I went to town to buy a good axe, a wheel of cheese, and a bushel of apples. The market stalls told a tale of summer kissing fall. Tomatoes, peppers, peaches, grapes, winter squash, kale, and the first flush of apples. The heat faded, coming to call only in the afternoon, and the light took on a sideways slant.

Every year my Northern blood curses summer in the South, and every fall there is no other place I’d rather be. Yellows and reds wave from the tree branches. Goldenrod and aster sing from the pastures. I see a leaf fall: my heart gets caught in my throat. How many times have we wished someone would leave, only to miss them as soon as the door closes?

Preparations for winter ensued. On a breezy, blue afternoon, I harvested the winter squash that managed to survive the drought and whatever apples I could get from the tree next to the pond. Loads of slab wood for the bakery and cordwood for the house arrived. I spent the following days splitting and stacking with friends. Cordwood that wouldn’t fit in the woodshed was piled on the porch. In the morning, with hot coffee in hand, I stepped out like the captain of a ship to meet a bank of fog. My spirit came back after being expelled through heat and exhaustion. I could feel my skin again, no longer an oil slick of soot and sweat. I welcomed the brush of wool and silk.

The farmer who raises cattle in the neighborhood also keeps a field of tobacco down the road. When the first flowers appear on the plants, they “sucker” them, cutting off the blossoms to direct energy toward the leaves. The tobacco plant in maturity is a beautiful sight. Five feet tall, give or take, with broad leaves radiating from a single stalk. When the time is right, somewhere in the first week or two of the month, the plants get slashed and staked to dry before being piled in baskets and taken away in truck beds. In the summer, Laura and I sneak out into the field to be dwarfed by the plants. In September, we sneak out to see the leaves spread like dancers’ skirts, turning yellow.

The practice of baking now begs for a little more embellishment. Bread doughs behave in temperatures they adore. Pie crust doesn’t threaten to bake just resting on the workbench. I slow down and turn to the fine details. In a time when a bag of chips can be labeled “artisanal,” I find it essential to give some integrity back to the word. Artisans are meant to transform themselves through their work. You cannot look like an artisan. You cannot even be an artisan. The artisanal path is an invisible process deep inside the wild darkness of your chest. The journey is never done and yet is always attempted. Growth and change are inevitable.

September 21: the last day of summer. Over a few beers on the porch, Laura, Jason, and I decided to get on the river in search of pawpaws. We’d found them a month ago. The water was high then, right after a downpour. Maneuvering our canoes through a tricky side passage to the left of an island with no name, we had to lie down in the boat to pass under fallen tree trunks. Looking up at a matrix of branches, I saw them: huge clusters of neon green pawpaws simultaneously in plain sight and completely hidden.

One last rumble. One last truck careening down a dirt road. One last shot at playing hooky. Driving the road next to the river, trying to jog our memories, we took an educated guess and parked in a turnoff, dragging the canoe through the trees down to the water. The three of us ferried across in the wide red canoe. Shored the boat, bushwhacked across the island, and surprisingly, arrived at the exact same spot we had been a month ago. There was nothing. The pawpaw trees were beautiful. And completely barren. In it for the adventure and impressed enough with our navigational skills, we weren’t entirely downtrodden. But then something else kicked in. A disbelief. A rejection of the obvious. We split apart to see if we could find some evidence. A rotten pawpaw was better than none at all.

Sandals crunching on dried leaves. Unidentifiable shrubs and branches up my skirt. Bugs in my ear. I felt childish. A signature of adulthood is accepting disappointment gracefully, but all I wanted to do was pout. Next time we could get our hands on them was a year away, and who knew if we’d ever get back to this spot? Just one more step. Just one more look. Just a few more minutes. And then, when I spotted a fallen one nestled in a pile of leaves, I felt childish in another way: unbridled, selfish, and saturated with enthusiasm. I screamed. And then Jason screamed. We hit a hot spot, shaking the trees and raking the ground. I frantically gathered handfuls in my skirt, jumping up and down. The whole world was raining tiny green treasures.

The pawpaw, a huge berry, is the largest edible fruit native to North America. Preferring semishade and thicket, pawpaws are often choked out of well-established forests. They do well along rivers and bottomland, ranging from the Gulf Coast up to the Great Lakes. Forming in clusters of two to five fruits, pawpaws on the same tree can ripen at different times, so if you find a patch, it’s worthwhile to visit several times. They bruise easily, the major reason they’ve been left behind in the gross industrialization of agriculture. Once removed from their environment, they need to be eaten within two to three days. Looking down at the one in my hand, I could almost watch it turn from green to brown.

A bitter taste and a pear-like consistency at first—the skin was thin, scraping it away with my teeth revealed a banana-like, custardy interior studded with several large black seeds. I bit again, this time taking in a mouthful and eating it like a watermelon, spitting the seeds aside. Good art makes you uncomfortable. The flavor of the pawpaw is like that, a wave of tropical delights: pineapple, mango, banana, and then a musky flavor that leaves a question mark on your tongue. Hard to tell what I was tasting. I bit again and again, till it was gone. Juice dripped down my chin, my humanity restored.