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HOW OFTEN, DEAR READER, HAVE YOU raved over the colors of autumn? Those brilliantly-hued leaves! They are always impressive, its true. I've oohed and aahed with the best of the fall sightseers. But I'm here to ask you:

Can you EAT those colors?!


BLUEBERRIES and black raspberries.
These waiting patiently to be consumed with my breakfast cereal are from the neighbors' berry farm. I stopped by on Monday and got blueberries. "How much longer will you have them?" I asked the girl at the stand. (It's a two-week old photo; the raspberries were around for two short weeks. Alas, Week Two was the one just past).

"We'll have the last of the blueberries on Wednesday," she told me. "That's our final day for the season."








It was about four p.m. when I thought of it today, rushed there, and was blue to discover that I was too late!


RED bell peppers. These two have grown at my kitchen window, becoming less shy as the days have gone by. Now they're showing their true colors! Their reward will be a spot on the heavenly green salad I'm making for supper!


YELLOW Patty pans.
Patty, Patty, you and your tiny offspring are such an exquisite shade of sunny yellow!







And talk about gasping...
Oh, you little beauty queen!!




(I'll have to confess, Reader Dear, it's kind of difficult for me to chop up the Patties and put them in my stir-fry. But, oh my...








YUM!)





ORANGE (er...peach-colored) peaches! I stopped at a local roadside stand to buy them. "Do they like to cling?" I asked the seller. The answer was no.
So I got ready to buy a little paper box of them. Then I spotted a bagful with a sign, Seconds--$1.50.
In response to my, "What's their problem?" the young woman told me they had some unlovely spots.
Well, the ones on the top didn't look all that bad. So I brought them home--those little not-so-needy pariahs.

"Wow!" I exclaimed to my yard man , "nineteen very nice peaches for less than ten cents apiece. Someone didn't know what they were doing when they rejected these fuzzy little babushkas! They're going right into a cobbler, so get ready!" (He did so with relish!)

GREEN zucchini. I've got no photos of the green veggies (other than their spot in my stir-fry). Nor can I show you RED watermelon, the type of which my yard man and I have been gorging ourselves for lo, these many weeks. There are lots more colors, of course, but I can't talk about them now, Reader Dear. That's simply because I am busy...

...EATING the colors of summer!
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