Seasonal Signs and Blessings

It rained hard last Sunday night and into Monday early morning. It was a blessing. The rain barrel down at barn, the way I gauge our water situation, was less than half full. Monday morning, when I took my walk, the world was dripping wet and there were puddles in the right places and the barrel was full and overflowing. That made me happy.

My wildflower meadow mostly full of weeds, but still lovely.

When I looked at the weather forecast Monday morning, the prediction was for severe thunderstorms with a possibility of large hail and damaging winds. As soon as I saw it, I said a prayer that their prediction would be as wrong as it usually is. With the garden at its peak, hail and wind would be devastating. Corn and pumpkin vines with their big leaves do not fare well in hail or wind. The storm was predicted to arrive around 3:00 p.m. I felt anxious all day.

I went out later that morning and picked zucchini and cucumbers. Miriam spent the day turning some of the zucchini into muffins and bread, a lovely transformation. It rained for a while in the early afternoon and stopped just before chore time – another blessing. I didn’t get soaked going to and from the barn. That was at 3:00 and there was no sign of a storm, hail, or strong wind. I checked the forecast again and found that they’d changed it. Instead of a thunderstorm we were now under a tornado watch. I said another prayer. We did not get a tornado. We didn’t even get a thunderstorm. We just got rain. I love the blessing of having the weather forecast be wrong sometimes.

The long border.

There are signs that I always look for as summer advances, markers that indicate how far along the path toward its demise we are. Last week there were several. I noticed that when I awake at my usual time, 5:30, it’s darker now. I have to turn on lights. When I go out on my walk, it’s still pretty dark and the chickens are not out yet. The old idiom to be “up with the chickens” doesn’t apply anymore. I’m up long before the chickens. The growing darkness will only increase from now until the winter solstice, a sad thought.

On one of my morning walks last week.

Another indicator that the season is moving on is peacock feathers. Every year around this time, our peacock sheds his beautiful tail feathers. There are about 200 feathers in his tail – technically it is not his tail, it is his train. The long feathers with their iridescent eyes are tail coverts that he raises with his stiffer, shorter real, tail feathers when he displays. He stopped displaying a few weeks ago, he doesn’t call as much, and now he’s shedding feathers. I find them all over the yard. If they are in good condition, I save them. He will regrow a new train in the spring, but from now until then, he is a little less impressive.

Some of the peacock's discarded train feathers.

There are also evident botanical signs of the season. The first of the goldenrod has bloomed and the others are soon to follow. Early goldenrod starts the goldenrod season in late July. As the weeks go by into autumn, there will be more. There are thirty species of goldenrod native to Pennsylvania. I’ve identified four on our property – early goldenrod (Solidago juncea), wrinklekeaf goldenrod (Solidago rugosa), Canada goldenrod (Solidago canadensis), and grass-leaved goldenrod (Euthamia graminifolia). They are beautiful flowers, yet seeing them in their golden glory makes me sad. Along with asters, they mark the end of the wildflower year.

Early goldenrod out in the meadow.

There are invertebrate signs of the season too. This is the time of spiders. On the outside of almost every window on our house, a spider has built a web. They choose the windows to catch the bugs that are attracted to the house lights at night. Smart arachnids. Down in the barn the crowned orbweaver spiders (Araneus diadematus) build their webs between the beams to catch flies. I often walk into their webs if I’m not careful and then I do the I-just-walked-into-a-spider-web dance. Out in the garden, there are big, beautiful black and yellow garden spiders (Argiope aurantia). Most mornings out along the edge of the meadow, there are webs of grass spiders (Agelenopsis actuosa) like gossamer hankies on the dewy grass. I’ve been watching for one of my favorite insect signs – monarch butterfly caterpillars in the milkweeds. So far, not only have I not seen a caterpillar, I haven’t seen a single monarch butterfly to lay eggs. I grow milkweed patches for that very purpose. I’m sad that the monarchs are becoming scarce.

A black and yellow garden spider in one of the flowerbeds.

Another seasonal sign is the increase in produce from the garden. After all the weeks and months of germinating, planting, and tending, we now reap the fruits of our labors. An abundance of blessings. Sometimes it’s almost too much. If we miss a day or two of searching for zucchinis among their huge leaves, we find monstrous twenty pounders. And you can only make so much zucchini bread before you run out of room in the freezer. The same goes with cucumbers. Their vines are thick and leafy and it is hard to find them all. Some go unnoticed until they are huge and yellow and fit only for the chickens. We planted forty cabbages and they are all ready at once – an abundant and slightly overwhelming blessing. I will turn ten of them into sauerkraut. We are going to try shredding and freeze-drying some. The rest we will wrap and store to use over the winter.

What happens when you miss a day or two.

One of the red cabbages out in the big garden.

The pumpkin vines have outgrown their bed and invaded the lawn.

These are the days when all the canning equipment will stay in the kitchen continually. There is always something to be processed. When Stacey and I were married, we were given two sets of dishes as wedding gifts. We only needed one, so we traded in a set and bought a canner – the classic thirty-three quart, black speckled enamel canner that holds ten quart sized mason jars or fourteen pint jars. That old canner lasted us thirty years until it was so chipped and rusty that we had to retire it and buy a new one. The new one isn’t so new anymore. It gets a lot of use. What would we do without it?

