This is the only time of year when I miss New England.
For me, summers there involved much sweating and general unpleasantness--when we did get a lone air conditioner in our bedroom, I spent the bulk of one summer holed up in that bedroom, even eating meals there--so I generally thank all available deities to be in the Rocky Mountain West when the summer heat and humidity makes its first appearance. (Ask me about New Haven, my bedroom, and the frozen peas sometime!) Which brings me to spring in New England. Perfectly lovely, yes, for the week and a half that it appears between the end of winter snow and damp cold and the start of the Residing In Someone's Armpit season.
Winter wasn't too bad--I come from Montana and am therefore hard to scare or freeze--but the whining and general panic that accompanied each and every winter storm was amusing at best and annoying at worst. Schools closing! Cars piling! Teeny, tiny amounts of snow falling! In Montana, it takes an act of God to close the schools. Snow day? Hah. In my 13 years of Montana public schooling, we had a snow day exactly once. It was -40 degrees Fahrenheit, but that wasn't what caused the powers-that-be to close schools. Nope. It was because the power had gone out and they couldn't heat the building. But I digress. I was talking about why I liked New England.
It's a cliche, but fall in New England really is spectacular. The weather cools down (and, more crucially, dries out), and the trees actually do turn these unbelievable colors that I've never seen anywhere else, especially not in Montana. And it's time to go to the orchard and buy way too many apples .
I remember the first time my friend Kristyn--a Connecticut girl--told me that she was going apple picking over the weekend. I have to admit that I mocked her. That's a great racket, I told her. Instead of paying people to harvest your crops, you get silly people to come and pay you so that they can do it for you. Makes perfect sense. But when Chip started working at UMass, and I started spending a lot of time in Amherst, we were invited on such a trip, and I was totally converted. That year and the next two years that we remained in New England, we made the pilgrimage and had apple dessert competitions afterward with our friends. The "judging" involved lots of warm beverages, fireside conversation, and scrumptious apple desserts.
In Bozeman, we have Rocky Creek Farm, where you can indeed pick apples, but it's just not the same. Going there for pumpkins is a lot of fun (I'll post pictures of Connery's Montessori field trip there this week), but I think it is the community that gathered after the picking that I miss more than the actual produce. Funny how just the smell of fall in the air can bring back so many happy memories and nostalgia for a place that I didn't necessarily appreciate fully while I was there. I guess it's time to redouble my efforts to enjoy being exactly where I am now, instead of finding fault. Now, I need to go find some doughnuts to go with my cider.