To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
A time to be born, and a time to die;
a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted.
We are in the season and time for plucking up that which is planted now. With my usual obsessive curiosity regarding the meaning of words and their origin, I looked up the etymology of the word “season.” It comes from the Old French word seison, which means “sowing or planting,” which in turn came from the Latin word sationem, meaning “sowing.” Initially, it meant the actual sowing of seeds, but later it shifted definition to refer to the time period when you sow seeds, so literally it meant “seed-time.” The word “season” first appeared in English around the 13th century when it came to mean the times of the year as we use it now.
A time to be born, and a time to die;
a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted.
We are in the season and time for plucking up that which is planted now. With my usual obsessive curiosity regarding the meaning of words and their origin, I looked up the etymology of the word “season.” It comes from the Old French word seison, which means “sowing or planting,” which in turn came from the Latin word sationem, meaning “sowing.” Initially, it meant the actual sowing of seeds, but later it shifted definition to refer to the time period when you sow seeds, so literally it meant “seed-time.” The word “season” first appeared in English around the 13th century when it came to mean the times of the year as we use it now.
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| The late summer garden. |
As a gardener and husbandman (husbandman, n., one who cultivates land), my life is bound closely to the seasons. We all live through them, whatever they may be in the places where we live, but many pay little heed to them. Human ingenuity and technology over the centuries have done much to protect us from the changing seasons. We wear clothing and live in buildings equipped to counter the shifts in temperature and weather that come as the seasons change. Because of that, most of us don’t need to pay as close attention to what’s going on outdoors as our less-protected ancestors did. Turning up the thermostat feels different than needing to stockpile and lug around wood to keep warm.
Each season has its good points, but they have bad points as well – too cold, too hot, too wet, too dry, too short, too long. Some seasons are weighted more heavily with bad, mostly related to how cold they are in my opinion. All of them have their beauties, be they flowers or frost. This season that we’re in now, late summer, is beautiful in a wistful way. The flowers in the garden are trying to hold on. Our summer has been very dry and that has hastened the demise of many flowers that would have continued blooming until frost. But there are still beauties to behold. The tall phlox, as fragrant as it is pretty, is at its peak. The dahlias are still going strong. I planted them all in one bed this year and I love to bring bouquets of them into the house. The gladioli (plural of gladiolus, which comes from the Latin gladius, sword, referring to the shape of their leaves) have been spectacular and we’ve had a vase of them on the dining room table for two weeks now. But they are almost done and that is sad. Rudbecka, marigolds, and calendulas are putting on the best show now, all in shades of orange and yellow. Most everything else is fading away. Soon the sedum and the cosmos, the last of the garden flowers to open, will bloom.
Each season has its good points, but they have bad points as well – too cold, too hot, too wet, too dry, too short, too long. Some seasons are weighted more heavily with bad, mostly related to how cold they are in my opinion. All of them have their beauties, be they flowers or frost. This season that we’re in now, late summer, is beautiful in a wistful way. The flowers in the garden are trying to hold on. Our summer has been very dry and that has hastened the demise of many flowers that would have continued blooming until frost. But there are still beauties to behold. The tall phlox, as fragrant as it is pretty, is at its peak. The dahlias are still going strong. I planted them all in one bed this year and I love to bring bouquets of them into the house. The gladioli (plural of gladiolus, which comes from the Latin gladius, sword, referring to the shape of their leaves) have been spectacular and we’ve had a vase of them on the dining room table for two weeks now. But they are almost done and that is sad. Rudbecka, marigolds, and calendulas are putting on the best show now, all in shades of orange and yellow. Most everything else is fading away. Soon the sedum and the cosmos, the last of the garden flowers to open, will bloom.
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| White phlox, the most fragrant. |
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| Pink phlox. |
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| Bouquets from the garden. |
In the meadow and along the roads, the goldenrod has started to bloom. There are over 100 species of goldenrod in the world, most of them native to North America. Over 60 of them are found in Pennsylvania. Five of them grow on my property: Wrinkle-Leaf Goldenrod (Solidago rugosa), Canada Goldenrod (Solidago altissima), Early Goldenrod (Solidago juncea), Giant Goldenrod (Solidago gigantea) and Grass-Leaved Goldenrod (Euthamia graminifolia). The first asters are flowering down by the barn. Goldenrod and asters are beautiful and sad. They mark the end of the wildflower season. It seems too soon to be there already.
While family and friends in the west have been baking in triple digit heat, our weather turned unseasonably and unwelcomely chilly last week. On Wednesday and Thursday morning, I awoke to temperatures in the 30's. It felt so wrong to put on a fleece-lined hoodie to go out on my morning walks and to sit at my desk with the electric heater on while waiting for the sun to warm things up. Later in the week it warmed up again. In fact, by Saturday it was hot – in the high 80's again. I don’t want to see cold weather again until October. And maybe not even then.
