Peace and Quiet

Today is the first day of August and I feel a little sad about that. Although it is entirely a summer month like July, August has a different feel to it. I can sense a sort of growing finality in it. I start feeling a little desperate in August. The days are noticeably shorter now. Gardening becomes more frantic as the weeds get hostile and kick into high gear, trying to grow as big and make as many seeds as they can. They know the end is coming too. I always feel like the weeds are winning the battle in August. The garden starts to look a bit tired and ragged. The poppies are mostly just stark seed pods now, browning toward ripeness. Occasionally one still blooms here and there to surprise me. There are wide gaps in the flower and vegetable beds where I pulled up spent plants and have nothing new to take their place. The tall grasses have all gone brown. Where July’s hot days had some excitement in them, August’s heat feels oppressive. And by the end of the month the cold will start to reassert itself. Poor August, it ranks low on my list of favorite months.

Poppy seed pods.

A surprise late poppy.

There is vivid color in the garden – zinnias, cosmos, celosia, and phlox with intense reds, yellows, and oranges – hot colors for a hot month. The only cool tones left are fading fast – the cornflowers, the last of the larkspur, and the balloon flowers with their perfect star shaped blooms. They will not last the month.

Bold color in the late summer garden.

Some of my zinnias.

Sweet peas.

More sweet peas.

Bouquets of glads and sweet peas.

And yet, despite my growing sense of impending gloom, there are still some great garden events ahead. We will eat broccoli, cauliflower, zucchini, cucumbers, tomatoes, and early cabbages all month. We’ll dig up more early potatoes. Someone will probably drop by with sweet corn. We’ll be making batches of relish and canning tomatoes before the month is done. And the early apples – Duchess of Oldenburg, and Sops of Wine – will be ready to eat and turn into applesauce. All that is yet to come.

A cauliflower - we're having it for lunch today.

One morning's picking of zucchini.

The last week of July was peaceful and quiet here. I love peace and quiet. By peace I mean the absence of contention, a harmonious state of being where things do what they are supposed to do without violent interruption. While the wider world smoulders with turmoil and discontent, the most contentious occurrence in my cloistered world lately has been a bit of frustrated rage at the destruction caused by beetles, snails, and deer, and annoyance at the noisy trucks that speed through Gold.

The kind of quiet I like can actually be quite noisy if it’s the right kind of noise. My craving for peace and quiet makes me a lover of summer’s early mornings and late evenings. The world isn’t really quiet around dawn and dusk, but nature’s noise as it greets the sun and settles into night is a gentle kind of noise made of bird song, frog voices, and insect music. At least it is here. I suppose if I lived in Central or South America where howler monkeys announce the dawn at 90+ decibels, I’d feel differently. The place I like to be on these mild mornings and evenings is out in the garden, in the orchard, or the meadow. I try to take a walk every morning to enjoy the peace and quiet. And I’ve made places – a bench, a swing, an overturned bucket – where I can sit and watch and listen as the sun comes and goes. That’s where you’ll find me most summer mornings and evenings.

But sometimes I also love noise and clamor. When my family gets together it’s never quiet unless everyone is asleep (and even then there is some sleep talking and snoring). But when we are awake there is a lot of noise made by people who are happy to be together. Playing games, making music, talking, singing – we are loud. Sometimes I wish I had a decibel meter to measure the volumes we can reach. Normal conversation, according to the charts, registers at between 60 to 70dB. I bet when we are together, we average 80dB or more. But then when the house has been full of family and they all go away again, as happened in July, the resulting quiet seems more sad than tranquil.

I looked up what the ten loudest animals on earth are and it’s a surprising list. Number one on the list at 200dB is the Tiger Pistol Shrimp. From there it goes down to Blue Whales (188dB), the Greater Bulldog Bat (140dB), the Kakapo (132dB), the Green Grocer Cicada (120dB), Lions (114dB), the Water Boatman Beetle (99dB), the Coqui Frog (90-100dB), Wolves (90dB), and Howler Monkeys (90dB). So I guess my family isn’t so noisy after all – maybe like being in a room full of monkeys.

On Monday I finally sprayed the orchard. As soon as the dew was gone, I mixed up my malodorous potion and filled my sprayer and began dousing the trees. As I walked along spraying, I took note of the trees, the condition of their leaves and fruit, any dead branches that need removing, apples that need thinning. I discovered some surprising things. I had planned to cut down my two remaining pear trees. They have never produced much fruit and they always get fire blight which then spreads to the nearer apple trees. But I never got around to cutting them down in the spring. Maybe they sensed my intentions. This year they are loaded with pears and there was just one branch tip on one tree with fire blight and I removed it. So I will let the pears live – at least for one more year.

I also discovered a hornet nest in my Roxbury Russet apple tree. My first reaction was to go get some insecticide and spray them, but I decided to do a little research first. I found that they are bald-faced hornets (Dolichovespula maculata), and they are not a “true” hornet. They are type of yellow-jacket. The only true hornets in North America are European hornets (Vespa crabro), and they are an accidentally introduced species. Bald-faced hornets can be a nuisance when they make their nests too close to humans. They can be aggressive and they have a painful sting – more on that below. But they are also considered beneficial because they prey on other insects and they are pollinators. This nest is not near a place where we go all the time. Even when I was spraying that tree with my potion, they didn’t pay any attention to me. So I decided to leave them in peace for now. Those apples won’t be ready to harvest until late in September and if the hornets are still there then, I might have to take care of them, but for now they can stay.

