Summer's Wings of Lightning

I can't believe we've passed so deep into the summer already. We're already in the latter half of July! Summer is, at least mentally, the shortest season. The warm days come late and leave early. Some years they don't really come at all. I think the laws of physics apply to summer's brevity on some mental level. Physical matter moves slower when it's cold and faster when it's hot. I know that in reality, time does not obey those laws, but in my perception of it, it does. The cold days grind by at a crawl. The hot days speed by in a flash. Summer moves too quickly. In writing that, I find myself singing verses from our hymn Improve the Shining Moments.

Time flies on wings of lightning;
We cannot call it back.
It comes then passes forward
Along its onward track.
And if we are not mindful,
The chance will fade away,
For life is quick in passing.
'Tis as a single day.

As wintertime doth follow

The pleasant summer days,

So may our joys all vanish

And pass far from our gaze.

Then should we not endeavor

Each day some point to gain,

That we may here be useful

And ev'ry wrong disdain?

I looked up that hymn to see who wrote it and got sidetracked for a moment. It was written by Robert Bell Baird. He was born in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1855. He and some of his siblings came to the United States in 1863 and traveled west with the Daniel Thompson Company in 1866 and settled in Willard, Utah. He studied music under Evan Stephens, a prominent church musician. He married and had eleven children. He became a school teacher. He died in 1916. His house in Willard is listed on the Utah Historical Buildings Survey. In addition to writing the words and music to Improve the Shining Moments, he also wrote Thanks For the Sabbath School, and the words to Welcome, Welcome, Sabbath Morning, which are in our current hymnal, and a dozen other hymns that were in previous hymnals and songbooks. I love learning about things I never considered before. I've sung those hymns countless times and never gave a thought about who wrote them.

Robert Bell Baird.

And that brings me back to my reflections on the passage of time. I sat musing on all of this on Monday while I waited for the morning fog to lift and the day to warm so I could go outside and work. I've written before about my penchant for living a relatively scheduled life. I follow routines out of habit or preference. I get up around the same time every morning. I go to bed around the same time every night. I go through the day doing many of the same things around the same times. It varies somewhat, but not a lot, from season to season. I find routine comforting, I suppose. Now that I'm retired and the master of my time, at least I like to pretend I am, I find my inclination for abiding by my routines growing stronger. And yet, at the same time, now and then I feel the need for a break from it all. They are, after all, routines I've made for myself, enforced by no one but me, and adjustable, or even disposable. I'm beginning to suspect that living so strictly by my routines helps make time seem to fly on wings of lightning. More disruptions, the pleasant sort anyway, might help to slow it down a little.

Time is a fascinating thing and I do not pretend to understand it. According to present scientific thought, time is a dimension, interwoven with space into the space-time continuum. It doesn't have a speed as such. Our perception of its passing is relative. We measure it using clocks set to a rate we've devised made up of units – seconds, minutes, hours, months, years, etc. based on the movement of our planet around the sun, or the rate of the vibration of an atom. But it seems that's for our convenience in wrapping our minds around it. The speed of time is the speed of our clocks. It makes my brain ache to think about it too much. 

And then there's eternity, which is time without end, or in scriptural terms, a condition in which time does not exist. The scriptures in Revelation 10:6; Doctrine and Covenants 84:100; and Doctrine and Covenants 88:110, tell us that at some point, "there shall be time no longer." We talk of things pertaining to time and eternity. God dwells in eternity, and yet the scriptures also speak of God's time, measured according to the planet on which he resides, which Abraham tells us is a thousand years to one earth year (Abraham 3:4). Someday when I'm a resurrected being and the veil is lifted from my mind, I hope to comprehend it all. Until then, I ponder on it feebly. And luckily, mid-pondering, the fog vanished and the sun came out and I went out to work in the little patch of the world I pretend to understand better.

With the fog gone, the day grew hot and the humidity was terrific, 99%. It was like working in a sauna. It was sweaty and wonderful. I like working up a sweat. It's good to sweat. On muggy days like that, I feel sorry for the pigs. They aren't able to sweat much. They only have a few sweat glands on their snouts. They cope with the heat by not moving around much. They sleep in the dirt under the shade of their shelter through most of the day. They get up now and then to eat and drink and to wallow. These pigs, unlike other pigs we've had in years past, have not been very good at making a mud wallow. They like to lay in the wading pool, but they're big enough now that they only fit in it one at a time. They have a mud puddle next to the pool that they lay in, but it isn't very deep. Our previous pigs dug deep, muddy wallows that they lounged in all day. I'd dig one for them, but I don't want to go into their pen.

 

Trying stay cool.