The work of the harvest continues. I picked and froze 15 more pints of green beans. Miriam grated and froze 20 pints of zucchini. The first tomatoes are ripe. The vines are loaded with fruit and I hope they all have time to ripen so I can put up some sauce and salsa. Despite my intentions to be a vigilant pinch-pruner this year, the vines have gotten out of control and have sprawled all over. Once there is fruit on a branch, I can never bring myself to prune it.
While family and friends in the west have been baking in triple digit heat, our weather turned unseasonably and unwelcomely chilly last week. On Wednesday and Thursday morning, I awoke to temperatures in the 30's. It felt so wrong to put on a fleece-lined hoodie to go out on my morning walks and to sit at my desk with the electric heater on while waiting for the sun to warm things up. Later in the week it warmed up again. In fact, by Saturday it was hot – in the high 80's again. I don’t want to see cold weather again until October. And maybe not even then.
The work of the harvest continues. I picked and froze 15 more pints of green beans. Miriam grated and froze 20 pints of zucchini. The first tomatoes are ripe. The vines are loaded with fruit and I hope they all have time to ripen so I can put up some sauce and salsa. Despite my intentions to be a vigilant pinch-pruner this year, the vines have gotten out of control and have sprawled all over. Once there is fruit on a branch, I can never bring myself to prune it.
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| Out of control tomatoes. |
The early apples are done. We had a windy day and it brought down most of the fruit still in the tree. We raked up the fallen apples and fed them to the pigs and the chickens. The late apples won’t be ready until October. There are some nice pumpkins and butternut squash out there. They just need a little more time and some warm days to ripen. My melons and cucumbers have succumbed already. They didn’t amount to anything this year. There are still carrots, beets, and cabbages to bring in. All my yellow onions are cured, trimmed, and in storage now. I pulled up the red onions last week and they are curing in the woodshed.
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| Yellow onions headed for storage. |
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| Red onions curing. |
This is the season for insects and spiders. Cicadas drone through the afternoons. The days and nights are full of cricket song, something I truly love. We’ve had more ants this summer than ever before. There are at least ten anthills in various parts of the property. Some even invaded the kitchen, which hasn’t happened before. I think the dry weather had something to do with that. A colony of carpenter ants has built a nest in my linden tree and the tree is in distress. Its leaves are turning yellow and falling off. From what I’ve read, carpenter ants are opportunists and only nest in already damaged and decaying wood. That means that tree has deeper troubles. I’ll be very sad if I lose it.
We have some nice patches of milkweed on the property, especially out at the back of the orchard. I’ve been watching for monarch caterpillars, but so far I haven’t found any. I see the butterflies, but no larvae.
We have some nice patches of milkweed on the property, especially out at the back of the orchard. I’ve been watching for monarch caterpillars, but so far I haven’t found any. I see the butterflies, but no larvae.
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| A big patch of milkweed, but no caterpillars. |
A few big spiders have taken up residence in the upper part of the barn. They are mostly bridge spiders (Larinioides sclopetarius). They build beautiful webs between the rafters. I have to be careful not to walk into them. The only time you will ever see me dance is when I’ve walked into a web.
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| One of the barn spiders. |
School starts this week on Wednesday and Miriam and I have been called to substitute for the first three days. That has only happened once before for me, never for Miriam. Subs usually don’t get called in until later. I will be working in the office, not a classroom. Miriam will be in a classroom. There are lots of new regulations – temperature checks, mandatory masks, social distancing, room capacity limits – that will make those first days even more anxious than returning to school usually is. I think our governor is ready and waiting for any excuse to close all the schools again, so I don’t know how long it will all last. The beginning of school and the cool weather have brought on my annual end of summer malaise.
The volume of my reading slows down in the summer. There are too many other things going on that keep me from my books. But last week I re-read a book I love, A Month in the Country by J. L. Carr. It is a small and lovely book. In it, Tom Birkin, a veteran of World War I and a recently failed marriage, arrives in the summer of 1920 in the rural village of Oxgodby in Yorkshire where he has been commissioned to restore a recently discovered medieval mural in the local church. Living in the bell tower, surrounded by the beautiful countryside, he slowly uncovers an anonymous painter's depiction of the Last Judgment and finds as he works that his own spirit has been restored and he is given new hope. But summer ends, the work is done, and he has to leave. Now, as an old man, he reflects on the passage of time, the power of art and love, and he finds in his memories some comfort for all that has been lost. That may not sound like a very compelling plot, but the book captures something, some feeling of poignant perfection, that makes me ache for a time and place I never knew. Here is a small sample:
“The weather, those long warm days, went on in majestic succession right through August. The front gardens of cottages were crammed with marjoram and roses, marguerites, sweet williams, at night heavy with the scent of stocks. The Vale was heavy with leaves, motionless in the early morning, black caves of shadow in the midday heat, blurring the sound of trains hammering north and south. Summertime! And summertime in my early twenties! And in love! No, better than that – secretly in love, coddling it up in myself. It’s an odd feeling, coming rarely more than once in most of our lifetimes. In books, as often as not, they represent it as a sort of anguish but it wasn’t so for me. Later perhaps, but not then.”
