I like to think that during the summer while school is out, my life is free and unscheduled, but the truth is, I am a creature of habit no matter what. The only difference during the summer is that I have a bit more control over my routine, but the pattern of my day is pretty consistent – up at 5:30 (if not earlier), a morning walk, let the chickens out of their coop and give them their morning meal, fill the bird feeders, back in the house in time to get the rest of the house moving, scripture study with Stacey, and then when they’ve all gone to work elsewhere, I get to work here. I follow a weekly schedule for weeding. I have the flower and vegetable gardens divided into sections and each day, except on the Sabbath, I tackle one or two, moving in succession across the yard. If it hasn’t rained (more about that later), I water by hose, watering can, and bucket. Twice a week, usually, I mow the lawn in the morning when the dew has dried. I try to be done with my tasks by the time sun is hottest. If I haven’t finished by then, I take a break and wait until late afternoon to finish. At 3:00 I do the evening chores, feed and water the chickens and peacocks, collect the eggs. My routine can be interrupted by rain, by the need to paint sign orders, or some other unplanned activity, but that’s how things usually run here day by day. In the evenings I try to take another walk just to take in all the loveliness and appreciate the results of a good day’s work. When it gets dark and the chickens have gone to roost, the last thing I do is close up the barn. On my walk back to the house, if the sky is clear, I usually pause a moment to marvel at the stars. And then to bed.
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| Sunrise this morning. |
During the non-gardening months I read a lot of books, but from early May to late September, my reading time is more limited and I miss it a bit. My children have come to my rescue and introduced me to audio books. I know they are not a new thing, but I never paid much attention to them before. Now, while I’m doing other things, I listen to someone else reading books to me. This summer so far, my reading, actually listening, has been rather apocalyptic. I’m listening to a trilogy by William R. Forstchen. I’ve already finished the first novel, One Second After, which deals with a fictional electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack on the United States and its effects on the people living in and around the small American town of Black Mountain, North Carolina. I’m almost done with the second novel, One Year After, and the third, The Final Day, is next on my list. They are exciting books that make me feel grateful for the comforts of life that I enjoy and, at the same time, completely unprepared for what we would do if something like an EMP occurred. As I listen, I find myself pondering on what would happen if the power went out and there was no chance that it would come back on soon. I like to think that, like the Amish that live all around us here, we could get by. We’ve had power outages before that lasted several days. But the more I think about it, the more I can see that life would be very different and difficult.
In the Forstchen books, the EMP was the result of a high altitude nuclear attack that wiped out the power grid and fried all advanced forms of electrical technology. But nature can also trigger EMPs. The Carrington Event was a large solar storm that took place in September 1859 when Earth experienced an unprecedented geomagnetic storm. Telegraph systems went haywire and aurora displays were visible all the way to the tropics. If a solar storm on the scale of the Carrington Event, happened today, it could cause a technological disaster on an apocalyptic scale. And in case you think it is improbable, at 4:51 p.m. EDT, on Monday, April 2, 2001, the sun unleashed the biggest solar flare ever recorded, much bigger than the Carrington Event, but it was not aimed at Earth. In 1921, 1972, 1989, 2000, 2003, and 2006 large solar storms did hit the Earth causing some major disruptions to electrical grids and satellite communications.
As I worked all week, in the garden and in my workroom painting, listening to my books, I got to thinking about how popular apocalyptic and dystopian literature, movies, and television shows have become. The word apocalypse originally comes from the Greek word apokalyptein which means to uncover or reveal. The most famous piece of apocalyptic literature is the apostle John of Patmos’ book Apokalypsis,which the Bible translators rendered into English as Revelation. The use of the word to mean “a cataclysmic event causing the imminent end of the present world” is modern, first appearing in the mid 19th century. Dystopian, the antonym for utopian, describes a society where people live dehumanized, fearful lives.
