Several Types of Labor This Week

Monday was Labor Day, a sad holiday to me. I know it was originally designated as a day to celebrate the working people who built America, but it has never really meant that to me. To me it is the holiday marking the end of summer. The day began cold, foggy, and dripping with dew. I was shivering as I went down to do the chores and take my morning walk, but I had to admit the sunlight shining through the fog was beautiful. I saw a fog rainbow, an arc of faint color to the west over the beaver pond. I tried to photograph it, but it didn't work.

Across the front yard, Monday morning.

The beaver pond.

Coming back through the meadow.

Early that morning, Sarah and Tosh left to go downstate for a few days. They dropped their dog, Maverick, off here, and picked up a load of produce from our garden to take to the Thayns. 

A wagonload of produce for the Thayns.

Holiday or not, I had things to do on Monday—lots of labor, which seemed an appropriate way to spend the day. It was 38° at sunrise, so I waited until the day had warmed a little before starting. While I waited, I looked at bulb catalogs. It's that time of the year when the fall bulb catalogs begin to arrive in the mail. The timing is perfect. The bulb companies know that, of course. With this year's garden winding down, they know a gardener's heart turns toward visions of spring. I know mine does. While I'm clearing away the wreckage of this year's garden, all I can think of is what I need to plant now, in the dying days, that will fill these beds with flowers when the world wakes up again. Crocuses, tulips, daffodils, squill, fritillaries, snow drops, hyacinths, muscari—the very names fill me with hope as I utter them. To put dormant bulbs in the earth in September and October is an act of faith that spring will come again. I receive a dozen catalogs and I read each one, cover to cover—some of them several times. Then I make a list of the things that appeal to me—tulips in a certain color range, a new daffodil, more purple and white crocuses. And can you ever have too many hyacinths? I compare prices among the different catalogs, and compile my list. It always starts out overly ambitious—and too expensive. Sadly, affordability is the biggest limiting factor in my planning. If I had a million bucks, my yard would look like Keukenhof. But I do what I can.

Keukenhof Gardens in The Netherlands.

By 9:30 it was 55°, and that was good enough. I had a list of projects to work on. I chose mulching first. Between cutting down our two maple trees and Fosters cutting down ten pine trees and chipping all the branches, I had two large piles of mulch to use. I'd already used some of it—maple chip mulch in the front flowerbed and around my fruit trees, and pine chip mulch on the blueberry rows—but there was still a lot left. I carried maple mulch by the bucketful and spread it under the trees at the edge of the front yard along the road. They cast shade and the grass doesn't grow well under them, so I mulched there. In the woodland garden, I have two woodland azaleas that like acidic soil, so I mulched under them with pine chips. Then Kurt came over with his tractor and moved the rest of the maple mulch. He dumped some on the path that leads to the upper part of the barn. It runs between two fences that go around that chicken yard. I call it the alley. Now it is covered with a nice layer of chipped maple. Next I weeded my blackberry row along the edge of the orchard and mulched it with pine mulch. I like having piles of mulch at my disposal.

The mulched alley.

We had a cookout over at the Shilligs at noon. Kurt and Julie are temple workers at the Palmyra Temple and they invited a couple, fellow workers, who are on a temple mission from Arizona, to join us. We had hot dogs, hamburgers, watermelon, pistachio salad, pasta salad, potato salad, deviled eggs, seven layer salad, and baked beans—an all-American menu. 

Labor Day cookout on the Shillig's porch.

At 3:00 the power went out. There was an accident up the road. Someone hit a telephone pole. The power was off for several hours. I was out in the garden all that time, so I didn't really notice. Hannah was in the middle of doing her laundry and, with no electricity, had to resort to hanging her clothes out on the clothesline to dry. Primitive living. Later that afternoon, Kurt and I started digging up potatoes. We only harvested part of the smaller potato patch. We got a bushel of nice red potatoes. We still have half the small patch and all of the big patch to harvest. That's going to be a lot of potatoes.

The first potatoes.

At the end of the day, as I often do, I went out to sit in the garden and watch the day close down. I have a chair in my vegetable garden beside some washtubs planted with petunias where I usually sit. There are other places where I could sit, but the petunias are fragrant in the evening and I love their scent, so that's where I sit.

My seat by the petunias.

In September, I really begin to mind the shortening of the days. The mornings are so dark now. During the month, we will lose about 77 minutes of daylight—more than an hour lost to the dark. That makes every hour of light seem even more precious to me. I hate wasting daylight. I want to go outside as soon as I can, but unfortunately, with the decreasing hours of sunshine, the earth is also cooling. Mornings are very chilly now and very dewy. I find myself waiting for things to get warmer and drier before beginning the day. To keep from fussing during the idle time, I created a project. I found that there is a program online that will read scanned copies of my handwritten journals and transcribe them into editable text. I dug out the box from under the eaves that contains my journals and began scanning pages. The online program lets me do 50 pages a month for free, and I'm cheap, so that's the pace I'll be moving at.

