Jessica took this shot out of our front window the other morning (or maybe Emma did; she’s into photography). You can see the snow has already moved into the high country, including the cliffs and long rocky slopes of Wanderer’s Peak. (That’s my mountain; but I let others visit it when they want to.) You can also see the line of mist that’s suspended above the river; most fall mornings it’s settled down into the channel, but not today.

There’s an old ditty that says

Red sky at night, sailor’s delight;
Red sky in morning, sailors take warning.

That’s because a red sunset indicates a westerly wind, bringing calm weather; while a red sunrise indicates atmospheric winds moving east to west, usually presaging stormy weather. Snow is predicted for tomorrow. Let it come! We’re ready.

There is a scripture that says, “If ye are prepared, ye shall not fear.” That is sure true. After a summer of hard work, our harvest is in, our outside stuff is secure,* and we have twice as much firewood as we had last year. That’s a good feeling. It must be one reason I love fall more than any other season (but only while I’m in it; the other seasons are pretty terrific too for their own reasons). Fall always produces a feeling of snugness, the delightful sensation of readiness for the long dark winter ahead.

Every now and again I re-read Laura Ingalls Wilder’s book The Long Winter. It always gives me pause. Would I be ready for such terrible conditions as they passed through? You can never know exactly until you encounter it; but I think we’re prepareder this year than we’ve ever been.

I hope to say the same next year as well. Yahoo!

*Except for the greenhouse. Hm. Have to do that Saturday, sometime in between going deer hunting with John and fixing Dexter’s hood and fender, some six months after the Flying Deer incident (finally!).

New England has its maples. We have our aspens, birches, and especially our tamaracks. Tamarack (Larix laricina) is conifer whose needles turn orange in the autumn and fall off the tree. There is a stand of them on the northwest border of our property, and when the sunrise moves south in the fall it illuminates them like 60-foot-tall light bulbs. Scattered as they are among other conifers, in the fall they make for a truly awesome spectacle: miles and miles of dense green flecked with gold along the flanks of the mountains, in the horizontal light of fall, with the blue shadows of clouds slowly ascending to the peaks, and the mist curling up from the canyons. It looks as soft as the softest fur. It’s a thrilling sight, one I never tire of.

Anyway, here’s our patch of tamarack as seen looking north out the front window. (Our house faces northeast.) You can see the roof of the shoop at center left, and Jacob is standing on the sofa in the lower left. Until some clown invents a CCD as sensitive as the human retina, no camera can capture both an electric display of autumn foliage and a kid in the darkened foreground.

Well, there it is. When Jess was putting this year’s cider into the root cellar, she had me bring up these two jars—the last of last year’s cider stash. It’s kind of funny that our quantity of cider from last year lined up so tidily with what we produced this year, but there you are. I’m glad we didn’t run out of cider before this year’s apples were ready.

You can see from these bottles, which have sat on a shelf in the dark for a year, where the store-bought apple juice gets its look. The particulates have settled to the bottom of these jars, and what remains is probably what Tree Top and the rest of them bottle up and sell to you, O consumer, with the probable addition of 17 strange chemicals that neither you nor they nor anybody but some now-retired chemist in Jersey City knows exactly what they were for. Blech. The first time I tasted homemade cider is the last time I will ever give a second glance at the glop in the stores. The taste is out of this world. The distance between that and what is sold commercially is like the distance between a store-bought tomato and one you grew in your own soil. You look at the red things in the stores and think, “Those are tomatoes?” Homemade cider is so sharp and sweet that you never want to drink anything else.

When we serve cider we shake up the jars, restoring the original cloudy look. It’s entirely possible that those particulates are not just innocent apple pulp, but tiny bits of peel, core, seeds, and yes, even worms. The whole shebang is boiled for 15 minutes in canning, so I’m not worried about germs. (Most of our apples are clean off the tree, but I won’t swear they’re antiseptic.) And who knows, all that good honest gunk is probably what makes it taste so good. I’d rather drink cold tangy cider from apples we picked ourselves than unpronounceable chemicals from a lab in Jersey City.

Well, this year our garden pumpkins were dinky (again), and I was going to say I didn’t know why– but I think it do. They need feedin’, and we didn’t feed them. All the manure went to the other plants and flowers, and our pumpkins struggled along as best they could.

Enter Jean, an older lady friend of Jessica’s in town, and her spacious garden with its dumptruck load of manure every spring. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen another garden as productive as Jean’s, and her friendship with Jessica has certainly borne fruit. As here: This behemoth is the biggest I’ve ever seen outside a county fair. We’ll be putting manure on our pumpkins next year.

As for Halloween this year, we’re far enough out in the sticks that we don’t take the kids trick or treating. (And anyway, anybody lurking in the woods at nighttime around here is liable to get shot.) We’ll be taking them to a Trunk-or-Treat in town. But the kids have all drawn and painted our cantaloupe-sized pumpkins from the garden, and left this guy for Dad. When I get a chance I’ll draw on it, and then after the tooth-rottin’ festivities Jess will wash them all off and can them. That’s a lot of pumpkin for pies and cookies. No sense wasting it for a lopsided Jack-o-lantern.

This actually happened almost a week ago, last Friday, in fact. The snow stayed in shaded areas for upwards of four days. It’s been cooooold out there! January weather, sometimes. Way too cold for October, and I’ve been burning firewood frequently.

That said, we’re back to more normal fall weather now. It’s welcome; I still have a lot to do before the real snows start!

Some of my immediate family gathered last week to spend some time together in the mountains. On Thursday evening we hiked up Rock Canyon past the old beaver farm, up past the abandoned mine with its cascading waterfall, and in the darkening twilight we ascended the switchbacks to Rock Lake in what became the darkest part of the night—just before the full moon rose.
I took this shot the next afternoon. That little form in the lower right is Emma, who had gone out onto a rock in the afternoon and sat down contemplating. Of course I whipped out the camera. You don’t see the humps and broken crags of Rock Peak 3000 feet up to the left, nor the vertical granite slab of Ojibway Peak to the right, but a camera can’t get it all anyway. This trip was a fitting end to an eventful summer.
(I had planned to climb Sawtooth Peak in a couple of weeks, but unless I can get a few more folks along I don’t want just two of us to attempt a steep climb up a remote mountain without a trail. I may have to bag it till next year.)
That morning we had hiked to the opposite end of the lake, climbed up the cascade feeding the lake, and progressed toward St. Paul Pass just beneath the far saddle you see here. It was a rough trail, and after lunch we were ready to head back. Then we spent a few hours in the afternoon picking huckleberries, which were surprisingly thick near the lake. We picked over two gallons in a few hours, which is saying something when you’re picking these little berries scattered amongst the leaves. When we got home on Saturday, Jess made three huckleberry cream cheese pies—one of the foods they’ll serve in heaven.
Autumn is coming. This morning I went out to hang up a batch of laundry and the thermometer read 41 degrees. The shrubs and mountain maples around our house are turning yellow. Yahoo! Fall is my favorite season, except when it’s springtime.