More than one hundred parents, residents and officials attended the September 28 Town Meeting held at the Hampton Elementary School to present and discuss the findings of the Ad Hoc Committee on Interdistrict Educational Cost Sharing charged with studying the viability of combining the Hampton and Scotland elementary schools.  A 31 page report was distributed, containing an executive summary and conclusions, estimated budgets, staffing and compensation, school capacities and class sizes, current enrollment and trends, potential programs utilizing cost savings, and a proposed Cooperative Agreement for a combined school.

Scotland’s First Selectman Gary Greenberg presented the report of the committee which was established in November 2020 to address concerns regarding the sustainability of the towns’ elementary schools due to declining enrollments and escalating costs.  Members representing the school boards and fiscal authorities of the two towns were appointed to study the possibility of adopting a Cooperative Agreement to allow the towns to jointly operate a single elementary school to serve the pre-school through sixth grade students of Hampton and Scotland. Subcommittees were formed to study the governance structure, and models for educational programming, staffing and operating costs for the school.

Greenberg introduced the committee and provided an overview of its work over the course of the last two years. Scotland Selectman Wendy Sears provided details of the data contained in the report, including proposed staffing levels for instructional and support staff and administrative positions, an estimated budget, including the additional costs of tuition and transportation to the local boards of education and the grants which were not included in the budget models, and the estimated savings. According to the data presented, under a cooperative agreement with a proposed estimated budget of $3,316,688, Hampton could expect to save $743,299, and Scotland $626,971, for a total estimated savings of $1,370,270.

Along with the benefits of larger peer groups and increased diversity, educational advantages to the plan were listed. These included additional money for enrichment such as field trips, foreign language instruction, and after school offerings, separate positions for the technology specialist and the librarian, increased psychological services, and opportunities for intramural sports, including integration with middle-school sports programs, as well as participation in academic competitions.

But several parents who spoke were still concerned that the committee’s focus was on cost savings rather than improving educational opportunities.  Among their specific concerns were the length of bus rides, building security, and class size – with one resident asking if teachers should expect more pay because of larger classes. Board of Finance Chairman Kathy Donahue explained that the classes in Hampton, which are now combined, approximate the number of students which would be in each grade in the cooperative model.  Parents also questioned the accuracy of enrollment projections, and wondered if the pandemic had temporarily reduced the numbers as some students have not yet returned to school. The report contained charts illustrating state and local enrollment trends from 2016 to 2021, which showed a 4.69% decrease in student population in Connecticut, a 12.9% decrease in Scotland, and a 29.5% decrease in Hampton.

To concerns raised on the stress caused to students if their school were to close and they were forced to attend a new school in another town, Greenberg acknowledged that a “loss will be experienced”, and asked one parent, “Would you accept the plan if the school was built on the line between the two towns?” Greenberg contended that the pooled resources of the two towns would increase programming opportunities, pointing to current constraints placed on the boards of education to produce a budget with decreasing grant funds. The Hampton Elementary School budget has decreased for over a decade, with taxpayers rejecting amounts that exceed the Minimum Budget Requirement.

Other questions were raised, and suggestions given, for the use of the potential savings. These included tax relief and meeting other municipal needs, with some residents noting the town’s significant elderly population. First Selectman Allan Cahill stated that the school could be repurposed for other uses, among them a facility for seniors, reminding residents that the former consolidated school was converted into the current Town Office when the elementary school was built. Our town “adapts to its needs,” Cahill said, noting that Hampton once housed seven one room school houses, which were reduced to three before forming a consolidated school for grades 1 – 8, and later K – 6.  Donahue also noted that the decrease in the State’s Education Cost Sharing (ECS) Grant will absorb some of the savings. A chart showing the State’s formula for the distribution of the ECS grant from 2020 to 2030 reveals that Hampton will lose nearly $500,000 in the next ten years, with Scotland losing almost $400,000.

A discussion on grant funding ensued, with questions raised on other sources. State Representative Doug Dubitsky, who has served the district for a number of years, spoke to the unlikelihood of additional funding for towns like ours. “The overall view,” he said, “is that small schools get more money than they deserve.” He advised his constituents to make their own decisions on educating their children. “The status quo will not last forever,” he warned. “Sooner or later the State will legislate a plan.”

