A Prairie Home Companion with Garrison Keillor

Opening script
Saturday, September 29, 2007
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Garrison Keillor: It's one of those perfect days in Minnesota, sunny, in the 70s, fall, almost a full moon last night, and in the fields you see grass matted down where the deer lay themselves down on their backs, and feet folded on their chests to look at the moon. They'll do that, you know. And in the morning there's a mist over the lakes and rivers and in the valleys where if you walk into the mist you may disappear and suddenly you'd be somewhere else, in NY or L.A. or who knows, it's a roll of the dice, and most people look at those mists and decide against it.

Photographers go around snapping pictures of the mists but it's wasted effort. You can't get it in a picture. You get it in a song.

It's apple time in Minnesota and the crop is pretty good despite a hot dry summer and the bee population got sick so some of the growers had to go out and do the pollination themselves which is tricky, putting the seeds in each little flower just right, and then there were floods in SE Minnesota, home of the big orchards, but apples are a hardy crop, and the cold weather now just makes them sweeter, which may be true for some of us too. The Cortlands are ready for picking and the Honeycrisps and the Empires are ripening.

The deer get interested in apples and they can eat a lot of them and the only defense is to spread cougar urine around the orchard. Or if you know some cougars, you can just invite them over for beer. But deer are smart and they are probably not going to be scared off by bad smells.