Slowing the spinning globe

Autumn days shorten and condense, a sort of intense reduction sauce of summer's French Kitchen activities. The keyboard is abandoned to the last garden tomatoes frenzy. Fall market tables crowd deep orange squash between dark, crinkled green Savoy cabbage. Color and flavor jump onto the french kitchen table. It is a favored time, this summer straw turning to fall gold.

Since I wrote last, visitors have come and gone leaving their green thumb prints on the potager as cooking students have learned about October's pumpkin soup, fearless butter pastry, and tender rabbit drunk on wine and prunes.

Since I wrote last, the wild mushrooms growing on the towpath have been harvested, eaten and reharvested again. We have drunk the newest wine, le bourru, and tasted the first promise of armagnac's 2005 vintage- fruity sweet juice, clean dry wine, waiting barrels that will exhale alcohol into celestial parfume--la part des anges.

Since I wrote last, the moon has come and gone and freshly turned fields are being put to bed under a dark Gascon sky. The cheminee has been lit, one friend grows a year older, and another marries in a Gascon wedding celebration that lasts long into the same dark night.

Before I write again, there will be new stories to tell, old recipes to refine and winter bitter greens to plant alongside the grape-hung arbor. I hasten to slow the globe before November's dark days arrive so that I can remember these sweet fall moments.