There was also discussion on the impact on property values in a town without its own school. Greenberg confirmed that currently all towns in Connecticut have an elementary school within their geographic region. While one resident said that developing our own cooperative agreement could serve as a pilot program for other towns and a source of pride for our own, others predicted that our property values would decrease, as would our ability to attract families. With an aging population, one resident expressed concern for the future of our town.

But Cahill disagreed with the characterization that our town isn’t attractive to families. “We’re safe, solvent, and this a beautiful place to live,” he said.

A non-binding vote will take place simultaneously in the two towns on October 11, from noon to 8PM, in the residents’ respective towns.  However, the ultimate decision, per State statute, rests with the members of the Boards of Education of both towns.  If approved, transition planning will begin with the goal of combining the schools for the 2023-2024 academic year.

The polls will be open on October 11 from Noon to 8PM in the Community Room at Town Hall, for electors and residents on the October, 2021 Grand List as owning at least $1000 of property, to participate in the non-binding vote: Shall the Hampton Board of Education negotiate and enter into a Cooperative Agreement with the Scotland Board of Education to open and operate a Hampton/Scotland Cooperative Elementary School, to commence at the beginning of the 2023-2024 school year?” Absentee ballots are available in the Office of the Town Clerk during regular business hours, Tuesdays from 9AM to 4PM and Thursdays from 10AM to 7PM.

The Registrars of Voters will hold a registry session on November 1 from 9AM to 8PM in their Office at Town Hall for the purpose of registering voters who appear in person. The deadline for mail-in applications is also November 1. Hand-delivered mail-in registration applications must be received by the Registrars, or a Voter Registration Agency such as the Department of Motor Vehicles, on this date, and mail-in registration applications must be post-marked by this date in order for applicants to be entitled to participate in the November 8 State Election. Only those whose qualifications as to age, citizenship, or residence mature after the November 1 deadline may register to vote up until November 7, when the Registrars will hold a limited registration session at their Office at Town Hall from 9AM to 5PM.

Absentee ballots for the State Election will become available on October 7 at the Office of the Town Clerk during regular business hours. Completed applications and ballots may be mailed, or delivered, to the Town Clerk, or placed in the secured deposit box at the top of the ramp at Town Hall.

Dayna McDermott-Arriola and Sulema Pagan-Perez

Grand Opening Event!

October 8, 2022 from 11AM to 3PM

The Hampton General Store has returned, and is inviting everyone to a Grand Opening Event. Come welcome the new store owners and visit with neighbors, discover what’s for sale and a few surprises!

Transfer Station Stickers, due November 1, will become available at the Town Clerk’s Office during regular business hours beginning October 1. They will also be available for sale at the Transfer Station toward the end of the month. The annual fee remains at $25.

Procrastination: The thief of happiness

It’s the most wonderful time of the year.

With kids jingle belling

And everyone telling you be of good cheer

It’s the most wonderful tiiiiiiiicth (needle skips across the vinyl)

Sirens sing — are you listening?

Stovepipe glows — It’s surely glistening

Smoke fills the room – sad tidings and gloom

Living in the clogged chimney land.

On the roof there’s a clatter

It’s the fireman and his ladder

He comes without pay

Oh, what can you say?

He’s workin’ in his winter wonderland

The draft was poor – they surely knew it.

But they never quite got to it

Life is a tizzy – we’re always so busy

Livin’ in the clogged chimney laiiiiicth (needle skips across the vinyl)

Tomorrow.  Tomorrow.

There’s always tomorrow.

It’s only a fire away.

We have all had enough of the stifling heat, humidity and drought of this past summer. The temperatures are finally easing up. Autumn colors signal the change in season.  Nights bring a welcome chill to the air. You can almost hear the collective panting of local and imported Yankees in breathless anticipation of that first wood fire of the season. With the thermometer serving the same function of the tri-colored light at a drag strip, he watches: 52 deg – muscles begin to tense, 51 – heart beat elevates, 50 – poised, one eye on the match, one eye on the kindling, one eye on his neighbor’s chimney. 49! GO!

Hold your Chestnuts there Pilgrim. Santa gets a bit grouchy when he emerges with his fluffy red winter parka covered with soot and creosote and Rudolf’s nose is barely visible through the cloud of dense black smoke. Is your chimney clean? Is your wood properly seasoned?  Does your all-nighter make you feel proud and smart?  Do you want to avoid that rooftop clatter?

