore, I appreciate the annual rhythms of the harvest: asparagus in the spring, an abundance of juicy tomatoes and fruits, and flavorful lettuces, in the summer, pears and apples in the fall, oranges and grapefruit in the winter.

So today I say goodbye to summer’s delicious stone fruits. One more perfect plum, and then eight or nine months without. Time to turn to the autumnal harvest for cooking and snacking inspiration. The wheel of the year turns, and we’re at the start of a new season, once again.

This will be the year

Like the Red Sox fans who surround me, I’m perpetually telling myself: Maybe this will be the year.

Only for me, that sentiment reverberates through the air not on Opening Day at Fenway Park but on the eve of the first day of school.

This will be it, I tell myself. I’ve had seven years of training in How to Make the School Year Run Perfectly. This will be the year it all comes together.

This will be the year that everyone gets up on time and leaves the house punctually. In fact, so smoothly will our morning routine run that dishes will be washed and crumbs wiped up by the time the door closes behind us. No returning after my morning run to a kitchen-ful of breakfast clean-up: this year I’ll figure out how to get it all done at the same time the kids are preparing to catch the bus.

This will be the year the kids remember to sort their backpacks not just once a semester or even once a week but every day. They’ll come home and remove paperwork, lunch detritus, unwanted snacks, notes from friends, and (in Holly’s case) pet rocks, leaves, twigs and flowers accrued throughout the day.

This will be the year we all remember to get to bed on time every night.

This will be the year I make good on my resolution not to pester anyone about homework. Tim has already proved to us that he can be trusted to keep up with his work: we stopped reminding him last year, and his quarterly report cards made it clear he was holding up his end of the bargain. Now it’s time to make the same pact with Holly. She’ll do her work or she’ll learn the embarrassment of going into class empty-handed. I’ll save myself the daily lecture. We’ll all benefit.

Except that there’s always the nagging worry for me that she won’t get her homework done. After all, she hasn’t yet finished her birthday thankyou notes – four weeks after her birthday. Maybe I’ll pester just a little.

This will be the year I make the absolute most of my work time, too. As soon as I get back from my morning run, I’ll start writing, and I won’t stop until it’s time to meet the elementary bus. That’s more than six hours of focused, uninterrupted work. I should have a remarkably productive fall.

Well, uninterrupted: that’s the catch. That means no scheduling meetings or appointments or coffee dates or errands during work hours. But it’s fine. This is the year I realize that I’ll just have to find other times to get all of those peripheral responsibilities tended to: work time is for work, and I’m going to break the habit of letting it get adulterated with other duties.

But having said that, this will also be the year I find more time to walk in the woods. The trails of the state park beckon from just beyond the edge of our yard, and in the six months we’ve lived here, I have yet to learn more of the trails system than the one that leads to the ice cream stand at park headquarters. Well, that’s the only route that interests the kids; fair enough. But with them back at school, the dog and I are resolved to start exploring more of the trails. True, I just said I was going to work an uninterrupted six-hour work day Monday through Friday. But a half-hour walk in the woods now and then surely will only serve to fuel my creativity.

And in the interest of fueling that creativity, this will be the year I redouble my efforts to read more Thoreau. At the beginning of the summer, I bought a beautiful new volume called “The Quotable Thoreau,” clearly meant for people like me who need the Cliff Notes version of the great naturalist’s work. So far, I’ve dusted the book several times, but have yet to actually read it. With the kids back at school, this will be the year.

I know we’ll succeed in all of these resolutions because we’ll be so well-nourished. You see, this will also be the year I succeed in putting a three- or four-course meal on the table at the same time every evening, featuring a well-balanced menu of proteins, vegetables and starches, with just the right amount of leftovers (and continuing appeal) to pack up for the next day’s lunches.

This will be the year. Just like the Red Sox fans who surround me, I can hope, despite all evidence to the contrary. It could happen. And either way, I’ll keep trying.

Because time would not stop for me...

