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| The view from the Losey Overlook just south of us. |
by Helen Hunt Jackson (1830-1885)
And flowers of June together,
Ye cannot rival for one hour
October's bright blue weather;
Belated, thriftless vagrant,
And goldenrod is dying fast,
And lanes with grapes are fragrant;
To save them for the morning,
And chestnuts fall from satin burrs
Without a sound of warning;
In piles like jewels shining,
And redder still on old stone walls
Are leaves of woodbine twining;
Their white-winged seeds are sowing,
And in the fields still green and fair,
Late aftermaths are growing;
In idle golden freighting,
Bright leaves sink noiseless in the hush
Of woods, for winter waiting;
By twos and twos together,
And count like misers, hour by hour,
October's bright blue weather.
Count all your boasts together,
Love loveth best of all the year
October's bright blue weather.
My Grandma Rathfon loved the month of October and she loved that poem. While I was on my mission, she wrote to me often and she liked to include her favorite poems in her letters. She sent me this poem in a letter in October of 1978. I’ve written about my grandma before. I adored her. For the first ten years of my life, Grandma, along with Grandad and my cousin Rick, lived just above us on the third floor of our house on Bridge Street in New Cumberland. After my family moved to Ohio in 1968, Grandma and I started writing to each other, a correspondence that continued until her death in 1987. I saved every letter she wrote to me. A few years ago, my mother took them and put them into a binder, a chronicle of my history that I treasure. I took that binder down off the shelf last week and began reading my grandma’s letters to me. They brought back a flood of memories and made me miss her so very much. Yesterday was her birthday. Mary Elizabeth Showers was born on October 7, 1906, in Port Royal, Juniata County, Pennsylvania. She was a violinist, a poet, and had a lovely alto singing voice. She was one of the kindest people I have ever known. She married my grandad, Arthur LeFevre Rathfon, in 1927. They had four children, the oldest being my mother. Living so close to Grandma during those early years of my life, I have many memories of her. She was part of my life every single day during those years. Later, after we moved away, she would come visit us, usually in August, but she came to Naperville in the winter of 1978 to see me off on my mission and in 1980 she traveled all the way to California to see me when I came home. In 1982 I traveled to Pennsylvania to stay with her and Grandad for a while. The last time I saw her was in 1985 when Stacey and I took our newborn firstborn to see her. She has been dead for thirty-six years now and I still miss her. In odd moments I still find myself thinking I owe her a letter.
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| Grandma Rathfon. |
We had bright blue October weather for the first part of the week. The mornings were cool and misty. We had several beautiful sunrises and sunsets. The days were warm and sunny. The colors on the hills began to really glow. No matter how often I’ve seen it, the changing of the leaves in autumn seems like magic. I’ve read all the scientific reasons for the transformation, the pigments – carotenoids and anthocyanins – that hide latent within the leaves, masked by green chlorophyll until just before leaf fall. It might be explainable by science, but it looks like magic to me.
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| The hills just outside of Gold. |
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| A sunset last week. |
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| A sunset last week. |
I was not in school on Monday and that gave me the opportunity to begin one of the Big Fall Jobs – mowing the orchard. I used to keep the orchard mowed short like a lawn. Then I read that the fruit trees don’t like that, so I started mowing it just twice a year, in late spring and again in the fall. The first year that I let the grass grow, I was very ambitious and I bought a scythe thinking I would cut it that way and get some good exercise as well. It was much harder than I expected. Now the scythe hangs on the back porch, more decoration than tool. I might try using it again. Maybe next year. This year I didn’t mow in the spring so the grass in the orchard was extra thick and tall. I waited for weeks for it to turn brown and dry out, but it never did. I tried mowing it with the Cub Cadet, but it was too much. Last year, after he got his Bobcat tractor, Kurt mowed it for me, so I asked him to do that again. We spent two hours at it, with him on the tractor and me holding up low branches for him to mow under and pointing out stumps to avoid. After cutting the grass, I let it sit for a day to dry out and then Miriam and I raked it up. Then the next day, Stacey and I hauled the dry grass down to the chicken coop for their winter floor cover. Once all that was done, I mowed a second time, very short, with the Cub Cadet. Now the orchard is ready for winter.
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| The mowed orchard. |
Tuesday was another big day for us. Work on replacing our roof finally began. We’ve been waiting a long time for that. By the time Miriam and I got home from school that day, they had already finished the north end of the house. They worked again on Wednesday, but had another job to finish elsewhere and didn’t work on Thursday. Friday they did more work, but then the rain came and has been with us ever since, so the roof isn’t done yet. The weather should clear on Wednesday and then work will resume. They should be finished by the end of the week. It’s a relief to get the roof taken care of. The old shingles were in bad shape. This new metal roof should last fifty years. It will outlast me.
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| The house with part of its new roof. |
We continued harvesting all week and things are starting to wind down. We finished digging potatoes. We picked the last of the tomatoes. I picked a load of ripe peppers – red and yellow and dark purple, beautiful colors. I pulled up a big batch of carrots that we cubed and froze. There are more to pull and we will do that this week. We brought in a few more cabbages. We’re still picking autumn raspberries and will keep on picking them until a hard freeze comes. I gathered more flower seeds – cosmos and marigold. I brought in the last of the gladiolus, bright summer flowers to make one last colorful bouquet. I love Thomas Moore’s melancholy poem The Last Rose of Summer, but our roses are gone by the end of June. For us the last glads of summer are the sad flowers. Now I’m just waiting for a freeze to come so I can clean things up and tuck the garden in for its long winter’s sleep.
