Welcome to October

My life pretty much flows around my garden. I think you can tell how much it means to me. It's the focus of my whole year. When I'm not in it, I'm thinking about it. I love all the seasons of the garden year for different reasons. I spend the winter dreaming about it, planning it, and missing it. Then spring comes. Spotting the first shoots of the snowdrops or discovering a tiny patch of overwintered violas is one of the thrilling highlights of the year. Once the growing season gets underway, most of my activities are centered around planting, tending, weeding, and watering through the spring and summer. Harvest time is when all that work pays off and our days are filled with picking and preserving the products of our labors. Then follows one of the brief spells that, oddly, I really enjoy—destroying it all. I call it, euphemistically, putting the garden to bed for its winter sleep. It's actually more violent than that—ripping things out, cutting things down, and digging things up. That's where I'm at now. I think the reason I enjoy it so much is that, when I'm done, everything looks tidy. The last days of summer and the transition into fall get pretty messy with rampant weeds and half-dead plants. By the end of October, it will all be cleared away. The beds will be clean, their edges trimmed sharp, everything ordered and snug. Then I can say, let winter come. I'm ready. At least as far as the garden is concerned.

We had a spell of chilly weather during the week and the house got so chilly, we thought about lighting the woodstove. Not the furnace. We have strict rules about when that can be lit, but using the woodstove has looser restrictions. But we have a problem. For years we've had trouble with starlings coming down the chimney and into the stove. When we had our new roof put on, we had the roofer put some chicken wire at the top of the chimney. That kept the starlings from going down the chimney, but it didn't keep them from using the wire as a platform for a nest. So the top of the chimney is blocked and we can't use the woodstove. The chimney is so tall that the roofer, using a ladder set on the roof, could barely reach the opening to put the wire in. Stacey sent a message to him telling him about the problem to see if he can come and fix it. We're waiting. And chilly.

Most of the week was gray and drizzly. I did nothing outside but the necessary chores. Instead, I spent my time continuing to transcribe my journals. As I worked, I came to a particularly difficult set of entries. On October 24, 1992, our fifth child, our son, Abraham Edward, was born. He died at birth. My journal records in detail what happened, how I felt, how we dealt with it, the people who came to us with love and comfort. It was very hard for me to read now what I wrote then. Of course I remember a lot of it. It is engraved indelibly in my memory, but some of the small details I'd forgotten. There they were, scribbled on those pages, and reading them conjured up the grief and the love that filled our lives during those difficult times. Abraham's birthday is coming up. On the 24th of this month, he would have been 34 years old. I'm thankful for my knowledge of the great Plan of Happiness and for the covenants I've made that allow us to be an eternal family. That is what got me through those sad days, and it still sustains me now.

October arrived on Thursday. I remember, vaguely, an old cartoon, maybe one of those "Follow the Bouncing Ball" musical cartoons they used to show during the after-school time slot on TV. The cartoon showed a calendar page turning from September to October and the scenery changing from summer to fall. That's what October's arrival was like on Thursday. The trees started to change a few weeks ago, but that morning, it felt like a page had turned and suddenly there was color everywhere. We always say that the peak of fall color here comes in the second week of October, but I don't think the leaves will last that long this year. 

Our autumns here can be spectacular, but some years are disappointingly drab. The last few years have been that way. I always look forward to that last burst of color before the winter monochrome sets in. This year looks promising.

The hills are starting to show some color.

On Thursday, Miriam braved the yellow-jackets and closed down her big beehive. The yellow-jackets had won the battle. The bees were all dead. She took out sheets of comb, some just empty wax, and some loaded with honey. While she worked, bees from the other hive and wasps flew all around her. She put the empty wax comb in a bucket to melt down later. She put the honey-filled comb into sealed bowls and put them in the freezer in the woodshed to kill the wasps that were in it. She will extract the honey this week. I don't think she'll get much. She's pretty sad about that.

Miriam dismantling her big hive.

Friday was one of those days that I dream about. The Thayns were here for the weekend. They arrived late Thursday night. Our niece Emma was here too, all the way from Utah. She likes to come visit during harvest time and we love it. She is a willing and hard worker. With all that help on hand, we planned a Big Work Day. At first the weather was not the best. It was warm, but rainy. We started to work anyway, and after a while the rain stopped. We had a great crew of hard workers, and we got so much work done in the yard and garden. We borrowed a stump grinder from Stacey's work and Tabor spent most of the day grinding stumps next door at the Fosters' and in our front yard. Kurt used his tractor to haul the stump grindings to the compost pile.