The subject line of the email from the cooking website caused my eyes to narrow as it flashed across my inbox yesterday afternoon. “Thanksgiving menu: it’s not too late to start planning!”

Of course it’s not too late, I muttered to myself irritably. It’s not even close to being too late! Thanksgiving is still eight days away.

But in truth, I know it’s also not too early. In fact, I myself should be planning my Thanksgiving menu. And on some level I am. Kind of, In the back of my mind. But not with the zeal I usually plan Thanksgiving.

And when a friend said today that she was already humming Christmas carols and basking in a Christmas mood, I told her I was still in an October mood and working hard to get to a Thanksgiving one. I’m doing everything I can to make time stand still, and yet strangely enough, it’s not working.

I just feel that this autumn is going by too fast. There’s no reason I feel that way this particular year, except that this autumn has allowed me to become so immersed in my writing and the kids’ new school year and some new article ideas and the publication of my book and getting to know the area around my parents’ new vacation home and a host of interests and activities to which fall lends itself. And all of that somehow seems to come to a screeching halt once the holidays approach. New school year? Try Thanksgiving vacation followed three weeks later by winter break, with report cards in between the two to remind you that the year is already exactly one-third over. One-third over? But I’m just getting used to the idea that Tim is in middle school. I don’t want to hear that seventh grade is already looming. I want it to be the first week of school for as long as possible.

But it’s not, of course. It’s seven days ‘til Thanksgiving. I love cooking Thanksgiving dinner. I’ve done it yearly since 1999 with only one exception. For that matter, I like cooking and menu-planning at any time of year. It’s not the domestic side of the situation that’s causing my agitation this year; it’s simply the chronological part. Winter holidays? Really? But I was so happy watching the leaves change.

It’s inevitable, and fall more than any other season seems to bring out the resistance in many of us to see time pass. So I’ll keep writing, keep finding time to walk in the woods, keep up everything that made this fall such a resonant time for me, and also nudge myself onward to the preliminary steps of holiday planning.

After all, no one says that has to mean six different pies on the Thanksgiving table or hours of Christmas shopping at the mall. Holiday season can mean whatever you want it to mean, including writing, reading and walks in the woods. But regardless of what it may mean to different people, simply as a function of the sun rising and setting, Thanksgiving will soon be here, and I have a menu to plan. Fortunately, as the email I received yesterday assured me, it is indeed not too late.

In admiration of November

Ever since moving back here in late fall of 2001, I’ve believed November to be the loveliest month on the farm. Absent the verdant brilliance of June or the stunning golden and crimson colors of October, November has a quiet splendor, with its yellowed fields, early sunsets and bare gray tree branches. Five days into November, here are some of this year’s hallmarks of a magnificent month:

* The sight of the ten-year-old who lives next door on her cantering horse, the sunlight falling across the girl and horse in flashing planes of yellow as they carve wide circles over the yellow-green grass of the pasture

* The sheep hustling out of their enclosure in the morning as soon as I unlatch the gate to get their share of the hay before the cows decimate the bales

* A six-point antlered buck crossing the driveway just in front of me, stopping turn his big head slowly to look at me with big brown eyes before he steps on into the woods

* Yellow leaves so thick across the footpath that I can’t see the border between gravel path and the grass

* Frost making a smooth white plane across the lawn as the sun rises

* Hank, a very large bull, breaking the top plank of the fence as he pushes his neck through to eat the few remaining leaves on a tree at the edge of our yard

* A border of ice on the brook first thing in the morning

* Squirrels skittering along the fences

* The dog, uncharacteristically barking into the darkness when I let her out before bedtime. Maybe she sees a coyote? A bear?

The growing season is ending. The ground will freeze soon. But living things are busy at this time of year: some growing, eating, foraging; others – leaves and plants – dying. November’s assets repeat themselves year after year, appearing to me to be lovelier with each year that goes by.

