Sunday, October 1 was a glorious early-autumn day: sunny and warm, a pleasant change from the rain and gloom from the prior two days. It would have been a perfect day for the Walden Harvest Festival.

Sunday, in fact, was the advertised rain date for the 36th annual celebration that was thwarted by drenching rain Friday into Saturday.

But Bradley Park was quiet on Sunday, as the fields were deemed too wet to accommodate the highly-anticipated gathering. Organizers of the event apparently didn’t want a repeat of a scene from several years ago, when Mike Bliss and his crew spread hay along the fields to soak up the rain and protect guests from the mud.

There will be no rain date this year. The gathering was canceled outright.

It is a shame, not just for the disappointed residents who look forward to the annual celebration of village life, the bakers preparing for the annual baking contest, the two-legged frog-jumping contestants and the more than 70 vendors who had packed up their wagons and stocked up on their wares. The event also requires months of planning from village staff members and the Walden Community Council. A lot of hard work was washed away in Friday’s torrential rain.

The canceled festival will not be rescheduled, we are told, as many of the vendors and scheduled entertainers have other plans to be elsewhere in the coming weeks. The warm-weather window of opportunity will soon close.

Over the course of the 36-year history of Walden Day, organizers have been willing to experiment. Once held in mid-August, the festival was re-branded as a harvest festival when it was determined that too many families were on vacation in August. More recently, it was moved from municipal square to Bradley Park, to accommodate larger crowds and more vendors.

Maybe it should be moved back to the square, which would have been dry enough by Sunday to accommodate the festivities and allow for some family fun.

We cannot control the weather, but hopefully we can begin planning for a bigger and better festival in 2024.