The Beautiful Harvest

• Photo/Art by Michael Piazza

  http://www.yankeemagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/legacy_cms_images/9007.jpg

  The bright hues of just-picked cranberries are a festive reminder of the holidays to come.

  

• Photo/Art by Michael Piazza

  http://www.yankeemagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/legacy_cms_images/9008.jpg

  A cranberry bog in Duxbury, Massachusetts, awaits the harvest.

  

• Photo/Art by Michael Piazza

  http://www.yankeemagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/legacy_cms_images/9009.jpg

  During the harvest, a worker uses a rake to guide the loose, floating berries into the "boom," a kind of flexible, mobile corral that rounds them up and collects them.

  

• Photo/Art by Michael Piazza

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  Plump, ripe fruit is ready for cleaning and sorting.

  

• Photo/Art by Michael Piazza

  http://www.yankeemagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/legacy_cms_images/9011.jpg

  Apple-Pear-Cranberry Crostata

  

• Photo/Art by Michael Piazza

  http://www.yankeemagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/legacy_cms_images/9012.jpg

  Coconut-Curry Stir Fry with Pork and Cranberries

  

The New England landscape is so often portrayed as an austere place, the chilly backdrop to Pilgrim hardship, the model for Ethan Frome’s Starkfield. It’s this unforgiving land, so the story goes, that inspires some of our best Yankee virtues: our self-reliance and industriousness, our tolerance of extreme cold.

But travel down through southeastern Massachusetts in early October, and you’ll see one of nature’s most florid displays: 14,000 acres of shallow bogs turned scarlet in a rising tide of ripe cranberries. It’s a dazzling show of nature’s abundance–our own watery Eden–and one of the prettiest sights you could ever hope to witness on a cloudless day. Long after the harvest is over, the berries brighten our holiday tables in pies, sauces, cakes, and savory treats. Here’s a season defined not by its virtues, but by its pleasures.