The literature of fall often registers our anxiety about loss and death. In Felix Salten’s Bambi: A Life in the Woods, the novel that inspired the Disney movie, two humanized leaves clinging to a tall branch on a great oak at the meadow’s edge are contemplating the incomprehensibility of their imminent death:
“Can it be true,” said the first leaf, “can it really be true that others come to take our places when we’re gone, and after them still others, and more and more?”
“It is really true, whispered the second leaf. “We can’t even begin to imagine it; it’s beyond our powers.”
“It makes me very sad,” added the first leaf.
They were silent a while.
Then the first leaf said quietly to herself, “why must we fall?”
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The fall, however, especially early fall, is also a time of bounty. As Jewish people welcome the new Jewish year, autumn celebrates with them:
When orchards burn their lamps of fiery gold,
The grape glows like a jewel, and the corn
A sea of beauty and abundance lies,
Then our new year is born.
—Emma Lazarus
< https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46788/the-new-year-56d226cd558be>
Bella Chagall, wife of Marc Chagall, recalls her mother asking her when she was a little girl:
“Will you set the table, my child? . . . As she goes out I open the cupboards. I drag out the tall paper bags filled with fruit and spread all of it out on the table. As in a great garden, thick green melons roll on the table. Beside them lie clusters of grapes, white and red. Big, juicy pears have turned over their little heads. There are sweet apples that have a golden gleam—they look as if they had been dipped in honey. Plums, dark, red, scatter all over the table.”
But with culture also comes control. Some Jewish people over the centuries have refrained from eating at least one of the fruits of the harvest until Rosh ha-Shana, the new year, so that the taste is fresh and new. They recite a special blessing, Sheheheyonu, over these fruits. Chaim Grade recalls:
“I find my joy of the season in a small bunch of grapes, like a cluster of frozen dewdrops, and a slice of red, juicy watermelon studded with black seeds. Mother buys these delicacies in honour of the New Year, so that I might recite the Sheheheyonu, the blessing for new occasions. She herself also eats a little of those costly fruits. In the course of the two days of Rosh ha-Shana, she also eats a plum and a pear—fruits she had not tasted earlier in the season. As a child I always marvelled: where did she find the strength and patience to keep herself all summer long from sampling the fresh fruits in her own baskets, so as to be eligible to recite the Sheheheyonu over them on the New Year?”
What is it that should regulate our enjoyment of life’s bounty—our natural sense of gratitude and joy for creation and for our place in it, or the sometimes meaningful but other times arbitrary rules of culture?
When the speaker in William Carlos Williams’s “This is Just to Say” apologizes for disrupting his wife’s methodical breakfast plans, his contrition can easily be mistaken for a celebration of spontaneous enjoyment:
“I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold”
<https://poets.org/poem/just-say>
Full participation in life’s bounty does not come without some risk. In the “Fever ‘N’ Ague” chapter of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie, a season of blackberry picking in the mosquito-infested creek bottoms is interrupted by a vicious illness:
“Ma asked why [Laura] and Mary did not go out to play, and Laura said she didn’t feel like playing. She was tired and she ached. Ma stopped her work and asked, ‘Where do you ache?’
Laura didn’t exactly know. She just said: ‘I just ache, My legs ache.’
‘I ache too,’ Mary said.
Ma looked at them and said they looked healthy enough. But she said something must be wrong or they wouldn’t be so quiet. She pulled up Laura’s skirt and petticoats to see where her legs ached, and suddenly Laura shivered all over. She shivered so that her teeth rattled in her mouth.
Ma put her hand against Laura’s check. ‘You can’t be cold,’ she said. ‘Your face is hot as fire.’
Laura felt like crying, but of course she didn’t. Only little babies cried.”
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Matters only get more dire for the Ingalls family. Before long, the entire family is bedridden and nearly delusional with fever. When Mary sobs, “I want a drink of water! I want a drink of water!” and Ma is too weak to get up, Laura crawls across the floor to get to the water bucket.