Our old reliable canner.

Tuesday was an un-August-ish day. It was drizzly most of the day. It never got above 60°. No sunshine. No summer heat. I didn’t do any garden work. I needed to mow the lawn, but it was too wet. I moped around. I ate a lot of zucchini bread. I watched too much television. I needed to do something summery, so I decided to start the first batch of relish. We had plenty of cucumbers and onions from the garden, but it’s still a bit early for peppers. I had some, but most are still too small. I had to have Stacey stop on her way home from work and buy a few more from a local vegetable stand. We’ll have plenty for later relish batches. Grinding and canning relish is almost a ritual at our house. We always do it in a certain way, with the old hand turned grinder fastened to a bench up in the workroom, trays of sliced cucumbers, onions, and peppers, a pan to catch the grindings and another for the juice that drips from the grinder, something to watch on the TV while grinding, and tissues to wipe away the tears from the pungent onions. So after dinner, I sliced up the cucumbers, peppers, and onions. We took everything upstairs to the workroom and we watched several episodes of Alone Season Ten while Stacey did the grinding. We especially miss having Josiah here when we make relish. He was our grinder for many years. Before bed, I salted and mixed the mash and covered it to sit for the night.

Peppers and onions for relish.

Everything sliced and ready for grinding.

Stacey grinding relish.

The salted mash.

Wednesday was a nicer day. It was sunny and warmer, although not as warm as I like my August days to be. In the morning while it was still dewy outdoors, I finished making relish. I drained the liquid off the mash, put it in our largest pan, added sugar, vinegar, and celery and mustard seed and set it to boil. While it was cooking, I prepared the jars and the canner. Then, when it was ready, I canned it – 14 pints. The house was filled with the smell of relish, another sign that summer is well advanced.

The finished relish.

I started to mow the lawn that afternoon, but only made five passes when a gust of wind came out of the west and the sky grew dark. Suddenly, it started raining. I stopped mowing and drove the mower as fast as I could over to the pavilion where we keep it. By then it was pouring and I was drenched. I parked the mower and jogged home (I never run) and was soaked to the skin by the time I got there. After twenty minutes, the rain stopped and the sky cleared. I waited an hour for the grass to dry and finished mowing. I was glad I got it done. It would have bothered me to have a partly mowed lawn.

Dahlias.

It rained most of the day on Thursday. I had errands to run in the morning – a haircut, a trip to the chapel, buying chicken food, but after I got home from all that, there wasn’t much to do. It was another rainy summer day when all I wanted was to be out in the garden, but I couldn’t.

Friday morning it was overcast and gloomy when I started out on my morning walk. I decided to go back indoors and wait for the weather to brighten. While I waited, I did some musical exploration. In the book I’m reading, The Age of Voltaire, I just finished a chapter about George Frederick Handel. I know some of his music quite well. Messiah ranks as one of my top favorite works in all the world of music. I also know his Water Music and Royal Fireworks Music and other pieces. But I did not realize that, besides Messiah, Handel wrote thirty-one other oratorios, most of them on Biblical subjects – Israel in Egypt, Solomon, Samson, Saul, Joseph and His Brethren, Joshua, Deborah, Esther, and others. I was not familiar with any of these. I decided to listen to a recording of Israel in Egypt, considered by many to be his greatest oratorio after Messiah. I spent an hour and a half enthralled. The first part tells the story of the Passover using verses from Exodus and Psalms 105 and 151. The second part is Exodus 15:1-22 in a series of arias and choruses. It is magnificent. I’ve decided to add it to my yearly Passover/Easter music listening list. I’m going to explore some of the other oratorios in the days ahead. I love finding new great music.

Phlox.

The rest of the day was lovely. The sky cleared and the sun was warm. I went outside and stayed there. I harvested poppy seeds and picked more zucchini and cucumbers. I deadheaded flowers and weeded flowerbeds. I picked dahlias, gladiolus, and phlox for Miriam to arrange into bouquets. It was a perfect August day. Stacey and I picked strawberries in the afternoon and after dinner I made strawberry jam.

A bag of poppy seed heads.

The first strawberry jam of the season.

This weekend was Stake Conference. We had meetings yesterday at 3:30 and 6:30 and today at 10:00. The meetings were very good. We took our lunch with us today and after the meeting we went to a park in Celoron, New York, on Chatautuqua Lake near Jamestown. The park has statues of Lucille Ball, who was born there. We ate egg salad sandwiches and potato chips and cookies sitting by the lake. And then we drove home. Driving to and from Jamestown two times – a total of eight hours in the car over two days, was tiring. When we got home, I did the chores. I don’t plan to do anything for the rest of the day. I’m tired from all that time spent in the car.

After Stake Conference today.

This week things will get lively here. The Shilligs have guests arriving, their daughter Kohl and her family, and our niece Missy and her family. At our house, we have the Thayns and maybe the Fosters arriving. There will be a lot of family, a lot of food, and a lot of fun.