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Director's Notes – Episode 138 – Harvest Time
🕑 Added 2018-11-15 18:00:02 +0000 UTC (NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)In the area where I grew up, there's a Harvest Festival every October. This always sounded super fun to me as a kid, probably because it contained the word “festival”. In reality, it was just an open field surrounded by boxes of apples — farmers selling off their final harvest of the season. Sometimes they would hire local bar bands to play songs like “Jambalaya on the Bayou” and “House of the Rising Sun” and set hay bales around for people to sit on, to make it seem more like a “festival” I guess, but it was still just people hanging out around boxes of apples in a cold field. I would look at all those apples and I would not reflect on the abundance of a successful growing season, as the Harvest Festival gods/marketing team probably intended. I would think instead about the fruitless trees now left behind in the orchard, their skeletal arms reaching out, clacking together in the wind. I would see those boxes of apples for what they truly were. “You are the harbingers,” I would whisper to the apples when no one else was around, “the harbingers of winter death.” I hated winter very much. The electricity would go out, I'd miss school because of the road conditions and get behind in my classes, and there was an intrinsic cold that just stayed with you, became a part of you, even when you were submerged in near-boiling bathtubs or buried under stacks of blankets. Harvest time meant the end of warmth, and indeed, of all good things, and indeed, of hope. A cornucopia of dread. The onset of a long and miserable hibernation. “I curse thee, apples,” I would lament into the night, finally rampaging through the field, pushing over fruit crates like a wild animal. The band would stop playing. The farmers would chase me off the land. I would run into the darkness, howling and raving. I am howling and raving still. I curse thee, apples. I curse thee, abundance. I curse thee, Harvest Time.
Happy autumn, everyone.
- Brie Williams
November 15th, 2018