The hornet nest in my apple tree.

I have a bad memory involving yellow-jackets. When I was young, maybe seven or eight, back when we lived on Bridge Street in New Cumberland, I was running around in my bare feet. We had a big Bartlett pear tree in our yard and there were lots of over-ripe fallen pears on the ground. I stepped on one that was covered with yellow-jackets and they stung my foot. I limped into the house crying to my mother and she put my foot in a pan of ice water. It hurt until my foot was too numb from the ice to feel the pain. I didn’t get any sympathy from my mother. We were not supposed to go barefoot and I was breaking a rule. [Her usual explanation for the ban on barefootedness was that we would get worms, but I think it had more to do with dirty feet in the house.] So I felt a bit magnanimous last week in allowing that nest to stay in my orchard.

On Tuesday and Wednesday I was in the orchard again thinning apples. I’m a reluctant thinner. When I see branches bending under the weight of too much fruit, I fret. In order to get a good crop, I know that half of those apples need to go. I can easily pull off the ones that are too small or deformed or diseased. But what about a cluster of perfectly formed and pretty apples? Which ones do I remove then? And what if I pull off half of them and then the rest drop off later? It takes me a long time to thin a tree. And I have thirty trees that need thinning. Thinning is my least favorite orchard chore.

Branches heavy with apples.

Rain came on Thursday and I spent most of the day indoors painting. I have two orders I’m working on. While I painted (mostly waited for paint to dry), I continued working on transcribing my letters to Stacey while listening to the music of Vaughan Williams. His music was a perfect accompaniment for my mood – pastoral, at times sweetly melancholy.

Thursday evening we went to the temple for the first time since November of 2019 – winter weather and then a year of covid prevented us from going. We are so happy that our temple has reopened. Our temple is in Palmyra, a two and half hour drive from home. It’s a beautiful drive across western New York. It was wonderful to be in the temple again. It is a place of heavenly peace and quiet.

Our trip to the temple.

At the temple.

The temple.

Friday was a lovely day, not too hot, a soft breeze blowing all day. I worked in the garden all morning and then mowed the lawn in the afternoon. Toward evening, it began to get pretty cool. When I went to bed that night it was 48°. When I got up on Saturday morning it was 40°. That’s too cool for the last day of July. Maybe August won’t be so hot after all.

All week long the mornings were heavy with dew. I came back from my walks every morning soaked to the knees. On Thursday morning I took a longer than usual walk past Burrell’s and up the hill. I was tempted to go into the woods, but instead I turned and walked along the edge of the hay field where it meets the sheep pasture. I was there just in time to see the sun come up over the hill. It only glowed for a moment before the clouds swallowed it. Not long after that, soon after I arrived home again, the rain came. These quiet, warm and dewy mornings are precious to me. They are what I store in my memory to keep me sane during the long, cold months. I always have to remember that there are summer days ahead.

Sunrise on Thursday.

Our house as seen from hay field hill.

Curious sheep watching me.

Coming back into Gold.

The birds are busy. The robin that nests under the eaves of the back porch has hatched her third brood of the year. The thistle by the mailbox is full of goldfinches in the morning eating the seeds and collecting fluff for their nests. A kingfisher has been by to check out our little pond, but has gone away disappointed because there are no fish in it yet. I’ve been seeing hummingbirds more often. They come to feed at the bee balm and the runner bean flowers. One morning I watched a female ruby-throat visiting the gladiolus. I thought it was odd because glads don’t produce any nectar that would attract a hummingbird. As I watched her, I realized she was actually bathing in the dew that was gathered in the blossom. A family of crows has their young out and about. They sit in my maple trees most mornings and make a racket. I don’t know where they nest. I’ve never found a crow’s nest. Birds mob my feeders. I fill the feeders every morning and by noon they are empty. I’ve seen a hundred swallows gathered on the telephone wires in the mornings. I think they will soon be heading south.

Goldfinch on the thistle.

Eating thistle seed.

Close up.

Hummingbird in the glads.

Hummingbird in the glads.

Yesterday Stacey and I worked in the gardens in the morning. We picked peas and raspberries. We thinned more apples. The Yellow Transparent apples are ripe already and we picked some and made the first applesauce of the year. The smell of the cooking apples is one of my favorite late summer smells. While we were working, I saw several monarch butterflies among the flowers. I’ve been watching for them. After seeing them, we found several of their caterpillars in the milkweed patch by the orchard. We don’t see as many as we used to. I let the milkweed grow for them (and also because they are lovely plants).

Picking peas.

Washing apples for sauce.

Monarch on the cone flowers.

Caterpillar in the milkweeds.

This morning I was up at sunrise to enjoy the peace and quiet of a Sabbath morning. It was a beautiful cool morning with heavy dew and a bright blue sky. Today was Fast Sunday. Part way through church a big storm rolled in with lightning, thunder, wind, and pouring rain. As we arrived home, it began to hail. We’re supposed to have severe thunderstorms for the rest of the day. The rain is pounding on the porch roof. I like thunderstorms. They may be noisy, but that is also noise I like. To be snug in my home while the rain pours down and the thunder roars makes me feel peaceful. I am especially hungry today. Lunch preparations are underway. There will be baked cauliflower slathered with mustard sauce and cheese, a Caprese salad (tomato, mozzarella, and fresh basil), and some meat pies. I can hardly wait. Then for the rest of the day I will relax and listen to the rain as it blesses my gardens.

This morning before the storms came.

This morning.

Dan