Tuesday's big project was fortifying the chicken coop against rats and anything else that thinks it can tunnel under the wall. I went down in the morning and dug a trench along the front foundation and pulled out all the cinderblocks and stones that I'd piled there over the years. Later Miriam came down and helped me. We rolled out hardware cloth, bent it into an "L," and laid it in the trench. Then we set cinderblocks on it and filled in the trench. We had some leftover hardware cloth, so we replaced the plastic screen on one door with it. It was a long, dirty, and hot project, but I'm glad it's done. I haven't found a rat, trapped or poisoned, in a week. I hope our Chicken Fortress will be able to withstand any further invasions.

The fortified front of the chicken coop.

I ran errands on Wednesday and when I got back, I spent the afternoon mowing. I can't believe how the grass is still growing. We should be approaching the end of the mowing season, but it's growing like it's May. I was glad I finished mowing that afternoon because later it rained.

Thursday evening our friends the Lewises came for dinner. Al's 90th birthday was on Saturday and we wanted to celebrate with them. We had meatloaf, potatoes, baked cauliflower, tomatoes, watermelon, and for dessert, peanut butter brownies. Many of the menu items came straight from the garden. We had a pleasant evening eating and chatting.

On Friday afternoon, we left to go down to the Thayns' house. Rachel was scheduled to have her baby on Saturday and we wanted to be there. We left home at 4:00 laden with produce from the garden. The drive is long—four-hours—and uncomfortable for me. About half-way there, I can't find a comfortable position to sit in anymore. I try to sleep most of the way if I can. We arrived at the Thayns' at 8:00 and settled in for the night.

Rachel and Tabor went to the hospital around noon on Saturday. At the house, we worked on projects, cleaning, playing, waiting for any news. At 5:00 nothing much was happening at the hospital. Stacey and I went over for a short visit. They had Rachel on an oxytocin drip, but labor hadn't begun yet. We came back to the house and waited some more. By bedtime, nothing had happened. At 2:00 Sunday morning, the baby was finally born. She weighed 9 pounds, 7 ounces, and was 21 3/4 inches long.

The last photo of the family with only five children as they leave for the hospital.

Sunday morning at the house we all dressed and went to church. On the way home from church we stopped at the hospital to meet the new baby. Rachel looked good. The baby was adorable. We took turns holding her and cooing over her. I forgot how very precious new life is. You might be wondering why I refer to the baby as just the baby. As of this writing, they still hadn't settled on a name for her. No matter what she will be called, she is a precious and welcome addition to our family. She is our tenth grandchild.

Saying hello to the new one,

Meeting her grandpa.

A happy grandma.

After our visit, we came back to the house, had lunch, and went on with the day. We decided to stay another night. This morning Stacey, Hannah, and I left to come home. We left Miriam there to help out for the week. Rachel and the baby were due to be released later in the afternoon. We arrived home at noon. Stacey and Hannah went to work for the rest of the day. I worked on some laundry, took a tour of the garden, went down to visit the chickens, and here I am, finishing the journal. So we are home and unpacked, and at the start of a new week. It looks like the week ahead will be mild and good working weather. That's good because I have plenty of work to do.

Welcome to September

I try not to let the weather influence my mood too much, but if you are familiar with my journals at all, you know I'm not very good at it. The week was supposed to be rainy. All three of the weather sites I check agreed. So I knew I wouldn't be able to do most of the things I needed to do in the garden. The potatoes needed to be dug up, and you can't do that when the ground is wet and muddy. Well, you can, but it's miserable work, and the potatoes are filthy and have a greater tendency to rot if you do. The grass was going to grow like mad and we wouldn't be able to mow. There were beans, corn, and raspberries that needed to be picked. It looked like it would all have to wait, and waiting meant they might be past their prime by the time we could harvest them. Part of my brain said, be the dedicated and diligent gardener and just get wet. The other, practical—or perhaps lazy—part said, you could get pneumonia working in the rain, or at least be uncomfortable. I brooded on all of that as I looked out Monday on a gray, rainy, dismal morning. I had a fit of pre-frustration, a whole week's worth of exasperation lodged in my brain. I needed to find a way to brighten the atmosphere, at least in the confined space of the rooms where I was hunkered on a dank and dismal Monday morning.

I needed music. But what music? That set off another fit of unsatisfied brooding. I scanned all my music files. Nothing appealed. I went to YouTube and looked through my usual categories. No. Then I remembered my old record collection on the shelf in the music room. A few months ago, after many years of neglect, I'd set up my stereo and brought down my records, but hadn't used them much since then. I went in and sat down and began to look at the albums. I've been working on editing my journals, and I suppose that put me in a nostalgic mood to begin with, but looking at those albums was like reading pages of my life. I didn't even listen to the music. The record jackets were enough. I could tell a story for almost every one of them—where I lived when I acquired it, what I was doing with my life at the time. I spent several hours looking through them. It was entertaining, nostalgic, and a bit melancholy at the same time. In the end, I chose the recording of Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto in E Major, Op. 64 and Bruch's Scottish Fantasia, Op. 46, performed by Campoli and the London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Sir Adrian Boult. The album was a Christmas gift from my parents in 1971, when we lived on Campbellsport Road in Ravenna, Ohio. We only lived in that house a year and that was the only Christmas we had there. As I listened, all the associated memories of that time and place came rushing through me.

