Leaf peepers aside, Maine colors shine

The stranger at the table nearby spit out her question: “Where’s the color?” She might as well have asked, “Where’s the beef?” as the old lady in the television commercial did years back, her lips pursed and eyes squinted at the thin hamburger she was served.

“It’s late this year,” someone at the counter answered, “but we’ll see some by and by. Always do.”

“That won’t help me,” she said, studying the Down East map on her place mat. “I’m leaving in three days, back to Arizona.”

She called to mind a guest we had who grumbled for four days about the fog before he left – by compass, he would later complain – and drove back to Rhode Island. Worse yet, he preferred ham to chowder and shivered the whole visit, wrapped in an afghan, although it was August. We remembered a few who griped about the wind and rain during their stay; others who deplored the heat of this past summer.

Some visitors to Maine seem to think they can order the weather as they do a fried scallop roll with plenty of tartar sauce and two wedges of lemon. The rest of us just take what’s served up, even if it’s coffee, old and thick as molasses.

So far, we like what’s being served up this October, with the misted, early mornings cool and the days warm and golden as buttered toast. With sunsets blazing the sky in reds, with blueberry fields stained cerise, and roadside ferns curled and russet.

Mountain ash limbs droop with red berries and the cattails in the marshes are furry brown. Crab apples are crimson, pumpkins more orange than tangerines, and bittersweet vines are laden with yellow-skinned berries soon to open into their autumn rust.

“Where’s the color?” It’s in the maroon burning bushes, in the chrysanthemums, in the Cortland and MacIntosh apples, in the lush golf course greens, in the giant sunflowers next to the barn, in the bog cranberries, in the rose hues of hydrangea, in the blue of the bay- and sky overhead.

As the fellow said, we’ll see the foliage turn by and by, the oaks gold and the maples scarlet, and the frost glistening white on open fields. The season’s peak may come too late for some disappointed leaf peepers who left the area before the first V of Canada geese flew by.

But, the rest of us are perfectly content with a prolonged Indian summer. In our book, it’s made to order.