Matt
Sweetbriar Starling Farm’s Harvest Festival Opening Day came in clear and cold and smelling of fallen leaves and chimney smoke, the first morning all week it hadn’t rained, and by nine the whole town was walking up Starling Lane in flannel and warm coats with their breath showing, kids running ahead, dogs on leads, the maples on the ridge gone full red now, blazing against a sky so blue it looked fake.
Sweetbriar Starling Farm sat barely a mile out from the middle of town, close enough that you could walk it if the morning was fine, close enough that the church bells carried out to the fields on Sundays and the high school’s Friday-night lights glowed faint over the ridge in football season.
The town had been holding things on that lawn for as long as anyone could remember—the Harvest Festival, sure, but also the Fourth of July, and the spring plant sale, and more weddings than Iris could count, and the occasional funeral reception when the church hall wasn’t big enough for how loved somebody had been.
The farm was where Sweetbriar went to be Sweetbriar.
So when the festival came, it didn’t so much arrive as come home.
And it had arrived. They’d transformed the whole lower grounds overnight. I hadn’t seen much of it when I was here to walk the corn maze; the dark hid it. But now it was daylight, and I didn’t know where to look first.
There were hay bales set out in rings around the gazebo lawn for seating, cornstalks lashed to every post in fat golden sheaves, and pumpkins everywhere—pumpkins by the hundred, lining the lane and stacked in pyramids by the stand and tumbled artfully around the gazebo steps in every shade from pale ghost-white to a deep blaze orange.
Strings of café lights and orange bunting crisscrossed overhead, not yet lit in the daylight but promising the evening.
Somewhere a cider press was already going, and the smell of it rolled across the lawn and mixed with everything else until the air was a whole season in one breath—hot apple cider and frying dough, kettle corn and crushed grass, cinnamon and damp pine and the cold clean bite underneath it all that meant the season was turning.
Donna’s burrito cart had been wheeled out from the Stop you made it up—”
I left them to it. They argued the way some people breathe, constantly and without distress, and if you listened to the words it sounded like a fight and if you looked at their faces it looked like the opposite, and everyone in town had clearly decided years ago to let them get there on their own schedule.
Because the other thing I’d learned was the exact size of my own trouble, and the trouble was standing up on the gazebo steps with a clipboard and a megaphone, running her festival.
Elizabeth had her hair down in a loose braid, dark red under a knit cap, and a flannel I’d have known at a distance, and she was lit up in a way that had nothing to do with the cold-bright morning—this was her element, the whole day revolving around her, and she stood up there calling contestants and wrangling her hosts and bantering with the crowd and she was, plainly and completely, in her glory.
I’d seen her tired. I’d seen her scared, on a porch in the dark, for one unguarded second.
I had not yet seen her like this, doing the thing she was built for in front of the whole town, and it did something to me I filed under a heading I was running out of room in.
“Contestants,” she called, and the lawn turned toward her, and she grinned out at all of us from the steps.
“Welcome to the kickoff. The rules are simple. There’s a pie in front of you.
You eat the pie. The first one to finish and keep it down”—she paused for the laugh, got it—” wins the round.
No hands. We’re not animals. We’re worse than animals; we’re a small town with nothing better to do on a Saturday.
” Another laugh, bigger. “Your hosts at the table can’t be bribed, though heaven knows you’ll try.
Donna, who made the pies and will know if you cheat.
My grandmother, who is here against medical advice and will not be deterred—” a wave toward the front row, where Iris Starling sat enthroned in a lawn chair under three quilts, looking delighted and furious to be seated “—and Rosemary Barrett, her oldest friend and oldest rival, who has heckled this round for forty years and is, she’ll have you know, completely without favorites.
” She swung the megaphone toward the side of the stage, where her cousin June stood with her phone held up in both hands like a torch.
“And June, who is going to settle every round the only fair way there is. Hit it, June.”
“We’re LIVE, by the way,” June announced, to the crowd and to whoever was watching on the other side of that phone, of which I gathered there were a startling number.
“And the way this works, for our friends tuning in—” she waggled the phone “—is I’ve got a meter on here that reads how loud you animals get.
Whoever you scream the loudest for wins.
That’s it. My grandmother and her bestie, Rosemary, can root for their favorites all they want; it doesn’t count for a thing; they just get the good seats.
” She grinned. “So scream as if it matters. Because it’s the only vote there is. ”
“I have no favorites,” Rosemary announced from the hosts’ table, in a tone that suggested she had at least two, and gave a small queenly wave toward the end of the contestant line, where her grandsons Jude and Simon sat—Jude waving both arms back like a man flagging a rescue plane, Simon pretending he hadn’t seen.
“I have plenty of favorites,” Iris said, not to be outdone, settling deeper into her quilts.
“I just have the decency to pretend I don’t until the cheering’s done.
” And the two of them looked extremely pleased with themselves, and the crowd ate up the whole exchange, and somewhere I heard my Aunt Aggie note that the matriarchs were “in midseason form.”