A few simple guidelines to help secure joy in your world and avoid having the silence of the night shattered by singing sirens:

Before firing up that trusty wood stove, clean, or have your chimney cleaned and inspected. If you burn a lot of wood and/or your wood is not fully seasoned you will want to clean your chimney frequently throughout the season.

Be sure your wood is dry.  On average, it takes about six months for wood to properly season after it is cut and split. If you buy your wood cut split and delivered be aware there is a high probability that it was cut and split within hours of being delivered. The tree may have been dropped, trimmed and lay log-length as much as a year ago. Some seasoning has occurred. Only once it is split and open to the air does proper seasoning take off. Unseasoned or poorly seasoned wood is the bringer of creosote to your chimney. Santa doesn’t like creosote or having his butt catch on fire when he’s trying to make his deliveries.

The all-night burn: Oh how that Yankee chest swells with pride and frugal wisdom when he throws on the last chunk of wood for the day and shuts that damper almost completely down. Brushing the dust from his hands and thighs, he stands himself up straight and tall, silently declares, “That should do it.”  Then turns around ready for his photo-op. Unless your wood is fully properly seasoned don’t even think about it. Unseasoned wood makes for smoky fires. Smoky fires increase creosote deposits on cooling chimneys. Just toss in that last chunk and let it burn. Put on some warm jammies and get a good night’s sleep. In the morning start a new fire and enjoy a steaming cup of java while the house heats up again.

Now here comes Santa Clause, right down Santa Clause lane. It’s Christmas morning. There are piles of pretty Christmas wrappings all over the living room floor. What better more convenient way to dispose of the mess than to toss it all in the stove and be mesmerized by the roaring flames. Nope. Nope. Nope. Creosote just loves those glowing little shreds of paper drifting up the chimney. There is a warm embrace, the sparks fly and the flames of love are ignited, followed by a disconcerting crackling roar, singing sirens and that clatter on the roof. The transfer station is prepared to handle those Christmas wrappings. Let them have it.

During the month of August members of Hampton Fire Company responded to 20 emergency dispatches, attended two training meetings, two admin meetings and spent four days parking cars at the Brooklyn  Fair. Six-hundred and thirty-five man-hours were logged. Meetings are held Wednesday evenings at 7.  New members are always welcome. No time?  You can also effortlessly support HFC when you shop on Amazon. Use Amazon Smile and select The Hampton Fire Co. Incorporated as the organization you wish to support. (Be sure it’s Hampton Ct)

Firehouse Dog

After a two-year gap due to COVID concerns, Hampton’s fortune-telling witch returns to distribute her magic pennies and fascinate kids with her predictions for their futures!  The Recreation Commission is setting up shop at the Pavilion next to Town Hall on Main Street. Come visit the Witch, play a round or two of Corn Hole, and collect a goodie bag of treats and prizes. Activities will be available from 4 to 8 PM on Monday, October 31.

In event of a downpour or a blizzard (remember the October blizzard?), activities will relocate to the Community Center next door.

“There’s scarcely a town in New England that has not sometime in its history a legend of a haunted house. Hampton is no exception,” Susan Griggs Jewett wrote in the local classic Folklore and Firesides”.

Most notably was the haunted house that once stood on the corner of Windham and Reilly Roads. Griggs writes:  Only the cellar hole is left of the century old gambrel roofed house in the southern part of Howards Valley just east of the three bridges on the road to Canterbury. For many years it stood empty, with sunken door sills and gaping window frames. Tradition says that more than a hundred and twenty-five years ago a peddler was murdered in the old house; anyhow, he disappeared mysteriously, after having lodged in the house, and when uncanny sights and sounds were heard, his memory was revived – his uneasy ghost haunted the place.

One story goes that a family had moved out because of the weird noises at night. One day, going into the cellar, the woman noticed a sword protruding from the thick walls of the chimney. Wondering why she had never noticed it before she tried to pull it out, an awful groaning and shuttering sounded throughout the house. Terrified, she fled upstairs and told her husband, who went to the cellar but failed to see the sword; although he had heard the groans and moans. Naturally, they moved out as soon as possible.

