As autumn approaches, I’m always overcome by a feeling of nostalgia. Nostalgia is an interesting word. I use it to mean simply “a feeling of pleasure and also slight sadness when you think about things that happened in the past” (thank you dictionary), but its etymology is more complicated than that. It actually started out as a medical term and was considered a disease.
Nostalgia (n.), 1770, “a morbid longing to return to one’s home or native country, severe homesickness considered as a disease.” Modern Latin, coined in 1688 in a dissertation on the topic at the University of Basel by scholar Johannes Hofer (1669-1752) as a rendering of the German word heimweh “homesickness” (home + woe) from the Greek nostos “homecoming” + algos “pain, grief, distress.” The French term nostalgie appears in French army medical manuals by 1754. By 1830s the word was used of any intense homesickness: that of sailors, convicts, African slaves. “The bagpipes produced the same effects sometimes in the Scotch regiments while serving abroad” [Penny Magazine, Nov. 14, 1840]. It is listed among the “endemic diseases” in the Cyclopaedia of Practical Medicine [London, 1833], which defines it as “The concourse of depressing symptoms which sometimes arise in persons who are absent from their native country, when they are seized with a longing desire of returning to their home and friends and the scenes of their youth.” Its transferred usage (the main modern one) to “a wistful yearning for the past” is recorded by 1920, perhaps from such use of nostalgie in French literature. The longing for a distant place also necessarily involves a separation in time.
If nostalgia is a disease, I have a chronic case of it that recurs every September and October. But my nostalgia is not really a longing for home. I am home. It is related more to time. It manifests itself as a sort of pleasant sense of melancholic longing for another time. The time can be as close as a few months ago – June when the garden was fresh and full of flowers. It could be as distant as the years when my children were young and this house was full of their energy. It often comes as poignant memories of a time when I was young and innocent and the world seemed simpler to me. It centers more often on the people I miss than a place I long for. People I miss, be they the dead like my grandmother and my sister, or the living like my parents, children, siblings, and friends. I’ve been feeling the stirrings of my annual bout of nostalgia.
There are definite signs of the trees changing now. There are leaves on the lawn. Because school is back in session, I always take my morning walks before or at sunrise now. The mornings are chilly enough that I have to wear a jacket. We’ve had some very pretty sunrises lately.
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| A sunrise last week. |
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| Another sunrise. |
Today is my son Daniel’s birthday. He turned 27, a fact I cannot fully digest. It hardly seems possible that it has been that long since he was born. He is the sixth of our eight children. You’d think by then we would have been old hands at having babies, but Daniel’s birth was tense for us. He was born almost a year after his brother Abraham, who died at birth. Daniel was born a month early. If he had gone full term, he would have been born very close to his brother’s birthday and I think the trauma of that happening caused Stacey’s labor to come early. He was the smallest of our babies at six pounds and one ounce. He was also the strangest looking, being so small and skinny. It took him a month or two to look like a fat and normal Howe baby. Now, 27 years later, he’s a big man – at 6' 1", he’s not as big as his oldest brother Geoffrey, who is 6' 5", but not as small as his younger brother Josiah, who is 5' 10". Daniel has always been, perhaps, the oddest of our rather strange children. He was the one that wanted to play Little League baseball. He was the one who was on the high school track team. He was the one who didn’t like to read as much as his siblings. He’s still interestingly strange. He lives in Washington State with his wife Raven and we don’t see much of him, but we Skype and message regularly. It would be nice if they came for a visit sometime soon. I think that was a hint.
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| The infant Daniel. |
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| Daniel and Raven. |
My children are getting older and that makes me feel old. They are a great bunch. They were interesting as children – silly, smart, fun to be with – and they are the same as adults. I love them all so much. I love having them around me. I’m glad they are mine for eternity.
Friday was September 11th, a day I will remember vividly for several reasons. On that day in 2001, I was working as office manager in a stock broker’s office in town, sitting at my computer, when the company’s network switched to live coverage of what was taking place in New York City. I watched, transfixed with horror, as the World Trade Center crumbled and planes crashed into the Pentagon and in a field in Pennsylvania. It hardly seemed possible that such a thing could happen. The world changed in just a few minutes and has never been the same. But something wonderful happened that day in the midst of all that destruction and sorrow. My sister Mindy gave birth to her seventh and last child and only daughter, a beautiful baby she named Elisabeth. Mindy died after a long and brave battle with cancer in 2008 on September 17th, a few days after Elisabeth’s seventh birthday. This Thursday it will be twelve years since Mindy died and I miss her still. I always will. Elisabeth turned nineteen on Friday. She is a beautiful girl. She looks a lot like her mother.
Josiah left on Wednesday to return to school in Idaho. I was sad to see him go. He helped me get a lot of things done in the short weeks he was here. I was glad to have his muscle and energy at my disposal. He is fun to have around. I love to sit and listen to him banter with his sisters. I love to sit and talk books and music with him. He is starting his junior year at BYU-Idaho. He is majoring in physics and has told us that this will be his toughest semester. This semester’s classes are the ones that determine who goes on and who gives up. I think he’ll do great. The house is quieter and sadder with him gone.
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| Good-bye to Josiah. |
The weather was lovely last week and I accomplished a lot outdoors. I harvested most of my carrots. I divided and transplanted irises. I’m going to have a lot of irises next year. I found a monarch butterfly chrysalis while I was working. The caterpillar chose an odd spot to metamorphose – on the frame of my glass pepper box. I spent most of my time dismantling parts of my garden. You would think that, as caught up in gardening as I am, that pulling it all up would be a sad thing for me and it is a little. But it is also exhilarating. As I take it apart, I review what went well and what went wrong. I assess the state of the soil. Most of all, I make plans. Ideas for next year’s garden flow through my mind. Sometimes I have to stop what I’m doing and rush to jot down the things that come to me. I start making lists of the flowers and fruits and vegetables that I want to grow next year. I draw maps of what grew where this year. Any sadness I feel at seeing everything wilt and fade and go into the compost pile is offset by the thrill of what I hope will come next year. It is a cycle that keeps me in balance as the seasons of the earth and of my life roll on and on.
