Summer Adieu

I like to think I live on a farm. By most farmers’ standards, I don’t. I only have three acres – one acre in orchard, a little less than one in garden, the rest in lawn. I don’t really have a barn, just a big chicken coop. I don’t make any money off what I grow except for some occasional egg money. Once a few years back a game warden came to our house when we were having a problem with a bear. He walked around the property and commented to me that we have a nice “little hobby farm.” I bristled a bit at that. It sounded condescending. But I guess he’s right.

A lot of the big farms around here have names. There’s our friend Rhoda’s Knowlstead Farm, the Dunn’s Dunnlea Farm, and the Rigas’s huge Wending Creek Farm among others. I always wanted to name my farm (even if it is just a hobby farm). I’ve toyed with several ideas over the years. I considered calling it Three Sisters Farm in honor of my three aunts who lived here for so long and also as a nod to the Native American agricultural practice of the same name. But when I looked it up, there are quite a few farms with that name. I thought of several names using Howe in them. None of them seemed right. Now I’ve finally decided on a name.

Last summer for several weeks we had a family of crows that perched in one of our maple trees and cawed at dawn every morning. It was a family with two parents and four young ones, six in all. I loved to watch them. This summer there were crows in the maples again, perhaps some of the same ones. Crows are my favorite bird. I love them for their intelligence and the almost human structure of their society. Watching those crows, I thought of the old nursery rhyme for counting crows –

One is for sorrow.
Two is for mirth.
Three for a wedding,
Four for a birth.
Five is for silver.
Six is for gold, etc.

We live in the village of Gold. In fact, as far as I can determine, in all the United States there is only one town or village named Gold and this is it. So six crows is for Gold. We are Six Crows Farm. I’ve painted a sign that I’ll hang on the barn (chicken coop).

The sign I made to hang on the barn.

Our woodchuck war continues. Last week the woodchuck managed to evade all my traps, nets, and fences and devour three entire heads of cabbage. So all my broccoli and kale are gone and now the cabbages are going. I’ve put stronger fencing around the cabbage patch hoping to save the few remaining cabbages and the single cauliflower that have escaped destruction. I’m thinking that when we catch the woodchuck we should eat it as a sort of triumphal revenge. It is, after all, well fed on organic greens. Anyone know some good woodchuck recipes?

The onions are garlic are finished now. I trimmed them and sorted them and set them in baskets for storage. We had a good crop this year.

Trimming onions.

Onions and garlic.

On Tuesday Josiah and I drove down to Dubois so he could have his wisdom teeth extracted. It was a long drive there and back – five hours round trip. They took out all four teeth. The actual extraction only took about 45 minutes, which surprised me. They anesthetized him and I got to sit in the recovery room with him while he came out of anesthesia. It was amusing. He kept saying the same things over and over again. He loves the YouTube video “David After the Dentist” where the little boy says silly things while coming out of anesthesia. Well, in the recovery room Josiah reenacted that video five times, all the while laughing about how funny it was. Then he started to sing “I Am Not Dead Yet” from Monty Python’s “Spamalot” and when it got the part about the Highland Fling, he tried to dance the Highland Fling while sitting in his wheelchair. When he could finally stand up I walked him to the car and we drove home. He slept most of the way home and doesn’t remember much of what went on.

Yesterday Josiah was working for some friends of ours chopping and splitting firewood. In a careless moment he put his thumb in the wrong place and the hydraulic wood splitter came back and crushed the end of his thumb. So between his teeth and his thumb, he’s had a lot of pain this week. And all of that just in time for school. School starts on Tuesday. I can’t believe we’ve come this point already.

Although the calendar says there are still a few weeks of summer left, it feels like it is gone. It already feels like fall. Last week most mornings were chilly and foggy and soaked with heavy dew.

The meadow on a foggy morning.

I have to put on a sweatshirt when I go out in the mornings now. The days still warm into the 70's, but there is a feeling in the air, a sense of the season shifting. The goldenrod is beautiful. The asters are blooming, the last wild flowers to bloom and one of the loveliest.

Asters by the roadside.

These last days of summer are spider days. Their webs are everywhere. In the mornings when the world is dewy the webs are easy to see. There are funnel webs like pieces of gauze scattered all over the lawn. There are the classic, perfect webs of orb spiders strung like nets between almost anything vertical. And there are the single strands that stretch for yards that seem to come from nowhere and go to nowhere.

Funnel web in the meadow.

Dahlia with webs.

Dahlia with webs.

This week will be full of changes as we switch back to our scheduled lives. It will be hard. It is every year. But we adjust quickly. Soon summer will be just a memory.