Amber oaks, swollen pumpkins, scarecrows, and other pleasanter things.

September. I'm glad it's September. I love the fall. I love the caramel-apple smell of it, the leaf-smoke scent, the mulch and wet-brown dirt envelopment of the senses.

I am secretly hunting for a pumpkin farm to visit with my little boy.

I can see the white farmhouse, like the ones in picture books that I read as a little girl. It stands with perfect posture, alone, a fringe of green pines and maroon and golden oaks and elms and maples off in the distance - orange leaves spring out like wild hairs, glow against the deep cornflower sky. Brown soil furrows surround the house off and away to the distant treeline. Orange pumpkins, fat and heavy, droop, loll, sag and slump into thickets of green and spiralling vines. Someone somewhere is baking a pie thick with cinnamon and nutmeg and brown sugar. I imagine it is Mrs. Brown, the farmer's white-haired wife. And she will have warm apple cider ready to serve in brown mugs. The apples come from an orchard several dirt roads away, dirt roads lined with Queen Anne's lace and black-eyed Susans and purple coneflower in the spring. Now they are lined with green-golden grasses, crackling and sharp. There are puppies and kittens scattered under withering forsythia bushes, pricked by holly and yelping or rolling over to display chubby bellies. And somewhere, amidst the ticklish scents, the carefree pups, the distant dark wood, there is a pumpkin waiting for my baby and me. If we take the whole weekend, some perfect weekend, we'll find it there and forget about everything else. We'll allow ourselves to believe for a moment that this was why we were put on earth.