For many years I read A Month in the Country every year at the beginning of August for the pleasure of immersing myself in it, but I hadn’t done that in several years. Reading it again last week, I was pleased to find it as lovely as it was the first time I read it many years ago.
Miriam, Hannah, and Josiah left on Friday to spend the weekend at the Thayn’s house. The house is very quiet with them gone. Despite being short-handed, Stacey and I worked hard all day yesterday and got a lot done. I spent the morning mapping the garden, noting where I planted what and pondering where I will plant things next year. Later that afternoon, Stacey went up on the woodshed roof and replaced some siding on the house. And that was the day we cleaned up all the fallen apples in the orchard. Then we gathered the very last of the early apples – there was only one bucketful – and Stacey made them into applesauce in the evening. After we finished with the apple trees, I mowed the orchard grass very short. Because it has been so dry, the grass hadn’t grown much since the last time I mowed it, but I needed to gather up all the loose grass to prepare for planting wildflower seeds in the fall. After that, I spent an hour watering the garden. If I didn’t water, the garden would be dead by now. I can’t remember the last time we had a good heavy rain. All the grass is brown and crispy. We are praying for rain.
The volume of my reading slows down in the summer. There are too many other things going on that keep me from my books. But last week I re-read a book I love, A Month in the Country by J. L. Carr. It is a small and lovely book. In it, Tom Birkin, a veteran of World War I and a recently failed marriage, arrives in the summer of 1920 in the rural village of Oxgodby in Yorkshire where he has been commissioned to restore a recently discovered medieval mural in the local church. Living in the bell tower, surrounded by the beautiful countryside, he slowly uncovers an anonymous painter's depiction of the Last Judgment and finds as he works that his own spirit has been restored and he is given new hope. But summer ends, the work is done, and he has to leave. Now, as an old man, he reflects on the passage of time, the power of art and love, and he finds in his memories some comfort for all that has been lost. That may not sound like a very compelling plot, but the book captures something, some feeling of poignant perfection, that makes me ache for a time and place I never knew. Here is a small sample:
“The weather, those long warm days, went on in majestic succession right through August. The front gardens of cottages were crammed with marjoram and roses, marguerites, sweet williams, at night heavy with the scent of stocks. The Vale was heavy with leaves, motionless in the early morning, black caves of shadow in the midday heat, blurring the sound of trains hammering north and south. Summertime! And summertime in my early twenties! And in love! No, better than that – secretly in love, coddling it up in myself. It’s an odd feeling, coming rarely more than once in most of our lifetimes. In books, as often as not, they represent it as a sort of anguish but it wasn’t so for me. Later perhaps, but not then.”
For many years I read A Month in the Country every year at the beginning of August for the pleasure of immersing myself in it, but I hadn’t done that in several years. Reading it again last week, I was pleased to find it as lovely as it was the first time I read it many years ago.
Miriam, Hannah, and Josiah left on Friday to spend the weekend at the Thayn’s house. The house is very quiet with them gone. Despite being short-handed, Stacey and I worked hard all day yesterday and got a lot done. I spent the morning mapping the garden, noting where I planted what and pondering where I will plant things next year. Later that afternoon, Stacey went up on the woodshed roof and replaced some siding on the house. And that was the day we cleaned up all the fallen apples in the orchard. Then we gathered the very last of the early apples – there was only one bucketful – and Stacey made them into applesauce in the evening. After we finished with the apple trees, I mowed the orchard grass very short. Because it has been so dry, the grass hadn’t grown much since the last time I mowed it, but I needed to gather up all the loose grass to prepare for planting wildflower seeds in the fall. After that, I spent an hour watering the garden. If I didn’t water, the garden would be dead by now. I can’t remember the last time we had a good heavy rain. All the grass is brown and crispy. We are praying for rain.
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| My garden maps #1. |
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| Garden map #2. |
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| Stacey picking up apples. |
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| Stacey shaking down the last of the Yellow Transparent apples. |
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| The orchard after mowing. |
Stacey and I are home from church now. Lunch preparations are underway. We are listening to our Zoom Sunday School lesson. Sundays are still strange with our limited meetings and online interactions. As Branch Clerk, I had a financial audit today. Because of Covid restrictions, the Stake Clerk couldn’t come to our building, so we held the audit over the internet on Zoom. The Branch President was there with me. The Stake Clerk asked for documents, and I held them up to the camera for him to look over. Because of the audit, Stacey and I were at church for three hours. We aren’t used to that anymore. And wearing a mask the whole time was difficult for me. So we are home. I’m hungry. And it looks like a good day for a Sabbath nap. The children will be home sometime this evening. And then away we go into another week.
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| The brown lawn. |
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| Late summer sunrise. |
