By Martie Maselli
Courtesy Photo
Candy in the Kingdom
If it was October you wore a heavy sweater. If you are as old as I am, you can remember a favorite childhood pastime of playing with your toy kaleidoscope and getting lost in the splendor of multicolor as your fingers began to chill on your walk home from school.
If you go back to the autumns of your own childhood, maybe you remember tracing a fallen leaf on a piece of paper and using your favorite crayon to create a masterpiece. All these years later, if it is the end of October, you might still be able to taste the buttery yellow and orange vanilla flavors of candy corn. Or, remember the feel of your witch’s hat that you wore on Halloweens of long ago.
In my senior years, it is the loveliness of taking a stroll in the Northeast Kingdom during early October that enables these thoughts. The trees with their many swaying leaves are the kaleidoscope. The large leaves on the ground are the colors in your crayola box: green, golden yellow, orange red, burnt umber and brown. The smaller yellow and orange leaves that are still hanging onto the branches are the candy corn. And the tilt on the tip of the mountain Jay Peak is the witch’s pointed hat leaning over. If you listen hard you might hear her cackle.
Swirls of butterscotch seem to wrap around the mountain skyline. There are trees that make me want to bite into a dunked caramel apple for they are light brown on top and red from the middle down to the bark. Of course, the trunk is the stick holding my treat together. Then there are the trees with clusters of green foliage almost shaped like circles. Suddenly, I am back in time bobbing for granny smith apples. It is late harvest in The Kingdom where the green mountains are sprinkled with Halloween.