No place else has a restaurant you can go to, a show worth seeing, or a job worth doing. New England has this myth of easygoing happiness and harmony. It makes a good painting. So we drive our carbon-monoxide machines over interstates to what's left of farmland to pay to play farm worker for an afternoon. Feed the myth.
Truth is, it's fun to shop for apples in the fall in New England.
After nine months of imported Granny Smiths, suddenly you can find shiny local Macintoshes in September, then for a few weeks the most delicious, crispest, tartest apple in creation, the Macoun, in October. They not only taste great. Still, we return to the fields. Because we have kids. Kids have a sense of wonder about being able to take fruit right from a tree rather than from a supermarket.