Fall has always been – or used to be – cut and dried. The leaves started to turn in late September, around the time of the first frost. Then came the fair – take your pick: Fryeburg or Common Ground – with its frosty mornings turning warm by noon.  A few days later and gardeners woke up to the killing frost, the morning they’d been waiting for.

At last, it was over. The green tomatoes were spread out on newspapers in the spare bedroom to ripen, the squashes and pumpkins tucked under the bed in that chilly room, the pantry full of pickles and jam. Down cellar the underground stuff – potatoes, carrots, beets, turnips – were kept cool and damp in boxes of sawdust. Strings of onions hung along the cellar stairs.

The garden itself was a ruin of blackened vines and shriveled stalks, the rugosa roses showing off only their orange hips. The annuals had kicked the bucket weeks earlier, and the perennials had sensibly died back to a few stalks here and there.

So what’s going on? A friend has a two-foot-tall blooming foxglove, Betty Heald showed me her “last rose of summer”, a lovely big, red blossom. My calendulas are still in bud, green and vigorous.

“It’s sandal weather,” Corelyn Senn happily texted the other day, at the same time complaining about the ticks still abundant in the woods. I chatted with a couple of guys in Wentworth’s, bragging that they were still wearing shorts, and Don watched someone swimming at the Beach last week.

Corelyn has changed her tune as I write this morning with the temperature hovering, finally, around freezing. “My sandals and I are looking at each other sadly,” she just texted.

But right on schedule the turkey chicks have grown into teen-agers, tall and lanky, scattering all over the place while their moms try to lead them across the road. A whole family roosts in a big pine over on Ducktrap Road, and if I time it right, they fly out of that tree as I approach on my morning walk. One, two, three – I counted ten the other day – they half fly, half fall out like kids at recess.

Our own little chicks – pullets they’re called – have grown into young hens, all 25 of them (more or less, as they’ve mingled with the old girls and it’s hard to separate who’s who), and have begun laying an egg a day. If you’ve been buying our eggs, you probably get 10 or so smallish eggs along with one or two enormous ones in a dozen. Old hens can lay really big eggs, sometimes double yolkers, while pullet eggs start out quite small.

One young girl escaped the wing clipping we did a couple of months ago and figured out she could fly out of the pen. Our birds are not free range, but are kept inside a tall, fenced in yard. Free range means free lunch to the coyotes, foxes, bobcats, fishers, and weasels that roam these woods. We stopped feeding them years ago when we made the fence tight and six feet tall.

Ms Pearl White Leghorn, like many an adolescent, thought she knew all about the world, and to her that meant she could go where she pleased. Every morning she flew over the fence, and every afternoon she was begging to be let back in. After all, the chicken feed was inside, not out. The other day when I opened the shed door at dawn there she was, practically on the step. Clearly, she’d spent the night out.

Talk about the walk of shame. She gladly let me herd her back to the henhouse. I’d no sooner shut the door when a flash of white in the pines across the road caught my eye. A bald eagle shot out of the tree and flew right over the roof, undoubtedly disappointed at missing a nice breakfast of tender, young chicken.

And then there was the lunar eclipse the other night. I’ve never been much of a star-gazer, and hadn’t paid much attention to the upcoming event. Still, when I woke up at 3:30 that morning to the full moon lighting up my bedroom I went to the window to check on her/him? And saw the beginning crescent of the shadow on the moon.

So serendipitously I watched the whole thing, the moon going dark, and then covering most of it, until it – the moon – did what it does every night and set behind the trees, still in shadow as far as I could see.

And that got me thinking about Scott Dickerson’s new book, Telling Stone. The title refers to 23,500-year-old cave paintings and why they might have been made. In this, his first novel, Scott, who wrote To Save a River about the Ducktrap, imagines “the vocabulary and thoughts [of paleolithic hunter-gatherers] their response to conflict and sexuality, to becoming hearthmates” making one reviewer “wonder if this early art is witness to the first evolutionary glimpses of the human soul.”

Moonrise, sunrise over the Bay always bring to mind the early people who lived on our shore, saw the same horizon I see, the two distant hills, Blue Hill and Cadillac. The simple prose Scott ascribes to his characters as they move through their days and through the year – solalight, lunacycle, snowseason, greenseason– derives from that very evidence. And now I wonder, what would they make of a shadow crossing the moon?

Telling Stone is available on Amazon 

Back to the weather. Sunday, a gloomy, rainy day, gave Tracee and me the perfect excuse to both stay home and inside. We spent the afternoon in my kitchen (she’s my D-I-L who lives upstairs with her family and her own kitchen) baking goodies for next week’s Holiday Market. With a backdrop of Sunday football playing on the TV, glasses of sherry to keep up our spirits, and no kids looking for handouts, we had a great time. We put blueberry muffins, chex mix, chocolate crinkles cookies, and two dozen empanadas in the freezer to benefit the United Christian Church’s (UCC) annual Holiday Market.

Ed came downstairs to take pictures of the two “church ladies” (apparently on Election Day the return, after Covid, of the Church Ladies’ bake sale, was featured on Facebook) and sure enough, we both appeared shortly after on his page, including my dog Fritz stealing the show. And yes, I did wash the spatula.

Mary Schulein, UCC’s music director and the coordinator of the summer’s Indoor Flea Markets writes: 

“The Holiday Market will feature local crafters, farmers, and antique dealers offering unique and affordable products including hand-carved wooden utensils, honey, maple syrup, beeswax candles, blueberry products, vintage buttons and linens, Advent calendars, seasonal decorations, and antique curiosities.  Church members will be selling sweet and savory baked goods including pies, fruit cakes, and cookies packed to go.

Shoppers are invited to come and find unusual gifts for their loved ones, take home desserts for Thanksgiving dinner, visit with friends, all while helping to support the local economy and the ongoing ministries of the United Christian Church.”

The Market, held at the Community Building, 18 Searsmont Road (Rt. 173) will be held Saturday, November 19, 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. Masks are recommended, but not required.

If, in fact, this balmy autumn is finally giving in to the inevitable and turning cold, it should be no surprise that Christmas-by-the-Sea is a mere two weeks away, December 3. This year the Lincolnville Historical Society will be open from 3 to 6 p.m. that day with a special Christmas exhibit, as well as a chance to see the building’s new look if you missed the Open House a few weeks ago.

The Beach bonfire will be burning brightly by 4:00. It’s always a magical time as dusk falls and the ferry makes it last trip across the Bay; we sing carols around the fire as children race about in the dark, and finally, at 4:30 Santa arrives on a fire truck. Families make their way up the hill to the Beach Schoolhouse to warm up with cookies and sandwiches (we always told the kids that was supper that night, and so it was) and visits with neighbors.

So there. Let winter begin!

Beach Store

After a two year hiatus Lincolnville’s Beach Store is again open! Speaking as an already loyal customer, the sandwiches are delicious (and big enough to share, though when we do, Don and I wish we’d gotten two, they’re that good), and we love the pizza too. After a successful first summer season, owner Matt Hohman, a Lincolnville resident, now has enough help to stay open seven days a week: Mon-Wed, 11-5, Thurs-Fri, 11-7, and Sat-Sun, noon-6.  As with so many restaurants, finding help has been difficult. Matt would love to expand his hours to include breakfast, so if anyone’s interested, give him a call, 789-5555.

Condolences

Sympathy to the family and friends of Lincolnville’s Christina Beaulieu.