Two Sundays ago autumn let me know that it had arrived. I needed a fall jacket to sit outside for my morning writing. The squirrels in the yard all had bushy tails. It was only a few weeks earlier that I’d observed that their tails were unusually scraggly. If the bushiness of squirrel tails varies with temperature, this is something I should have noticed long ago.
My habit is to write for two hours, then go for a bike ride. The day hadn’t warmed over those two hours, so I wore a windbreaker and gloves for the ride. I should have put on long pants, too. During the ride, two V’s of Canada geese passed directly overhead. It seemed early for goose migration, but they were flying high and heading south. I assume that they were not birds from our local flocks, but skeins from the north passing through.
While on the marsh trails, I noticed that a few of the sumac leaves had turned. Green in its various shades was still the predominate color, but the reds of the sumac and the yellows of the goldenrod were impossible to ignore. There is a goldenrod truism that says early frost comes six weeks after the goldenrod blooms. I remember seeing goldenrod in flower at the beginning of the month, so the first frost is only weeks away.
Goldenrod was one of the first native plants I ever learned to identify. As a kid, each year around Christmastime my dad and I would find an abandoned field and collect a grocery bag full of goldenrod galls. Galls are swellings on the stems of the plant, and inside the gall is a single larvae of the gall fly. These small white grubs make for good ice fishing bait, so we would carry the bag out on the ice when we fished and split open the galls with a jackknife whenever the fishing was slow.
One time my dad had a half dozen galls and his favorite jackknife sitting in his lap when the end of his pole twitched. He jumped up to attend to his line and dropped his jackknife down a fishing hole. It was one of those moments when a kid sees his dad goof up and thinks, “Wow, am I glad it wasn’t me who did that.”
After my bike ride, Manyu and I, along with our friends Shu and Stefan, went apple picking. Buying the biggest bag that the orchardist sells and then filling it with more apples than Manyu and I can possibly eat has become an autumn tradition for us. By midSeptember, the Jonathans and Galas were mostly picked over, and we had to walk to the far end of the orchard to find the last of the Sweetangos. The Honeycrisp had not been ready for picking until that weekend, so they were plentiful.
I am old enough to remember when apples came in only three varieties: Macintosh, Delicious, and Golden Delicious. I tend to stick with the old ways on most things, but not so with apples. I may dress “vintage” for the orchard (i.e., 505 Levi’s and an old Carhartt jacket), but once I get there I go after the latest apple varieties.This year I was introduced to Zestar. The teenage girl at the cash register said that Zestar apples have been part of her dad’s orchard for as long as she could remember, but they were new to me. At least I don’t remember ever seeing them in a grocery store.
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