I was spending the weekend with my friends Sheila and Mike, out at their house in the country. It was late October, so we went to the local pumpkin “picking” celebration: “picking” in quotes because the pumpkins were just lying in the field. But there were other activities. A gigantic pumpkin catapult, tossing the pumpkins through the air to cheers from the crowd. There were also hay rides, as well as a corn maze. All of this is wonderful enough but we got there just at the right moment, when the liquidy molten sun hovered right on the horizon, casting insanely long shadows – pumpkin shadows were 20 feet long – as well as making the entire landscape BLAZE out in bursts of color. I took, like, 100 photos alone. None of these are “touched up” in any way. This is actually what it all looked like. I have the one of the pumpkins framed on my wall.