Autumn picnic

Early last week during the unseasonably warm weather, Holly and I took a late-afternoon walk. We passed a field near our house, and Holly noticed that a very tall oak tree had toppled over from the woods edging the field and was now lying almost all the way across it.

As she looked at it, it wasn’t so much like an idea formed in her head as like a snapshot popped into her brain. “I would like to have a picnic there with Samantha,” she announced.

Holly has several close friends, and she doesn’t usually plan picnics, so why this particular conflation of details – a picnic, Samantha – I can’t explain. I also suspected that by the next day, or at least once the warm weather broke, she’d forget about the plan.

But she didn’t. Two days later, she was still asking me if I’d emailed Samantha’s mother yet to invite the two of them on a picnic. So I sent the email, and they graciously accepted, and then it was menu-planning time.

Apparently to Holly, planning (and hosting) a picnic means drawing up a complicated menu that I am then expected to execute. Tea sandwiches – three or four varieties. Fruit salad (which would have to be made the morning of the picnic, for the sake of freshness). Apple crisp for dessert, Holly requested: warm from the oven.

I managed to make a few modifications. Two kinds of tea sandwiches rather than three. Sliced banana bread, which we happened to have in the freezer just waiting for an occasion. And how about those fancy chocolates I received for my birthday last week in place of the freshly baked apple crisp? (The fact that I was willing to break out my secret stash of fancy chocolates attests to just how much I didn’t want to have to worry about making an apple crisp.)

Holly was amenable, and I found little jobs for her to do as I prepared the food that Saturday morning: she fetched plastic plates and napkins from the paper goods closet, and then cleaned out the wagon, which we would need to transport our bounty to the field.

When we got there, everything seemed to unfold just as Holly pictured it. We shook out our picnic blanket, and the moms sat in the sun chatting (and munching on the sliced apples and brie that our guests had contributed to the meal) while Holly and Samantha examined the tree branches and jotted down their observations in small spiral notebooks Holly had brought along specifically for this purpose. (It turned out she had chosen the location because she recognized that when a tall tree falls down, it gives you a rare opportunity to examine what’s in those high branches that you can never see in a standing tree.) After we ate our tea sandwiches and drank our lemonade, Holly pulled out the songbook she’d brought along and sang a couple of songs she wrote last week. Samantha was a great sport: she seemed perfectly content with the remarkably micro-choreographed event Holly had planned.

For the two moms, it was a great chance to catch up; we’d both been busy all fall and hadn’t seen much of each other. For the girls, it appeared to be a happy fall afternoon, though the weather had turned a lot cooler since Holly first conceived of the plan, and we were wearing hats, gloves and fleece jackets. Mostly, Holly seemed pleased that the plan had unfolded just the way she pictured it.

But she also seemed unsurprised. She invited Samantha on a picnic; Samantha accepted. She brought notebooks for writing observations; observations were duly made. She gave me a picnic menu; I prepared the food. It’s nice to be eight years old and able to control an event to that degree, and I suppose it worked mostly because I went along so willingly. But this was a rare case where I was happy to take orders from my child. Holly had a plan and with help from me was able to make it come to fruition. The results were pleasing to everyone.

Usually, life is a lot more complicated. Parties don’t work out exactly as you expect; menus don’t turn out just as you imagine they will; the weather changes in unpredictable ways. But not this time. This time everything worked out just as Holly planned. I’m not sure if she realizes how rare that is, but I know it was a happy day for her, and I can only hope she’ll remember how happy she was on this day at some point in the future when plans turn out to be not quite always so easy to enact.

Fruit bowl

As happens every October, all around me appear magnificent tableaus. The trees burst with crimson, scarlet, peach, gold, russet; small yellow leaves float on the dark water of the brook. Against a bright blue sky flies an arrow of Canada geese.