My stereo and record albums.

My oldest album.

The year we lived in that house has taken on an idyllic glow over the years. We lived there from August 1971 to August 1972. The house was in the country on an acre of land. We had only a few neighbors, most of them nice except for the hillbillies that lived next door. We were surrounded by farmland and forest. Just down the road was the West Branch Reservoir. We explored the woods and the reservoir and rode our bikes countless miles over country roads. There was trouble while we lived there. We had problems with the neighbors. I cut my foot and spent most of my second summer there on crutches. But my memories of that time are mostly good. I loved living out in the country. We moved from that house to Naperville, Illinois, at the beginning of my freshman year in high school, where a whole new world opened to me. All of that was stirred up in me from an old record.

The house on Campbellsport Road, 1971.

It stopped raining for a while later on Monday afternoon. I hurried out and did the chores and then went out to the big garden to pick raspberries while I could. They are a delicate fruit and spoil very quickly, so I was glad to get a bowlful. Raspberries are one of the few fruits I'm allowed to indulge in. Luckily, they are also a favorite of mine. If I had to name a fruit flavor as my favorite, it would be raspberry, but I don't like the little seeds. As I was coming back to the house, I found one of those accidental bits of beauty that I love. Along the edge of the orchard there are a few blackberry plants. They never give much fruit and I don't pay much attention to them, but that afternoon they stopped me in my tracks. There was a perfect white blossom on a sprig with pink buds and small green berries. It made me think of the apple blossoms we didn't have this year because of the cold. 

Raspberries in the big garden.

My afternoon pickings.

Blackberry flower.

Sarah dropped in after dinner and we went out to harvest some things before the rain began again. We picked strawberries, cherry tomatoes, zucchini, cucumbers, and corn. The highlight of the evening was picking and eating the first ripe cantaloupes and a watermelon. Melons are not easy to grow here. Most years they don't have time to ripen before cold weather comes. This year, we've been blessed. We brought the melons in from the garden, sliced them, and ate them straight away. They were perfect, juicy, and sweet. The rain returned just before sunset.

The evening's pickings.

The first melons of summer.

Tuesday was the first of September and, although it didn't feel very different from the August days that preceded it, mentally it was different. September always has a shifting feeling to it. My brain knows that summer will end during the month and I become attuned to anything that indicates even a slight change in that direction—an increase in the number of leaves on the lawn, the disappearance of the swallows, goldenrod starting to bloom more abundantly.

A patch of goldenrod at the edge of the orchard.

Tuesday morning when I checked the forecast, it had changed—not much chance for rain during the day, it said. I was pleased. When I went down to the barn to do the morning chores, the garden was still wet from Monday's rain and a heavy dew. I fed the chickens, checked my rat traps (all empty), and came back inside to wait for things to dry out a little before going out to work. My garden plans were delayed by a trip to the gym. After we got home, I went to work right away. I saw that the rain was expected to return that night, so I hurried and mowed the lawn. After mowing, I spent the rest of the afternoon in the garden.

After she got home from work later that afternoon, Stacey and I went out to run errands. We drove into Ulysses to the bank, then out to the Amish bulk food store on Fox Hill, and then to the dairy on the Pusher Siding Road. As we were coming home, the National Weather Service issued an Emergency Weather Bulletin stating we could expect high winds and possibly a tornado. The sky was darkening to the northeast and we could hear distant thunder. When we got home, I went out to the garden to batten down the hatches. I moved all the top-heavy potted plants to sheltered spots so they wouldn't get blown over. I closed up the greenhouse. Miriam was out mowing next door and I walked over and told her she should stop and put the mower away. And then we waited. I've seen tornadoes before when we lived in Illinois—but never too close. Once when I was out at my friends' house on the flat farmland out of town, I raced a tornado home. I could see it in my rearview mirror, a couple of miles behind me. We don't often get tornadoes here in Potter County. We've had two touch down in the 26 years we've lived here. There wasn't one on Tuesday afternoon. I'm thankful for that.

Tornado warning to the east of us.

The storm missed us. It was like we were under a protective dome. There were dark clouds and lightning to the east, west, and south of us, but clear skies over Gold. After dinner we went next door to Fosters' and worked at chipping the huge pile of spruce branches. We worked until dark with lightning flashing in the gigantic clouds to the west of us.

Chipping branches.

Dramatic clouds at the end of the day.

