Fall

There’s a wonderful illustrated children’s book, which I first read with Thalia last fall at the height of apple season, called The Seven Silly Eaters, by Mary Ann Hoberman and Marla Frazee, about a weary mom who has one kid after another who will each eat only one food. My favorite pages were the ones devoted to Jack—“a happy baby, never cross, but all he’d eat was applesauce.” You can practically hear the New Englandy foliage crunching under the wheels of the kids’ red wagon and Mrs. Peters’s knife scraping as she sits outside on the front steps “peeling apples by the peck,” smell the earth being turned over by Mr. Peters (planting a seedling apple tree), and feel the crisp north wind that’s fluttering through the pages of a coloring book left open on the porch.