Help for the isolated family comes in the person of Dr. Tan, a travelling black doctor and Mrs. Scott, a neighbour. Laura recounts that the goodhearted Dr. Tan “smiled at her with all his white teeth. He walked with Pa and Ma, and laughed a rolling, jolly laugh. They all wanted him to stay longer, but he had to hurry away.”
From Mrs. Scott, the Ingalls learn more about the outbreak: “Mrs. Scott said that all the settlers, up and down the creek, had fever ‘n’ ague. There were not enough well people to take care of the sick, and she had been going from house to house , working night and day. ‘It’s a wonder you ever lived through,’ she said. ‘All of you down at once.’ What might have happened if Dr. Tan hadn’t found them, she didn’t know. . . Dr. Tan had stayed with them a day and a night before Mrs. Scott came. Now he was doctoring all the sick settlers.”
Mrs. Scott also acts as a quasi public-health official:
“Mrs. Scott said that all this sickness came from eating watermelons. She said, ‘I’ve said a hundred times. . . that watermelons—”
The scientific explanation piques the interest of the weak bur recovering Charles Ingalls:
“‘What’s that?’” Pa exclaimed ‘Who’s got watermelons?’
Mrs. Scott said that one of the settlers had planted watermelons in the creek bottoms. And every soul who has eaten one of those melons was down sick that very minute. She said she had warned them. ‘But no,’ she said. ‘There was no arguing with them. They would eat those melons, and now they’re paying for it.’
‘I haven’t tasted a good slice of watermelon since Hector was a pup,’ Pa mused.
While in recovery, Pa makes the most of his time:
“‘It’s an ill wind that doesn’t blow some good,’ he said. He wasn’t able to work, so he could make a rocking chair for Ma.”
Ma is grateful as she settles into the new chair in the evening:
“Oh, Charles, I haven’t been so comfortable since I don’t know when.”
This is what happens next, in the morning:
“The very next day, without saying where he was going, Pa rode away on Patty [the horse]. Ma wondered and wondered where he had gone. And when Pa came back he was balancing a watermelon in front of him on the saddle. . . . ‘I thought I’d never get here,’ he said. ‘It must weigh forty pounds, and I’m as weak as water. Hand me the butcher knife.’
‘But Charles!’ Ma said. ‘You mustn’t. Mrs. Scott said—”
Pa laughed his big, pealing laugh again. ‘But that’s not reasonable,’ he said, ‘This is a good melon. Why should it have fever ‘n’ ague? Everybody knows that fever ‘n’ ague comes from breathing the night air.’
‘This watermelon grew in the night air,’ said Ma.
‘Nonsense!’ Pa said. ‘Give me the butcher knife. I’d eat this melon if I knew it would give me the chills and fever.’
‘I do believe you would,’ said Ma, handing him the knife.
It went into the melon with a luscious sound. The green rind split open, and there was the bright red inside, flecked with black seeds. The red heart actually looked frosty. Nothing had ever been so tempting as that watermelon, on that hot day.
Ma would not taste it. She would not let Laura and Mary eat one bite. But Pa ate slice after slice after slice, until at last he sighed and said the cow would have the rest of it.
Next day he had a little chill and a little fever. Ma blamed the watermelon. But next day she had a chill and a little fever. So, they did not know what could have caused their fever ‘n’ ague.
No one knew, in those days, that fever ‘n’ ague was malaria, and that some mosquitoes give it to people when they bite them.”
Faced with a false health narrative, Ma protects her daughters and herself from eating watermelon. However, she does not prevent her beloved husband and provider (whose death would have been emotionally and financially disastrous to the family) from the apparently risky consumption of the demonized fruit.
Is it the oppressive patriarchal structure that prevents Ma from telling Pa what to do—or does Ma perhaps have some respect for Pa’s right to make decisions about what to put into his own body?