The next family, the Ebenezer Jewetts, had an even more terrifying experience. Sounds such as the drip of water from the ceilings were heard day and night. The front door, which opened into a small entry, could never be fastened all night, no matter what pains to lock it securely. Nails driven over the latch would be removed; a knife placed as a wedge to prevent the latch being lifted would also prove futile. The door was also found unlatched when morning came. In the night all through the house, the latches would rattle mysteriously. Upon investigation the rattling would cease, but commence in another part of the house.

East of the entry opened a long room. Before the south, front window, Mrs. Jewett kept her spinning wheel. Her bed stood against the east wall, opposite a fireplace built into the big center chimney. One evening when some neighbors had come into the kitchen, she opened the door from the kitchen into this bedroom to take out an extra chair. Her seven year old daughter Laura followed as did also the child’s small pet dog. They were startled to see the bowed figure of a man peering through the window. In a second, the figure seemed to come through the window, right through the spoke of the spinning wheel, rolling over and over. A headless body of a man; it vanished with a “whishing” sound up the chimney. The child remembered the experience perfectly and her fright at the terrible sight. The dog bristled and barked; and the household was much upset.

Mr. Jewett did not believe in ghosts; he poohed at the story. But one night, sometime later, he was awakened by something heavy falling on him from the ceiling. In horror he recognized the same headless, hairy thing that had frightened his wife and child. As before, it vanished in the fireplace. There was no longer any doubt, and the family moved at once. “

Another haunted house in Howard Valley was the Bennett’s on South Bigelow, which might explain why it was vacant for so long. George (Washington) Smith, who frequently tried to convince townsfolk that he was the first president of the United States, lived in the Bennett place with his mother, who could usually be seen sitting at the window, observed by teenagers who went horseback riding in the woods behind the property, and noted how still she was. Seems George’s mother died and he never reported it, instead driving down to the Little River where he lived, in the car, until someone reported a vagrant. Returning to the house, it was discovered that his mother died sitting at the window, which explained her stillness.

Other accounts confirm later hauntings and suggest an earlier cause. A subsequent owner would sleep in his car because of the unnatural cold which would overcome the house nights; the dog, as well, was petrified to enter. An addition was built to avoid living in the original structure, however, consumption of the property’s water would result in illness. One legend claims that Elizabeth Shaw, who was the first woman in the state to suffer the fate of the gallows, drowned her newborn in the well of the house and then brought the baby to the nearby Cowhantic ledges where the child was later discovered. Hence the warning – don’t drink the water!

Though Howard Valley is notorious for paranormal activity, it’s not the only place in town to experience apparitions. In the November 1978 issue of the Gazette, Agnes Steyert wrote of the “G-G-Ghost of Grandma Dooley”.  The Steyerts purchased the “old Dooley house” on East Old Route 6 in 1941, and realized they were sharing the homestead with a ghost. The legend is that Grandma Dooley died during a blizzard, and drifts of six feet prevented anyone from visiting her. When someone finally reached the house, “to her surprise and shock, she found Grandma Dooley sitting up in her rocking chair by the fireplace, fully dressed and cold and stiff as the weather outside.”

Though “Grandma” was a friendly ghost, she didn’t like being ignored. “Once we were entertaining friends in the living room, when she impatiently started the automobile horn blowing noisily in the garage, and didn’t give up until we went out and stopped her. Often in the still of the night, and indeed some days, she stomps across the floors upstairs. One night last year she tried forcibly to get in past our heavy kitchen door, rattling it impatiently. There was no wind nor person about outside. When we opened the door to investigate she slipped quietly into the house. Many times she opens cupboard doors to let us know she is present while we are quietly sitting reading.” Once when the Steyerts returned to Hampton in the spring, a worn deck of cards was discovered in a desk. “Grandma Dooley’s pastime is no doubt a game of Solitaire to while away the long winter nights,” Agnes wrote. “If anyone should care to play with these cards, you are welcome to do so, but be careful not to cheat, for Grandma Dooley will be watching you.”

Others remember a presence there, too. Ruth Halbach relayed that Dave used to mow the Steyert’s field summers, and when she would deliver lunch to him, there was a spot as one approached the house that caused her to shiver she grew so cold.  Once while sitting in the living room, Ruth was suddenly covered with long white hair, a foot in length, she recalled, adding that this was when her own hair was still black. Daughter Helen remembers her mother saying “where is all this hair coming from?”

