You can buy autumn produce in the stores, but if that were enough, why do the country u-pick places fill this time of year with customers? Cars nuzzle in the dirt parking lots hood to tailpipe, fender to fender; extra help directs overflow traffic to otherwise unused fields. Inside the barn or outbuilding where the cash registers live, harried parents make last-minute decisions about whether to buy their broods hayrides or food for the donkeys. There is a brisk side business in ice-cream sandwiches, humorous rustic postcards, and freshly fried donuts. When the sky is blue and the wind is still, it can be a heavenly experience, the earthly curtain call that seems as if it will never end in a darkened, shut-up theater.
Going out to see fruits and vegetables on trees and in the dirt rather than on a shelf in aisle three satisfies an ancient fantasy. The day after men discovered cities, they hankered for the countryside. The desire runs from Theocritus to Jefferson to Eddie Albert and Eva Gabor. We are not there ourselves anymore, yet we know we once were, and we understand, however sketchily, that our next meal will have begun there. Behind both the tasting menu and the frozen TV dinner lurks the farm. Earth is mother, and for those too denatured to have any experience of the fact, culture, high and pop, supplies a hundred clues. Even the digitalized sex mania that is 92 percent of our intake (in this particular election cycle, make that 98 percent) gives a hint: What are the divas and selfie-takers but fertility goddesses decked out in bling and not much else? Taking a day-long agrication is fun, a little exciting, a little atavistic, but mostly consoling, because Mother never lets us down.
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