Harvest

It's time for fairs and peach festivals and sweet corn and too many tomatoes and zucchini. Today I made salsa with some of the too many tomatoes and the corn, peach and blueberry crisp from fruit I picked in my Uncle's bounteous garden a few days ago, and I believe that zucchini and eggplant-roasting is also in my future. Sometimes it seems like just TOO MUCH. Too much all at once, too much lovely fresh food, too many events to pack in before the end of the summer, too much perfection. And yet, not enough stunningly hot days, followed by soft starry nights. Not even enough thunderstorms. The nights are cooler, now. So cool I am led to think of the blasting winter that will surely follow such glory as we've had this year. I want to get all the goodness out of this last bit of summer, can every tomato, lop off millions of corn kernels to freeze for the freeze ahead. I want to wring every last drop of fun out of every last day, go to the beach and lie in the sand, feel the hot sun on my skin. I want to eat fried dough with maple cream and huge grilled turkey legs (VT State Fair), and seafood chowder (Rochester Fair), and the best fish and chips ever outside of England & Ireland, bathed in malt vinegar (Heath Fair). I want to watch flowers of fireworks burst in the black night sky, and sweat a lot while running through Queen Anne's Lace in the fields with my happy dogs. I want to go to the gardens of stately homes and wander along in a white dress carrying a parasol, then have a decorous picnic on the intensely green lawn that rolls up to the huge behemoth, the white whale of a house. I want to ride horses through the forest, swooning at the smell of pine and hay-scented fern and horse sweat.
In other words, I want to live the Harvest, live the downswell of these days of summer's end. I want you to live them with me. Make yourself a list of Harvest desires. Do at least half of them, committing Acts of Attention all the while. Notice EVERYTHING. Then write, then draw.