I had a haircut appointment on Wednesday morning at 10:00. While I waited for it to be time to leave, I worked some more on editing my journal. By then, I was up to 1984, the first months of my marriage. My Grandad Rathfon had died just before Christmas. Stacey was pregnant with Geoffrey. We were living in a tiny apartment on Foothill Boulevard in Sylmar. I was working at a job in Hollywood that I did not like (what else is new), longing for better things for my new little family. As I was reading through these entries, there was a thunderstorm rumbling outside. And I was listening to music—Vaughan Williams' Symphony No. 6 in E minor, one of my most beloved pieces of music. When it got to the third movement, "Romanze," I had to stop everything and just sit and listen. The combination of the journal memories, the thunder, and the music all swirling in my brain was perfect.

I had a pleasant visit with Dawn, the lady who cuts my hair. Her husband loves to fish and ties his own flies. I brought him all the tail feathers I'd collected from the peacock. Apparently they're good for making flies. Dawn and I always chat as she cuts my hair. I tell her what's going on in my family. She tells me what's going on in hers. We've been doing that for more than a decade.

The rest of the day was rainy. I went out into the garden during spells when it was just drizzling, thinking I could tolerate it, but I didn't get anything done except get wet. I finally gave up and came inside. The weather changed after dinner. There were enormous cloud formations to the east and west, but again, Gold was clear. We went out again to work at chipping spruce branches. Kurt got out his tractor and helped pull some of the larger branches from the pile. The branch pile shrunk slowly, while the chip pile grew quickly. As sunset arrived, the sky was lit with incandescent clouds filled with silent lightning. Around 8:00 the silence ended when the storm finally arrived in Gold. The wind blew hard and the rain came down in torrents. We had to get up and close windows. All night long there was almost continuous lightning, thunder, and pelting rain. A few times the thunder shook the house. It kept waking me up through the night. 

Clouds to the east on Wednesday evening.

Looking south down highway 49.

Working until dark.

Thursday morning was one of those mornings that only come after a summer thunderstorm. It was very warm, very humid, and very fragrant. The sun was shining, but more rain was on its way, and we were under a flood warning. I went out after my chores in the barn, thinking I would work in the garden, but I only lasted ten minutes. Stopping work because of heat and humidity is not something I usually do, but 85° and 80% humidity was too much. I retreated, first to the shade on the front porch, and then to the living room with a fan. At 2:00 I went out again to see if conditions were any better. They weren't. But I heard Kurt's music playing out in the big garden (he has a radio on the bike he rides around the property), which meant he was out there doing something in the heat, and I thought I'd better go see what. I found him on his hands and knees, picking green beans. He was just finishing that, and wanted to pick some sweet corn before heading back to this house. I helped him fill the wagon that he pulls behind his bike. By then we were both dripping sweat. He went home, and after picking an armload of cantaloupes, I went back inside to wait for the cool of the evening. Don't misunderstand, I'm not complaining about the heat and humidity. It's exactly what I want on a summer's day. Using it as an excuse to take it easy is a welcome rarity here.

Cantaloupes in the big garden.

After the heat of the day, working in the late afternoon and into the evening was delightful. I worked in my vegetable garden. I pulled up the rest of the carrots, picked the last of the wax beans and green beans, and pulled up the plants. Then I turned the soil in those beds and planted buckwheat. As I was finishing, the clouds were thickening and I heard distant thunder. Not long after I went in, the rain began.

The last of the beans.

It rained hard all night and Friday morning was fresh. The air felt soft and the sky was blue and full of creamy clouds. I went out, as I do every morning these days, to look at the morning glories. I planted the morning glories at the base of an arch that spans two different raised beds. One of the beds contained older soil that I hadn't improved in a few years. The other bed contained newer soil enriched with mushroom compost. I planted two kinds of morning glories—Heavenly Blue went in the rich bed, Flying Saucers went in the poor bed. I didn't know it then, but I do now, that morning glories prefer poorer soil. When the soil is high in nitrogen, like it is in the mushroom compost bed, they produce massive vines and leaves, but no flowers. I also discovered that Heavenly Blue morning glories usually don't start blooming until the days start to shorten. So the Flying Saucer side of the arch is blooming and the Heavenly Blue side has yet to give me a single blossom. But there's still hope. The days are getting shorter. Unless frost interferes first, I might still get some Heavenly Blues.

Friday morning.

The Flying Saucer side of the arch.

Each flower is unique.

The Fosters rented a skid-steer and it arrived on Friday morning. All day and into the evening, Sarah, Tosh, Miriam, and Kurt worked on chipping spruce branches. They hauled five loads in the dump truck to a farm down the road that wanted them. I took two loads and Kurt and I used them to mulch the blueberry rows in the big garden and along the edge of my pumpkin patch. The weather couldn't decide if it wanted to be sunny, cloudy, or rainy. It switched between them all day long, but we got a lot of work done in spite of that.

Working with the skid-steer.

