Windfall

Say windfall and what’s likely to come to mind is some unexpected happening that brings good fortune. “Sudden money” perhaps.  A jackpot. A winning lottery ticket. It’s likely too, in these economic times when strapped households pinch pennies but corporations boast record profits, that windfall is viewed as what comes to those who skirt regulations, hire cheap labor, cleverly worm through generous loopholes.

But in September, hike an island path flanking the remnants of old rock boundary walls, tramp across a meadow increasingly encroached upon by stands of second growth spruce, or merely drive the roads that now course past what was once an old farmstead with pruned orchards, and another kind of windfall becomes evident.

Fallen apples. The “drops” of trees no longer tended, fruit no longer harvested for pies or cider or for putting by jam, and of less interest to people toting buckets than to swarming yellow jackets and the island’s deer timidly venturing forth from the woods. Yes, the sour, bring-on-the-stomachache apples but also those with names few of us know – like forgotten Kings and overlooked Mildens – just two of the 10,000 (!) varieties that, says Downeast Food Heritage Collaborative, grew in Maine in the mid 1800s. Mention apples and more readily tripping off our tongues are the handful of varieties familiar to us in supermarkets, some grown as much to survive potentially flesh-bruising transport as for taste or crunch.

So hand in hand do windfall and mid-September clarities arrive, it’s as if these freely offered apples, true gifts of the season, are more like golden reliquaries – not so much a part of, but responsible for, this scrubbed and almost touchable early autumn light. These “rivers of windfall light” as poet Dylan Thomas celebrates in “Fern Hill.”

And let’s not confuse windfall with blowdown. The word we use when the tree itself is uprooted, toppled over, when an entire swath of forest may be prostrated by a violent wind. “It’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good” proclaims an old nautical proverb. But no ill wind need be behind a windfall’s abundance. Nor even a breeze’s merest nudge.

Apples fall as they must. Out of the necessity of ripeness. They plunk into grass or onto path or roadway, worm-eaten, possibly smashed, fermenting and abuzz, but no matter how blemished or misshapen, they juice the soil, sweeten the earth.

It’s fall. The season of leaves falling. Of temperatures falling toward coldness. The season of shortening days failing to hold onto as much light and for as long. Sure, it might be hard to overlook the negative connotations of fall – Eve and the apple, anyone? Or the way, in falling, we might break a hip, crack a rib. Or the way the forgotten too often fall through the cracks. Although who doesn’t hope, at least once in her life, to fall in love?

Maybe part of windfall’s aim is to connect its lucky and unlucky connotations, to link the unexpected gift with certainty. For it’s certain, right?, that the apple cannot return to its stem. That we can’t halt the advance of nights dipping toward frost. And we cannot contain, stopper the bottle on this here-then-not cidery “windfall light.” Seasons march on. Another inevitability we cannot shake, like the certainty of our shared fate – “we all fall down” the final line reminders in, of all places, our toddlerhood’s sing-song classic "Ring Around A Rosey."

Now though, let's celebrate September days still reluctant to let go of summer, not quite ready to tilt toward winter. Days that perhaps resemble what the speaker in Thomas’s poem had in mind, what it may have been like “after the birth of the simple light/In the first, spinning place.” September days of cherishing light and dropped apples in our path. Each one of them a windfall.