Midsummer

And just like that, July is gone and August looms ahead. I can tell that just by looking out the window. All the early summer flowers are finished. The breadseed poppies have gone to seed and soon I will pull them up. The few that are still flowering are mobbed by honey bees who love their pollen. The last of the larkspur is lingering but will soon succumb to the heat. The time for the phlox to rule the flowerbeds is here. Tall and stately in shades of pink and white, they tower over all the other flowers. There are dahlias, gladiolus, marigolds, zinnias, gazanias, helenium, and my favorite platycodon – all solid high summer bloomers with rich, bright colors. They will flower from now until frost. I can’t believe I just used the F word. I will not think about that right now.

The last of the breadseed poppies.

Dahlias.

Platycodon.

I know I’ve mentioned it before, but I will say it again – August is not a favorite month of mine. When I was young, it was always the month when our family moved. First from Pennsylvania to Ohio in 1968, then from Ohio to Illinois in 1972, and from Illinois to California in 1978. The trauma of those relocations still taints the month for me. And August is the last full month of summer, which makes it feel sad. By the end of the month school will be in session again. Another thing for me not to think about right now.

The best thing about August, historically, is that for several years, it was the month that my Grandma Rathfon and some of my cousins, and once even my Grandad, would come to spend the month with us after we’d moved from Pennsylvania. I have many happy memories of those Augusts. I adored my Grandma Rathfon. All month long, we cousins rode our bicycles for miles and miles, played Monopoly games that lasted for days, ran through sprinklers across sun baked lawns, and if I remember correctly, we had ice cream after dinner every evening. The August that Grandad came along, he taught me how to play gin rummy and poker and chess. He won every game except chess. I learned that if I captured his queen, he gave up the game and I would win. Those were idyllic times.

Squash blossom.

I do love August’s heat. We have so few hot days in the year here that I treasure them. These will be the hottest days of the year. The world ripens in August’s warmth. It is the month when harvesting and canning kick into high gear. There will be tomatoes to process, early potatoes to dig up, onions to pull and cure. By the end of the month the dry beans will go brown and we’ll crack their crisp pods and save the seeds to eat in colder days. We will cut cabbage and start the first batch of sauerkraut fermenting. The broccoli will finally start to wind down. These are the days when we eat dinner straight from the garden – cucumbers, the last of the cauliflowers, green beans, tomatoes with fresh basil. And there will be sweet corn, one of the greatest treats of summer. Garrison Keillor understands the pleasure of fresh sweet corn. I love this quote from him:

“Sweet corn: the best thing in life. I grew up in a house about a hundred feet from a cornfield, and every evening we’d put the water on to boil, then pick the corn and husk it as we walked rapidly toward the house and chuck it in and dish up the chicken and say a prayer and out came the corn, on went the butter and salt, eight minutes flat from stalk to mouth, and when you ate sweet corn, life had nothing better to offer. You’d been to the top. That’s how it’ll be in heaven, I’m sure.”

These high summer mornings, when I go out on my walks through the garden, the still, damp air is heavy with the fragrance of dill. It makes my mouth water to smell it. Dill grows like a weed in my garden, sprouting everywhere, growing five and six feet tall, a pretty plant with fine leaves and yellow umbels of flowers. I let it grow almost any place it chooses, though sometimes it overpowers other things I’ve planted and then I have to pull it up. But I revel in its fragrance even as I kill it. Another fragrant summer favorite of mine is blooming now out in the woodland garden – the yellow woodland azalea. Its flowers smell like a combination of carnation and honeysuckle. In the evenings the scent of it hangs in the air. It is delightful.

Dill.

August is a weedy month. As the days grow noticeably shorter, it seems the weeds can sense that their days are numbered and they grow desperate to set seed to perpetuate their species. They are rampant to the point where I almost despair of ever controlling them. If I miss just one weed, it seems to know that it has had a brush with early death and it goes straight to seed before I discover my oversight. The worst of them is galinsoga (Galinsoga parviflora). It has tiny white flowers and one plant can produce 7,500 seeds. Inevitably I miss one or two or a hundred plants and so it is always abundant and a nuisance in my garden. I’ve read that it is edible and even nutritious, but I hate it too much to ever feel inclined to eat some. The same is true for purslane and chickweed and lambs quarters and other supposedly edible garden banes.

