Fall in America, just like the Ukrainian fall, paints the landscapes in all shades of red and yellow, leaving spots of late green in some places for contrast. However, there is one touch of the season, which Ukrainians could borrow: once fall comes in full-fledge pumpkins can be seen in nearly every yard. For me, an American with 17 years of experience of living in the States but a Ukrainian in my heart and soul, all of these pumpkins are as if saying in sincere and perky manner the lines of a Ukrainian children’s poem about pumpkin’s family. This is an old tradition that creates the distinctive coloring of American fall: big and small pumpkins of different colors and shapes, clusters of corncobs and bundles of dry corn, scarecrows in straw hats, bales of straw, and chrysanthemums in fall colors. All of this symbolizes simplicity, which lays the foundation for bread making and our thankfulness to God for it.
This fall the election races have added a stroke to the general landscape – mini-boards with the names of the candidates for presidency, Congress, Senate, and local governments. The number of such boards placed on sides of the roads and in private yards (with the owner’s consent, of course) was sufficient to make sure that elections in the United States are a really serious and deeply democratic business. If things were any different, do you think the resident of Bellville, Illinois would dare his “pigs” in his yard risking to be sent if not to Siberia, then at least somewhere in Alaska? Under the presidency of Barack Obama the unemployment rate in the United States did not go down, but it even went up (now there are 43 million unemployed in the country) and all of them, without any doubt, would put out their “pigs” too if they could afford to buy them. I personally know a man who has been taking random jobs here and there for three years now after he lost his decent-paying job but in his yard there is a state American flag waving proudly up high on a post. This is an instance of personal position that symbolizes personality of a typical American person focused on the future.
