As an artist, I’ve always loved October for its brilliant colors. The sky seems bluer, and it actually is. Ripening fruit and dying leaves add brilliant contrasts of yellow, gold, red and orange against the violet-tinted blue of the sky. I once believed that it was the contrast of those colors that caused the sky to simply appear to be a deeper blue than at other times of year, but I’ve since learned that it is due to the changing angle of the sun and reduced moisture in the atmosphere which cause the blue light waves to dominate. As a poet, I tend to think of October as a rowdy youth with brilliant blue eyes, playfully capering across the landscape. This bit of anthropomorphic fancy resulted, years ago, in a short poem which always springs to mind at this time of year.

Gleeful Autumn: Gleeful autumn rowdy youth with disrespectful charm, / tumbles in to shove and joke and grinningly disarm. / Tossing leaves, he chills the air and basks in amber light. / Cunningly, he sneaks away to glaze the pond at night.

Those images come partly from growing up on an acreage that included, aside from the orchard my dad planted, a variety of trees including black walnuts, silver maples and hard, or sugar, maples. The silver maple trees turned a lemony yellow which deepened to gold before falling to the ground in abundant tan-paper piles. The hard maples faded from a dark green to various shades of pink, red and burgundy, depending on their summer “diet” of carotenoids which provide red, orange and yellow colors in fruits and vegetables as well as essential nutritional elements. Anthocyanins are responsible for the deep reds, purples and blues in plants, fruits, berries and the wonderful black maples we enjoy for their deep burgundy foliage today. A large hard maple tree in front of the house dropped knee-high heaps of rosy leaves seemingly every day for weeks each fall. At one time, they were so deep that we had to rake and burn them every day just to keep the front walk open for the mailman to be able to make his way to our mailbox attached to a post of the front porch railing.

A deep, wide ditch ran between our front lawn and the gravel road that ended at the highway a block down the hill, and that ditch was where we burned most of the abundant leaves. Sometimes, on weekends, we would rake smaller piles of leaves and twigs onto the driveway that wound around to the back of the house and we would roast marshmallows or hot-dogs over the smokey embers. On sunny October weekends the whole town seemed to be fragrant with the smell of burning leaves.

School-days were no break from raking and other autumn chores. There were flower bulbs to be dug and stored, potatoes, carrots, onions, squash and other garden produce to be harvested and stored in basements, root cellars and pantries. Strings of garlic and bunches of dill, basil, thyme and lavender were hung in spare bedrooms to dry for storage. Mostly, though, we were told to hurry home, change from our school clothes to slacks and shirts, and help pick the rest of the grapes, apples and other fruits that remained in the orchard. Until the first hard freeze, everything that was still edible had to be harvested and preserved or given to neighbors. Nothing should go to waste, even when we had more than enough to last until the next year. Later, on the last warm days of late fall and early winter, we searched the grass around the walnut trees for black walnuts the squirrels had missed and the few sweet butternuts from an ancient tree behind the barn. The latter was saved for the special fudge Mother made at Christmastime. My dad’s dream of raising nearly all the food for his family was close to realization, but he hadn’t had to do it alone.

I guess that the one factor that permeated my life during those years we lived on the acreage was the time we spent outdoors. Hardly a day went by that we didn’t spend hours gardening or caring for livestock that included hogs, cattle, chickens, rabbits, a pony, pet dogs and cats and a few experiments such as the flock of bossy guinea hens who were determined to be in charge of everything.