Galinsoga.

Flowerbeds.

On Tuesday I dug up the garlic and Miriam helped me hang it up to cure. We got a good crop this year. In addition to my regular rocambole garlic, for the first time, I grew some soft-neck garlic. I’ve heard that it stores better than the hard-neck kind. We’ll see. I mowed the lawn that day and spent time tending the tomatoes. It was a warm, dry day, so that evening we burned the bonfire out on the edge of the orchard. We were going to burn it on Independence Day, but it was too wet.

The garlic harvest.

Garlic hanging to cure.

The bonfire.

Later that evening.

Wednesday it was hot. The temperature rose to 85°, the humidity was at 51%, and the sun beat down through a cloudless sky all day. I know that people in other parts of the country that are sweltering under triple digit heat would not think 85° is very hot, but here in the Allegany Highlands, we seldom hit 90°, so the mid 80s feels pretty hot to us. I spent some time that afternoon tying up willful cucumbers that were supposed to grow up the fence around the cabbage patch, but decided to go their own way. I was out there in the hottest part of the day fiddling with them and only lasted ten minutes before the sun, the heat, humidity, and profuse sweating sent me indoors to wait for the cool of the evening to finish.

On a morning walk last week.

The barn gets pretty hot during these high summer days. The front, the upper half, and the roof are constructed of dark green sheet metal and it really heats up when the sun hits it, which is nice in the cold months, but not in hot weather. To help the chickens stay cooler, I keep all the windows in the coop (the lower part of the barn) open and I open the door in the upper part to allow a draft. Even so, when I went down on Wednesday, it was very warm down below in the coop, so I made a screen door. There are three doors to the coop. The east door is the one the chickens use to go in and out (it’s the one with the solar powered automatic door). The middle door is the one I use to go in and out. The west door is never used (it used to be when we kept turkeys in that end of the coop, but that was years ago). So I stapled some bird netting across that door and propped it open. It lets a good breeze blow through. I can tell the chickens like it because they lounge in that doorway all day now.

The lower barn with its new screen door open.

The upper barn with the door open to help cool it.

As often happens, when we have a hot day, it ended with a thunderstorm. This one started at 10:45 on Wednesday night right after we’d gone to bed. I could hear and smell it coming. First a distant rumble that was soft enough and far enough away for me to think, “was that thunder?” Then a few minutes later, a flash of lightning that I could see even with my eyes closed. I counted, “One Pennsylvania, two Pennsylvania, three Pennsylvania . . .” I made it to six before the thunder arrived. On the next flash I got to three. A few flashes later it was two and the thunder shook the house. Then I smelled rain, that indescribable smell of dry fields and trees and dusty roads getting wet somewhere, but not here yet. Then there was a rush of wind and the rain began to fall, pinging against the west side of the house. We had to get up and close the windows on the storm-ward side of the house. The rain makes quite a noise on the metal roof of the front porch by our bedroom. It is a nice noise. I fell asleep to it. We had thunder and lightning and rain, sometimes very hard, off and on through the night. Around 4:00 in the morning, the rain was pounding so loud, it woke me up. I laid in bed and listened to it until it let up around 5:00 then I fell asleep again and woke at my usual 5:30 time.

Thursday was a wet day. The night’s storm had cooled things a little, but not too much. It was too wet to do anything outdoors most of the day. It felt strange to have an indoor day in high summer. I didn’t know what to do with myself, so I resorted to my usual backup activity – I sat on the front porch and read for a while. Twenty-five years ago when we lived in Canyon Country, California, Stacey found a set of books that someone had kicked to the curb, The Story of Civilization, by Will and Ariel Durant. There were ten volumes in the set beginning with Volume I: Our Oriental Heritage and ending with Volume XI: The Age of Napoleon. Over several years, I read them all, but my set wasn’t complete. Volume IX: The Age of Voltaire was missing. After all this time, this year for Father’s Day, Miriam gave me that volume and completed the set. That’s what I’m reading right now. I’m just at the beginning where it describes France in the early 18th century. Having just been to France and seeing places like the Louvre and Versailles, I can imagine somewhat the world described in the book. But it doesn’t just cover France, there are sections on England, Germany, and other countries. One thing I like about the Durants’ histories is that they look at things like art, music, and literature, as well as all the politics and wars. Reading was a nice way to spend a warm, wet, and gloomy summer morning.

