Mabon

It's the end of summer and the beginning of fall

In some places the harvest is in or just beginning. Here in Corsier, the grapes are about ready to pick. Soon men with baskets on their backs will be tramping through the rows of vines. Apple trees are heavy with fruit. In Canton Vaud beets fill train car after train car while others carry potatoes to market.

I yearn for my childhood ritual of picking out a pumpkin, both for hollowing out and for my grandmother's pumpkin pie, or a bean hole bake where after a 2.5-3 ft hole is dug and a fire of dried hard wood is allowed to burn for three hours until the hole is 3/4 full of hot coals. The beans were in a pot I still have today and was used by my mother, grandmother and great grandmother. I bake the beans with the same recipe they used but in an oven rather than leave them underground overnight for a Saturday night meal with ham and brown bread.

Some years my daughter and I went apple picking followed by apple pie and apple sauce making.

These rituals were as sure a sign of fall as the leaves changing colour.

Although it has been decades since I've had my own garden, I want to remember what mother earth gives me be it from a road side stand or Elisabeth in Argelès telling me that they've just brought in squash from this or that farm.

Almost all cultures in touch with the natural world are aware of the changing seasons and celebrate those changes. In modern society we tend to ignore them other than to put away summer clothes and search for mittens and scarves.

Modern Pagans celebrate Mabon--a name coined in the 1970s to the fall equinox. There is more than one origin of the name Mabon. One is Welsh and he appears in the Arthur legends. But there's also a Cornish Saint named Maybn, but her festival is in November.

Harvest festivals are varied: a dance in Nigeria, a special cake in China. In Valais they eat hot chestnuts and drink the first pressing of the grapes.

The harvest moon has been full and bright enough to light a path on the darkest street.

Summer is over.

The earth has turned once again despite all the attacks by man and produced food for me and others.

I celebrate the harvest in my heart.