The nights grow longer. Temperatures have cooled. The main harvest is only weeks away. We’re moving toward Samhain, or Summer’s End. First though we gather the bounty of the growing season over the long harvest that begins in Lughnasa and extends toward the end of Mabon.

I’ve written about back to school nostalgia. There’s also, for this Midwestern boy, memories of coming over a slight hill on a gravel road. Once in a while, during this time of year, a lumbering combine or a big John Deere pulling a corn picker can suddenly appear. Brakes. Gravel dust. Becoming part of the slow procession.

In the fields corn stands tall and green, its ears prominent in their maturity. Row after parallel row of corn. A major crop where I grew up. Alfalfa, too. Not much wheat, the fields often too small. Unlike the vast plantings in Nebraska. Soy beans, a lot of soy beans. Farmers would say, “I grow corn and beans.”

In my life harvest is not abstract or metaphorical. It is basic, predictable, woven into our fall days. Up here in the Rockies fall announces itself through hyperphagic bears tipping over garbage bins and that strange sound, the bugling of an amorous Elk bull. After 67 years in the Midwest I still look for slow-moving harvest machinery.