Season of the Harvest: Fields Full, Woods Full, Something Coming Home

A Cazan Fall Series · Opening Tale

Some folks call it Fall.

To me, it was the season when food fell to the ground.

Rice cut. Beans being cut. Grain spilled along the fields, and young rye grass beginning to push its green through the stubble. Persimmons ripening. White oak acorns dropping into the leaves.

The fields were full. The woods were full.

And if you knew where to look, you could see who had been eating before you got there.

Under a giant white oak, deer tracks told their part of the story. Above them, the squirrels had business of their own. I still remember the heavy thud of a big old fox squirrel hitting the ground beneath that tree. Some sounds stay with you longer than whole conversations.

People speak of autumn as the quiet season. Maybe it was, compared with the machinery of harvest or the long noise of summer.

But quiet did not mean empty.

There was a whole season going on beneath your feet, above your head, and just beyond the bank.

You learned to read the ground.

Grain in the stubble. Tracks beneath the oak. Persimmons fallen soft under the trees. You noticed which low corners of the rice fields held water and where the decoys had been set. The canals and bayous were part of the same country, carrying the season along their banks.

A field did not stop being useful when the crop came out.

An orchard did not stop giving when the fruit touched the ground.

And a pond could mean supper, if somebody needed a little work done.

That was how I came to know the harvest: not as one crop, one hunt, or one full basket, but as a string of opportunities. A job here. A line set there. Something gathered for somebody else, and a little coming home with me.

I did not trap for fur.

I trapped for food.

There is a difference, and it belongs in the telling.

La Vuhv Putnam, the widow, always had small jobs that needed doing. She also had the best persimmon orchard, right on the edge of a pine plantation.

That orchard belongs in a story all by itself.

Think of those trees when the fruit was ripening: orange among the branches, more beneath them, and the pines standing beyond. A place like that drew your attention. It drew other hungry visitors, too.

I would set drop lines in her pond for catfish, or fish a few sac-a-lait, always keeping two for me.

My time and effort were worth something. So were the fish.

Not every bit of work ended with money changing hands. Sometimes the return was something you could carry home for supper.

Then came the day she wanted a big, fat, live possum.

Now, that may stop some people right in the middle of this story.

If you have never had it, you may already be turning up your nose. But I am telling you about the country I knew, and the work I did there. What sounds unusual to one person can sit plain as day in somebody else’s memory.

She wanted a possum. I set live traps in the orchard.

The persimmons were part of the season, and so was that job.

That is what I mean when I say I worked for food. I traded time, effort, and what I knew how to do. Fish, rabbits, squirrels, things harvested for others. Some of what I worked for came home with me.

There was labor in it. Patience, too.

You had to pay attention. You had to show up. And you had to understand that wanting something from the land was not the same as having it in your hands.

Looking back, I remember more than the food.

I remember who had a pond. Who needed a job done. Where the persimmons grew. The giant white oak and the tracks underneath it. The fields after cutting, when what looked finished to one person was just beginning to feed something else.

That is the season I want to bring into these stories.

Not an autumn borrowed from somewhere else, dressed in bright red leaves. Our autumn. Rice stubble, young rye grass, pine edges, bayou water, white oak acorns, and persimmons softening on the ground.

A season of hunters and gatherers.

Of work exchanged and favors remembered.

Of knowing where to look, and remembering whose place you were on.

Some call it Fall.

I remember what came home.

Told by Cazan
Big Mamou Enterprises · Lagniappe Dispatches

Illustrations are AI-generated, story-inspired artwork, not photographs of the actual places.