Tabor grinding the first stump.

Grinding the second stump.

My stump-grinding digging helper, Russell.

Meanwhile, in the house, Stacey and her crew worked on processing potatoes and tomatoes. The tomatoes, the last of the year, were cooked down into sauce. The potatoes were peeled, boiled, and mashed, then spread on trays to be freeze-dried.

June helping with mashed potatoes.

Out in the big garden, we cleaned out the blighted tomato row, the last scraggly broccoli plants, the frostbitten beans, and dead marigolds. We harvested the rest of the peppers and tomatillos and pulled up the plants. We removed old landscape cloth, raked, and pulled weeds. We stacked the tomato cages for the winter. At the end of it all, Kurt tilled the row we'd cleaned out. We got so much done. It was wonderful.

Workers in the big garden.

June and Hazel after stacking tomato cages.

The last of the peppers and tomatillos.

And then, to finish the day in the best traditional Friday way, Hannah made pizza. And the sky contributed to the finale by giving us a spectacular sunset.

Sunset on Friday.

This is General Conference weekend, so all of our activities had to be planned around the two sessions at noon and 4:00. The day started with a big breakfast. Stacey prides herself on making meals from all home-grown ingredients, and this was a Potter County feast. She made apple turnovers with filling from last year's apples. She made a Waldorf salad with apples and walnuts from the Amish and celery from my garden. She fried bacon from last year's pigs, and hash browns from this year's potatoes. I scrambled a dozen and a half eggs from my own hens. To drink, there was last year's apple cider, this year's grape juice, and milk from the dairy down the road.

Breakfast with Russell.

A Potter County breakfast.

Between the two sessions, Stacey, Hannah, June, Mabel, and I took a drive into the Susquehannock State Forest to the Losey Overlook. From the overlook, we could look out over a wide vista of Potter County. We went hoping the fall colors would be good. They were good, but a bit dull. It was a hazy afternoon. We had to hurry home again and get ready for the second session of conference.

The view from the overlook.

At the overlook.

The second session of conference was excellent. I especially loved the music. Tabor and Hazel left then to go home. The rest of the Thayns are staying until Monday. After the session, we had a big dinner. This was another Potter County harvest meal. Sarah prepared most of it. The main course was a pork roast from our own pig. We also had spaghetti squash, delicata squash, salsa verde and chips, grilled cabbage steaks, funeral potatoes, and rolls—almost all of it made from ingredients from our garden. The Shilligs joined us and brought a pasta salad. It was all delicious.

Our post-conference feast.

I went to bed last night feeling a little queasy. I suspected it was something I ate. At midnight it was worse. I had terrible stomach pains. I got up and Stacey helped me take a hot Epsom salts bath. That's my go-to remedy when I feel like I'm coming down with something. I soaked for half an hour and then went back to bed. I slept late this morning and when I finally got up, I felt pretty good. Not 100%, but much better than I was during the night. I decided I'm taking it easy today. That won't be hard to do. It's the Sabbath and General Conference, so I know at least from noon to 2:00 and 4:00 to 6:00 I'll be reclining in my bed watching the last two sessions. I'm going to send someone else down to do the chores.

As is our tradition on General Conference Sunday, Stacey made cinnamon rolls this morning. She's famous for her cinnamon rolls. This tradition has passed on to our children. Geoffrey and Josiah make excellent cinnamon rolls too.

Stacey's cinnamon rolls, slightly overdone.

Geoffrey's raisin pecan cinnamon rolls.

Josiah's cinnamon rolls.

At 2:00 our niece Emma is leaving to fly back to Utah. It was great having her here. I hope she comes to visit every year at harvest time. I looked at the week ahead and I see that, after a brief spell of rain tonight, the weather will be clear, but chilly, with frost predicted every night. That's as it should be. It is October, after all. I still have some things that need to be done out in the garden, but the harvest is over except for late apples and there aren't very many of those. The rest is ripping, cutting, digging, and mowing. I'm hoping that by the end of the week my garden will be ready for its euphemistic winter's sleep. Then the garden year will be over.

Work, Wasps, and Reflection

On Monday, I was oddly unmotivated to work outdoors. The day began in a dreary Monday funk and, although it cleared later and was sunny, all my momentum dissolved in the morning and never recovered. Instead, I spent most of the day at my desk working on transcribing my journals. I've written about this project for the last few weeks. I've reached the point where I'm in the 90s now, and I want to get past them. They were hard years and I recorded them in so much agonizing detail. It has been quite painful at times to relive things I had forgotten. But it has also been helpful. I was frustrated and often angry during those years because I knew where I wanted to live and how I wanted to live, and I didn't know how to obtain it. Now, after miracles and the intervention of angels, I live in the place I desired, doing, for the most part, the things I hungered to do during all those frustrating years. Reading these old journals has made me more thankful for the blessings that brought us here at last. I swore when we arrived here that I would never take this place and the circumstances that brought us here for granted. Working my way through these painful journal entries has strengthened that resolve.

