Watching my grandsons scamper across the farmland like billy goats momentarily left me dizzy and displaced, as though somebody – without telling me – sped forward a family movie reel. It was a whole new film, with different children feeding corn to chickens, petting the cow, walking between rows of pumpkins, scrunching down in the gravel to get nose-to-nose with the rabbits behind the wire.

Truly, it seemed just yesterday when I visited that farm with my own youngsters, in the fall when gourds were turning golden and orange, when hay was being rolled, taffy was being pulled, when decorative corn attracted crows by the dozens, when molasses was simmering in vats, when … that kind of September was slow and oh, so mellow.

How I loved that song then: the one from the Fantasticks: “Try to remember, and if you remember, then follow. Follow. Follow. …”

The point is, I do remember when grass was green and grain was yellow, when dreams were kept beside my pillow. I do remember, and I’m following, following – all the way to another generation of “tender and callow fellows.”

I surely followed them last weekend, trying my best to keep up with one agile 4-year-old heading to the apple orchards while the 2-year-old almost climbed into the llama’s pen. “Wow,” he said as I yanked him over the fence rails.

Then, I followed and climbed into a wooden wagon filled with hay and with boys and girls of all ages, sizes and voice decibels, quite capable of muffling the sound of the tractor pulling the rickety wagon over rows of fields and furrows. It had been a very long time since I’d enjoyed a hayride on a golden September when the air was as cool and crisp as cucumbers.

Up the dirt path toward the orchards, I followed the boys, the younger toting a bag for our apples; the other, holding upright a long-handled plastic scoop so carefully one would have thought it was a pole flying the American flag and he the color guard.

He stood under the first tree, then the next, next, next, until finding the right apple tree from which to pluck the reddest, finest apples.

The younger lad chased apples that dropped to the ground when the whiffle ball-scoop didn’t quite scoop – thereby the $12 charge to “pick-your-own” half-bushel. But it was worth it when the 4-year-old proudly displayed an apple the size of a softball: “the biggest” he called it for the rest of the afternoon. “Wow,” said his younger brother.

Then, follow, follow, follow. Around the path to the pumpkin patch, up to the ice cream stand, to the right for the cider mill, through the barn with the horse stalls, down by the pond to feed the geese and ducks. “Wow,” said the 2-year-old.

It didn’t seem such a long time ago when I followed my kids as they bobbed for apples or snuggled against each other for their own hayride or tied corn shucks or helped carve jack-o’-lanterns.

Wow, I say. Time definitely marches on. And we follow, follow, follow, follow.