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| Bright colored peppers. |
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| The last gladiolus. |
Thursday evening Miriam and Hannah left to spend the weekend at the Thayn’s house. Friday I was not in school. After Stacey left for work, I was alone in the house. It was a gray and rainy morning. I couldn’t do anything outside. I did some tidying around the house. I fussed with my orchids for a while. Then I decided it was the perfect sort of morning to binge on Brahms. In my mind, he is an October sort of composer. I started with his Variations on a Theme by Haydn and then went on through his four symphonies and finished with his magnificent Violin Concerto. It was wonderful to sit in the gloom of a rainy autumn day and immerse myself in great music.
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| Brahms, my October composer of choice. |
Yesterday was another gray day, but it only rained a little bit in the morning. We had errands to run in the morning – buying chicken feed, doing some shopping. The drive to and from Wellsville would have been lovelier if there had been more sunshine. When we got back, we unloaded the feed and then spent the rest of day harvesting and processing garden produce. We are expecting a few cold nights this week – temperatures in the 30s, so we picked all the peppers out in the big garden and pulled up the plants. So we have another wagon load of very nice peppers, bell and jalapeño, to process. Stacey made more sofrito with some of them. We are going to freeze-dry some. We also took the very last tomatoes off the vines. We will try to ripen them, but it’s iffy at this point. When this cold comes, if it finally freezes things, and I hope it does, I will be very busy. I could have cleaned out the flowerbeds before now, but I didn’t have the heart. I’m willing to let them go until the very end. Saying good-bye to the growing season is a bittersweet thing. I want to get things ready for winter, but I just can’t pull up a plant that still has flowers on it.
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| Jalapeños, purple tomatoes, hubbard squash, and pumpkins on the back porch. |
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| Stacey making sofrito. |
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| Autumn anemones still blooming. |
Yesterday we also saw the end of some of the things that mean summer here. We helped put the Shillig’s trampoline and their water fountain in storage for the winter. At our house, I took the rocking chair from the front porch and the benches from around the fire pit and put them in the barn. I took the patriotic bunting down from the front porch. The next thing to decorate the porch will be jack-o-lanterns at the end of the month and after that – I shudder to think of it – Christmas lights.
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| The Gazdag Road. |
Last week in the last session of General Conference, President Nelson announced twenty more temples to be built around the world. The next to the last temple he announced was Osaka, Japan. When he said those words, tears came to my eyes. I spent most of my mission in and around Osaka. The first area I served in was in Tsuruhashi, a neighborhood in the inner city near Osaka Castle. I also served in Takatsuki, Minō, Neyagawa, and Toyonaka, all of which are in Osaka Prefecture. Osaka is a huge city, the third largest in Japan after Tokyo and Yokohama. The Osaka metropolitan area is crowded and complex with over 19,000,000 inhabitants. I took pride while I was in Japan that I knew how to navigate the many train and subway lines that crisscross Osaka. I’m sure that now, forty-three years later, I would be utterly lost there. Since President Nelson’s announcement last Sunday, I have been wondering where in that vast metropolitan area they will build a temple. Will it be in the inner city like the temples in Philadelphia, Manhattan, or the recently dedicated temple in Bangkok? Is there even enough open land somewhere on the outskirts of Osaka Prefecture on which to build a temple? I will be closely watching as plans progress. We have already decided that when the Osaka Temple has its open house, we will go – another big adventure to embark upon in a couple of years.
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| The area outlined in red is the part of Osaka where I first served. |
The wind picked up during the night and with it came rain. That brought down most of the leaves on my trees. I wish the wind had also blown them completely away, but no. I will be raking and mowing up soggy leaves this week.
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| The bank by the barn at sunrise last week. |
Today was Fast Sunday and October is my month to conduct Sacrament Meeting, so I got to bear my testimony. In contemplating what to say, it occurred to me that tomorrow it will be one year since I became branch president of the Wellsville Branch. As I looked out at the congregation this morning, there were only a few people there, just seventeen of us — and I knew and loved every one of them. That’s the nice thing about being in a little branch. I also contemplated what I have accomplished over the last year in furthering the work of the Lord in this part of His vineyard over which I’ve been given stewardship. Not much, I think. But things will change, I can feel it. We live in interesting and unsettling times, these last days before the Second Coming of Christ. As we move closer to the end and the signs of the times increase, I believe more people will be seeking for truth and we will find them and gather them in. Speaking of signs of the times, I’m watching with great interest the new war that has erupted in Israel. Actually, it’s a very old war entering a new phase.
So, we are home from church. We’ve been fasting and I am hungry. Stacey is getting lunch ready. Miriam and Hannah will be home later this evening. The week ahead looks to be colder and mostly rainy with only a little respite on Wednesday. I’m hoping they will be able to finish the roof this week. I’m hoping I’ll be able to get a few outdoor jobs done as the season is rapidly changing. I’m hoping a lot of things.
Tomorrow Kurt will undergo surgery on his heart. It is a procedure to correct a defect he’s had all his life that has become a problem. We are praying for him and would appreciate your prayers too.
Good Sabbath!
*I chose the title for this week’s Journal, The Magic of Color, as a twist on The Color of Magic, the first of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books that I love. I’ve been thinking about re-reading those books this coming winter, the prospect of which makes me very happy.
