Autumn in New England – what a lovely thought. “The maple wears a gayer scarf, the field a scarlet gown,” wrote Emily Dickinson, and I couldn’t have said it better myself.
Few could. But it doesn’t hurt to try. Here are some of my own attempts to describe autumn, culled from old columns:
The funeral for the green leaf lasts a couple of months in New England, where foliage season is both a rite of passage and a cottage industry.
In New England, autumn plays through the landscape like a kid with a box of crayons.
But the only winter worth worrying about is the nuclear kind. Otherwise, let us get on with autumn, New England’s most inspired season. Now is the time to notice: The landscape is electric, the air is reviving, and we wake to the knowledge that every new day is a blank canvas, and everywhere you look there is color to fill it.
New England already knows it’s God’s country, what with all those cute churches on every village green, but come fall it may really be true.
Actually, come this fall, we’ve learned that New England is the least religious part of the entire country. In a recent study, New England passed the Pacific Northwest as the place where the fewest number of citizens regularly go to church or follow a particular religion. But it’s true that those white-steeple churches and village greens contribute to the scenery.
Nothing says America like a cool afternoon spent apple picking, pumpkin carving and leaf ogling, all finished off with a nice, warm apple-cider doughnut (preferably two).
Not sure they feel the same way in Texas, but it’s a nice sentiment.
The problem is: I get sick just thinking about it. Why? I grew up in Connecticut, and as far as I’m concerned the leaves of autumn might as well be the 11th plague.
Sounds like yet another one of those Connecticutites who like to call themselves New Englanders because it gives them a kind of cocktail party cred but they’re really New Yorkers who spend every day commuting to Manhattan and would have to use MapQuest to find Boston. You know. The kind of Nutmeg State lodger identified in those local McDonald’s commercials, where Connecticut is referred to as “Newyorkachusetts.”
Oh, sure, tourists love them. I once saw a grown man cry over a particularly lovely stand of maple trees, and he was covered in Army tattoos. Tears aren’t the telltale sign of a leaf peeper – or “outsider,” as we locals like to call them. Outsiders are the ones who throw around phrases such as “nature’s majesty” or “breathtaking array,” all the while walking around with their heads cocked permanently skyward (I’ve always assumed that the first call they make on Monday morning is to their chiropractor.) Sure, all those leaf voyeurs drop millions of dollars on that horrible maple-syrup candy that I’ve never seen anyone actually eat. But they also clog up winding country roads, jack up the prices in restaurants, and buy up all the really big pumpkins.
Can a New Englander who loves being outside be considered an outsider? Because I don’t know any New Englanders who don’t look at the leaves every autumn, gasping at the colors and grasping for ways to describe them, sometimes succumbing to cliché. The “heads cocked permanently skyward” reference once again betrays the author as a closet Manhattanite. In technical tourism terms, that’s a New York skyscraper thing, not a New England foliage thing. The phrase “leaf voyeurs” is nice. I’ll have to borrow that someday. Except for a few weeks in November and March, “winding country roads” in New England are always clogged. Without the tourists, there would be no restaurants. And I’ve never had trouble finding a big pumpkin in autumn, even on Halloween.
A native New Englander does not gush over leaves. OK, so we don’t gush over anything, but leaves – never going to happen.
Not all of us descended from the Puritans. I’m a native New Englander. I gush. (See above.) Most of my friends are native New Englanders. They all gush. My friend Gavin and I gushed all fall as we jogged the same route along a local bike path, watching the changing color and transient wildlife in the swamp and woods. I went to a mountainside cabin in Vermont on Columbus Day weekend, with eight friends, all native New Englanders, when the trees were at peak color. We drank and gushed. I visited my friends Frank and Terri in my old stomping grounds in Plymouth, N.H. We hiked in the woods, following unmarked trails painted in sunshine and leaf colors. They’re both from the Midwest, but they supported my gushing wholeheartedly. I bicycled in Little Compton a couple of weeks ago, popping in at art galleries and coffeehouses, marveling at the range of autumn tones in the landscape, sharing brief conversations with native New England strangers. Gushing everywhere.
