By Wade Rouse

About this time last year, Gary and I had a friend visit from the city, and we took her to a local U-Pick renowned for its rolling orchards and fabulous fruit. I remember it was a gorgeous fall day, that brief time in October when the leaves have turned but are still clinging to the trees and putting on their daily theatrics.

As our friend began to retrieve a basket from a smiling U-Pick staffer, she asked, “Which way are the strawberries?”

“Strawberries aren’t in season, ma’am,” he replied. “It’s apple picking season.”

“Fruit has seasons?” she replied, flabbergasted.

I roared at this exchange, adding between laughs, “Just think of it as Fashion Week, but you know, with apples and pumpkins instead of capes and pumps.”

My friend turned and snapped, “Hey, Trader Joe! It wasn’t that long ago when you were me!”

She was right. In fact, I wrote a memoir, "At Least in the City Someone Would Hear Me Scream," about the difficulties in transitioning from urban life to a simpler, more natural Beach Coast existence. I once knew nada about natural. I was once sans simplicity.

That day, we spent a few lovely hours picking apples for eating and baking – me joking the whole time to our friend, “Big strawberries, aren’t they?” – before heading home to make Gary’s super-secret homemade apple crisp, which is delicious enough to form its own cult following.

As it baked, the smell filling our cottage, Turkey Run, my friend yanked out a copy of my memoir from a nearby canoe-shaped bookcase and read the following:

"Orchards and vineyards dot the area landscape, endless, rolling hillsides filled with fruit trees. In my short time in rural America, these orchards have come to define the time of year, tell me what season we are enjoying: blueberries and sweet cherries in July, peaches in August, apples summer through fall, as well as plums, nectarines, pumpkins, squash, Indian corn. These seasonal crops have replaced my office calendar."

It’s true.

As she was reading, I looked out into our woods, the sunset’s reflection through the sugar maples tinting our cottage a glowing gold and red, and remembered when autumn – especially October – was simply a block on my desk calendar, a flyover zone, as it were, between summer and the holidays.

Now, fall is when I tend to appreciate my life along the Beach Coast the most.

It’s when we all tend to relish home and the many splendors of autumn.

Fall is field coats and fireplaces, turtlenecks and color tours.

It means raking leaves, and Halloween, pumpkins and parades, and warm cider on cool nights. Fall is football, and breathtakingly beautiful drives along the Beach Coast.

I now define fall as a celebration of color, on cheeks and in trees, on apples and pumpkins, and in the fires that dance in our ancient woodstove.

A Beach Coast fall, in fact, is a melding of my five senses – sight, sound, touch, smell and taste – not a deadening of them, as it had been in the past.

To me, now, fall is not just how the sugar maple leaf looks on the tree, it’s the sound it makes as it heads south, whistling past your ear – almost sighing – before splashing into a pile with its friends. Fall is the spotting of a roadside stand stacked with perfect pumpkins, the selection of an orange work of wonder just waiting to be carved, candlelight flickering an eerie yet comforting glow on your front porch. Fall is not simply feeling the cool smoothness of an apple as you pick it, the childhood smell as you hold it to your nose under the still-warm autumn sun, but also the loud crunch and tart-sweet taste as you bite into its middle, juice trickling down your chin.

As we ate Gary’s apple crisp by the fire that evening last year with our friend, she turned to me – her mouth full – and exclaimed, “Fruit has seasons! Fruit should have seasons!”

“I won’t say it’s like Fashion Week this time,” I laughed.

“Actually, I think it’s way better.”

And then she polished off her crisp, hugged herself in front of the fire, and we talked of fall’s finery, and the pies that had yet to be baked.

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