“That was the first time I heard of the ghost. It wasn’t really scary,” Ruth said, “just a bit unnerving.”

“My first experience with bizarre ‘ghost’ events was in that house,” Helen recalled. “I was maybe eight years old. Mrs. Steyert made these figurines out of shells. I remember I saw with my own eyes, while sitting at the table waiting for my dad to finish raking hay, one of these figurines levitate, at least five inches off the table!” Though very intrigued, and a little scared, Mrs. Steyert assured Helen it was “just a sweet gramma letting me know she was there”.

The village was not immune from friendly hauntings. In the Main Street home which is now empty, Susan Latimer, who grew up there in the 50’s and 60’s, relayed that both she and her brother recall their mother saying she saw a ghost in the house, and in the 70’s, Lori and Sandi Kraschnefski simultaneously, from different bedrooms, saw a woman wearing white walk through the upstairs hallway and down the stairs. She was a frequent visitor.

Growing up, nearly every place that was empty at some point was a source of ghostly tales. The house at the corner of Parsonage and Cedar Swamp roads, the Bennett place, the one at the summit of Hammond Hill and Main, at the corner of Reilly and South Bigelow, with rumors of suicides, homicides, and ghostly apparitions. Perhaps it was only to keep us from playing in abandoned buildings. If so, it worked!

I remember the haunted house

That stood beside of the road

Down in the valley between the ridges

To the Eastward of the bridges.

Many a weird tale was told me

By Grandfather

Of the strange things you would hear and see.

The house was moved from one to another place

With all this the Ghosts kept pace.

The rent of the house was free

If from the Ghosts you wouldn’t flee.

Often times mid fear and gloom

You would hear footsteps

Pass from room to room.

Search, find no one there.

Then someone would hear them on the stair.

You would think of the dagger in the cellar wall

Many a man noted for being stout.

Could neither move or pull the dagger out.

The good wife was oft times startled

By the barking of the house dog

When he passed the fire place

and its huge back log.

You could see and almost feel

The spirits, when they entered

The closed window and danced

On Grandma’s spinning wheel.

In the evening quite hush

an illumed ball would seemingly

Leave the house,

cross the road

And disappear in the brush.

The belated traveler was oft times scared

When at such phenomena

His trusty steed pranced and reared

In 1848 these demonstrations were very great

And little understood.

Were deemed omens of ill instead of good.

Who knows if ones spirit doth linger around

That hallowed place called home!

Or through endless space forever roam.

Who knows if the faintest star

Mayhaps be the dwelling place of

Millions of mortals toiling and dreaming

The same as we are.

Can you forecast the countless ages

Thru which our existence has already past.

Or will in the future pass!

The giver of gifts has for us.

Many mansions in store.

The change we call death

Is a pathway leading to one more.

1. N. Jewett, the farmer poet of Hampton

  Sacred to the Memory of Ebenezer Jewett, 1st

So reads the second entry in “Hampton History, copied from Johnathan Clark’s Journal”.  This transcription, found in a scrapbook held by the Hampton Historical Society, is both shocking and bewildering.  For what possible reason might a body be disinterred and burned?

While the report provides no further information about the incident, the most probable explanation is that John Dunham had been suspected of being a vampire, or “Vampyre”, in contemporary terms.

Beginning around the 1780s, New England was in the grip of a terrible plague which was then known as “consumption” and now as tuberculosis. While consumption had been around for centuries (at the beginning of the 19^th century the disease accounted for 25 percent of deaths), it ravaged this area from the end of the 18^th century right through the 19^th and into the 20^th century.  The name “consumption” came from the way in which the disease progressed. Victims lost weight, strength, vitality and became cadaverous near the end, as if they were being “consumed” by someone or something.

The prevailing belief at the time for the cause of most disease was “miasma,” a noxious form of “bad air” emanating from rotting organic material, creating poisonous vapor or mist. Although there was ample opportunity for contact with “bad air” in colonial America, it did not explain all deaths, and survivors and relatives desperately looked for other causes.

According to folklorist Michael E. Bell, “Not willing to simply watch as, one after another, their family members died, some New Englanders resorted to an old folk remedy, who’s roots surely must rest in Europe.  Called ‘Vampirism’ by outsiders (a term that may never have been used by those within the communities themselves) this remedy required exhuming the bodies of deceased relatives and checking them for ‘unnatural’ signs, such as ‘fresh’ blood in the heart. The implicit belief was that one of the relatives was not completely dead and was maintaining some semblance of a life by draining the vital forces from living relatives.”

