Fall comes to the country.

Our friend Ben and Silence Dogood just returned from our local CSA (organic subscription farm), Quiet Creek Farm, here in scenic PA. It was a beautiful afternoon, cool and bright, and we especially enjoyed picking ‘Dragon Tongue’ beans (our very favorites, large-podded but tender purple-flecked yellow pods), basil and cilantro, and hot peppers, including the beautiful ‘Lemon Drop’ habaneros, from the U-Pick garden. (Silence has promised to make a special hot salsa for our heat-loving friend and fellow blog contributor, Richard Saunders, and let him name it.)

The lovely wooded drive out to the CSA was full of signs of fall: sumacs beginning to flame into orange and red, roadbanks spilling over with goldenrod, purple native asters, and white-flowered nettles. (We encourage these to grow at Hawk’s Haven, too; fortunately, they’re not stinging nettles! And the foliage is the most gorgeous blue-green, making them ornamental long before the plants flower.)

But these weren’t the signs of fall that struck us the most as we meandered along. Hawk’s Haven is tucked among farm fields, and we were startled to see how much the fields had changed in the short week since we’d last driven out.

Corn is the most noticeable crop, because around here it grows so high that it literally cuts off the surrounding view. To say that it’s as high as an elephant’s eye would only be true if you were talking about a really, really enormous elephant. For just one example, a month ago Silence mentioned to our friend Ben that the obnoxious floodlight of our across-the-road neighbor, which shines directly into our bedroom windows, had gone out. She’d been puzzled but relieved that he hadn’t replaced it. Straining to see, our friend Ben pointed out that he hadn’t replaced it because it hadn’t gone out. The field corn was simply so tall that it blocked the floodlight, and that field is at least four feet lower than the road!

On our country drive, we noticed that the corn stalks were drying out. Some were completely tawny; others (like the ones across the road) were just beginning to yellow. This begins a distinct phase in our seasonal cycle, because dried corn talks. It whispers; it murmurs; it rustles. We find corn a rather ominous crop anyway, since it grows so fast you can leave the house in the morning and come back a few hours later and literally—quite literally—see a height difference. But to hear those stalks audibly plotting among themselves every fall is to understand why corn mazes (a popular local feature) are scary and why “Children of the Corn” is a horror movie.

Corn wasn’t the only crop that the cool weather had transformed. Fields of soybeans were suddenly reduced to brown, leafless stalks with a few dried pods clinging to the stems. Soon they and the corn will be stored in silos and corn cribs, an abundant crop for the cattle, hogs, horses, chickens, and sheep. (Actually, I don’t know about the sheep; I suspect they’ll be enjoying hay from the earlier, abundant wheat and oats that filled the fields in spring.)

In any event, looking at those brown and gold fields said “fall” to our friend Ben and Silence in a way that even harvesting our adorable little pumpkins (from a volunteer vine in one of our compost bins) couldn’t. The year is ripening to harvest. Abundance rejoices. All the more so, knowing the long, dark winter is just around the bend.