The Fall Festival

The Ashfield Fall Festival is one of those truly small town things that make you feel like you just stepped back about 200 years into a nice post-colonial town. Each year, the same people attend, the same craftsmen display their glass, silver, wooden spoons, and quilted tea-cozies, and the same food-booths offer baked potatoes, maple syrup snow-cones, and fried dough with maple cream. The symbolic (and for many of the residents of Ashfield, still quiet pertinent) harvest is upon us, and pumpkins and gourds line the streets, while the telephone poles are sheathed in corn stalks.
It's hard to believe that a town like this truly exists, a town where the kids are left all day to run among themselves without danger, where everyone greats you by name, where the largest store is the tiny corner gas-station, or maybe the hardware store, packed full of odds and ends (and offering 50 cent ice-cream cones, no less). But it does, truly, 2 hrs west of Worcester, and the fall festival is one place where you cannot deny the authenticity of the town.