Comes in fresh gales and leaves miles high in the sky. All the leaf trees have caught afire now, and the red and golden flames of them fill the woods with vast light. Grandpa can read his newspaper without his spectacles by the July sunlight coming out of an October tree as he sits under the boughs at twilight. The air runs wine, the earth runs amber cider, and the sea is a fairyland of whitecaps. Surf booms on the reefs, an Easter lilies stand up at the ocean's edge. The days are like the insides of Sandwich-glass plates and all beaded with light.
Now apples drum the world, and the small son shakes down a heavy rain on the big son's back and Grandfather's bald head. He gets his breeches smacked on their blind side for his trouble. The big one catches the small one bending and stings him hot on his seat with a nodhead.
The apple now has its day in the kitchen, and the month's feast is the deep pork-apple pie. Mother peels the Northern Spies and covers the floor with fragrant S's and C's and O's. She pares the white fruit and gets out her deepest iron skillet. First a cushion of piecrust, then a layer of apples, a lacing of fat salt pork in strips, then apples, then pork, then apples. She sprinkles on brown sugar and cinnamon thick, dashes in a splash of molasses from the old flowered jug, and laces all with quick strings of honey. She claps on the thick top crust, notches a flock of flying geese across it, and sprinkles on cold water, to make it flaky. She claps the pie into a hot oven. Apple juice, pork fat, honey, sugar, and cinnamon fuse. Mother takes out one of the Delectable Mountains, sets it before the menfolks at table, and they carve deep in glory!
The sign is Scorpio, the Secrets. The small boy broods over the picture and the place the arrow points to on the Naked Man in the Old Farmer's Almanac; he closes the book and feels guilty when his grandsire comes into the kitchen to read about the coming weather. But Scorpio, too, on this coast is the big-clawed lobster. He sculls the bay at his tastiest now, he comes home by hundreds in the reach boat, with his dangerous jaws made fast with wedges of white pine. The fisherman moves his hand among living shears, he picks the lobster up with finger and thumb just back of his stickpin eyes. The big boy handles the reach boat as well as his father.
Now nights are full of shooting stars. The northern lights burn below the Great Dipper. Never so many stars as now; they dust the heavens deep from the north to the south. The baby cuts his third tooth. Grandma dreams of a friend, dust these fifty years in the graveyard. There will be news. The father leaves clamming and opens the land with his clam hoe; the potatoes dot the furrows for miles, and a small boy has a cricke back from so much bending and picking up the big ones. The farmer brings his dory home filled with apples to the gunwales, and the boy sits on the top of them and sings. The cider press pours out a dark silk cloth of running honey.
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