Celebrations in July

Last Sunday, in the late afternoon, the rain came at last. There was a rumble of distant thunder and a few flashes of lightning as the storm drew closer, and then it poured. The rain came down in torrents – two inches in an hour. We went out on the front porch to watch it fall and smell the wonderful odor of the earth soaking it up. Then it eased up and fell a little lighter through the night. It was a great blessing and an answer to our prayers. On Monday it rained off and on, sometimes hard, but mostly a drizzle, through most of the day. In all we got about four inches of rain over two days. The gardens, lawn, and I were very happy for it.

After the rain, the weather was very warm and humid. Out in the garden, I worked up a sweat without having to work very hard. But I did work hard. The rain had toppled most of the top heavy plants and I spent a lot of time propping them up. The rain revived the garden, but it also sent the weeds into overdrive. I wish all my flowers and vegetables had the vigor of weeds. But it seems that’s not how nature works.

Actually, with the rain and the heat, the vegetable garden is doing well. We continue to harvest broccoli. The variety we planted puts out lots of side shoots and it just keeps on going. The cauliflower is just about done. Unlike broccoli, cauliflower does not put out side shoots. You just get the big central head, so once it’s cut, it’s finished. We have an overabundance of zucchini. You’d think we’d know better than to plant eight plants. I only grew two, my favorite variety, Costata Romanesca, but Kurt bought a six pack of starts from the nursery of the usual sort. So with eight plants, we have more than we need. We are processing some of it, making freeze dried zucchini chips, but every other day there are nine or ten new squash. We took a box of them to church today to give away, but they didn’t all get taken. We might have to resort to the old method of leaving bags of it in unlocked cars. The next big harvest will be early cabbages. I will turn most of them into sauerkraut. Then comes cucumbers, onions, and peppers and it will be relish making time. The tomato harvest will be immense once the fruit starts to ripen. The vines are loaded.

The big garden.

The flower gardens have moved into the High Summer phase. The poppies continue to surprise me. Just when I think they are done, a few more pop up. The dominant flowers now and until fall arrives are the brightly colored ones – zinnias, dahlias, gladiolus, phlox, marigolds, and coneflowers. I love their deep, saturated colors. Unfortunately, so do the Japanese beetles. Twice a day now I go out with my bowl of soapy water and collect them by the dozens. There seems to be no end to them. But I’m determined to keep fighting them for the sake of the flowers.

Zinnias, coneflowers, and a late poppy.

A very fragrant lily.

We have blueberry bushes on the property, about twenty of them, and they have fruit on them, but they are still young, small bushes. Just up the road from us is a you-pick blueberry patch. Those bushes are forty years old, huge, and loaded with berries. We went up there on Thursday evening and picked 12 pounds. We froze them. I will make jam from some of them this week. The rest we will freeze dry.

The blueberry patch.

The bushes are loaded.

Washed and ready to freeze.

Last week we suffered a double tragedy, a fowl calamity. On Monday we found our peachick dead. He had wandered onto the path along the fence line where the peacock paces all day and he was trampled to death by his own father. Then on Tuesday evening, we found Petunia, the peahen, dead inside their shelter. I don’t know what killed her. There were no signs of violence. I’d seen her earlier in the day out and about. So mother and child are gone and Posey the peacock is alone again. We discarded Petunia’s last two unhatched eggs. Peacocks might be beautiful, but they aren’t very bright. At this point we’re trying to decide if we want to keep Posey. Our adventure with raising peafowl has not been a great success. But that is Miriam’s project and she will have to decide.

Nigella flowers in my garden.

Our family celebrates fifteen birthdays in the month of July, for living members, that is – Julie on the 9th, Josiah on the 12th, my sister Nancy on the 21st, and various cousins, nieces, and nephews scattered across the month. There are two other birthdays I also commemorate, both of them occurred last week on the 20th – my great-grandmother Mary Elizabeth Hench Showers (1879-1975), and my grandfather Arthur LeFevre Rathfon (1898-1984).

