Late fall ... grazing and haying (7USC1471d)

One of the things I have missed the most when living overseas is the season of fall. So when we scheduled a trip to the Midwest for the beginning of October, I was relieved that I would get a dose of autumnal glory this year. As it turned out, while we were back in Ohio, it was a sunny and summer-like, in the 80s the entire weekend. Nonetheless, we did get to see the colorful leaves in the countryside as we bore witness to not one, but two, beautiful bonfires.

Right before we left on our trip, though, I had to drop the dog off at the kennel. In an attempt to assuage my guilt over his impending captivity, I took him on a hike through a nearby county preserve. As we walked along, crunching through leaves, I realized that I might actually get the full breadth of my favorite season right here in California. Indeed, with one breath of crisp air, I knew that my sinuses, now fully clogged, were detecting the change in the air.

Actually, I should've seen the signs a few weeks earlier, when we went camping at Lake Morena County Park. During a lakeside sojourn with Sage there, I counted only a few wildflower holdouts among the tell-tale brown, dry grass.
And the hazy light from the fading sun already was casting long streaks and shadows earlier in the evening. Sage and I had to abandon our dip in the water quickly, so we could get back to camp in time to light the fire before darkness fell.

Some of our campground compatriots also gave hints of a full fall. One man by the lake was taking advantage of the rising autumn winds to fly a kite. And a local family taking a stroll through the park was accompanied by a turkey, named Lady Gaga, who perhaps was on the "edge of something final," like landing on the Thanksgiving table.

Just to be sure we were adequately reveling in the harvest celebrations of fall, a few weeks later we decided to seek out a corn maze. We wound up driving to Temecula for the Big Horse Corn Maze, which greeted us with pumpkins, primed to be carved and propped on someone's doorstep or put into a pie.

This being my first corn maze, I opted to let our more experienced companions, a gang of adolescent boys, lead the way. Despite their fast-paced enthusiasm on an unusually warm Saturday, we managed to all make it out of the 11-acre maze alive, in less than an hour.

And thank goodness, because otherwise, how would I have learned the wonder of shooting corn cobs out of an air-compressed cannon or the pleasure of riding around a random cornfield in the desert atop a rickety, hayless cart?

Lest I sound cynical, other activities managed to make me forget the unfall-like heat for a while. The band, complete with washtub bass and poetry-reading groupie, offered to let TJ sing with them when he gave them a good tip. And watching farm workers try to wrangle Bacon, a fiesty contestant that got loose right before the pig race, was quite entertaining.

All right, so our experiences in California weren't quite as authentic as a Midwestern autumn, but sometimes you take what you can get. And for fall on the West Coast, apparently you get a tame turkey named after an outrageous pop star.