The Apple Squeeze

When the music stops and before the leaves peak, Lenox throws the Apple Squeeze, the September street festival the shire town has held for decades, closing its historic blocks for a weekend of orchard stands and cider pressing, craft booths and bandstands, pie contests judged with Berkshire gravity, and the town's shops and restaurants spilling onto sidewalks in the year's best weather. It is the harvest town of these pages at village scale, and the season's correct hinge between Tanglewood and the color.

The festival's charms are proportionate and real, the cider presses working in public with the county's orchards supplying the fruit, the apple everything, pies, crisps, butters, dumplings, competing across the booths, the children's midway running its gentle rides on the church green, and the bands playing the afternoons from porches and stages while the crowd, summer people extending the season and year-rounders reclaiming it, mixes at its annual best. The surrounding orchards run their pick-your-own weekends on the same calendar, per the standing harvest method, bags filled in the morning, festival in the afternoon.

The weekend also catches the town at its shoulder-season sweet spot, per the arithmetic of these pages, the cottage inns and bookshops of the town's pieces at softened rates and gentle pace, the trails of the reserves walking green-going-gold, and the leaf weeks, whose Berkshire timing the foliage pieces chart, arriving two to three weeks later for those extending the trip or booking the return.

Come for the festival Saturday, pick a half bushel that morning at an orchard, and enter nothing in the pie contest without genuine preparation, since the competition is real. Buy the cider by the gallon and the apple butter by the case. The town spends its summer hosting the world's music, per its famous pieces, and one September weekend it presses its own valley into cider on Main Street, which is the older Berkshire program, and the sweeter one.