Monday was a beautiful and a wasted day. I was still not over whatever bug I’d caught. I spent the day doing nothing, which seemed tragic given the perfect weather. There were so many things I could have done. Instead, I napped off and on through the day, drank lots of water, and tried not to think about a missed opportunity to be out working in the garden in the sunshine and the heat.
When I am immobile, I find mental distraction necessary. Between naps, I read for a while. When I grew tired of that, I listened to some music. Instead of my usual recourse to classical music, this time I chose hymns. I selected some random hymns sung by the Tabernacle Choir. Part way through my queue, they sang O God, Our Help in Ages Past and that started me on a mental adventure. I remembered that it was the last hymn sung at the church service on board the Titanic the morning before it sank. That set me to discovering its origins. The words to the hymn were written by Isaac Watts based on Psalm 90, and the tune was composed by William Croft in 1708. It is one of nine hymns by Isaac Watts in our hymnal. Several of them are among my favorites – From All that Dwell Below the Skies, Come We That Love the Lord, Sweet is the Work, and Joy to the World. Watts wrote 750 hymns. I went to a website and perused some of the ones I wasn’t familiar with. He was a gifted hymn writer. He was born in Southampton, England, in 1674 and was brought up as a nonconformist, a Protestant that did not conform to the Church of England. Because he was a nonconformist, he could not attend college at Oxford or Cambridge. Instead, he went to the Dissenting Academy at Stoke Newington in 1690. After that, he worked as a pastor and a private tutor and before his death in 1748, he managed to write 750 hymns. It was nice spending an otherwise frustrating summer afternoon with Watts and his hymns. O God, Our Help in Ages Past, has nine verses but only four of them are in our hymnal and some of the words are changed. Here is Watts’s original hymn as published in 1719 in Psalms of David Imitated in the Language of the New Testament.
Our Hope for Years to come,
Our Shelter from the stormy Blast,
And our eternal Home.
Thy Saints have dwelt secure;
Sufficient is thine Arm alone,
And our Defence is sure.
Or Earth receiv’d her Frame,
From everlasting Thou art God,
To endless Years the same.
Return, ye Sons of Men:
All Nations rose from Earth at first,
And turn to Earth again.
Are like an Evening gone;
Short as the Watch that ends the Night
Before the rising Sun.
With all their Lives and Cares
Are Carried downwards by thy Flood,
And loft in following Years.
Bears all its Sons away;
They fly forgotten as a Dream
Dies at the opening day.
Pleas’d with the Morning-light;
The Flowers beneath the Mower’s Hand
Ly withering e’er ‘tis Night.
Our Hope for Years to come,
Be thou our Guard while Troubles last,
And our eternal Home.
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| Isaac Watts. |
Tuesday morning I felt well enough to go out on a morning walk, the first I’d taken in days. I didn’t go very far. I walked along the long border and then sat on the bench at the top of the vegetable garden. It was a cool and dewy morning. It was quiet. There was no birdsong, all the songsters having fled, apparently. The sunrise was pale. I sat and looked out over the garden in its shaggy late summer loveliness. It is ebbing toward its end with stems too tall and tattered leaves and flowers trying to set seed. I felt the oldness of it. I suppose that, having just come through a bout of sickness, I was more attune to the mortality all around me. I wasn’t feeling morbid, just thankful to be part of a world so beautiful even in its decline.
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| Late August garden. |
I continued to take things easy on Tuesday. There were a hundred things I could have done, but I knew that it was risky to push myself. It was a hot day. I sat out in the sun for a while, but only lasted a few minutes. It was too intense. In the afternoon Bob and Nancy Jones dropped by with some buckets of apples from their orchard, a variety called Summer Rambo. I don’t have a Summer Rambo tree in my orchard and I’d never seen the fruit before, so I did a little research. It is a very old French variety brought to North America by the colonists. The description says they have “crisp, juicy, yellow, breaking flesh, a great apple for early season eating out of hand and also perfection for sauce.” On Wednesday I made them into sauce and it looked and smelled perfect.