Foggy morning after rain.

Later that morning, I had errands to run in Wellsville. On my way back to Gold, the sky was very dramatic. I needed to go to the dairy to get some milk, so I decided to take the Gazdag Road which cuts over the hill. It has a fine view looking east toward Ulysses. I stopped the car at the crest of the hill and took a panoramic photo. I went on to the dairy and then home again. And it rained some more. In the late afternoon the weather cleared and the evening turned out to be lovely.

The view from the top of the Gazdag Road.

One of the Big Summer Projects is building a tree house over in the pine trees next door. It is really a Shillig project. I haven’t had much to do with it. Kurt and Chase have been working on it for several weeks now and it is starting to take shape. It’s a rather complicate tree house using chains and cables for suspension and cargo nets for safety. It will be great when it’s done. My grandchildren will love playing in it. Thank you Kurt and Chase!

The tree house under construction.

Thursday evening we had guests arrive. My nieces Jennie and Laura (my sister Hollie’s daughters) my great-niece Mary (Jennie’s daughter), and Laura’s boyfriend Brandon, came to spend the weekend with us. They drove up from North Carolina and got here at dinner time. After dinner, we took a walk around the property then came back in for dessert – a German chocolate bundt cake made by Miriam. Then we went over to sit in the cool of the evening on the Shillig’s back porch. That night we had another thunderstorm.

Friday was a busy day. We went in the morning to get Amish donuts. They only sell them on Friday and Saturday mornings and you have to get there early before they’re gone. Later in the morning I took our guests on a drive to the Amish dry goods store and the creamery. When we returned, Jennie helped me pick and cut broccoli and cauliflower. In the afternoon we went swimming at the Rigases’. It was a very hot day – almost 90°, a perfect day for swimming. For dinner, Hannah made pizza and Julie made her great mosquito salad (it has so much garlic in it, it keeps the mosquitoes away). Miriam made peanut butter brownies and homemade vanilla ice cream. We ate on the Shillig’s back porch. A nice ending to a good day.

Jennie helping me harvest broccoli and cauliflower.

Jennie cutting up cauliflower.

Swimming at Rigases'.

Yesterday Stacey and I went with our guests to Palmyra. We went first to the church history sites – the Smith Farm and the Sacred grove. We had lunch at the Chill and Grill in Palmyra – they have a new soft serve black raspberry ice cream that is delicious. Then we went to the temple to do baptisms. Laura’s boyfriend, Brandon, is a recent convert to the church. It was his first time going to the temple. We had a great experience there. After the temple we went to the Grandin Press where the first copies of The Book of Mormon were printed. It poured rain off and on during all of this. After the Grandin Press, Stacey and I drove home, but Jennie, Laura, Mary, and Brandon went to Niagara Falls. While they were there Brandon proposed to Laura. We are happy for them and congratulate them on their engagement. When Stacey and I got home, we had dinner over at the Shillig’s. The Niagara Falls group didn’t back until later.

At the Palmyra Temple.

In the Sacred Grove.

Lunch at the Chill and Grill in the rain.

Brandon and Laura at Niagara Falls.

It is cooler today after yesterday’s rain. Church went well. Brandon, Laura, and Jennie spoke in sacrament meeting today and gave great talks. They left after the meeting to go back home. Now we are home from church. The house seems quiet. Lunch is ready, leftovers. I’m hoping to take a little Sabbath nap before chore time. I’m looking at the week ahead. The weather is supposed to be good as August arrives. I’ll do what I always do during these summer days, work while the sun shines and enjoy it while it lasts.