No, it isn’t the end of daylight savings time, but it does feel very autumnal today here in the far north.

I nearly gasped with delight when I pulled into the parking lot of my local country store this morning and saw a magnificent display of pumpkins, corn stalks, hay bales and chrysanthemums. This store is the real deal—wooden floors, a woodstove in winter, a huge array of produce from their own farm and fresh-pressed, unpasteurized true apple cider. Today I bought some small pumpkins and my all-time favorite fruit: concord grapes. Why does something so good have such a short season?

Anyway, though it’s my favorite season, autumn is a season of contrasts. The light is waning, the ferns are folding into themselves, the bones of trees are emerging—and yet the colors that remain are vibrant, vivid and energizing. It’s funny (to me anyway) that the rest of the year I hate orange. Can’t stand it in any form—okay maybe inside a nice piece of carrot cake—but not in anything else. I never have orange flowers in my garden or anything orange in my house. Yet come autumn, I can’t get enough of all the many oranges nature so delightfully serves up. Perhaps it’s a case of orange only feeling like it fits in this season. Some people plant crocuses and other “spring” bulbs so that they’ll bloom in the autumn—that, too, feels wrong to me. I like my crocuses to be harbingers of the returning light, thank you very much.

Even though I’m well into middle age, I like to think I’m much younger in spirit. After all, I certainly embrace all things digital, but walking into that farm store today made me feel like time had stopped there about fifty years ago, and it made me wish I could freeze that experience forever. Over the past decade I’ve learned to eat much better foods, and this place is my shrine to all things fresh and fabulous. What is time, anyway? It only means what we decide it means. And I’ve decided that today I’m going to linger in the russet, sepia tones of the rural America of my childhood. Want to join me? Go buy a plump pumpkin—I guarantee it will light up your life, even if you don’t carve it.

CONTEMPLATIONS

• How do you react to autumn?
• Do you find the natural decay of the plant world depressing or simply a sign of the season?
• What cheers you up as the light diminishes?
• Do you need more pumpkins in your life?

Take other fall trips here.