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| Apples from the Joneses. |
I went out after dinner on Tuesday to visit the pigs. I hadn’t seen them in a couple days. I took them a bucket of apples. They were happy to see me. Or maybe it was the apples. The day had begun to cool by then and it was lovely. The air was soft. It was like paradise to walk through the garden in the long light of evening. A light breeze carried the fragrance of phlox and night blooming jasmine across the garden. If there had been palm trees and plumeria instead, I would have thought I was on some tropic isle. These late summer evenings are the best in all the year. It rained just after sundown. I wasn’t expecting it. I heard the noise of it on the front porch roof and then smelled it as it soaked into the earth. We needed rain. The garden was dry and I didn’t feel up to dragging the hose all over to water it. The rain was a blessing.
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| August morning. |
Wednesday morning, after making applesauce, I decided to mow the lawn. I thought it would probably tire me out, but it really couldn’t wait another day. As the seasons go in reverse, we’ve reached the same amount of daylight now that we had in April when the grass was growing fast and thick, and so it is again. As the daylight diminishes, it will slow down instead of speed up and finally it will go dormant. Other plants that bloom in April and May have also revived for a last hurrah. There are a few dandelions in the lawn again. We haven’t seen any through high summer. The magnolia bush surprised us with a few flowers. One of the daylilies has a few blossoms. And if we are lucky, the white reblooming iris will show some buds soon. It’s a little happy/sad gift to remind me what spring was like as autumn sets in.
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| Some of my dahlias. |
That afternoon, I picked a bucket of tomatoes and cooked them down. We turned them into pizza sauce. The tomato vines are in a sorry state. Blight came early and, although there are lots of tomatoes on the vines, the leaves are almost all gone and the vines are shriveling. We’ll have to pick everything now, green, red, and in between, and set them to ripen on the back porch. Despite planting nearly a hundred plants, our harvest will not be very good. Some years are like that.
Thursday morning was gray and it smelled like rain was coming. I put off starting any morning projects outdoors not wanting to be interrupted by rain, but, it didn’t arrive until afternoon. When I checked the national weather map that morning, I saw that parts of Idaho and Montana were under frost, freeze, and winter weather advisories. It made me shiver to see it. May it all stay far to the west until December – or later – or never.
I spent the middle part of the day at appointments, a haircut in Genesee and then a chiropractic appointment in Coudersport. I noticed while driving back and forth that the leaves seem to be changing early. I saw maple trees and sumac all along the roads and on the hillsides already showing color. That concerns me. Maybe they know something. On the roadsides, the chicory is at its best right now. It is one of my favorite wild flowers with its sky blue flowers. The fields beyond are full of goldenrod just coming into its glory. I think by next week they will be spectacular with bright waves of golden yellow flowers.
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| The trees are showing color now. |
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| Fields of goldenrod. |
When the rain finally arrived, around 4:00 in the afternoon, it came with thunder and lightning. One strike was so near the house, the flash and boom were simultaneous. We all jumped and then laughed. The electrical display didn’t last long, but the rain went on for a few hours.
We’ve come to the season of mushrooms and spiders. The most obvious and dramatic mushrooms are the puffballs that come up in the lawn and in the orchard. They start out as little tan spheres like leather marbles that grow and grow, sometimes reaching amazing sizes. There is one in the front lawn that is almost the size of a football right now. It is a Purple Spored Puffball (Calvatia cyathiformis). I love it when they are mature and I can puff out all the spores in grayish purple clouds. Stacey hates mushrooms. It’s something lodged deep in her brain from childhood or something. She can’t walk past a mushroom without kicking or stomping on it. I have to keep warning her not to smash them. So far, I have succeeded in protecting this one.
