September Pivot

The weather in Michigan has made the September pivot from summer to fall.  Nighttime temperatures have slipped into the forties.  Grabbing a fleece seems like a good idea on morning walks.  A fleece sometimes seems like a good idea in the house as well.  And harvests are coming in.

     The neighbors around the corner who raise vegetables in a front-yard garden have started leaving cherry tomatoes in a bright yellow dish on a little wooden chair by the sidewalk, generously sharing their bounty with passersby.  The oversize squash being coddled in plastic-bag cradles on the vines at the community garden are disappearing from sight, presumably being brought in by the gardeners.  Happily, though, the elderly gentleman who, when all his plants are planted, trains squash vines over sticks to form an arbor over his chair, hasn’t disturbed his shade.  In fact, those vines are still blooming, big yellow squash blossoms cheery as he rests from his labors.

     Yesterday, I visited two nearby farm stands and the midweek farmers market in search of end-of-season wonders.  Did I really need to go to all three to find what I wanted?  Nope.  But what I wanted even more than fat zucchini for bread, summer squash, and beans was to fill up my eyes with the colors, the shapes, the textures.  At farmers market, in particular, not only are there vegetables in the usual range of colors, but exotic ones, too.  Purple veggies?  You bet.  I saw tomatoes, potatoes, carrots, and beans in purple, and there may well have been others as well.

     And does the harvest taste good?  Yes, indeed, it does.  A friend dropped off some peaches she’d picked up at one of the farm stands, and they’re the best peaches I’ve had in decades.  They don’t just look like peaches, they taste like peaches, and they’re juicy enough to run down your chin unless eaten with care.  She dropped off some apples, too, that became the season’s first cobbler.  It was delicious.

     There was a bountiful crop of excited teenagers at Argo canoe livery this morning.  It looked like about forty students from Greenhills School, moments from clambering into two-person kayaks with their chaperones.  Sue and I had walked well beyond Argo when we heard the kids going by on the river, shrieking in exhilaration.  We also saw a man who, quite possibly, had been shrieking earlier, as he wore the wet bathing suit and full-body goosebumps of someone who’d just climbed out of the river.  Yikes.

     Large birds in the area have been interfering with traffic, lately.  The trouble isn’t so much that they’re crossing streets, although they are doing that.  We’re used to that.  Drivers are indulgent about stopping to let them go by.  The problem recently is the birds’ failure to cross streets, preferring, it seems, to mill about randomly in the roadway.

     Canada geese have been doing this on Nixon Road, sometimes even walking out to the middle of the road and turning around back the way they came.  It’s the turkeys on Huron Parkway that are creating real backups, though.  Yesterday, seven to ten of them were working the intersection of the parkway and Hubbard Road, and had traffic stopped in all directions.  Far from looking distressed in any way, they seemed curious about their surroundings.

     They were particularly interested in the UPS truck that was first in line on Hubbard.  A couple of them had approached the open driver-side door and were leaning their heads forward for a better look inside the truck.  The driver didn’t appear perturbed, and I don’t know whether or not the big birds invited themselves all the way inside, as the turkeys all moved onto Hubbard, and traffic going my way on the parkway got underway again.  Sue and I agreed later that, had we been driving the UPS truck, we just might have eased the door shut.

     Seeing a couple pieces of spaghetti that had missed the colander, one evening this week, I pulled one out of the sink and offered it to the dog.  Would he eat it like Lady and the Tramp in their movie?  Yes, he did, nibbling his way daintily along just like the cartoon dogs did.  So, I offered him the other strand, this time where my husband could see, and he also was charmed by Rascal’s way with spaghetti.  A real-life dog clearly inspired the scene in the movie.

     From the pleasures afforded by seasonal fruits and vegetables, to the excesses of kids set loose with paddles, big birds at large on the streets, and one dainty dog, it’s been a fun beginning to autumn.

15 September 2023