Yet just as beautiful is the tableau on my kitchen counter: one of the loveliest arrangements of fruit I have ever seen. And I didn’t even try specially to arrange it that way; it just happened. A round, shiny, red tomato; a verging-on-ripe yellow banana; a pale green pear; an avocado as dark green as green can be without turning to a shade of black; an orange. I have to restrain myself from fishing for adjectives to describe the colors; the fruits themselves are the best modifiers for these colors. Crayola would name these colors banana yellow, pear green. The fruits are such perfect hues.

Their spectrum catches my eye every time I walk through the kitchen, and I just can’t stop marveling at how beautiful this arrangement of fruit is. At other times of year, I have just as much fruit in the house but don’t always keep it on the counter. Summer fruits – sweet, juicy peaches and nectarines – attract fruit flies, so keep them in the fridge, as I also do with winter apples and grapefruit. But the fall harvest stays out in the silver fruit bowl, making my kitchen more beautiful than any intentional work of art ever could.

I’m reminded of one of Mary Oliver’s best-known poems, The Summer Day. (I’m no poetry scholar; in all likelihood, any poem I know is quite likely to be “one of the best-known” by that poet.) Oliver wrote:

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean--
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down--
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.

…and I find myself wondering accordingly, who made all of this beautiful fruit with its rainbow of colors, and why? Each piece would taste just as good if their skins or peels were dirt brown. They didn’t need to be so beautiful….but they are. Every time I eat arugula, I think to myself something similar to Mary Oliver’s questions: “Who made this lettuce?” We could have been just as satisfied with endive and romaine, and yet whoever made Oliver’s grasshopper also made arugula, a green that tastes garlicky and musky and delicious.

Who made grasshoppers, and oranges, and arugula? I could get a lot of different answers to that question if I asked even the smallest subset of people. I wouldn’t want to have to try to answer it myself. And yet there’s a feeling today that Divinity nestles in my fruit bowl, reminding me every time I pass it of all that is inexplicable and yet beautiful in the world.

Changes in the weather

When I stepped outside just before heading up to bed last night, I noticed a smell I hadn’t smelled in a long time. It wasn’t completely foreign to me, but it wasn’t anything that had been in the air recently, and I can’t exactly describe it, except that it comes sometimes with rain: sort of a metallic scent that reminds me a little bit of dirty hair. We’d had light rain on and off all day, but this isn’t the way rain always smells, or even often. Just occasionally. Like last night.

I don’t know where the smell came from – some particular combination of the air and the groundsoil and the precipitation, or maybe even something as specific as a mushroom that was blooming due to the moisture – but what struck me was how the environment immediately around us has changed so often in the past few weeks. Every day feels like a different biosystem, or micro-biosystem anyway. One day last week the air was as humid as it normally is during a tropical storm. Another day was one of the windiest I’ve known; my mother and I went for a walk in the afternoon and picked up debris from falling branches on the driveway the whole way out to the road and then picked up more debris on the way back that had fallen since we’d last passed by. Other nights in the past few weeks have smelled like quintessential New England fall, the air crisp and dry, with a scent of pine and maple.

Smelling the unusual metallic/dirty hair/rain smell last night reminded me of how many changes we witness outdoors at this time of year. In the winter, when the ground is frozen, changes in the atmosphere are almost imperceptible: one frozen night and day seem indistinguishable from the next. And in the summer, when the heat and humidity hover, the weather can seem to change very little for days on end as well. But this fall has been like a kaleidoscope of climate: the temperature, humidity, ground cover -- from dry leaves to wet leaves to acorns -- and yes, even the smell of the air, have changed daily.

I’m grateful I can be outside experiencing it for so much of the day. Yesterday I walked to school with Holly in the morning, then set off from there on a two-mile run; later in the day I walked next door to my parents’ house, and earlier in the day I had been out to the barnyard to let the sheep out to graze. When I was working in a corporate environment full-time, one of the hardest parts of it for me was how often I would be indoors from 8:30 a.m. until 5 p.m. or later. It just seemed like such a waste of the world not to get out into it at all. Sometimes during lunch I’d walk around a residential neighborhood near my office, an uninspiring neighborhood with busy streets and a jumble of houses that had little character but at least gave me a chance to be outside.

