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Gathering in the Fall

Of pumpkins and bread boxes and long friendships

by Edie Clark

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Every year at this time, I drive down into the Connecticut River Valley, down through Northfield and Sunderland and Hadley, to buy my winter supply of onions and potatoes, plus winter squash and apples, and a few other things that will keep in my root cellar. This way, I don't have to think about buying winter vegetables again until spring. I have done this so many years, I can no longer count how long this has been my custom. This year was especially exciting as one of my friends from my growing up years moved to Amherst in the beginning of September. She had lived for years in San Francisco until she and her husband moved to Washington D.C. a couple of years ago. That was certainly a lot closer but a move to Amherst put her practically in my back yard. I went down to welcome her on Saturday, which so happened to be one of the most magnificent days of the summer, so far. Cloudless, cobalt blue skies. Warm but not hot sun. Gentle breezes. The harvest was in progress on the fields of all the farms I passed on the way down. What could be a better setting to renew a friendship?

Mimi and I went through high school together. We listened for hours on end to Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (and sometimes laughed hysterically at the wry irony of the lyrics and the comedic intrusion of the tuba and exalting horns). "Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I'm 64," sounded to us like twenty lifetimes away. Subsequently, we discovered our love for classical music, not as much of a contradiction as that may sound. Mimi had a passion and a talent for modern dance and even danced for a brief period with the Jose Limon dance troupe in New York City. This would have been in the 1960s. I sometimes accompanied her in to New York so she could attend her dance classes. After, we would explore Greenwich Village where we would eat at exotic food stands and buy unusual earrings at bohemian stalls several steps down from the sidewalk. There was a sense of freedom in all of this, a sense of new beginnings and a great big world out there ahead of us. We grew up together with these expectations.

So here we are, more than forty years later, with most of that great big world now having been encountered, digested, analyzed, laughed at and mourned over. It seems almost impossible that we are at an age where we are able to look back further than we will ever again be able to look forward. I picked Mimi up a bit before lunch and we set forth. I wanted to find a pumpkin, for starters. We pottered along, admiring the old tobacco barns, many of them now used for purposes other than drying tobacco. The open stretches of field all around us created a big sky and made us think of the Midwest. Corn had already been cut, leaving that distinctive autumnal stubble. Great coils of bittersweet wrapped itself around trees and telephone poles, turning itself red from the effort. Occasionally we'd slow for a big wide tractor lumbering down the road, many of them pulling large wagons loaded with squash or pumpkins. They were headed, we assumed, to the farm markets of Northampton or Amherst. Weathered wooden stands set close to the roadside displayed bright bunches of multi-colored zinnias in Mason jars, $5 a bunch, an honor system box beside them. We saw pumpkins big enough to wage war and cabbages too ("that would make a lot of galumpkies," Mimi commented as we encountered a monster bigger than a basketball), all massive examples of the abundance of summer. Many varieties of winter squash spread across lawns, boxes of tomatoes sat under umbrellas, pots of purple asters and orange mums lined the roadways, all beauty queens hoping to be noticed. We noticed. We bought. We filled the trunk.