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| The carrot harvest. |
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| Replanting irises. |
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| The monarch chrysalis. |
Yesterday was the usual busy Saturday. It started out chilly, 38° at sunrise, and it only warmed into the 60's during the day. Stacey and I ran errands in the morning. We went out to the Amish Dry Goods Store. We went to the dairy for milk. We drove into town to buy chicken feed and to get parts to fix the shower in the upstairs bathroom. In the afternoon, I had planned to burn the meadow. I’m trying to grow wild flowers there and the thick grass has prevented the flowers from establishing themselves. Burning the grass will help. Unfortunately, the State of Pennsylvania just issued a Drought Status update and Potter County is the only county in the state under a Drought Warning. That means we are supposed to cut back on our water usage by 10-15%. We have our own well and it never runs dry, but even so, I could hardly burn the meadow at a time like this. We would have to use a lot of water to keep the fire under control and in bounds and that wouldn’t look good. So I have to postpone that activity for a while. We’re supposed to get some rain tonight. It needs to start raining a lot and hard to replenish the water table.
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| The Brenneman farm where the dry goods store is. |
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| The Drought Map. |
The Thayns arrived last night to spend a little time with us. The primary reason for their visit, besides just liking to be together, is for Tabor to help take our pigs to the butcher. We had a hard time finding a butcher that could take them now. So many people are raising pigs this year that the local butchers are booked into February and that would be too long for us to wait. We finally found a man up in Howard, New York, who said he could take them and asked that we deliver them today, something we would not otherwise do on the Sabbath, but we agreed. Also our friend Roger Dunn, who will be driving them there in his trailer, was available today.
We bought these two pigs back in April and they have grown to be very large. I’m not an expert at judging hog weight, but I’d say they each weigh well over 300 pounds. They have been good pigs, not mean or destructive like some of the pigs we’ve raised. They’ve had their moments though, like when they pulled down and shredded the tarp cover we put up to give them some shade or when they demolished not one, but two feed troughs. But they’ve been more playful than destructive. Their appetites grew with the size of their bodies. I think they would have liked to have eaten continually if we could have kept a constant flow of food to them. However, we had a hog crisis yesterday. On the eve of their departure to the butcher, it seemed one of them was going to depart earlier than planned. Yesterday the larger pig, the one the girls named Orville, was listless. He had no appetite, which was alarming. He just laid against the fence looking sad. I thought we were going to live out our own version of E. B. White’s Death of a Pig (if you’ve never read White’s Essays, I recommend them and that one is one of his best).
“The scheme of buying a spring pig in blossomtime, feeding it through summer and fall, and butchering it when the solid cold weather arrives, is a familiar scheme to me and follows an antique pattern. It is a tragedy enacted on most farms with perfect fidelity to the original script. The murder, being premeditated, is in the first degree but is quick and skillful, and the smoked bacon and ham provide a ceremonial ending whose fitness is seldom questioned. Once in a while something slips – one of the actors goes up in his lines and the whole performance stumbles and halts. My pig simply failed to show up for a meal.”
Stacey thought Orville had a cold because she’d heard him coughing, so she tried some doctoring. She gave him a rubdown with Vick’s VapoRub and dosed him with vitamin C and a few shots of herbal cold tincture down his throat. We watched him closely the rest of the day, but he seemed to just want to sleep. We broke a fresh bale of straw for him to nestle in. E. B. White gave his sick pig an enema, but we weren’t about to attempt that. I began to wonder if poor Orville had somehow realized what was shortly in store for him and was depressed. His comrade was not depressed or sympathetic to his brother’s ailing. Wilbur, the other pig, took advantage of his friend’s lack of appetite and gleefully hogged all the food. He frisked around the pen while we were trying to minister to his brother and made a nuisance of himself. We went out during the night to check on Orville. He seemed to be resting comfortably.
This morning at dawn I went out to feed them their last meal. Wilbur was in high spirits and good appetite. Orville just laid there in his bed of straw and grunted at me. I gave him a pat and spoke some words of encouragement to him, feeling all the while like a hypocrite knowing what would happen later in the day.
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| Orville and Wilbur before the episode. |
We had church at home today. With the Thayns here and all restrictions and requirements in our chapel, it was easier to just stay home. Our friends the Dunns, Kerry and her children, joined us. Stacey taught a great lesson. We sang hymns and Primary songs, which isn’t allowed when we are in the chapel.
We are waiting now for things to come together to transport the pigs. Roger Dunn will be coming with a truck and trailer later this afternoon. It has started to rain, which at any other time would have made me so happy, but today will just make a messy job more miserable as we try to load muddy pigs out of a muddy pen. Tabor and Stacey plan to go with Roger to deliver the pigs. I hope it all works out. We’ll see.
With the pending departure of the pigs, it seems as though an era in our lives is coming to a close. That, along with the garden in decline and the days growing shorter and cooler and the trees starting to change, has made me feel the need to live in and enjoy the moment. Life seems short. The seasons pass quickly. Spring pigs become ham and bacon. Caterpillars become butterflies. Apples turn from blossoms to cider in a flash. Children grow up. Grandchildren grow up. That’s life.
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| Me and the Thayn girls. |
Dan
