Fall, by Tom Dinard

A wet chill stings you in the morning air. The drizzle blows sideways from the south as the ferry boat reaches its island dock. That’s when you know that the eighty-degree sun you devoured the day before was a final sputter, that the leaves blowing into the road are the truth.

You are driving with your four-year-old son to a farm where the final Sunday of each September marks the celebration of the harvest. Last year you took the ferry ride over just to get him out on the sound. You were walking down the main thoroughfare of the island’s downtown when you saw a colorful poster for the fair. You lucked out — it was happening that day — and he had a ball. You told him you’d come back.

Now woodsmoke wafts above as you hold hands and stride up the dirt path to the entrance. A jug band plays a front-porch bluegrass number you don’t recognize, but when you sit down on a hay bale with your fresh-roasted corn on the cob and your son begins to stab away at his five-dollar mac and cheese, the players begin “Losing My Religion,” and you think about the end of one of your favorite bands, another piece of childhood vanishing, and the coming end of the year.

The wind has picked up. The jug band can only wince and laugh as the tent they’re under while crammed onto a small stage is pulled this way and that, struggling to keep its moorings. A blue heeler named Molly walks by with her ears pricked. You tell her owner that you used to have a cattle dog, too, but she was red. He says he’s heard that the red ones aren’t very good with other dogs and sometimes with people, too. You can’t argue that point, having remembered the pit bull she gave a fat lip and the time she bit off the bottom of the cable installer’s jeans.

Sheep are being sheared, ponies are being ridden, and apples are sitting in buckets, waiting to be mashed into cider. Zucchinis are sitting on a table, waiting to be measured for a contest. Kids are zooming down a makeshift slide on burlap sheets while a John Deere tractor pulls families around the grounds in a trailer filled with straw. Ripe blackberries are glistening on thorny brambles as the sun shows up again, and you can’t help but picture this place in a few days after the volunteers clear it out. It’ll be a farm once again, yellowing grasses turning back to green in a hurry when the October rains arrive.

You think about the seasons, about getting older, about loved ones getting sick and friends’ loved ones close to death. You know that all you can do is what you do every day: try as hard as you can for yourself and the ones you love, not giving up and not giving in.

You descend from the hilltop farm and walk back to the car, still hand in hand, and your son points to a police officer directing traffic into the appropriate parking areas. The cop notices, smiles, and pulls a sticker out of his pocket, a replica of a badge that anoints the boy as a junior detective. You stick it on his shirt and he lights up with what looks like pride. He asks you if you’ll get him a cookie before you drive back onto the ferry, and you tell him you will.

The sun has packed up and left, sleeping behind dark clouds as the crowd dissipates in front of you in a line down the two-lane road.

This beautiful afternoon is like summer, the year and your life — moving forward, slow but steady, to the inevitable fall while leaving the days, hours, moments, memories and legacies behind.

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