No Child Leafed Behind
Last fall, my 13-year-old daughter and I got lost in the woods of Frick Park.
Deliberately.
Over and over again. All autumn long.
We knew that, eventually, as each unfamiliar path forked, then forded streams, then emerged into the sunlight minutes or even miles later, we would find ourselves someplace familiar. And we knew that we liked walking these trails not for their destinations, or even for the turning trees, but for the unfolding journeys.
When we arrived at cemeteries or city streets or the backs of other landmarks, it was almost disappointing. The beauty of these walks was in the mystery of not yet arriving.
Fall will do that to you: make you savor the outdoors even more, now that the temperatures threaten to drive you inside.
Don’t let ’em. You could take your clue from one set of non-local parents — Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes, who apparently enjoyed a horse-drawn wagon tour of Soergel’s Orchards in Franklin Park with young Suri during Tom’s break from filming “One Shot” here. Soergel’s features everything from a wine shop, gourmet food market, bakery, deli, Amish furniture shop and farm tours to fall cider, apple, pumpkin and harvest festivals.
Or you could take your clues from these local parents, whose tastes in autumnal action are as varied as the next leaf:
Barbara Winters of the South Hills, who for many years hosted her Journeys To Motherhood podcast, loves to take her five-year-old daughter “to anything and everything that’s harvest-time oriented,” she says. “By far our favorite is Simmons Farm in McMurray. It is so wide open and lovely there. My daughter especially loves the petting zoo area, the large pumpkin patches and the extremely long slide that they supply potato sacks for… We never miss it.”
Simmons also has hay and corn mazes, a pumpkin carving display, pony rides, an
apple sling shot and pick-your-own-produce events.
Sheri Minkoff of Squirrel Hill recalls her son loving another traditional fall pastime – touch football. Aron, she says, couldn’t get enough of it on the large lawn beside Community Day School in that leafy neighborhood. After school, on weekends before Steelers games … Sometimes the simplest things are still the best.
Sewickley mom Charlotte Savocchia recommends Reilly’s Summer Seat Farm. “They do hayrides – kids get to pick out their own pumpkins,” she says. “My kids loved this when they were little. One year we picked raspberries there.” Reilly’s fall activities include night hayrides with a bonfire, hayride stories and Nursery Rhyme Land for the youngest kids, and animal feeding.
“Color me biased, but fall is the perfect time to take your kids to a cemetery,” says Jennie Benford of Polish Hill. “There are buckeyes to collect, [and] a huge variety of leaves to pick up and identify.
“Granted, it’s not for everyone,” she acknowledges. And people are too tempted each autumn to use these places as playgrounds for costumed Halloween mischief, she feels. The cemeteries she likes are “all lovely and beautiful and full of life – people jogging, all sorts of wild life, trees, birds, et cetera. Homewood Cemetery, specifically, was landscaped so that you can always see off into the distance, so a walk through that cemetery on a nice day is literally a walk through the sunshine.”
Parents can talk about all sorts of cemetery-inspired subjects, she says, such as the surrounding stained glass, large stone angels, “and why people named their kids things like Saphronia and Worthy…”
For the adventurous ones, a stroll among the upright stones can be “a nice walk and an easy and fun history lesson … I can personally suggest Homewood, St. Mary’s, Alleghenyand Union Dale. For older kids, stop in at the office and get a map and ask about famous people. It can be sort of a scavenger hunt!”
Captions: Soergel’s Orchards; Reilly’s Summer Seat Farm; the Heinz Mausoleum at Homewood Cemetery; walking in the woods; Reilly’s
Photographs copyright Brian Cohen