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| The puffball on the lawn. |
She also is not a fan of spiders. I like them as long as they are not in the house. I love big spiders – in the garden and from a distance. There are golden orb garden spiders (Argiope aurantiain) in the garden now, especially in the raspberry patch. I’m careful to keep an eye on them while picking raspberries. Down in the barn, the barn spiders (Araneus cavaticus) are busy putting up their webs every night. In the morning when I open the barn, I always forget and walk right through their webs. That’s when I do the closest thing to dancing you will see me do.
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| Orb spider in the raspberries. |
There is a little calico cat that wanders our neighborhood. She hunts in my orchard and gardens. I see her carrying field mice and voles that she has caught. While the grandchildren were here, they befriended her. Now when she sees me, she comes to me to be petted. Last week she started to show her affection for us by leaving gifts on the front porch every morning, perfect dead voles, not bloody or mauled, laid by the front door. I love that she catches voles. They do a lot of destruction in my garden and orchard. She’s a nice little cat.
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| Some of my zinnias. |
On Friday we left at 1:00 p.m. and drove down to Cranberry, Pennsylvania, to the open house of the Pittsburgh Temple with our friends Benj and Sheila Olney. Cranberry is almost four hours away which gave us a lot of time for some great conversation there and back. The temple is beautiful. We were glad the Olneys had an opportunity to see it. Rachel, Tabor, and Hazel were working as volunteers at the open house and it was fun to see them there. Miriam and Hannah went down a little earlier. Hannah came home with us and Miriam stayed to be at the Thayn’s house for a while.
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| The Pittsburgh Temple. |
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| With our friends, the Olneys. |
Saturday morning was stormy. It started right after I finished the morning chores – thunder, lightning, and heavy rain. I was glad it waited until I was back in the house. It rained off and on during the day and I didn’t accomplish anything outdoors, but that was okay because we had an indoors project to work on. We’re almost done with our kitchen redo, one of the last things to do was to put up shelves in the alcove where the washer and dryer are. Stacey and I drove up to Olean, New York, to Home Depot and got the supplies we needed. Then we came home and spent the rest of the day constructing them. Neither of us are especially skilled at that sort of thing – the measuring, sawing, connecting – but when we finished it looked pretty good. Just don’t look at it too closely. Then we loaded the appliances and cookbooks that were stored in the music room and on the back porch onto the shelves. We have another set of shelves yet to build on the other wall of the alcove, but that will wait.
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| Our finished shelves (the camera angle makes them look warped). |
Last night Stacey and I went on a date to see the movie Reagan. Ronald Reagan was president from 1981 to 1989, a period covering the time right after I returned from my mission and the first five years of our marriage. I was interested to see how the movie would portray those years. For my parents, the Eisenhower Years 1953 to 1961 were a sort of Golden Age before the 60's sent everything into a crazy mess. They were married in 1953 and by 1961, four of their six children were born. I was born during the Eisenhower administration and was too young to remember much of it, but I have always felt nostalgia for that time period. The Reagan years are also like that for me. Stacey and I were married in 1984 and by 1989, when he left office, three of our eight children were born. So there is a sort of Golden Age parallel with my parents, they were a young married couple with young children during the Eisenhower Era, we were a young married couple with young children during the Reagan Era. I look back on those years as good years, optimistic years. Things seemed to be going in the right direction. The movie was good. It was interesting to look back at it all. I didn’t remember it as being so turbulent and the movie reminded me of the dramatic changes taking place in the world. We once took our children to the Reagan Library in Simi Valley in 1997 (I think that was the year) and I was impressed by what we saw there. I’ve always considered Reagan to be a great president. He was a great and eloquent speaker, something I miss in our present political situation.
It’s a lovely, summery Sabbath day. As we drove home, we noted how beautiful the sky was, bright blue with perfect clouds, like a painting. We’ve finished lunch and I’m feeling that postprandial nap desire settling in. I might catch a few winks before chore time. Then after the chores, I think an afternoon walk would be the perfect thing to do on a day such as this. Good Sabbath.