This is a time of year when our surroundings change fast: the grass begins to die off, the leaves change colors and fall from the trees, acorns encrust the ground, pine needles turn to mulch. There’s a lot to see, and I try to spend a lot of time outdoors witnessing it. It’s autumn in New England, and I don’t want to miss a thing.

Dogs, deer, and mysteries of the natural world

Leaves are falling fast and piling on the ground. We wake to frost many mornings. And like last year, the deer are making their way out of the thick forests and groves to find more food.

For months, the dog and I have not chanced across a deer while out on our daily run, and I’ve been letting her off-leash for long stretches on our dirt road. Yesterday, just as we approached the first bend in the road, near the brook, we both heard a rustle and Belle took off, tearing through the woods, trying simultaneously to propel herself forward for speed and to leap higher for a better view of whatever she was chasing.

I continued to the end, which is about three-tenths of a mile long, hoping she would catch up with me by the time I reached the main road. That’s what usually happens when she sprints into the woods after a squirrel, chipmunk or bird; she realizes quickly the futility of the chase (oh that’s right, I can’t climb trees! I always forget that!) and she remembers that she doesn’t want to miss out on a run with me, so after a few seconds she’s back by my side.

But yesterday I reached the end of our road and she hadn’t yet appeared, so I doubled back. Still, no dog, so I turned and ran again out to the main road. And back. I had hoped to run two miles, and my Nike Plus mileage chip was keeping track of the distance for me, so I knew I could still get in my two miles even if I just kept running back and forth over the same stretch of dirt road. But that didn’t solve the problem of where my dog was.

Ever since we adopted her exactly a year ago, I’ve worried that someday this would happen. My concern is twofold: first of all, I didn’t want her to get lost while chasing a deer – which I was beginning to suspect was now the case – but second, I didn’t want her to be responsible for the demise of a deer. The presence of these large mammals is generally considered something of a mixed blessing in our area – though they are beautiful, they are also responsible for the prevalence of Lyme disease in our community – but I still don’t feel that it’s my place to release a non-native predator on their habitat. Moreover, and somewhat more selfishly, I don’t want to have to deal with the logistics of a dead deer: how to handle the event with children or other kids who happen by, what to do with the carcass left behind.

Up and down the driveway I ran again. Still no dog. But this time as I rounded the bend I saw something else: the white flash of a tail. I watched as a deer loped across the road in front of me. Puzzling. This deer was not moving with the speed or the frenzy of an animal being chased; it was just kind of making its way into the woods. If a dog were after it, wouldn’t it be moving a lot faster? And if a dog had just taken down one of its cohort, wouldn’t it flee the area? Though I don’t know a lot about deer behavior, I don’t think of them as altruistic (to use the actual term animal behaviorists use) animals. I tend to imagine that when one is attacked, the others take off, not hang around.

Down to the end of the road again, and by this time, my Nike Plus mileage counter said that I’d gone 2.1 miles, so I took it down to a walk and tried to listen very carefully as I peered into the woods. Still no dog. I decided I’d go home, let the town officials and neighbors know to keep an eye out for her, and just hope she turned up soon.

And this time when I reached the thickly wooded bend where Belle had first disappeared, three deer. Not running. Not even loping. Sauntering. They crossed in front of me and picked their way slowly among the trees.

It was as if the Greased Lightning gang from Grease had taken over the forest. “We’re here, we’re deer, get used to it. And we ain’t afraid of no dogs,” they seemed to be saying to me. Was it possible that Belle had indeed encountered the deer – and the deer had won?

But in any case, where was she?

My husband was driving out of the driveway as I approached the house. Knowing he had to get to work, I didn’t want to slow him down any with lost-dog tales, so I hadn’t planned to say anything. But he rolled down the window. “What’s wrong with Belle?” he asked me.

“Where is Belle?” I responded.

