Apple Days

Today dawned sparkling; the sky was perfectly robin's-egg, the air as clean as a sheet on a line. I spent the entire morning walking with Bea, my friend Sal, and her boy. We walked up hills and down hills, around neighborhood corners and across streets, over gravel, grass, brick, and concrete. At one point we puffed up a hill that Sal's boys have named "Steep Street" and gazed out over the town--the steeple of the courthouse, a graveyard on the ridge, the mine in the far distance, trees bronzing and flashing pumpkin-orange all over the hillsides. Took a deep breath and plunged into the valley again: gourds and autumn paraphernalia on porches, ghosties in the windows, gardens at their last brilliance before they begin to wane.

Our neighbor, Mr. Wilson, has already cleaned his beds; a few stragglers remain, but the tomatoes are down, nesting in dark soil--I guess he'll plow those under for compost. Our garden is popping with late zinnias, pink and orange, dense marigolds and cluttered with fading zinnias, dried dill-heads, the black domes of shasta daisy.

Time to fling open windows, simmer apples, roast squash in the oven. Time for leaf-piles and seed-collecting. Apple Days! Delicious days!

(I'm tempted to begin rhyming but will stop myself. Nutritious days! etc. Told you sunshine makes me giddy. Thankfully the snow and freeze is coming and then I'll be so depressed I'll have to write well. . .)