The weather turned cold on Tuesday. Not just chilly – cold. On Wednesday we finally had to relent and light the gas furnace. The wood stove was doing a pretty good job, but no one wanted to get up in the night to keep it stoked. Every year we try to wait as long as we can to light the furnace. Some years we make it to November 1st, but not this year. I'm not used to the furnace being on yet. When it comes on in the night, the whoosh sound it makes wakes me up. It's an old floor furnace with one grate in the living room. It keeps the main part of the house warm. We have the thermostat set low so it won’t kick on until the house cools to 55°.
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| The furnace grate. |
We got our first taste of snow on Wednesday. Just before sundown a storm rolled in and pelted us with hard little snow flakes. They accumulated a little during the night and we woke up to the sight of white. By noon on Thursday it had all melted, but Friday morning we awoke to find another short-lived dusting of white. It was sobering to see it and realize we are just at the front of a long winter.
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| Our first snow on Wednesday. |
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| View from my window at school on Thursday. |
We finally tied up most of the loose ends of autumn last week. The mower, tiller, bicycles, garden hose, and hammock are all put away until spring. We brought in the cabbages and the celery to store. We finally dug up and canned the carrots. I shelled the flint corn and the kidney beans, finished drying them, and stored them away. We finished with the woodpile on Saturday, working in a howling, icy wind to get it done at last. I packed the dahlia roots and gladiola bulbs in sacks of peat moss and put them down cellar for the winter. The garden is empty now. I moved the more tender potted plants – the rosemary, gardenia, and osmanthus – off the back porch and into the house.
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| Shelled kidney beans. |
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| Shelled flint corn. |
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| Cutting carrots to can. |
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| Preparing cabbages for storage. |
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| Cabbages. |
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| Finishing the woodpile. |
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| A good supply of wood on the front porch. |
As winter approaches, my world seems to contract a little bit more each day. First I withdraw from the yard onto the back porch, then from the back porch into the house, and once inside the house, to the warmer spots near the wood stove, the furnace grate, and the electric heater. The cold makes things get thicker and slower until they finally go rigid and dormant. I see it happening in the world outside and I feel in me, too.
With the outdoor gardens shut down now, I will focus my gardening energies on my houseplants. I tend them all year long, of course, but during the cold months I lavish all my attention on them. Right now all six of my orchids either have flowers in bloom or new flower stems emerging. And one of my most anticipated Yearly Houseplant Events is now underway – my Christmas cactus has buds on it. They appeared suddenly last week and are developing quickly. They should open in the first weeks of November and finish sometime in the early new year. Soon after that, the clivia and amaryllis should begin to bloom. My houseplants keep me sane.
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| Christmas cactus in bud. |
This next week we will be busy as we begin butchering turkeys. It's time. The young ones are as big as their parents now and they are getting better at finding ways out of their pen. We'll butcher them three at a time every few days until all twelve are either in the freezer or in canning jars. Stacey does most of the work of butchering. I catch the birds and truss them up but she does the killing, cleaning, and canning. It's hard, messy work, but she is good at it and I appreciate her skill.
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| Turkeys. |
This week we'll mark the end of October and that means Halloween. I don't like Halloween. I did when I was a child, but I think nature of the holiday has changed drastically since then. It has become bigger and more gruesome. It has evolved from a holiday mostly kept by children whose main interest was the candy they would collect to one where more and more adults keep it as an extravagant celebration of things evil and occult. The witches and vampires and gore have become very sophisticated. Some polls show Halloween poised to takeover the #2 favorite holiday spot in America, crowding out Thanksgiving (Christmas is still #1). We don't do much for Halloween at our house. We don’t carve jack-o'-lanterns anymore, we prefer to eat our pumpkins. We buy our favorite candies knowing that no one will come trick-or-treating. We watch a scary movie if we can find one that meets our standard – nothing rated R or involving demonic themes or gore. We often end up watching a classic Hitchcock film or our old Halloween standby, E.T. That’s it for us. And then it's November.
I'm working on my winter reading list. I read steadily all year, but in the winter when I have more time with the longer, darker evenings, I read more. I read every kind of book and I try to vary my reading among all the different genres of fiction and nonfiction. I'm always on the lookout for good books. I have plenty of books on my shelves that I haven’t read, but I like to look for new books at the library, too. I like books recommended by others whose opinions I value and whose standards I trust. It seems to be getting harder for me to find new books that aren't full of profanity and fornication. I find myself turning more and more to the classics. I often reread books I especially love. Some of the rereads on this winter's list are by some of my favorite authors: The Essays of E. B. White, The Once and Future King by T. H. White, and at least one novel by E. M. Forster (initialed authors seem to be especially attractive to me, I guess). I'm planning to explore some murder mysteries. I have all of Agatha Christie’s books on my Kindle. I might read a few of those. And then there are the books that call to me when I go to the library. Who knows what adventures lie ahead. Books thrill me.
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| One of many bookshelves in our house. |
It is chilly, rainy, and blustery this Sabbath day. As we drove home from church, the closer we got to Gold, the harder it rained. Josiah is firing up the wood stove. Stacey is busy making dinner, fried cabbage and rice. It smells so good. We have an angel food cake for dessert. Then I'll nap on the couch by the wood stove if I can beat Hannah to it (she says she has dibs, but I don't play that game I say "first come, first served").
Good Sabbath.
