with thoughts of coming fall

fall leaves in London

Apparently this is a touchy subject, fall. The way our summer is lingering, everyone in Seattle seems to be in denial -- everyone right down to my fellow 118 riders who yelped "don't say it!" to the bus drivers standing around at the ferry dock gossiping about the inescapable change.

But the shifting of seasons is pretty hard to deny when you live on a farm. I've seen it coming for months, actually. For right at the pinnacle of summer, the height of the tomato harvest, the heat of canning season, autumn was right outside our front door: in the pumpkins swelling orange and fat in the patch along the driveway, and in the jungle of prickly winter squash leaves in the north field, and in the cover crop that started to creep across fields put to bed already for winter.

Weeks ago now we felt the weather switch -- like the snap of the farm cat's tail when he perches on our windowsill every evening, asking to be let in (a cold-weather habit). It's dark when I get up and barely dawn when I leave, and I need my biking jacket again. We used to leave our big barn door open until nine o'clock in the evening, but we close it around six now, the windows an hour later.

Okay, yes, the farmstand is still full of tomatoes and peppers and squash and cucumbers. But I happen to have heard a rumor that the tomato harvest this week was thirty percent of last week's. And this weekend we feasted on the first brussels sprouts.

Lest this sound too melancholy and chilly, I have to say I'm very much ready for fall. Fall typically symbolizes eras drawing to a close, and this is true: my era in-house at Mountaineers Books is nearly over. But to me, fall always symbolizes newness more than anything: new colors in the trees, new briskness in the weather, new classes and friends and things to learn, new vigor as the school year gets going. And this is true, too: I'm at the brink of so much newness as I pour my time, full time, into The Friendly Red Pen. These changes bring new vigor and creativity to my mind as I think and plan and imagine.

I'm also ready for the newness of rain and cooler weather -- something besides sun, however much I've liked it; for the coziness and -- yes, even this -- the drawing darkness that comes with the change. I'm also ready for root vegetables and a freezer full of pork. Just imagine: pork chops, brussels sprouts, squash, and potatoes for dinner. It makes us both drool.