I still have a long way to go on this project. I have five more volumes to go before I hit January 2000, when we moved here. After 2000, I began writing a weekly update email which eventually became the Potter County Journal, and that mostly replaced my hand-written journals. I do still write in my journals, but I don't use them to record the day-to-day stuff. My hand-written journal now is for weightier and more private reflection than what I share in the PCJ.

My journals from 1975 to 1999.

On Tuesday, while walking across the front lawn on my way to the barn to do the morning chores, I smelled The Smell. It was a damp and dewy morning. The lawn was covered with fallen maple leaves. I stopped, inhaled deeply, and smiled. The damp-fallen-leaf-smell is one of the finest, most nostalgic odors I know of. As I walked, I wondered what actually makes that smell. Surely it was some magical concoction of rare volatile oils. I had to do some research to satisfy my curiosity. It turns out I was partly right. There are volatile oils involved. But most of that delightful perfume is the smell of decomposition. It is made by bacteria and fungi as they break down the leaves and, in the process, release into the air substances with unpoetic names like geosmin, and 2-methylisoborneol that give us the woody, smoky, sweet, musty smell that I love so much. It's fungi and bacteria turning this year's leaves into next year's soil. Nothing triggers stronger memories for me than smell. The scent of a particular flower, wood smoke on a chilly evening, ripe apples, so many different aromas have the power to unlock floods of memory for me.

Leaves on the lawn.

The weather on Tuesday turned gloomy, but I went out to work anyway. I pulled up the smelly stumps of harvested cabbages and broccoli. I worked on readying a bed to plant garlic. And I spent time wandering through my vegetable garden, along the long border, through the meadow, and out into the big garden, noting all the things that needed to be done that I didn't feel like doing that day. Kurt was more motivated than me. He got out his tractor and tilled parts of the big garden. Then he spent several hours mowing. I got tired just watching him. Maybe if the day had been sunny and warm, I would have felt more ambitious. I told myself that I needed to "make hay while the sun shines," as the old adage says, but the sun wasn't shining. Excuses, excuses.

Tuesday evening at 8:05 EDT, we crossed the Autumnal Equinox. I sometimes wish that when we hit these astronomical season markers there was some sort of noticeable signal. A soft "pop" would be nice. As it is, you can't really tell unless you know. The seasons seem to come and go randomly, overlapping, shifting back and forth, sometimes not showing up at all. There have been years when it seemed we never had spring or fall. One thing is certain— here, every season but winter is too short.

Wednesday was cool, but it was bright and sunny. I spent a large part of the day mowing. After that, I worked in the flowerbeds. As I worked—and I hate to confess it—I found myself almost wishing we'd have a frost. There were scraggly plants in the garden that needed to be put out of their misery, and I couldn't bring myself to do the deed. A frost would do it. But I wanted it to be a selective frost—to only kill some things, but not touch other things, like the morning glories and the zinnias. But that's not how frost works. When it comes, it is both merciful and merciless. That morning, when I looked at the national weather map, I saw that blue blob indicating frost slowly making its way south out of Canada into Minnesota, upper Michigan, the top edge of New York, and Vermont. It's coming, I thought. It won't be long.

Later in the afternoon, Miriam checked on her beehives. The smaller hive that had such a rough start is doing fine. The larger hive that was doing so good had a problem. It had been invaded by yellow-jackets. We checked with a couple of people—my brother-in-law, Bob and a lady up in Genesee who keeps bees—to see what we should do. They both said the same thing—restrict the access to the hive so the bees can defend it better, and set up yellow-jacket traps. Miriam blocked two of the three access holes with steel wool. We were told to use steel wool because the yellow-jackets will chew through everything else. She also partitioned off the half of the hive the bees hadn't yet built comb in. We ordered some traps that will arrive tomorrow.

Miriam checking her beehives.