Grandma Showers was born in Port Royal, Pennsylvania, on July 20, 1879. She died in 1975 at the age of 96 when I was 17 years old. I remember her as a tiny, wrinkled, fussy woman who dressed impeccably, and always carried Chicklets in her purse. During the years I knew her, she lived in Florida most of the time with her daughter, my great aunt Vivian, but she came up to visit us fairly often when we still lived in New Cumberland, and once after we’d moved to Ohio. I remember her sense of humor (sometimes a bit ribald) and her funny laugh. I remember sitting at our dining room table after dinner listening in fascination to her, my grandma Rathfon, and my mother as they talked about family members and other people I didn’t know, relating events from the past, funny stories, family scandals and tragedies. I remember well the ruckus she caused on Saturday nights during her visits when she insisted we change the channel and we had to miss Get Smart so she could watch The Lawrence Welk Show. She was a good cook and two of her specialties, cherry pudding and apple dumplings, are legendary in our family. We baked her cherry pudding recipe just last week when we had ripe cherries. It was delicious, as always. We don’t have her recipe for apple dumplings. They are lost to history. Her memory lives on in our family as we continue to use the funny words and phrases she used – and her cherry pudding.

Grandma Showers.

Grandma Showers

Grandma Showers' cherry pudding.

Cherry pudding with milk - delicious!

My grandfather Arthur LeFevre Rathfon was born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania on July 20, 1898, the ninth of ten children. It is ironic that he shared the same birthday with his mother-in-law. They did not get along. I remember that while she was visiting, they avoided each other as much as possible. Behind her back, he referred to her as Razzle-dazzle. She only ever called him Art, the shortness of his name indicating her dislike of him. For the first ten years of my life, Grandma and Granddad Rathfon and my cousin Rick lived upstairs on the third floor of our house on Bridge Street. All of my early childhood memories are intertwined with them. Granddad was an alcoholic, having been introduced to drink at a very early age by his older brothers. It was a curse whose effects were felt, if not fully understood by us children. I have mostly happy memories of him. He liked to take us on walks down to the river and he would boast to everyone he met along the way that we were his grandchildren. I remember several times while on those walks we stopped at the New Cumberland Bakery on 4th Street and he bought us all a gingerbread man. He was a very talented man, a painter of houses, signs, and pictures. Several of the pictures he painted hang in this room where I’m sitting. Granddad was a character, very opinionated and prejudiced, typical of many in his generation. He was a member of the church, actually the first in our family to join the church, but after a few years of activity, he stopped attending, probably due to his drinking and the cigars he smoked and the tobacco he chewed. In my early twenties, after my mission, I went to stay for a few months with Grandma and Granddad. By then they lived in a first floor apartment on the other side of Bridge Street. During that visit, I sat evening after evening and listened to him talk about his childhood and early life, stories I’d never heard before, things that even Grandma said she’d never heard him talk about before, and I gained a deeper appreciation and insight into his life and the struggles he faced. He died seven months after Stacey and I were married in 1984 and I left my newly expecting wife in California and accompanied my mother to his funeral. I think of him often as I look at his paintings.

Dapper Granddad Rathfon.

Granddad as I remember him.

Now we have a new birthday to celebrate in July! This morning Rachel gave birth to a not so little boy – 10 lbs. 4 oz., 22 inches long. They haven’t decided on a name yet. From the pictures I’ve seen he is adorable. Stacey left on Wednesday to go down to the Thayns to help out. She has been having a great time with Hazel, June, Mabel, and Florence. Now she’ll get to see _____, whoever this little boy is. Miriam, Hannah, and I plan to go down to meet him this weekend. That’s eight grandchildren now, and our second grandson. Rachel is doing fine. She came through it with no problems. We’re so happy.

Our new grandson.

We had a brief and very welcome thunderstorm yesterday evening. After the rain stopped, there was a rainbow that lingered on for almost half an hour. It was beautiful and reminded me of the covenant God made with Noah:

And God said, This is the token of the covenant which I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for perpetual generations: I do set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a token of a covenant between me and the earth. And it shall come to pass, when I bring a cloud over the earth, that the bow shall be seen in the cloud: And I will remember my covenant, which I have made between me and you, for every living creature of all flesh; and the waters shall no more become a flood to destroy all flesh. And the bow shall be in the cloud; and I will look upon it, that I may remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is upon the earth. (Genesis 9:12-16)

Saturday's rainbow over the beaver pond.

With Stacey gone, the house seems incomplete. And as always when she is not here, I don’t sleep well at nights. I toss and turn. Every little noise wakes me up. Early on Saturday morning, around 3:30, there was a bat in the house again and I as I ushered it out the front door, I missed Stacey hiding under the covers as she always does while I’m being the heroic Bat Hunter. She’ll come home with us this weekend. We’re home from church now, trying to decided what to have for lunch. I think we settled on zucchini bread. The forecast said there was a chance for another storm and more rain today and they were right for once. As I’m sitting here, the rain has started pouring down. I hope it keeps it up for a long time. Good Sabbath.