The first recorded case of disinterment in this area involved the family of Isaac Johnson, a Hampton native, residing in Willington, Connecticut in June 1784.  Two of Isaac’s children, Amos and Elizabeth, had recently died of consumption and a third was gravely ill.  A “quack doctor, a foreigner,” as reported by Moses Holmes, directed that Johnson dig up and examine the bodies of two deceased family members.  When evidence of living plants was found on the bodies, the doctor proclaimed this to be evidence of vampirism.   While Johnson was unconvinced, the daughter was disinterred and her organs burned.  The diagnosis was spread through the Connecticut Courant, under the leadership of co-publisher George Goodwin, and gained popular acceptance throughout the region.  The reference to “a foreigner” may be significant, as the belief in vampirism was apparently established in the Hesse region of Germany early in the century, and Hessian prisoners of war were housed in Tolland, adjacent to Willington.

The practice did not end with the 18^th century.  In 1854, the family of Henry and Lucy Ray of Griswold, Connecticut, suffered the deaths of two adult sons, Lemuel and Elisha and Henry himself, all by “consumption.”  When a third son, Henry Nelson Ray, was afflicted, the family disinterred and burned the two sons in the graveyard to combat the “disease.”  The Ray family today is known as the Jewett City Vampires.

The most famous local case was that of Mercy Brown of Exeter, Rhode Island.  As late as 1892, the belief and practice persisted.  Widely documented at the time, four members of the family had perished from “consumption” over the course of a few years.  Several bodies were exhumed by townspeople and a doctor. Mary Brown and her daughter Mary Olive were normally decomposed, but a daughter, Mercy, appeared to be unusually preserved and still had the tell-tale blood in her heart. This confirmed the diagnosis and her heart and liver were burned, and the ashes were mixed in a potion and given to her brother who was suffering from the disease.  He unfortunately passed away two months later, however. The presence of a “news reporter” at the exhumation helped to spread the tale throughout the region.

With the development of the germ theory of disease in the late 19th century, most notably through the work of German Robert Koch and Frenchman Louis Pasteur, belief in both “miasma” and vampirism receded from popular understanding.

As regards John Dunham’s exhumation and burning on Hampton Hill, perhaps further research will reveal the true reason for this ultimate violation. Until then we can only speculate about the existence of a vampire in Hampton.

Mary Russell McMillen

October 18: I know that once in May I chose those days of spring as the finest of the year. And I may think so again when I am in the midst of another spring. But now it seems to me it is these few lingering days of October that must be the finest of all. In them, as in the days of spring, there is beauty, sunshine, genial conditions. But here there is an added quality, a sense of maturity, of having experienced more, a greater sense of knowing, a sense of ripening, of fulfillment, of acceptance.

from “A Walk through the Year”, where Teale chronicled our natural world; I would feel remiss in not sharing his brilliance with my humble reflections on this, our most brilliant of seasons.

The season of autumn is our most robust. Spring tiptoes in gently, unfurling itself in the gauzy haze of the awakening swamp, in the pearly buds of pussy willows. Summer lazily rolls in with its sweltering temperatures, winter sweeps in with snowflakes. Autumn gives us only a few whispers of its approach — in tasseling grasses and sprouting toad stools, in dewy spider webs — before trumpeting its presence, bursting forth by igniting the trees, sprinkling fields with flowers and insects, crisping the air. “A time rich in beauty,” Teale wrote, “before a time of bleakness.”

New England’s foliage is legendary, with people traveling miles and from around the world to witness what surrounds us, the autumnal equinox a brilliant bridge we cross, first signaled with the startling flash of Virginia creeper racing around trunks of trees still saturated with summer’s green. This is the first of the series of flames Teale called the “annual pageant of the autumn foliage”: the flickering yellow of birches, the chartreuse fountain of willows, sourwood’s crimson pendants, purpling dogwoods, coppery pyramids of pears, the rust and bronze of oaks, maples — the enormous Norways providing golden domes in our yards, the ornamental Japanese that abruptly sparks and drops as suddenly, leaving a scarlet ring around its circumference, and our own natives — the bright red swamp maples and the bright orange sugars embroidering the hills and valleys that beckon visitors, and beckon us to collect samples of leaves that appear to have been painted with the tiny brushes of autumn elves.

