Amongst The People

All photos by Debra Marshall, 2016

I have a dear friend who lives in Florida, which should tell you that she's at least slightly insane. Florida - land of sudden sinkholes that can swallow a house, alligators in back-yard pools and possibly up a tree (seriously - there's a kind that can climb trees), poisonous, biting bugs, and poisonous, biting snakes - really, really, really big ones. The bottom third of the state is not-so-slowly sinking back into the ocean and yet is filled with silly people who continue to build expensive, sinking houses - did I mention hurricanes?  tornados? and poisonous things that can creep and crawl into your bed?  Even the lovely fresh oranges and strawberries that grow prolifically down there are all wrong – they’re too good for the natives, and so get shipped to the mid-West. Floridians eat the same hard fruits that are picked unripe in California that the rest of us do.

My friend - let's call her Kai, since that's her name - likes to remind me that we who live in heaven have ticks (they have giant cockroaches) and what she thinks of as that scariest of critters - bears; and I like to remind her that Florida has bears and many more tourists than we get. But she thinks of New Hampshire as a darkly-wooded, ravenous critter-infested, spooky world. She knows better - we met in college back in the dark ages in Connecticut, so we've been through blizzards (howling wolves blocking the path to the outhouse, she says) and late-arriving springs together, and back in those days I visited her in  Florida (I thought I would die of heat stroke before I got out, assuming I wasn't eaten first by the back-yard alligator) and she visited me when I lived in far-off Maine (water that can cause a heart attack if you dip your toes into the frigid waves, and bears and moose running about loose with nothing between them and us - she barely got out alive).

 

 But there's no accounting for love, and we fell in love at first glance, across a tedious English classroom; and here we are, she in Florida and I in New Hampster, still telling each other all our little secrets and trying to get a rise out of each other, even though we can't bear to visit the other’s Home Place anymore.

She does miss seasons, though, so I make sure to describe what's happening up here where the seasons actually turn and you can tell what time of year it is by more than the length of the mold growing on your living room wall. In spring I describe the golds, coppers, silvers, and delicate roses and greens of trees newly budding on the hills (after reminding her what a hill looks like), and in summer I give her the blow-by-blow of the garden: planting, weeding, harvesting, and preserving the results - she knows to the day when I switch on the big chest freezer because the tomatoes and corn have taken over.  And she eagerly awaits the arrival of fall leaves and with them, the Harvest People.

I work in the Upper Valley, and my main route is up 4A, through Springfield, Grafton, Enfield, Lebanon, and on into VT. Until you get to Enfield, there aren't many houses on 4A, and it's a lovely place to drive, especially when the swamp maples light up in the fall and the larches turn golden. I've seen many a moose on my trips, once even a herd of more than a dozen – they were hard to count in the dark, moving about just beyond my headlights when they weren't lounging in the road. I've seen also plenty of deer, foxes, coyotes, owls, hawks, and once a bobcat. These are lovely to encounter, but unpredictable. What is predictable is the Harvest People. 

 

The Harvest People move into Enfield in early October; and they all leave - in a mass migration - the day before Hallowe'en.  I'm not sure where they live in summer, and they don't all arrive on the same day, but they seem to travel in groups.

There’s always a first flush - maybe one or two, then the next week another five, then a dozen more, and often some Hallowe'en People seem to be traveling with them. 

They look like they've come to settle in - there's a bride and groom at the church, a woman in a bonnet at the historical society, a postal worker, a grocery store employee, a fella fishing off a bridge. There's a fireman, a child walking her dog, and a farmer. By the time they all arrive, there are enough to populate a village, and there's a black-robed priest to keep the rest on the straight and narrow. 

                                                                                I crossed the bridge to the center of Enfield one day and discovered an even larger population there, as varied in their pursuits as the year-round residents.  Very clever, these seasonal residents are – and very busy. The Husband took photos, which I sent down to Kai, so she could make positive identifications.

 

I suspect that at the stroke of midnight on October 30, they all fly south for the winter to work on strawberry and orange farms. If I’m right, there’s a town in Florida that wakes up, on Hallowe’en morning, to find its voter lists have expanded significantly, and all the newcomers have the same middle and last names: Harvest Person. 

Originally published in The Concord Monitor, September 29, 2016, as “The Lure of the Harvest People.”