Mulched blueberries in the big garden.

Mulched blueberries by my pumpkin patch.

Finally, Saturday was a day with no rain in the forecast. That morning, when I checked the morning glories, there were two solid blue flowers. They were still Flying Saucers, not Heavenly Blue, but I thought they looked pretty heavenly. 

Solid blue Flying Saucer morning glories.

The weather was perfect for working, and work we did. Next door at the Fosters' they continued chipping branches and hauling away logs.

I worked in my vegetable bed weeding the asparagus rows, tying celery for blanching, and weeding. I finally got around to tying up the grapevines. They were sprawling across the ground and needed support. I stretched wire between their posts and fastened them to them. During the day, we picked raspberries and zucchini. We snapped and froze green beans. Later in the afternoon I mowed. While I mow, I usually sing or just meditate, but this time I decided to test my memory by trying to recite poems. I have quite a few committed to memory. I did a good job with the smaller poems. The big test was The Walrus and the Carpenter. I memorized that poem back when I was 15 and infatuated with Alice. It has 108 lines. I recited it almost perfectly. When I came in the house later and checked, I only messed up one word. I said the young oysters came skipping through the frothy waves, when they actually came hopping. Pretty good after 53 years.

Celery tied for blanching.

Grapevines up on supports at last.

So, at the end of the day we had the tree branch chipping project done, the lawn mowed, the garden in order, and various other pre-Sabbath tasks completed. I love a busy Saturday. I love the feeling of accomplishment at the end of the day. After such a day, I feel ready and eager for the Sabbath.

The pile of branches gone.

Saturday night, after everything was quiet, I sat for a moment and thought back on my week-long journal editing project. I've gone as far as I can go for now. I only have my hand-written journals transcribed through 1985. Maybe over the winter I'll continue transcribing them and resume editing. I enjoyed revisiting 1975-1985, but in the end, the feeling that settled in my mind was the fragility of life, how quickly time passes, how short life is, and how much things change—people and places. I saw on the pages of my journals a world that has vanished, in many instances without a trace. Places that only exist now because I wrote them down. My intention in keeping a journal—written in the very first lines I penned back in 1975—was to preserve something I knew would inevitably be lost. I was a strange and moody teenager, and often an insecure and moody young adult, who, from an early age and even to today, has experienced what is called anticipatory nostalgia—a feeling of nostalgia for something while you're still living it. The pages of my old journals are full of people I miss—my grandparents, my father, my sister Mindy, other relatives, friends I lost touch with, and family scattered across the continent that I rarely see anymore. I don't mean to make this sound depressing. I enjoyed the journey back through time in a happy/sad way. I'm very good at feeling that way. I've been doing it for a long, long time.

So the Sabbath is here. It was chilly and foggy this morning when I went down to do the morning chores. The world was very quiet. The fog seemed to swallow all the sound. The only birds I heard were some crows far away talking to each other. Even the chickens seemed subdued. On my way back to the house, I took a quick walk through the meadow and around the garden and was soaked with dew to my knees. It felt like fall. Finally, around 8:30, the sun broke through. It looked so bright and lovely that I went out again to look at the garden.

Some of this morning's glories. I'm obsessed. Can you tell?

Sunflowers after the sun came out.

We are home from church. Our meetings were very good. Today is Fast Sunday and I'm looking forward to breaking my fast. We're having hamburgers, French fries, corn on the cob, and watermelon. Just writing that makes my stomach growl. I have plans for the week ahead. I have all the supplies I need to work on fortifying the barn against rats. That's my big project. They are delivering a stump grinder sometime during the week and we will grind down the two stumps in the front yard. And we'll continue harvesting. By this time next week, we should have a new grandchild. Rachel is scheduled to deliver her sixth child, our tenth grandchild, on Saturday. Lots to do, lots of changes. Time flies, life goes on.

Roosters, Rats, and Rain

Sarah harvested these beets from my garden. I thought they looked pretty.

Monday gave us another gloomy start to a not-summery week, the last week of August. It was chilly and overcast and too wet to work outdoors. I fretted through the morning, trying to entertain my brain. After looking at various news sites, which made things feel even gloomier, I watched some YouTube. I like to watch Baumgartner Restorations, where Julian Baumgartner restores damaged paintings. The most recent one I watched that morning involved restoring an antique icon. I find what he does fascinating. Then I watched Words Unravelled with Jess Zefarris and Rob Watts where they explore the etymology of English words. Also fascinating. Then I checked the Netherlands Bach Society's channel to see if there was anything new since the last time I checked. I found a performance of the Minuets in G Major and G Minor BWV 841–842, by Hanna Zhang on the harpsichord. That was a lovely three-minute distraction. Then I read.