The fields where the “great employment of the plants,” Teale explained, “is the spreading and perpetuation of the species”, host mellower colors with their wildflowers: pale tapestries of lavender thistle fluff and violet ladies’ tresses, or royal robes of mauve Joe Pye weed and golden rod. Asters, the delicate mist of palest blues and lavenders, deeper violets and wines, those with raspberry centers flushing their tiny white petals palest pink, billowy clouds of cream-colored flowers with honey-toned centers, veils of those with miniscule white petals circling yellow centers, those with tawny, wind-swept petals. All of these I allow, actually encourage, coax, into my gardens where they complement fall’s perennials.

In the garden, rudbeckia lingers well into the fall, bushels of golden rays which speak so harmoniously to the season as they wither. Sunflowers also extend their season, the sunny disks that attract butterflies and bees developing into thousands of seeds for the chickadees. Sedum ‘Autumn Joy’ offers its metamorphosis for months, their umbels the pale pink and green of carnival glass aging to purplish pink, bright raspberry, dark cranberry, and finally their winter rust. Clusters of mauve “amphibians” climb along turtlehead’s stiff stalks, and boltonia becomes smothered with the multitude of miniscule white daisies monarchs favor. Cascading branches of New England asters, the purple ‘Hella Lacy’, raspberry ‘Alma Poetske’ and the paler ‘Harrington’s Pink’ swap seeds to produce flowers of violet, lavender, wine, plum, grape, magenta, fuschia and rose. Last to flower, chrysanthemums; though my garden can always rely on one golden variety, a cream, a mauve, and the sparkling Montauk daisy, mums are always worth the annual purchase for the autumn hues which reflect those of the harvest and the foliage.

Ornamental grasses come into their own in autumn with bristled spikes, ivory fronds, purplish plumes, and feathery shafts the color of wheat waving over blades of blue and silver, green striped gold and white, and those which turn the colors of fall foliage, fountains of yellow and orange and red. And there are the berries. In the garden, viburnum’s lustrous fruits, clusters of dark blue, rose pink, scarlet, ivory and cherry-red, ripen as its foliage turns burgundy, gold, orange and crimson. And in the wild, there are the ruby chokecherries, the garnet beads of barberry, bittersweet’s yellow capsules opening to vermillion seeds, and the black inkberry, a single plant Teale estimated “supplying more than 25,000 large, plump, juicy berries for the migrating birds to consume.”

Fall is not only visually vibrant. There are the vegetables brimming in the garden, the flavors of apples and pumpkin spice, the feel of the closing light, the incomparable brush of Indian summer, the wind that ushers in winter. And the seasonal sounds. The morning birds, their songs rousing us at the sun’s first emergence, afternoons of blackbirds scavenging the fields in synchronized flights, arrows of departing geese sounding the alarm, the nighttime orchestra of insects measuring the progression of the season as it swells, then slows, the symphony that envelopes us nightly “filled with gentle melancholy,” Teale wrote, “that each year seems to me, more than any other, the voice of summer’s ending.”

There are quiet, gentler notes that Teale so famously noticed, “a thimbleful dipped from the wide lake of occurrences transpiring unobserved around us.” A chrysalis splitting open, the first flight of a butterfly, the rapid darts of slender dragonflies. The mist rising on the pond mornings, golden leaves freckling the black water of the brook. The mellower slant of light, the sharpness of the stars, the harvest moon. The rattle of dried corn in the fields, the dance of the wild wheat, the whisper of milkweed silk, the ballet of falling leaves…

…and the scents. The unforgettable tang of Concord grapes encountered on a woodland hike. The aroma of ripe apples in the orchard. The mustiness of fallen leaves as we shuffle through their brittleness, a scent as singular as leaf mold mingling with soil in early spring. The smoke of the hearth, “where the first small fire of the year is blazing”, alerting us to the tendrils dispersing into the dusk. At no time throughout the rest of these seasons will smoke rising from the chimney welcome us quite this way, with this comforting scent of warmth. From here to April, the scent of the smoldering incense of chimney smoke is the norm, what penetrates the air in and around the house, the indiscernible. It is only this first that wakens us to the purest comforts of home.

Dayna McDermott Arriola