From Connecticut: apples and orange, redux

As a kid living in the city (there is only one city, come on, we all know that), I looked forward to the rare Sundays that we would head out for the country. Typically we would drive no further than Connecticut, where we would find some roadside stand selling apples, stock up (because these were what, fresher than city apples?) and return home.

My parents weren’t into holidays much and so pumpkins were not an option. Cider, yes, we’d get cider too.

For the past several years I have been coming to Connecticut in the month of October and each time, if the weather is good, I take whichever daughter has time, up to the orchards north of New Haven. I have always wondered if the place we typically go to is the same that I stopped at some forty-five years ago.

In a complete turn around, the weather turned brilliantly lovely on the Coast (it will rain again once I leave tomorrow, but for now – the skies are magnificent). Red apples, orange pumpkins, blue skies – I could not ask for a better set up. Yet it is the kids’ faces that made me take out the camera most.

Of course, everything is more crowded in coastal Connecticut. At the Green’s, south of Madison, my friend and I were the only visitors last Thursday. Here, they needed someone to direct traffic.

I’m sure most of the kids running around the pumpkin patch were city kids. I could see myself in them. Me, kickin’ pumpkin ass, stuffing myself with apples, preferably covered with caramel (I had a sweet tooth). Me, wanting to take a pumpkin home. Me, loving the feel of the “country.”



bundled up for the brisk country air



a day in the fields; take a picture!



city brats, taking it all in, the apple trees, the rocks...



even the apple branch is crowded in this part of the country


The last photo is from the town square in nearby Guilford. But I needn't have identified it -- there are a million hints that this is indeed Connecticut: the colors and styles of the houses, the age and nature of the foliage, the suspended elctrical wires. Connecticut, aging gracefully in coastal towns, less so in the larger cities.