Actually, we try to pretend the leaves are still green, because long after all the peepers have gone home, we have to dispose of all those leaves. Raking leaves is a horrible, Sisyphean chore.
No, again. Standing in line at the DMV is a horrible, Sisyphean chore. Raking is only spiritless for people who own too many acres. Obviously the author has never raked leaves on a sunny autumn day surrounded by bounding dogs and godchildren jumping in leaf piles. It is good exercise and the leftover non-raked leaves make a fine mulch for the winter garden.
I’m quite sure that is the main reason New Englanders are so grumpy. (I used to think it was because the Patriots were such losers, but that, apparently, wasn’t the problem.)
O-for-three. The Patriots had nothing to do with it. New England grumpiness began with Calvinism and continued with the Red Sox being oh-so-close but not winning the World Series for 86 years while the dreaded, Babe Ruth-swiping, money-burning Yankees consumed pennants like Cracker Jacks. Now that the Sox have won a couple recently, there isn’t as much grump in our demeanor, although the fact that this year’s Bronx Bombers are world champs is – like thickness on a red berry or a horse’s coat – a sign of a longer, darker, colder winter.
The misery of raking cannot be exaggerated.
Except for when it can…
Imagine standing for hours in the sun, dragging a huge metal salad fork back and forth, back and forth. Your vertebrae compress. Your hands break out in blisters. Your feet sweat and swell. Sometimes the rake moves the leaves toward the pile, but more often the leaves clog the rake, requiring you to stop, remove them by hand, and place them on a huge pile of already raked leaves. A huge pile, by the way, that attracts wind, dogs, small children, and fire like nobody’s business. It’s easier to get a cat into a sack than to keep a pile of leaves together. Seems Mother Nature’s determined to protect her precious babies from spending eternity in garbage bags.
Go ahead, reader. Take a few seconds to shake off the hyperbole.
And it’s not as if the leaves are doing anything miraculous. Get a grip on yourselves, people. Cold weather stops photosynthesis, and the leaves die. All that bright color is a death shroud.
That’s precisely why it is so miraculous. The colors of flowers growing out of the earth in the spring and the colors of leaves falling back to the earth in the fall is great spectacle and drama, reminding us of the beauty inherent in the cycles of life, birth and death. There was a time when artists and scientists both understood that exploring the truth doesn’t mean sacrificing wonder.
We’re not Disneyland – far from it.
For which we are grateful. The Disneyfication of the universe is a depressing turn of events.
If you want a warm welcome and some kind of apple-picking show, try a different part of the country. We will take your money, but we’re miserable hosts (guests don’t rake).
Sounding like a whiny New Yorker again. A true miserable New Englander would never confess the fact.
That’s why local farmers walk the other way when you want to buy something. That’s why so many of them use “honor bins.”
Actually, most farmers use honor bins because they’re usually out farming. Or sometimes, in the case of the farm I used to visit regularly in Ashland, N.H., out playing paintball games with their kids.
In that way they get the money, but they don’t have to make small talk – a chore second only to raking.
It’s true that New Englanders aren’t schmoozers. Small talk is, by definition, small. We like big talk. Whether it’s in our sermons (“Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”), poems (“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood…”), philosophical thought (“Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.”), political speeches (“Ask not what your country can do for you…”) or daily conversation (“Yankees #@*%!”).
The spread up the street from my parents feeds its apples to the neighbor’s pigs – that’s how little they care about whether you get a pie to take home as a souvenir.
Or how much they care about the neighbor’s pigs…
And don’t even mention syrup.
Syrup.
Just buy the candy and go. All the carbon emissions from your slow-moving cars have overcooked the environment, and now the maple trees are going dry. On the other hand, no maple trees means fewer leaves to rake.
Spoken like someone wearing a crisp, blue cap with “NY” on its bill. If Twain, who became an end-of-his-life New Englander, settling in Hartford, could write one of his most moving pieces on the aftermath of a New England ice storm, surely there’s still room in the region for those of us who like watching leaves dazzle as they die.
This week’s question: What is your favorite piece on nature written by a New Englander?