He briefly told me the story. As he was getting ready to leave the house, he spotted Belle, standing at the door, looking frantic to be let in. She was so quavery he thought she might have run into a swarm of bees. She repeatedly looked behind her as he headed to the door to open it for her. Once he did, she dashed upstairs and hunkered down between our bed and the wall, which was where he had last seen her.

We still don’t really know what happened. Within a few minutes after I got home, she seemed like herself again: not quavery or fearful, and not in any pain, so I don’t think Rick’s theory about bees was correct. It’s possible that whatever happened during the twenty minutes I searched for Belle had nothing to do with deer. Maybe she was quavery and fearful upon returning home only because it was the first time she’s ever run away from me and thought she’d be in trouble.

It’s a mystery that we can’t solve. Unlike my daughter, who sometimes refrains from telling me what happened with her friends at school but then enacts the whole scene while playing an imaginary game several days later, I doubt there’s any way Belle will ever express her adventure to me.

But there was one other event that seemed like it might be related. Hours later, something caught my eye through the living room window: an animal loping across the field past our house. At first I thought one of the neighbors’ horses was loose. But as it passed our house, I could see that it was a buck with a full set of antlers: four-point, I think, though I couldn’t tell for sure.

Even though we see deer frequently at certain times of year, they are usually either running through the woods or hovering at the edge of the lawn. And it’s usually female adults and babies. This was different. This was a large male running down the driveway the way a horse would. I went to get my camera, but when I came back he was no longer visible, though I could hear him crashing through the woods.

So my theory is that we have some really tough deer hanging around this fall. And it’s possible that my worries about Belle wreaking carnage can now end: either she’s no match for them or, better yet, she’s sufficiently traumatized that she’ll stay away from them now. (While animals acting uncharacteristically bold or aggressive is often a sign of rabies, I don’t think deer are considered a rabies threat as they don’t bite.) I just really wish there were a way for her to tell me her side of the story.

Farewell, September

It’s already the first of October, and the weather feels like fall: cool dry gusty air, trees aflame with yellow and red foliage, ground turning hard and rutted where in the spring it was muddy and in the summer, dusty. I caught the cows eating out of the hay barn today, standing at the gate and chomping on whatever they could reach, which means they’re finding the grass less lush for grazing. Last year we didn’t start feeding them hay bales until November 1, but I think we’ll start sooner this year, unless there’s a resurgence of thick green grass, which would take warmer temperatures and a lot of rain.

Mid-fall is beautiful, but I would have been happy to stay stuck in September, with its mild sunny days and sense of boundless enthusiasm.. At the beginning of the month we went to such a great Labor Day cookout at Anjali and John’s house (for which I still owe a thankyou note); then there was the triumph of Holly learning to ride her bike, and in the middle of the month Tim’s eleventh birthday (for which he still owes some thankyou notes). Now, the new school year is well under way. So far, the fun parts are still a novelty: the bike rides to and from school for Tim; the walks with me out to the bus stop for Holly. And the kids tend to stay fairly enthusiastic about school all year long. But it’s so much fun when everything still seems new: not only the teachers and class configurations but the schedule and activities. Soon the weather will turn a lot colder and the routine will seem more, well, routine.

September is always a time of beginnings when you’re on the school calendar, and my theory is that even if you’re an adult without children, some part of your consciousness always retains that sense of a new start in the fall, but this September seemed more exciting. It felt like there were more hopeful possibilities in the air and fewer onerous duties, which may be because neither of the kids is playing soccer this year. (Just kidding, soccer fans!) I’m really excited about the directions my writing is going in: new article assignments, long-time jobs starting to wrap up (such as the Stow municipal master plan), and yes, even this blog is giving me fresh motivation for writing. After a somewhat uninspiring though not unhappy summer, September brought with it fresh air, new opportunities and high spirits.

Now it’s October 1, and although ruing the passage of time is a pointless conceit, I have to admit I’m sorry to see September end.