strike that

falliest day ever

This time of year, fall is my favorite season. In spring it’s spring and in summer it’s summer and in winter it’s winter, but right now I’m with fall all the way. (I used to be Grass is Greener but now I’m Love the One You’re With.)

I read under the covers in my bright brisk room until Jamey called good morning from the hallway, and isn’t it fabulous to live with people? Because they say things like Good Morning and Sleep Well and Do You Want Tea, I’m Boiling Water. And for only children, these things are small marvels every one.

Jamey had a Plan involving the improvement of our semi-neglected garden. So after fresh figs and yogurt on the porch we went to the downtown Saturday farmer’s market, which this time of year is a festival of abundance: eight kinds of thinly sliced apples for tasting, four colors of potatoes, twelve shapes of squash. Goat cheese and scones and hazelnuts and garlic. And bluegrass music.

Next was a nursery for winter veggie starts. I hate pulling out the tomatoes, but the time had come, and it made room for rainbow chard, collard greens, purple cabbage (which apparently everyone else calls “red cabbage” but I’m sticking) and oh so very many beets. Beets in every nook and cranny, hiding between the broccoli and crouching by the pea trellis. More beets than one can reasonably expect to eat, even if one were wild for borscht which I am not. But what’s to be done when the plastic pot is bursting with little sprouted beets? Their little beet bodies withering on the path is more than I can bare, with all they have invested in shooting out leaves from nothing. They must go in the ground.

And then! Josh & Nikki, Nate, Joshua, Deb & Nopporn and I drove out to Suavie Island to celebrate Deb’s birthday. The idea was to explore the corn maze but we got so distracted with corn on the cob and caramel apples and picking-our-own pumpkins that the afternoon grew late, and in the last light we rushed to a nearby wetland to watch sandhill cranes through binoculars as the sun set. And for cinematic effect we drove home under a harvest moon.

posted by tortaluga @ 11:51 PM