I wrote last week about my unsuccessful venture into The Odyssey. I was disappointed that I was disappointed. I really wanted it to turn out to be a great encounter with an ancient literary masterpiece—which I'm sure it is—but my ability to appreciate it is limited. That happens to me sometimes. I just can't get into certain famous works, no matter how often or how hard I've tried. Moby-Dick is on that list. I've tried several times and just can't do it. The great Russian authors are on that list, too. Maybe someday I'll be able to read Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy without falling asleep by the third page. Maybe not. So after my disenchantment with Homer, I was looking for a new direction to freshen my brain before returning to the Discworld books (I'm still determined to read them all this year). On the recommendation of Miriam and Hannah, I'm reading Anne of Green Gables. I've watched the wonderful 1985 series several times, but I'd never read the books. It has been a treat. Lucy Maud Montgomery is a great writer. Her ability to describe places, her characterizations, and dialogue are perfect. Maybe the fact that I've watched a well-done adaptation of her books has helped—I do picture Megan Follows as Anne, Colleen Dewhurst as Marilla, and Richard Farnsworth as Matthew as I read. I'm enjoying the book and now have added Prince Edward Island to my list of places I need to visit.

If you'll recall, several weeks ago I wrote about a nest of bunnies in one of my raised beds. They were too cute to do anything about, plus we had grandchildren here and they would have been appalled at even the thought of disposing of them. The bunnies eventually left the nest and went across the road to live in the scrubby brush, and I swore if they ever came back into my garden, they were fair game. Well, one of them did come back. It has made its home under the woodpile at the side of the house. It isn't especially afraid of us. It comes out several times a day to nibble on clover in the lawn and doesn't hop away until we get very close to it. It's still pretty small and cute, and despite my vow, I can't bring myself to shoot it. Living under the woodpile and eating lawn clover does no harm to my garden. It hasn't invaded any place where I have flowers or vegetables, so I'm willing to tolerate it living there. Am I getting soft in my old age?

The bunny that lives under the woodpile.

Because the weather wouldn't give us heat, I went to the gym to use their steam room. I sat in the steam and sweated, then took a cold shower and repeated the process four times. It felt great. It made me think of the few times I got to go to a bathhouse when I was in Japan. Missionaries were only allowed to use them if the bathing facilities in their apartments were not working. That only happened three times during the two years I was in Japan—once in my first area in Tsuruhashi, in Osaka, and twice later when I lived in the city of Akashi. That first trip to a bath house was a very different experience for me. I'd only been in Japan two days, and in spite of seven weeks of studying Japanese at the Missionary Training Center (it was the LTM back then, the Language Training Mission), I didn't understand much of anything that was said to me, nor could I make myself understood. This is what I wrote in my journal about that experience.

Saturday, April 15, 1978. Last night the heater on our bathtub broke, so we got permission to go to a public bath house called an ofuroyasan. The elders call it the "fud." It was just down the street from our apartment, so we walked there. The entrance was covered with a cloth banner that the elders call a "fud flag." A lot of elders collect them when the fuds change and replace them. My companion has three of them. We went into a lobby and paid an old woman some money. She gave us a plastic basin, two towels, and a key. There was a men’s side and a women’s side, completely separate. We went through a door into the men’s locker room, where we undressed. I’m very shy about being naked around other people, so I tried to wrap a towel around me, but it was too small. No one else was wearing a towel, so I just said, “Oh well, when in Rome, do as the Romans do.” We went into the fud room. There were hot-water spigots and stools along one wall. We sat on the stools, and using the plastic basin, we washed at the spigots. We had to soap up, shampoo, and rinse off completely. You never go into the tubs until you are completely clean. Next, we went to the hot-water tub. It was very large and about four feet deep. There were three middle-aged Japanese men and a young boy, about ten or eleven, already in it. It was made of tile and there was a ledge all around it that we sat on. You were only allowed to go in the water up to your chin. You never put your face or head in the water. The water was very hot. As I soaked in it, my face broke into a sweat. We wiped our faces with towels, then got out and went to the other tub. It was just like the hot tub, but the water was very cold. It was shocking to get in. I couldn’t stay in very long. We went back and forth between the hot and cold tubs three times. The whole time, we were chatting among ourselves in English and not paying much attention to the Japanese. My companion whispered to me that the men were talking about us. They didn't know that some of us could understand what they were saying. My companion said they were commenting on how big American boys are. I assumed he meant that they were impressed with how tall we are, but my companion made it clear that was not what they were commenting on. Until then, I hadn’t minded too much that we were naked, but when he told me that, I was embarrassed and wanted to cover myself. We stayed in the tub until after those men left. When you go to the fud, you are supposed to finish by soaking in the cold tank to invigorate the body, but my companion said not to. He said that if you finish with the hot tank, you’ll sleep better. So I finished with the hot tank. He was right. I was so relaxed that I almost didn’t make it home before I fell asleep. I slept the most relaxed and peaceful sleep I’ve ever slept. I think I love going to the fud, but I wish there were just elders there and no Japanese. I hope we go there often, but my companion says we won’t because permission isn’t often granted to go. Too bad.

