How can you not love a pumpkin? I mean, look at them. The colors, the shapes, the stripes. Technically these are gourds, but gourds, pumpkins, and squash are all part of the same family so that’s close enough for me. In Connecticut where I grew up and spent most of my life, a lot of people carve pumpkins and set them outside on their front porches or steps, often with a battery-operated candle inside so they glow at night. In Florida where I’ve lived for the past 28 years, however, it’s too hot in October to keep a pumpkin outside. It’s too hot in November to keep a pumpkin outside. They just don’t last. So, I satisfy my autumnal urge by putting fall wreaths on our front doors and keeping some little pumpkins (gourds?) inside.

When our daughter was a child, we’d buy a pumpkin and she’d draw the eyes, nose, and mouth/teeth. My husband or I would carve the pumpkin to make the face. The process was the

I’m in Connecticut, where I spent most of my life, and I’ve been thinking lately about past summers, including some from the distant past. One of my fondest summer memories is of the first time I made ice cream. It was with my father at our former home in Darien where I grew up. I was probably in my late twenties on this inaugural day of ice cream making. I might have been thirty. I remember making it in the garage because it was kind of a messy process.

My dad had one of those old ice cream makers that required rock salt and bags of ice you had to crush into chips to get the job done. It wasn’t like the ice cream makers of today where you just put the little bucket in the freezer and then pop it into the machine, pour in the liquid, and it churns and chills and you’ve got ice cream. My dad’s ice cream maker was electric, however. It wasn’t so old that it had a hand crank, although I think

Apples feature fairly prominently in The Rules of Love & Grammar. There’s an apple orchard in the town of Dorset, where the story takes place, and all of the local restaurants try to outdo one another with their own versions of apple pie.

When I was growing up in Connecticut, we had a couple of old apple trees in our back yard. The apples that came from those trees were tiny, green, and extremely tart. Against what seemed to be all odds, my mother somehow turned those apples into pies. She would scoop them up from the ground and pluck them from the branches. I have no idea how many apples she had to collect to make one pie, but I’m sure she needed a lot. When the pies baked, the fragrance of apples and cinnamon that filled the kitchen was heavenly.

Here’s a simple recipe that makes great blueberry muffins:

2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 cup sugar
2 teaspoons baking powder
8 tablespoons (1 stick) unsalted butter, melted and cooled
3/4 cup whole milk
1 egg, slightly beaten
1 teaspoon vanilla
1-1/2 cups fresh blueberries
1 heaping tablespoon sugar (optional, for tops)

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Grease a 12-cup muffin pan. In a large bowl, combine the flour, sugar, and baking powder. Reserve one tablespoon of the mixture to coat the blueberries. In a smaller bowl, combine melted butter, milk, egg, and vanilla, and mix well. Add the milk mixture to the flour mixture and stir with a spatula or whisk until just blended (the batter can be lumpy). Do not over-mix or your muffins will be too dense. Toss the blueberries with the reserved flour mixture and gently fold the blueberries into the batter.

Fill muffin cups 2/3 full. Sprinkle tops with additional sugar, if desired. Bake for 20 to 25 minutes. Cool the muffins for 15 minutes