September's executioner

With a slow, deliberate motion, and a steady, grinding noise, the executioner moves through its victims, row upon row of bowed heads, cloaked in a somber dark brown in their final hour, waiting for their turn at the blade. When he’s done, all that remains is an eerie mass of decapitated stick torsos, still standing where once they stood tall and blazing yellow in the blue skies of summer.

It’s September, the month when things begin to turn. Summer is over, the beaches are emptying, the schools are filling, the weather is changing, and it’s harvest time. Where we are, that means sunflowers. For two years running, my only exposure to this quintessential crop of the rolling Italian countryside has been in the latter stages of its growth cycle, when they are bent over and black. The hillsides seem like large gatherings of monks in earnest praying posture. One day they’re there, silent in their solemn ranks, and the next they’re gone, just white stalks – thousands of them – remaining where they once stood.

In our garden, it also means a fig tree that’s alive – fruit ripening and rotting, and a constant buzz in its branches from the ample population of flies that’s attracted to such a rank feast. The small, hard apples are also starting to fall, tear-inducing in their crisp sourness. And if there’s standing room only for the flies on the fig tree, they have two grape vines to choose from – one white, one red.

In Marche, you can smell the change of the seasons.

It also seems to be a signal for the night air to start nipping. While this is in reality a welcome change, so sudden was the switch that it caught us by surprise the other night, leaving Julius and I shivering through the wee hours and sleepless in the morning.

However, the days are still warm, and the flies are still here, buzzing constantly. So persistent and numerous are they that I’m beginning to wonder if – in defiance of the cycle of nature – they ever get harvested…