Holy guacamole! It’s October! People are buy pumpkins and soon they’ll be carving them. Can turkey with all the fixin’s and the fat guy in the red suit be far away?
This year, Charlie and me are hoping to go the Topsfield Fair, down in Massachusetts, and check out their Giant Pumpkin Contest. We’ve never been, and I think it’s high time we do. I’ll keep you posted.
Our neighbor Gretchen made us aware of this contest a few years ago, when she followed her passion and grew a giant pumpkin. That baby was something to behold. Godzilla, they called it, and it topped out at just under four hundred pounds. Gretchen says that’s small stuff compared to the ginormous ones they get at the Fair. She’s continued growing giant pumpkins every year since. But as she’ll tell you, if given half a chance, that none of ‘em compare to Godzilla. Like everything else, I guess, there was just something special about that first one.
Fall’s a good time for apple picking, of course, whether that means pick your own or pick ‘em off the shelf at the local farm stand. We go up to Bouchard’s farm, where on the weekends they serve homemade apple cider donuts at their little farm store. They make some tasty apple muffin’s, too; perfect with their own apple butter. There’s a corn maze for the adventurous, and hay rides for the kids.
I can’t believe the variety of apples grown in Maine, now. Remember when “apple” meant McIntosh? Red Delicious? Maybe a Golden Delicious, if you were lucky enough to come across one? Now, it’s hard to choose. Pink Ladies are my favorite off season apple, you know, the ones I get down to the A&P. But if the apple’s fresh, it’s fun to experiment: Ginger Gold, Macoun, Cox Orange Pippin, Northern Spy.
I’ve been tidying up my garden, dead heading and stuff, but am always reluctant to cut back my perennials and wait as long as I can. Right now there are still flowers blooming, which is a treat. I know the day will come, sometime in October, after we’ve had a frost or two and everything looks brown and scraggly, I’ll get out the clippers and go to town. I don’t think of it as preparing for winter. I say to myself, I’m getting ready for spring.
I remember the year my mom passed away (twenty-one years ago this October 18, can’t believe it), I never did get to putting my garden to bed. I was just too wiped out. Come that spring, I watched my crocuses try to maneuver around those stalks of dried plants that should have been cut back that fall, seeking the sun light, and I thought, I know how you feel, little ones. I know how you feel.
That’s enough of that, Ida! Slather some apple butter on one of those apple muffins, pour yourself another cup of coffee, step outside on the deck and take a good whiff of the crisp, autumn air. Be here now, live life to the fullest and don’t forget your lip gloss!
That’s it for now. Catch you on the flip side!
Hear Ida Tell It: It’s Fall, After All