Apocalyptic and dystopian fiction is a subgenre of science fiction/fantasy in which civilization is collapsing or has collapsed due to anything ranging from a meteor impact, a nuclear holocaust, a pandemic (one that turns us into zombies is very popular), an alien invasion, technology running amok (robots take over the world), or something like an EMP. It makes for some entertaining books, movies, and TV shows. There has been an explosion of this sort of stuff in the last few decades, which to me indicates the feeling of angst building up in society. I think people like them because they seem remotely possible, are full of action and adventure, and usually, but not always, have a hopeful ending. After reading an apocalyptic book or watching a show or movie, you tend to see that things right now are not that bad – but they could be soon.
I know these are pretty somber thoughts to occupy me on these summer days. Sometimes when I’ve spent some time looking at the news, it feels like the world is on the verge of an apocalyptic disaster. Around here right now, I suppose the weather has a lot to do with that feeling. Our problem is rain, or rather, the lack of it. Our summer has been very dry so far. We get a little sprinkling now and then, but we are far below our normal level. On average, from May through July, we usually get 12 inches of rain. This year, in that time span so far, we’ve only gotten 4 inches. The grass in my lawn has gone dormant – crisp and brown. The creeks and rivers are running very low, some creeks and streams not at all. We’ve been watering the gardens several times a week by hand, which makes us worry that we might be overtaxing our wells. It rained during the night on Monday. The sound of it woke me up and I was so happy to hear it. But when I checked my rain gauge in the morning, it showed that we only got .16 of an inch. It wasn’t enough to tamp down the dust or replenish the rain barrel down at the barn. Because we’ve been watering manually, the garden hasn’t suffered too much, just a bit of wilting on hot afternoons. I pray for rain several times a day, every day. This lack of rain brings to mind scriptures in the Old Testament when the Lord instructed the Children of Israel —
If ye walk in my statutes, and keep my commandments, and do them; then I will give you rain in due season, and the land shall yield her increase, and the trees of the field shall yield their fruit. And your threshing shall reach unto the vintage, and the vintage shall reach unto the sowing time: and ye shall eat your bread to the full, and dwell in your land safely. And I will give peace in the land, and ye shall lie down, and none shall make you afraid. (Leviticus 26:3-6)
And it shall come to pass, if ye shall hearken diligently unto my commandments which I command you this day, to love the Lord your God, and to serve him with all your heart and with all your soul, that I will give you the rain of your land in his due season, the first rain and the latter rain, that thou mayest gather in thy corn, and thy wine, and thine oil. And I will send grass in thy fields for thy cattle, that thou mayest eat and be full. Take heed to yourselves, that your heart be not deceived, and ye turn aside, and serve other gods, and worship them; and then the Lord’s wrath be kindled against you, and he shut up the heaven, that there be no rain, and that the land yield not her fruit; and lest ye perish quickly from off the good land which the Lord giveth you. (Deuteronomy 11:13-17)
I think maybe we need to do some repenting.
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| The long border. |
We did have some excitement last week. On Wednesday when Miriam checked our peahen’s nest, she found that an egg had hatched! Petunia, our peahen, had six eggs to begin with. One broke early in the incubation period. Another cracked and then broke with an almost fully developed chick in it. Then on Wednesday, we had our first successful hatching. We’re really pleased to have a new peachick! We don’t know its sex yet, but the girls have named it Pike. So now we have Posey, Petunia, and Pike.
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| Our newly hatched peachick. |
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| Petunia and her new chick, Pike. |
On Wednesday afternoon, I drove out to North Bingham to pick up cherries that we ordered from Ervin Keim, our local Amish fruit dealer. We bought 20 pounds of sweet cherries. When I got home, we spent an hour washing, de-stemming, and pitting them. We got to use our new cherry pitter (a handy German device called a Kirsch-Entkerner) that made an otherwise tedious job quick and easy. They are now in the process of being freeze-dried.
