Oh, ’tis the season, right? This time of year with it’s endless orange just slays me. The crispness, the pumpkin everything, the farm themes, the reason to wear scarves — what’s more delicious than fall, really?
One of the most wonderful aspects of moving somewhere new (as we did, just 8 short months ago) is that so many things feel like the beginning of a new tradition. ”Oh, we’ll do this again next year,” I hear myself saying about everything from the earliest organized city bike rides to the first summer concerts to our amateur canning session from our own little backyard fruit orchard, and all the little seasonal rituals that have packed themselves into our days along the way of this first, knee-scraping year.
And so it was, with our inaugural trip to the pumpkin farm over the weekend that set yet another family tradition in stone. The sea of pumpkins (aka climbing apparatus) was so thrilling we never even made it to the actual pumpkin patch. The baby pigs with their head stuffed into a pumpkin held our attention a good long while, and so did the big mama pig with her low grumble and her chicken friends alongside her. The corn maze was truly a place to change directions every 5 seconds (a favorite activity in our house) and engage in a game of real hide and seek. We lost ourselves in the scent of hay, tall corn, and farm animals doing what they do. And we quelled our hunger with caramel apples and cider, thinking to ourselves, could any Saturday morning activity be more lovely than this?
Of course, it being Portland — the city that never stops eating well — we also made a lunch of it among the various delectable food truck offerings and then filled our trunk with the funniest-shaped pumpkins and bumpiest gourds we could find, and headed home for a nap. Waking up that afternoon, I found we still carried the smell of farm in our clothes that is just so compelling this time of year, and the sound of the chickens in our heads, and together made a front porch display that reminds us, it’s October.
Beautiful !