Summer Days

E. B. White (a brilliant essay writer) once wrote: “The essayist is a self-liberated man, sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is of general interest. He is a fellow who thoroughly enjoys his work, just as people who take bird walks enjoy theirs. Each new excursion of the essayist, each new “attempt,” differs from the last and takes him into new country. This delights him. Only a person who is congenitally self-centered has the effrontery and the stamina to write essays.”

I have been writing these weekly “essays” every Sunday afternoon for over eighteen years now. I started when we moved here and some of my family requested that I give a weekly account of what was going on as we settled in our new home. At first this was “The Update” and it was sent by email to family members and a few friends. Somehow The Update got shared with more and more people, many of whom I did not know. The Update eventually became The Potter County Journal and became a blog as well as an email. When I was given a digital camera, I started including photographs with the words. After eighteen years, I think we’ve settled in and with my strong focus on the seasonality of my life here, I wonder sometimes why I’m still writing it and why anyone wants to read it. I suppose, as E. B. White suggests, I’m self-centered and childish enough to believe my goings-on are interesting to others.

For me writing is cathartic. I started keeping a personal journal when I was fifteen years old. I wrote almost daily and recorded all the minutiae of my life – what I did each day, my feelings, frustrations, triumphs, failures, and sometimes even events taking place in the larger world. My journals fill volumes. On occasion I’ve gone back and re-read some of what I wrote over the years. Some of it is silly. Some of it is tedious. Some of it is surprisingly profound. Some of it I had completely forgotten until I read it again. In 2000 when we moved here, my private journal became this weekly journal. I enjoy writing. I hope that others enjoy reading what I write. Whether you do or not, I will keep up the effrontery with stamina for my own self-centered reasons (thank you E. B. White).

Last Sunday evening, Stacey and I went to a Music on the Lawn concert at the library in Ulysses. They’ve held these concerts for four years now on Sundays at 6:00 during the month of August. We’ve managed to attended some of them over the years and even performed at one once. This time it was a man with a guitar and a woman with a fiddle performing songs we all knew. It was lovely. The library lawn was full of people who had brought their own chairs. We sat in the warm August afternoon and listened and sometimes sang along. Overhead, high above us, a flock of swifts flew, turning in the air, twittering softly. As the sun started to go down, the town took on that golden glow that comes on summer evenings and makes the world feel perfect for a while.

Sunday evening felt perfect and summery, but the rest of the week had its ups and downs. We had lots of rain, but not the downpours that caused so much flooding to the east of us. The rain let up long enough now and then for me to get some much-needed yard work done. The lawn was starting to look like a hay field. I’ve abandoned parts of the vegetable garden to the jungle of weeds. It’s okay. After frost comes (I hope not until the beginning of October), I will clean it all out. The pumpkin and squash vines have taken over  large areas and made it impossible to get in and weed or mow the lawn where they’ve invaded. I’ve never grown such rambunctious pumpkins before.

The rambunctious pumpkins.

There’s still plenty going on in the vegetable garden. I planted late lettuce and some Napa cabbages two weeks ago that are looking good. The tomatoes are almost deceased now. The blight has murdered them. We’ve gotten some ripe fruit, but its been a disappointing year for tomatoes. The vines look awful, but there’s still some fruit on them, so I haven’t ripped them all out yet. But I’m itching to do it soon.

Napa cabbages and lettuce.

My pitiful tomatoes.

I’ve also grown impatient with parts of the flower garden. I’m pulling up all the plants that have gone past their prime. The empty patches keep getting bigger and so does the compost pile. I don’t have anything to fill the empty spots, so the beds will stay bare until it’s time to plant fall bulbs. Right now the tall phlox are the lords of the garden. They are four feet tall, bright, and very fragrant.

Phlox.

More phlox.

Every year I grow certain flowers, kinds that I especially love and want to see every year. Some of them I plant on purpose, starting new seed or buying starts from the nursery. Some of them are trusty self-sowers who take care of themselves every year. Nigella (also called love-in-a-mist) is one of the self-sowers. It comes up wherever it wants and I let it grow wherever it comes up. I love its blue flowers and strange puffy seed pods. This year I bought a different type of nigella to add to the old reliable kind. I saw a photo of these in a seed catalog and they intrigued me. They’re called exotic nigella. They are blooming now, and they are exotic looking. I will save seed to spread so there is more of it next year.

My exotic nigella.

I also planted some portulaca this year. I saw some at the local nursery and thought, why not. It’s pretty and easy to care for and I haven’t grown any in years. It has turned out to be so lovely that I’ve decided to plant a whole bed of it next year.

My portulaca.

I grow zinnias every year because Stacey likes them (well, so do I). The zinnias I chose to grow this year are at their best right now. I selected odd colors this year, not the bold, bright colors I usually grow. These are subtle shades of yellow, orange, and pink mixed with green. I like them. Stacey likes them too, but next year she wants me to plant the bold, bright colors too.

My zinnias.

