Tonight Main Street will officially shut down for the 43rd annual Autumn Leaves Festival. I have waited all year for the delicious food and the chance to walk up and down the street to see who’s in town for the weekend.

Since I live just three blocks from Main Street, the Autumn Leaves Festival can be both a blessing and a burden. It seems every year I forget not to travel down Main to Rawley, because the intersection at Rawley and Willow is an absolute mess. Since I’ve written it down this year, perhaps I will remember.

I don’t know who started it, but it is a rule that you have to go downtown on Friday at lunch to get a ground steak sandwich from the Flat Rock Ruritans. This year, they are also selling them at their Ruritan building throughout the festival. So if you don’t want to fight the crowd downtown, there is another alternative. They will be selling them Friday and Saturday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Sunday from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.

Another festival favorite is the collard green sandwich provided by the Sandy Level Community Council. For years, I didn’t understand the attraction. Collards were not something I had ever craved. Well after watching year after year as people stood in long lines to get their hands on one, I decided I had to know what the hype was all about. Now that I’ve tried it, I’m an addict. I crave them so much that I have attempted to recreate the sandwich at home. I’ve come pretty close, but there’s no substitute for the real thing.

The sandwiches have been a fixture at the festival for the past 17 years and are made from scratch. They don’t use canned collards. So even if you don’t think you like collard greens, give it a try. The real secret is the fat back. There’s nothing like a little pork fat to make anything taste good. I wonder if by writing this I may have just made the line at their booth a little longer. Maybe they will let me cut in line.

This year in doing some stories leading up to the Autumn Leaves Festival, I learned that there will be some new craft vendors. I’m looking forward to seeing what’s new this year.

While I sort of cringe at the thought of Old Man Winter creeping this way, I really do love the fall of the year with the festival and then the beauty of the changing autumn leaves.

Mondee Tilley is a staff reporter for The Mount Airy News. She can be reached at mtilley@mtairynews.com or at 719-1930.