This is a typical "fud" entrance with its "fud flag."

Me and my first companion, Elder Patterson, who took me to the fud for the first time.

That was my first experience at a Japanese bathhouse, a good memory. But, back to the present: Tuesday morning was another frustrating morning. It was chilly and gray again. I didn't take a morning walk. I just did the necessary chores and came back inside to wait, hoping the sun would come out. I can tolerate the chill if the sun is shining, but cloudy and chilly is too much. In the late afternoon, the sky cleared. Sarah came over and we spent some time working in the big garden. We picked another load of cucumbers. We have an overabundance of them this year. And we finished putting the plastic cover over the tomatoes. We're hoping the plastic will hold in enough heat to ripen the hundreds of green tomatoes on the vines.

The tomato tunnel completed.

That evening, after dark, Stacey, Miriam, and I went down to the chicken coop. Miriam went to shoot rats. Stacey and I went to clip the wings on the renegade young chickens and to catch two young roosters. These young chickens thought they could roam outside their yard all day. They even started going across the road. And they liked to perch on the railing of the barn bridge and made a mess of it with their poop. So we clipped their wings to keep them from flying over the fence. When we bought this last batch of chicks, they were all supposed to be pullets, but two of them turned out to be roosters. It wasn't a problem until they became mature enough to try and breed. That created a ruckus as the two older roosters wouldn't allow it. A lady who raises chickens near here takes unwanted roosters to an auction up in New York state and she was going there on Wednesday morning, so we caught the two roosters, put them in boxes, and set them on the back porch for the night. Wednesday morning I drove them over and delivered them to the lady. Things are under control down in the barn again. Except for the rats.

Two boxed roosters, ready to take away.

I don't know why there are so many rats this year. Most years we go through a cycle where a few move in, we kill them, and we're rid of them for a while. This year there are so many and all our efforts to get rid of them have been in vain. I decided to make a multipronged attack. I bought four new rat traps and a bag of poison pellets. I baited the traps with peanut butter. Then I set up a rat smorgasbord in the middle pen of the coop where I could keep the chickens out. Now I also make sure the chicken feeder is empty by nightfall so there is no chicken food available for the rats. Thursday morning, when I went down to check, all four traps were sprung and three had dead rats in them. And all the poison was gone. I emptied and reset the traps and put down more poison. On Friday morning, there were three more, and Saturday morning another two. This morning, before I got ready for church, I went down to check and there were five more. Thirteen down—how many more to go?

I know it's gross, but it also feels a bit triumphant.

Right about now, at the end of August, I start to give up. There is too much going on in the garden. It's harvest time and picking and preserving food becomes the most important task. Other tasks have to be neglected. I stop being so vigilant about deadheading flowers. I figure that, come the first frost, I'll be pulling them up if they're annuals, and cutting them back if they're perennials, so why fuss with them anymore. Same with the weeds. Soon I will overhaul the flowerbeds, the raised beds, and till up the rows in the big garden as they empty out, so why fight the weeds. They'll be ripped up and ground down soon. It's not that I'm feeling defeated exactly, I just have to prioritize things. I make sure things look tidy—as long as you don't look closely.

I spent the morning on Wednesday mowing. I only mowed our property. Miriam took over when I was done and mowed the Shilligs' yard and the Foster's property. She was at it until dinnertime. Sarah came over for dinner again on Wednesday. After dinner we went out and worked in the big garden. She, Miriam, and I dug up the places in the long rows where we'd cleared out garlic, cabbages, and basil, and we planted cover crops of crimson clover and a mix of other seeds. We worked past the sunset and finished up under the light of a primrose full moon. It was quiet and cool as we made our way back to the  house.

Sarah working by moonlight.

Thursday was an overcast day. I worked in the garden, wishing the whole time that the sun would break through. Sarah came here for dinner again, and afterward we went out to work some more in the big garden. We pulled up the row of peas. The vines were spent and mildewed. We pulled up the rest of the onions and brought them into the woodshed. We worked until it got dark.

Toward midnight, Stacey woke me up and we went out to watch the eclipse of the moon. Julie was out on her back porch watching and we walked over and joined her. Miriam and Hannah eventually joined us. We watched the moon almost disappear behind earth's shadow. We saw several meteors streak by as we watched. Far to the south of us, there was silent lightning. When the moon was obscured as much as it would be, we came back inside and went to bed.

The eclipse (not my photo).

On Friday, Miriam and Hannah went down to spend the weekend at the Thayns' house. They left in the morning, and with Stacey at work, I was alone all day. I worked part of the day on an indoor project.