I spent that morning working on trees. Several of the old maples in the front yard have dead branches. I got out my extendable pruning saw and tried to remove what I could reach. I wasn't very successful. I missed Josiah. He used to climb up into the trees and saw out the dead wood for me. I removed what I could. The rest of them will have to rot and fall down on their own. I also removed some branches from the tulip tree. They weren't dead, but they were low and they made it difficult to mow under the tree.

Working on the trees, maple in front, tulip tree behind.

Twice while I was working, neighbors from up the road stopped as they were driving by to chat for a minute. I know just about everyone who lives up our road, by sight if not always by name. I don't know the names of either person that stopped that morning, but I recognized them. They were just old guys (I say old but they were probably around my age) who wanted to comment on the weather and how they like to see our peacock when they pass by and how bad the road has become this summer. I stopped working and stood by the road and chatted with them. I can be conversational when I try. For a minute or two anyway.

I had to stop working midday. The heat was too much. I took a siesta, read my book for a while, and then went back out later when it was a little cooler and worked until dusk. It was a magnificent evening. I wish I could convey scent electronically. When the humidity is this high, all the plant world seems to release volatile oils, some sweet, some earthy, some spicy, and they hang in the heavy air. Breathing becomes a delight. And then, to crown the day in glory, there was a rainbow.

A rainbow at the end of a magnificent day.

Tuesday was even hotter than Monday. I tried to get the strenuous stuff done before the day got too warm. Following my usual summer routine, I opened the barn to start the air circulating. I did my morning snail and bug collection. I filled the pigs wading pool and made sure they had water to drink. And then I weeded until it was too hot to work. By 11:00 the thermometer was at 86° and still climbing. I came in to read and take a short siesta. I'm reading John Steinbeck's East of Eden. I'd read a lot of Steinbeck's works before, but not this one. I'm only half way through it and I'm not sure what I think of it yet. Parts of it are beautifully written. His descriptions of the Salinas Valley of California in the early 20th century are great. His characters are interesting. Sometimes it tends to bog down a bit or maybe I was getting drowsy when I read those parts. I'll wait until I get to the end to render final judgement. Then I plan to watch the 1955 movie version starring James Dean in his first major movie appearance. Somehow, I've never seen it. The trailer is pretty sensational.

I was roused from my siesta (a valued part of my routine most days) by the sound of a helicopter. It was very close by. We don't get that sort of thing around here. I went down to the front of the property by the road and found Miriam and Kurt there. They were watching the field on the corner of the Gold intersection (Hwy 49 & 449) where the helicopter had landed and an ambulance was parked. The helicopter turned its engine off. There were men directing traffic through the intersection. We stood and waited thinking they would transfer someone from the ambulance to the helicopter to be life-flighted. After almost an hour, they finally did transfer someone to the helicopter and it flew away. We have no idea what tragedy took place.

Sunset Tuesday evening.

Wednesday was warm, humid, and overcast. All morning it felt like it could rain at any moment, but it didn't. I spent most of the morning spraying. First I sprayed for Japanese beetles. I bought a powder containing Bacillus thuringiensis subsp. galleriae, which, when ingested, kills Japanese beetles and several other garden pest beetles and borers. I mixed that with a bit of tea tree oil soap and a gallon of water and sprayed all the plants the beetles like to infest – roses, raspberries, blackberries, and dahlias. Next, I prepared my own concoction to spray for potato beetles, a mixture of diatomaceous earth, neem oil, tea tree oil, and powdered cayenne pepper. The potato beetles have been very bad this year. All that spraying took me to lunchtime and I needed a break. I lunched and lounged about for an hour hoping the rain would come and give me an excuse to stop working, but no.

The rain held off until after dinner. We were headed down the road to meet Sarah at a U-Pick berry patch to pick currants. A thunderstorm was just beginning, but we thought it wouldn't last long. By the time we got to the berry patch, a mile and a half away, it was pouring rain and the lightning was close. We turned around and came home. The thunder and lightning let up after a while, but the rain continued on through the night.

We've come to the season of spiders. I noticed on my walk on Wednesday morning that there were webs strung everywhere. The dew revealed them to me. In the meadow, the gauzy funnel webs of the grass spiders (Agelinidae) were white with dew, like filmy bits of lace scattered across the grass. And every window of the house has its resident spider – on the outside. The clever spiders make their webs there to catch insects attracted to the lights in the house at night. I like spiders in their proper place, which is not inside the house. I appreciate the work they do keeping the bug population in check.

Dewy funnel spider webs in the meadow.

