|
|
|||||||
|
October 24, 1999 |
|
autumn |
|||||
|
|
|
|
|||||
|
October 24, 1999 Today's Starting Pitchers: Kevin Millwood for the Braves, David Cone for the Yankees Yesterday's Starting Pitchers: Greg Maddux for the Braves, El Duque for the Yankees Today's Reading: Born Naked by Farley Mowat
Copyright © 1999, Janet I. Egan |
|
The Fox Point neighborhood of Providence has enough trees, historic houses, and brick sidewalks to make an autumn afternoon walk a pleasure to be savored. Nancy and I spent the better part of the afternoon experiencing Fox Point in fall. A couple who looked like they'd been married forever knelt on the sidewalk next to their front steps. Nancy asked if they were worshipping. They were replacing some moldings or flashing on the steps, which were painted a deep green. They liked the idea of fixing their old house as worship. A woman sat on the floor in a half open doorway painting varnish onto a door. The russet and gold trim all around the door looked freshly painted too. We told her we liked the paint job. Two blue jays, one on either side of Benefit Street, scolded each other from the tops of blazing yellow maple trees. A gray squirrel chattered at me and ran away along the top of a fence. Some kids in the playground cranked their boom box up so loud it echoed off the stone walls. Halloween decorations in this part of Providence tend toward simple pumpkins, gourds, hay bales, and corn stalks. No garish strings of orange plastic lights, witches on broomsticks, or white plastic bags stuffed with leaves at the top to resemble ghosts. Many of the pumpkins weren't even carved into jackolanterns. They're arranged in groups on stairways, porch rails, over the doors, in corners, or on top of hay bales on the driveway. It looks more like a tasteful harvest festival than an attempt to appease the spirits of the dead. The view of the river from the middle of Hope Street, painted fences peeling in layers, miniature dogs walking their owners on South Main Street, RISD students studying at the Cable Car Cinema's outdoor cafe tables, yellow leaves collecting in gaps in the brick sidewalks from a hundred years of freezing and thawing, the taste of chai and hot chocolate, a few hundred starlings suddenly re-foliating a bare tree, and the rustle of dry leaves all have that special poignance of the end of warmth and light and the beginning of cold and darkness. There's nothing new or original to say about fall in New England. The only thing to do is go outside and walk in it. |
|||||
Fall
is a glorious time to live in New England. It's not just the
colors of the leaves, although that is a spectacle that
draws tourists from all over. It's the color of the sky -
that deep blue that makes you think you can touch outer
space. It's the energy of everybody bustling around doing
last minute house maintenance projects or laying in firewood
before winter. It's folks sipping hot cider in sidewalk
cafes. It's apples and pumpkins and shapely squashes. It's
that last explosion of all kinds of color before the
dullness of winter. It's the ducks arriving and the egrets
leaving. It's the slant of light in the afternoon that makes
the reeds light up from inside and makes the bay shimmer and
glow silver and gold.