Death of Autumn in Bethel

Death of Autumn in Bethel was captured back in early November 2017 behind the farmhouse in Bethel NY where my wife was raised by her grandparents as a young girl. Back then, they had no running water in the house -- just a hand-pumped well in the front yard; the water from it ran cool and clear all year round. The trees behind the Adirondack chairs conceal the skeletal remains of the outhouse they used, a good thirty or forty yards from the main house.

She still remembers picking wild berries with her grandmother in the morning chill, collecting them in their aprons, then taking them back to the house where, hours later, they would wind up—sweet and tart and redolent—in one of her grandmother's pies, casting their perfumes out across the entire yard and down the road.

Death of Autumn in Bethel enters our bloodstreams like a magic elixir, a tonic that compels us to pause and clear a path in our hearts for our own halcyon memories.