In recent times, one of the disruptions to my scheduled life are visits to doctors. They have become frequent enough that they are starting to feel routine, a sad sort of adjustment, but necessary. I was talking to my mother the other day and she was commenting on how so many of us now seem to be spending so much time at the doctor's office. It comes with getting old. But she is almost 97 and I am 67, so she has more reason to complain and I still have a lot of aging to do. Several weeks ago, in addition to my other doctors, I began seeing an acupuncturist. I'd read an article about a study done by the Harvard Medical School that said acupuncture could help with my condition. I'd been to an acupuncturist before, years ago when I was dealing with another problem and it helped. So I looked her up. She used to be in Smethport, Pennsylvania, but she has moved her office to Olean, New York. I made an appointment and I've been going to her once a week since then. I enjoy my sessions with her. I think they are helping. This week's appointment took up a major portion of my day on Thursday. Olean is an hour away and my session takes almost two hours. But it was a dreary morning, so it was okay.

By the time I finally got home, the weather was beginning to clear, but it was very windy. I didn't let that stop me. Last week I bought a new garden tool, a sickle. I bought a scythe several years ago thinking I would use it to cut the tall grass in the orchard, but I never got good at using it. It cuts such a wide swath that I'm afraid of cutting the trees. This sickle is smaller, handheld, and much easier to control. I took my new sickle and headed out to the orchard to start cutting the grass right around the trunks of the trees. The grass was about three feet tall. It was hard work.

My new sickle.

That evening, Sarah came over for dinner (Tosh was out of town) and after dinner, we made another attempt at berry picking. This time we were successful. The weather was perfect. The berry bushes were loaded. We picked red and black currants and blueberries. Sarah took them to her house for processing. She made them into jam and jelly and a blueberry buckle. She made a special blueberry buckle for me. I ate it warm with milk and it was delicious!

Picking currants.

Picking blueberries.

Sarah making jelly.

Sarah's black currant jelly.

My blueberry buckle.

Friday was a busy day. I drove into town early to buy two cattle panels that I turned into arched supports for my cucumber vines. After that, I weed-whacked and then I mowed. One of the big midsummer projects is mowing the orchard. The Yellow Transparent apples are ripe and it's easier to pick them when the grass under them is short. Other apples, Duchess and Sops In Wine, will be ready soon too, so it was time to mow. I'd already used my new sickle to clear the grass near the base of the trees. In the past I've used the Cub Cadet to mow down the rest of the grass, but I've found the best way is to use Kurt's tractor with the wide mower on it. Kurt came by and said he was running errands, but when he got back he could mow. When he got home, we hooked up the mower and started to mow at 3:30. I had to be there while he mowed to lift low branches for him and show him where the tree stumps are. We didn't finish by dinner time and left it to finish the next day.

My new arched supports.

Hooking up the mower to the tractor.

The mowing begins.

Yesterday was the big Amish School Auction out in North Bingham. We always go to it, but seldom buy anything. We left midmorning to drive out there. The Shilligs and the Fosters went too. There were more people there than ever before. We got our bidding numbers and went from auction to auction. Inside, they were auctioning furniture and quilts. Out in the field there were several auctions going on for farm equipment, sporting goods, and lumber and building supplies. There was a tent for the livestock auction and another for the plant auction. And along the side of the big building, under a wide awning, was the produce auction. We checked out the plant auction and they had a lot of nice things, but the bidding always went too high. We hung out at the produce auction and bought some cabbages, grapes, tomatoes, and potatoes. We never bid on quilts, but it's fun to watch the bidding. They sell for hundreds of dollars. Then we came home.

Arriving at the auction.

Sarah, Mila, and Miriam at the produce auction.

Inside the big building.

At the produce auction.

By then it was past lunchtime. I ate a quick lunch and headed outside to work. Because I didn't get a chance to water on Fertilizer Friday, I did it on Saturday. This time I used some of my comfrey water, which smells terrible, so I called it Sewer Water Saturday. Later in the afternoon Kurt and I resumed mowing the orchard. We still didn't finish. It's about half done. We will finish it tomorrow.

The half-mown orchard.

Last night we went to the movies to see F-1. I'm not a fan of car movies. Or horse movies. Or dog movies. Or sports movies. But especially car movies. I went because Stacey wanted to see it. It was pretty good. Not as good as Gran Turismo, because that was a true story, but pretty good.

It rained while we were in church. Not much, just enough to raise the humidity. Lunch will be ready soon. I need to do the afternoon chores. The chickens and pigs are waiting to be fed too. I think I'll go out after that and sit in the garden. After working and sweating in it all week long, it's nice to sit and sweat and do nothing in it on the Sabbath.

Daisies, phlox, and hollyhocks – high summer flowers.

On Friday the Thayns are coming up to drop off the four younger children. Rachel and Hazel are going to girls' camp. We will have the grandchildren here for a week, so things are going to get lively. Until then, I will keep to my usual routines. The weather looks good. I have lots to do to keep me busy. And summer flies on.