Pictures of Children--Fall

These came out in the reverse order that I wanted, as well as in time, but I'm not going to worry too much about it.

This is at the Fall Foliage Festival in Warner, New Hampshire, on Columbus Day weekend, which is almost always the peak time for colorful leaves in this region. After Columbus Day all the slightly tawdry, supposed-to-be-fun sorts of establishments geared towards holidaymakers close up until May. This pretty much captures the general tenor of the festival, with a couple of bright trees thrown in in the background for good measure. There is something rather desperate and pitiful about these fairs and the amusements they offer that appeals greatly to me. At some point the children will inevitably have some kind of emotional collapse and fall to weeping in the face of such monstrousness, but I think it must somehow fulfill the role of a necessary catharsis for I believe they feel a similar fondness towards such events to that I do.

This fat and sluggish toad was easily captured in the swimming pool at the Brattleboro house (we are back in September now).

My oldest son, who has what seems to me a kinetic energy of fairly high potential capacity, though to what end most suitable I cannot as yet very well make out, has taken to scaling doorways, an activity which I cannot recall ever doing or seriously attempting as a child, though I don't feel as if I would have been able to do it, and certainly not with such authority as this one does.

It won't do to reiterate here the full list of lost skills of which the shameless donkeys of our age who try to pass themselves off as human beings live in complete ignorance, but I believe cooking is usually considered one of them. It has always been a theory of mine that the main reason modern people forgot how to do the sorts of tasks that built human civilization was not that technology rendered them unnecessary, but that they did not have, or were not made to wear, the appropriate clothes for learning them.