Prompt #4 - Seasons

For my favourite season, I think I have to pick fall. Probably because it meant the start of the school year. New clothes, a new lunch kit, new scribblers and pens. The smell of cedar shavings around the classroom pencil sharpener. Of someone's orange rinds in the wastepaper basket after lunch. And the end of the farm year, with combines and grain trucks, augers and elevators. The hot noon lunch driven out to the fields, eaten "on the run" so as not to lose even an hour of warm dry days. Hot tea drunk from quart sealers. Cookies stuffed into dusty shirt pockets. And the garden harvest, Mum's kitchen becoming a factory production line. Blanched peas and corn for the freezer. Rows of cellar shelves stocked with sealers and more sealers full of every kind of food for the winter. Apricots. Blueberries. Cherries. Crabapples. Peaches. Pears. Raspberries. Rhubarb. Strawberries. Tomatoes. And pickles. Beets. Mustard cauliflower. Mustard beans. Rhubarb relish smelled the best of all--onions and cinnamon stewing together. Tomato and cranberry catsup. Thousand day pickles. Dilled cucumbers. Dilled carrots. Old hens and venison. Grape jelly and strawberry jam. A full potato bin. A huge crock of sand with carrots and parsnips buried within. Stacks of pumpkins and vegetable marrow. Cabbages hanging upside down from the joists. That was what it seemed to be all about. The world turned upside down. With everything that had been "going out" now coming back in, in a flurry of lonely or communal labour.

I love the colours. Gold. Red. Brown. Orange. I loved the full pumpkin harvest moon climbing from the horizon. The smell of wet earth in the air. The colours of the sunset exploding with all the extra dust. And in the olden days, when they used to burn the stubble and the fields were a line of fire, yellow and orange and red against the black of night. The smell of clean smoke.

I live elsewhere now. There is no real harvest except for decorations on school windows and displays in the supermarket. And fall here means the beginning of the rainy season. I can already hear it strumming as it hits the roof. Everything is still lush, even the crop of leaves which have fallen on the moss of the lawn. A different kind of beauty. The same wet earth smell. No basement. No canning. A wealth of generous friends with gardens.

Maybe I'm feeling nostalgic because my brother just phoned me with the news. The house, the yard, the barnyard have all disappeared. Bulldozed like the windbreak and the pasture and the sloughs which used to surround it. Bulldozed, burned, buried, levelled, cultivated over into the one grand wheatfield. Owned now, rumour has it, by some giant corporation on another continent. Things change. Life goes on. Mine goes on virtually without wheat, and without a cellar full of home preserves. I'm just glad that such abundance was once a part of my experience. I'm glad too that it sewed in me an appreciation of how so much is given.