On Wednesday I picked apples and made and froze two gallons of applesauce. The last batch of applesauce I made was a varietal batch of Yellow Transparent apples. This time I made a blend of Yellow Transparent, Sops-of-Wine, and Duchess apples. It turned out even better than the pure Yellow Transparent batch. It has a more complex and richer flavor. Those three trees are almost finished for the season. The rest of the trees – Jonagold, Sweet Sixteen, Honeycrisp, Caville Blanc, Chestnut, Wealthy, Roxbury Russet, Golden Russet, Northern Spy, and Cox’s Orange Pippin – will continue to ripen over the next weeks and months, so I’ll be working with apples on into early November when the last of them, the Northern Spies, will finally be ripe.

Yellow Transparent apples.

August and September are our big canning months. It seems like every few days I end up canning something. Our friends the Joneses, Bob and Nancy, have a huge vegetable garden and roadside stand from which they sell their produce. People are funny about produce – they will not buy things that don’t look perfect. On Thursday the Joneses gave me a box of tomatoes that were slightly blemished and some peppers that were a bit misshapen that they could not sell. It was a bonanza for us. I transformed them into tomato sauce and another batch of relish.

It rained all morning on Saturday so I didn’t do any work outdoors. Instead I worked in the kitchen. I chopped and froze bell peppers. I had a box of cucumbers and a basket of tomatoes (these were from my own garden) that needed attention, so I canned pickles and tomato sauce. In the afternoon I assembled all the week’s worth of canning to take down cellar. Not a bad week. May there be many more like it.

Canning waiting to go down cellar.

In the afternoon the weather cleared and it was beautiful outdoors, so I hurried out and spent some time thinning apples. Some of the trees have limbs bent to the ground under the weight of the fruit. I don’t want anymore broken branches, so I’m doing some drastic thinning. I also picked crab apples that afternoon. My little Russian crab apple was loaded and dropping fruit, so I couldn’t wait any longer. If it’s good jelly weather tomorrow, I’ll make crab apple jelly.

The honeycrisp tree loaded down.

Picking crab apples.

Crab apples waiting to be made into jelly

For weeks I’ve been inspecting my milkweed patches for signs of monarch butterfly activity. I’ve only seen a few monarchs fluttering around this summer and until Thursday, no sign of any caterpillars. Then on Thursday I found a chrysalis. I found it in a strange place – dangling from the wire loop that closes the upper gate to the chicken yard. I don’t know where this caterpillar fed, I never saw it or any signs of it feeding on the milkweed leaves. There are no milkweeds near that gate. It wasn’t a good place to settle in for a metamorphosis. The chickens are at that gate all the time and they’ll try to eat any butterfly they can catch. So I carefully removed the chrysalis from the wire and took it to the house. I tied a thread to it and hung it from the high shelf on the back porch. I will watch it now. After that, I did a thorough examination of the several milkweed patches in my yard and discovered two caterpillars. It made me happy to see them. I love monarchs.

One of my milkweed patches.

The chrysalis on the back porch.

One of the two caterpillars I found.

Speaking of chickens, my little hen Lola has gone broody again. This is maybe the seventh time this year – I’ve lost count. So far I haven’t let her keep any eggs, but this time I’ve relented. I’ve given her five eggs to sit on. They should hatch in the middle of September.

Lola on her nest.

On Friday evening we attended a memorial service for a woman who goes to our branch. She died suddenly last Monday. We saw her at church on Sunday, and the next day she was dead. She was only a few years older than me. The chapel was filled with her family (she has nine grown children and all of them were there with their families) and her friends paying tribute to her. Her death has made me realize how suddenly things can change. You never know what might happen in an instant that makes everything different. That feeling, coupled with my usual waning summer melancholy, makes me feel even more keenly how precious every day is.

The season is shifting. I can feel it. I can see it. I can smell it. It still looks lush and green thanks to all the rain we’ve been having, but if you look closely you can see things are yellowing at the edges. The goldenrod has started to bloom. The wild asters that grow along the edge of the yard are flowering. The mornings that aren’t rainy are dewy and foggy. Some mornings I have to put a jacket on when I go down to do the chores. The air is changing. The garden smells like ripe, fallen apples and the perfume of phlox. Inside, the house is full of canning odors – cooking apples, stewing tomatoes, vinegar and spices. School starts this week. I usually don’t get called in for the first little while, but I still have to be ready just in case. It changes everything. I know the changes are inevitable. The seasons have moved in their decreed order, seed time and harvest, winter, spring, summer, and fall, since the beginning. I love the changing seasons. Each one has its particular beauty and its place in the order of things. But this change, the transition from summer into fall, is the hardest for me. It always comes too soon. Every year for all the years of my life I’ve felt this way.

Roadside asters.

All day today this verse of the hymn Improve the Shining Moments has been stuck in my head:

Time flies on wings of lightning;
We cannot call it back.
It comes, then passes forward
Along its onward track.
And if we are not mindful,
The chance will fade away,
For life is quick in passing.
'Tis as a single day.