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| Sweet cherries. |
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| Hannah pitting cherries. |
Our summer harvest so far, despite the lack of rain, has been pretty good. We brought in five more cauliflowers and another picking of broccoli. We are eating zucchini. Although the first planting of lettuce has bolted, we are eating the second planting and tomorrow I will sow the third planting which will be ready to eat when things start to cool down in September. But I don’t want to think about September yet. We’ve yet to harvest any cabbage, but will soon. The green beans are blooming, so there will be beans before too long. The tomato vines are full of green fruit. Down in the barn, egg production is almost back to normal. On a good day I get two dozen or more. After gardening all these years and trying to grow food for my family, although on a modest scale, I have come to truly appreciate the farmers who supply us with food, whose entire livelihood is tied to the land and at the mercy of the weather.
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| My smaller vegetable garden. |
Because of my diligent watering, most of the flowers are still looking good. The poppies have reached their peak and are starting to decline. Soon there will be just seed pods and no petals. The lilies are blooming. I don’t know why most of them are pale yellow. I must not have been paying close attention when I ordered them. Next year I will plant some brighter colors. The first of dahlias are opening and the gladiolus have buds. Along with the tall phlox, they are the most spectacular of the summer flowers. And the linden tree is blooming. Its wonderful fragrance hangs in the afternoon air and I find it as intoxicating as the bees do.
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| Poppies in my garden. |
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| Pale yellow lilies. |
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| Bright bee balm. |
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| The first dahlia to open. |
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| The linden tree in bloom. |
Friday and Saturday was the big Amish Auction out in North Bingham. In the past we’ve gone on Saturday, the second day of the auction, but this time we went on Friday evening. There were far fewer people there than on Saturdays and most of them were Amish. We got there in time to see the end of the horse auction. We walked around in the big barn looking at the quilts. A group of little boys seemed very intrigued with Miriam and Hannah and followed them around. We ate dinner there, pulled pork sandwiches, baked beans, coleslaw, and donuts for dessert. After that we wandered around looking at the things that would be auctioned off on Saturday. We didn’t go back on Saturday. It’s always very crowded and we didn’t really want to bid on anything. Well, I would have liked to have bid on some of the plants, but the bidding always goes too high for me.
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| The horse auction. |
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| In the big auction barn. |
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| Checking out the quilts. |
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| The boys who followed us around. |
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| Plants waiting to be auctioned. |
Saturday morning we harvested our garlic. I dug it up, Stacey helped bundle it, and Miriam helped hang it in the pavilion to cure. The harvest looks pretty good. While we were working out in the big garden, we noticed that the peahen had her chick out of the nest. They were down near the waterer and feeder. The chick looked a bit distressed and I thought it needed water. The peahen wasn’t doing anything about it, so I went in and picked the chick up and dripped water into its mouth. It drank a bit and then hurried back to its mother. The hen still has three unhatched eggs. I’m beginning to wonder if they will hatch. We’ll wait a while more and see.
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| Digging up the garlic. |
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| Garlic hanging to cure. |
On Saturday Stacey and I went into town to the Eliot Ness Festival. Eliot Ness came to live in Coudersport, our county seat, and died there in 1957. A few years ago, the town decided to create a festival to celebrate their connection to him. This is the third time they’ve held it. They had Main Street closed to traffic and vendors all around the courthouse. Over Friday evening and Saturday, they did dramatic re-enactments of a bank robbery and speakeasy raids. There were people in costumes walking around the town and old cars on display. It was fun to see it all.
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| Eliot Ness. |
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| Main Street. |
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| The Eliot Ness house in Coudersport. |
Miriam and Hannah left yesterday to visit a friend who lives up near Buffalo. Our church was canceled again today because of ongoing problems with the building. So Stacey and I have had a quiet weekend, just the two of us. Our Sabbath has been very peaceful so far. We’re listening to sacred music and doing some family history work. The girls will be home later this afternoon and things will get livelier then. If the forecast is right, and I pray it is, we will have rain tonight and tomorrow. That would be an answer to prayers and a great blessing. Good Sabbath.
