I’m writing this in leggings and a hoodie, under a lap blanket I gave up pretending I didn’t need an hour ago. The window is closed for the first time since mid-May, begrudgingly. Rain is pattering against leaves that are still, brilliantly, green. Somewhere out front the apple tree is almost ready to give up its fruit, and the bees that still buzz around the meadow that my front yard has become this summer are getting drunk on the fermenting early falls from the tree.
Nobody around here can agree on what’s happening this year, in ways that go beyond the weather. That’s the real story, more than any of it being early or late or right on time. People aren’t sure if they should pull the boats out, move from Camp to wherever their winter home is, or depend on the unpredictability of it all and just wait and see.
I met a friend and client who recently closed on a new home on the patio at El Centenario where we shivered but stubbornly insisted that margaritas on a patio in September was a no brainer. He told me, with the specific confidence of someone who has just made a tactical error, that he’d taken his window units out for the season. Which means, by local lore, we are now owed a heat wave sometime before Columbus Day. And, when I say that, I’m joking (and so was he), but only sort of. It’s closer to a genuine hedge, the kind everyone in this region makes without noticing they’re doing it. Summer flew by faster than usual, we say. Feels like an early fall, we say. And then we immediately protect ourselves from being wrong about it.
I keep thinking about a party I threw two Octobers ago, when everyone ended up drifting into the back garden, fairy lights strung along the fence, grass still high enough to catch on your ankles, everybody in short sleeves like it was the summer solstice instead of Halloween. That night is in the same folder in my head as this afternoon’s rain and blanket and closed window, even though the only thing they have in common is that they failed to understand the assignment. That’s what a Lakes Region fall actually is. Not a season so much as a folder full of contradictory signals.
I was in Portsmouth for lunch today, a mere 40 minutes south, to talk to a new client about listing their seacoast home of 20 years and the story didn’t change so much as resonate in a different key. The host at the restaurant had on one of those Irish fisherman’s sweaters. The late-summer tourists were out in shorts, hustling along sidewalks that had gone slick with rain, looking like people who’d read a different forecast than the one actually happening around them. Same uncertainty, same collective shrug, just with an urban harbor view instead of a country lake one.
The brochure version of fall up here is a single, iconic image, that’s been sold so consistently that most people can picture it whether they’ve ever visited in person or not. A ridgeline gone orange and yellow and red as far as the eye can see. A red barn with pumpkins stacked on the porch. Somebody’s grandmother’s hands wrapped around a mug of cider, steam catching the light just right. It’s the version on the postcard rack at the general store, the version a hundred Instagram accounts recreate at the same three overlooks every year, the version that shows up in every “best fall foliage towns” listicle with a stock photo that could be any covered bridge in New England. And I want to be clear that it’s not fake. That weekend exists. I have escorted guests across said covered bridge in a flannel with a hot cider in one hand and an apple donut in the other, leaves crunching satisfyingly under my feet. I’ve grinned as I sped past tourists pulled over on the shoulder with their hazards on, taking the same photo everyone before them has taken. And I can’t even blame them for it.
What the brochure obscures is that these are all moments, not a season, and which weekend gives you the promised experience changes every year depending on things nobody around here controls. An early frost or an early nor’easter can strip a ridge to bare branches before the leaf peepers even book their rooms. A wet, warm September can hold the green on for so long that color doesn’t really arrive until people have already given up and gone home. A summer that does an early Irish goodbye, the way this one has, can shove the whole thing sideways so that what should be six weeks of gradual turning collapses into ten unpredictable days. The postcard has the luxury of capturing the Platonic ideal of fall in New Hampshire. Living here means you get whatever outcome actually shows up, and you don’t get a vote.
I don't think that's a flaw in the place. I think it's closer to the actual character of it. You stop checking the forecast so much as reading the room, the way my friend reads the nights to decide when to pull the window units, the way I read the apples dropping off that tree. You start keeping a lap blanket by your desk in September, just in case, even though your shorts and bathing suits are still in the dresser. And there's every chance this year could be the kind that hands you a need for both in the same month. Who knows?
Here’s what I do know. I’m definitely going to buy the cider donuts this year just like I do every fall. I just won’t pretend I know when.
Here’s to the version of autumn that actually shows up, not the one on the postcard.
🧭 Jennifer
Keys to the Lakes
