Here we are mid-October. My thirteen-year old nephew is playing fall ball, the fall baseball league for middle-school boys. On the league are all the boys who have chosen not to play football, and so my nephew is hitting clean up and batting somewhere in the 800's, at least according to his somewhat suspicious calculations. (He tried to explain to me how he got a triple in his last game without making contact with the ball or any errors on the part of the other team.)
My two youngest nieces, eight and five, are cheerleaders for the first time. The eight-year old cheers and though she does not seem to be the master of voice projection, she is proficient at the attitude and head-snap of much older cheerleaders. The five year old is really too young to cheer, but they put her on the squad as mascot and she has a sweatshirt and gets to shout and clap alongside the older girls.
My eldest niece, a junior in high school, does not leave her room without a book and a pen. The weather has cooled enough where I finally feel confident enough to put my window air conditioners in storage and an extra blanket on the bed. Mister President wakes up a half-hour earlier, prancing and anxious to experience the morning at it's chilliest. A sweater, thin jacket and scarf are adequate to keep one warm and stylish. That's all to say, things seem right and fall-like to me. Fall is good. Fall is great.
I'm writing this entry without much of a point other than to extol the goodness of fall. Other than the peach-colored berries that fall from the trees along my streets and smell like vomit underfoot, I can see no disadvantages to the season. I've been writing with my weeks off, inspired by the back-to-school nature of the season, and not yet encumbered by holiday shopping or daunted by endlessly frigid weather.
I've been hiking with Mister President in upstate New York. There is nothing like a few hours in woods surrounded by the smell of damp leaves and bark, the air cold and burning in your nose. On Sunday's hike in Cold Spring, we made our way along Brokeback Ridge, a trail that snaked briskly down the face of the mountain with expansive overlooks along the Hudson River. It was a trail made mostly of bare rock and required rock scrambles that proved too challenging for Mister President, but at one overlook, we watched a train made of different colored boxcars twist along the bank of the river. Our vantage point was high enough so we could see the beginning and end of the train, and still it looked a mile long. It moved silently and steadily along the river's edge, timeless and beautiful, something out of a painting or history book, and I couldn't take my eyes away.
This past Sunday, I took my niece apple picking. She turned sixteen in September and apple picking was her gift of choice. She is my eldest niece, and I have always been close to her, mostly because I was in college and available to babysit often when she was small. When she was three I took her to a sunflower patch and at the site of the stalks, triple her size and some of their faces black and rotting, she cried and hid her face in my jacket and probably still has nightmares about sunflowers to this day. When she was six, I took her to see Jurassic Park, another error of judgment. Add raptor nightmares to sunflower ones. After that, I took her apple picking a few times, and other than the time her brother had to rescue her from a corn maze, these trips seemed much gentler on her constitution. When she asked to go apple picking for her most recent birthday, I was touched that our past trips had been so cherished. I hadn't really known. You take kids to do things and it's hard to say what will stick beyond the trips that cause them nightmares.
Our apple-picking day was delightful and somewhat uneventful. My 16-year old niece is a generous girl, and she invited her two younger sisters to come along. The youngest girls probably had a better time than anyone. They gingerly stepped through the puddles of spilled apples beneath the bushy boughs of the trees so as not to roll their ankles, jumped at low branches to get yet another perfect apple, and filled up their bags until they were too heavy to carry. After we picked seventeen pounds of apples, we sat on bales of hay and ate hot dogs cooked in apple cider. And then we all ran around in a corn maze.
At home, I taught my eldest niece to make apple pie. (The younger girls declared our bake-off, "boring!" and ran off to the basement to play). I had been taught to make apple pie by my grandmother and building on my apple picking success of the past, I thought it might be something to hand down to her. When I mentioned baking a pie to her on the phone as a way to end the day, she sounded none too excited. Still, she is a generous girl and a good sport and after peeling a bowl full of apples together, she rolled out the dough and we made a very nice looking pie.
The unfortunate thing is neither of us eats apple pie. Still it seemed the fall thing to do. Just like homework, picking apples, cheering at football games, hiking, wearing thin sweaters and scarves, curling up under an extra blanket and playing fall ball are fall things to do. And fall things are things to relish and celebrate. Like all great seasons, it's a short one. Hail fall!
