Fall Comes to Ohio

WOOSTER--The summer seemed to go on and on in a mirror of the seemingly never-to-end winter. The sun beat down day after day, scorching the plants and drying the earth and making any outdoor task harder by each degree of mercury. But just as the freezing days of winter suddenly passed into Spring and sun and heat so one day I woke up to find a chill in the morning air and a peculiar melancholy scent in the air that signified that another year was coming to an end.

Ohio, in certain prime weeks of its seasons, has lovely light and both late summer and early Autumn produce glorious light in their mornings and evenings. Every day I have been carrying at least a Canon G9 and here are a few pictures from Wayne and Holmes Counties. If Ohio is, as the State motto reads, "The Heart of it All," then I believe these two counties are the beating, rural heart in the center of that. They are places where the American dream of the family farm still exists, practically in its Platonic ideal. Now, in Fall, at harvest time, the fruits of all those hard hours can be seen: being harvested from the fields, pulled behind tractors, for sale in roadside farmers markets and on display at the annual Wayne County Fair.

I am not a native of Wayne County, having grown up in the entirely different Southwest and, to be honest, Arizona is still a spiritual home to me. Long ago I resented being uprooted and moved to Ohio. Then I worked at the local newspaper and while driving to Orrville one early Fall morning I came over a rise and a field of drying corn and a red barn rose from a ground mist into bright clean, morning air. I was taken aback and suddenly realized how lovely and special a landscape this is.