Writing about going to a public bathhouse earlier in the week triggered something in me. I spent some time every day after that going through my missionary journals, editing them. I copied the entries and pasted them into ChatGPT, and had it check my spelling and punctuation. I edited my journals several years ago the old fashioned way. This time, using AI was amazing. It found many errors and inaccuracies that I'd missed before. Oh, the wonders of AI.  I corrected them as we went along. As a result of that, I was mentally immersed in that world again all week. My reaction to it surprised me. Looking so closely at who I was from the age of 19 to 21 was interesting. There were things that I wrote down that I would not remember otherwise. As I read, at times I became very emotional. I've told stories many times of the strange, funny, and bad things that happened on my mission, but reading through my journals this time, I realized that I'd forgotten some of the wonderful things—especially the Japanese people I grew to love. I wept several times as I read about them. I regret that I never kept in touch with them. But when I left Japan, I came home to a new place and was swept up in the affairs of my family and coping with that next phase of my life. I left Japan behind me. Only I didn't, really. It has always been there, in a place in my mind. It changed me in profound ways and has had an influence in everything that came after it. When I finished my editing on Friday afternoon, I did some searching online to see if I could find some of those people I loved, but time and incomplete information prevented any discoveries. Almost fifty years later, I suppose many of them are dead. I'm glad I preserved some part of them on the pages of my journal.

I find that I've been dwelling on Japan more and more of late. I often dream about it at night. It's been 47 years since I was there. I can't say that I loved every minute of my time there. That's very apparent in my journal entries. Being a missionary was difficult a lot of the time. My greatest difficulties were with the American missionaries who were my companions. But I quickly learned to love the country, its people, its culture, and its food. I always thought that I would go back again someday to visit. More and more, I feel that the time is coming—maybe it's here now. I like to sit and work out imaginary travel plans—the places I'd like to see again, the places I'd like to show my family. Should we go during sakura season, or when the azaleas are in bloom, or during the fall when the maples are magnificent? Can I find the gyoza restaurant I loved in the heart of Osaka? Is my language good enough to navigate the trains and buses? I think the translation programs available today will help with that. My Japanese is very rusty. I can dream, can't I?

After I was done with my journal, and a bit of daydreaming, I went out and worked in the garden. I pulled a few weeds and sowed some cover crop seed in the newly cleaned out raised beds in my vegetable garden. The day was pleasant, mild, and breezy. Later, I trimmed the onions we brought in the day before and hung them up to cure. It was very fragrant work. The smell of onions always makes me hungry. The rest of the day was quiet. Stacey and I ate a simple dinner of leftovers, and then spent the evening not doing much at all. Maybe we're just old and boring. Or comfortable doing nothing. Both, probably.

Onions curing in the woodshed.

Saturday was quiet. I didn't feel motivated to do much. I planted some clover seed out in an empty row in the big garden. I spent some time after lunch watching trailers for upcoming movies. I like to find one or two that look good. It gives me something to look forward to, although I'm often disappointed when I finally get to watch them. I wish they'd make more movies based on the great novels I love, but then, when they do, I usually don't like what they do to them. How I've pictured the stories as I've read them, and how they're portrayed on film, are usually too different. And I prefer what's in my head to what I see on the screen. And how many versions of Jane Austen's novels do they need to make? Move on, for heaven's sake. There are so many other great books that would make great movies. In a fit of misplaced ambition a few years ago, I tried my hand at writing a screenplay of F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise. I knew as soon as I finished it that I didn't understand the process well enough. I think with proper instruction, I might make a good screenwriter. Then I could help transform more worthy novels into great films.

Late on Saturday afternoon, I took a slow walk across the compound. My purpose was twofold: to make a note of the things I need to do this week, and to enjoy a summer afternoon with its sunshine and flowers. As I walked, I noted my successes and failures. What I'll do differently next year. The happy accidents where volunteers popped up—petunias in places where I hadn't grown them in years, pink bee balm that somehow transported itself all the way across a flowerbed. I like those happy accidents. Often the volunteers do better than the plants I planned and carefully tended. The sunflowers are blooming at their best now. I always realize, too late, that I didn't plant enough of them. Every year I think I've planted more than the year before, but when they bloom, I find it's never enough. Next year I'll plant more.

Some of the sunflowers in my garden.

Today is a fifth Sunday so, as branch president, I was responsible for what happened in the second hour at church. Starting next week, our meeting schedule changes and there was a video from Salt Lake that explained the transition. It was directed at the youth of the church, and we don't have any youth in the branch, but I watched it beforehand and determined that everything in it also applied to us more mature youth. So we watched it and the branch members said they found it applicable. Plus it was short, which meant we ended our meetings early and no one complained about that. We're home now. Lunch is almost ready. Miriam and Hannah will be home later this afternoon.

Now I'm sitting here, looking at the week ahead. Yesterday I made my list of things I need to do this week, but it looks like the weather won't be cooperating with my plans. There is rain in the forecast all week until Friday. At least it's not supposed to be chilly. I'll do whatever I can whenever I can. And I have a new indoor project for those rainy days—I'm going to edit my earliest journals. I started keeping a journal in 1975, and I wrote a lot. It will be fun to see what a silly and sloppy teenage writer I was.