Wednesday evening Stacey and I went to the movies. Through Stacey's negotiations, our local theater was showing, for one day only, Fathom Entertainment's movie Heaven in Stone and Glass, a documentary hosted by Bishop Robert Barron, that explores the history and spiritual significance of the French Gothic cathedrals. I was glad we got to see it. In the film Bishop Barron visits five cathedrals: Notre-Dame in Paris, Chartres, Saint-Denis, Reims, and Amiens. I have a special love for Gothic cathedrals, especially Amiens. While working on my degree in Medieval European History, I wrote a paper on the cathedral at Amiens. By the time I was done with that paper, I knew just about every inch of that magnificent building, inside and out. And I got an A+ on that paper. After our own temples, I think the Gothic cathedrals are the most magnificent sacred structures on earth. When we were in France in 2023, we saw Notre-Dame, but it was still being repaired after the catastrophic fire, and we couldn't get near it. We did get to visit Chartres. Unfortunately, we couldn't fit Amiens into our itinerary.

 

At Chartres in 2023.

The west portals of Chartres, 2023.

Thursday when I got up, the first thing I did was check the temperature. It was 29°. It was still dark out, so I couldn't see anything from the windows. I showered and dressed and waited for the light, fearing that my reckless wish on Wednesday might have come true. At dawn I went out and looked across the backyard. The lawn was covered in frost. I took a quick walk to inspect the garden. It looked bad. I retreated to the house and my desk with the heater on beside me, and waited for things to thaw before assessing the scope of the damage.

Frost at dawn on Thursday.

Frosted flowers.

By 11:00 it had warmed to 60° and I went out to have a better look. As I approached the garden, I could see from a distance that the frost had done some damage. And I could smell it. The injured plants gave off an odor as they thawed, a spongy, sweet sort of smell, herbal and sad.  It wasn't a killing frost, just a wounding one. The most exposed leaves of the morning glories were blackened. The dahlias, zinnias, and nasturtiums were crisped. Out in the big garden, the peppers took a hit. The basil suffered the worst. Everything survived, but it would have been nice if some of them hadn't.

Frosted morning glory vines.

Sad frosted basil.

Sad zinnias after they thawed.

That afternoon, I pulled up all the dry beans and hung them on the clothesline to cure for a day before shelling them. I also trimmed the last of the onions that had been hanging in the woodshed. Sitting in the woodshed, with warm sunlight shining through the windows and the warmer smell of onions in the air around me, I dozed off. I don't know how long I was asleep. I was awakened by the sound of a wasp buzzing against a window pane. After dealing with yellow-jackets a few days earlier, my first reaction was to swat and kill it, but I didn't. I caught it in a jar and let it go outside. It was a pretty wasp, metallic blue and shiny. It flew away and I went back to trimming onions. I looked it up later and found that it was a Great Black Wasp (Sphex pensylvanicus). The adult wasps eat pollen and nectar and feed their larvae with paralyzed insects like grasshoppers, which means they are a beneficial predator. So I felt noble for not killing it.

 

Trimming onions.

The Great Black Wasp (not my photo).

Beans hanging to dry.

When Stacey and Hannah got home later that afternoon, we dug up part of the big potato patch. We harvested two of the five rows and got about 200 pounds of red potatoes. 

Digging potatoes.

Sorting and bagging potatoes.

Friday was another cold and frosty morning. It was 28° at dawn. It was also foggy, as befits a fall morning. This time it was a killing frost. Things that only got singed on Thursday got fried on Friday. It was the end for the morning glories, zinnias, nasturtiums, basil, and even the potted coleus and impatiens on the front porch. My pace was quick on my morning walk. It had to be to keep warm.

Sunrise on Friday.

I worked through the day in the garden ripping out some of the frost casualties. I had quite a pile of marigolds, cleome, cornflowers, and zinnias ready to go to the compost pile. I spent an hour picking dry bean pods from the bushes I had drying on the clothesline. Sitting in the afternoon sunshine on a lovely fall day, harvesting beans seemed like quintessential late September. Later, Miriam helped me crack the pods and extract the beans.

Picking off pods.

Shelling out the beans.

Miriam checked her beehives again that afternoon and determined that the invaded hive was dead. There was no queen and only a few bees, but lots of yellow-jackets. She closed the hive. She will harvest what honey and wax she can and start it again next spring. It's sad to lose a hive like that.

That afternoon, Stacey and I went out to the Amish Bulk Food store on Fox Hill to do some shopping. We got the items we needed and then saw that they had Concord grapes for sale. We couldn't resist. We bought three boxes, a bushel and a half. They also had bins of apples. They were from New York State. We didn't buy any. I could hardly stand to look at that beautiful fruit when I had thirty apple trees in my orchard with hardly enough apples to make a pie.

Grapes from the Amish.

The Fosters and the Shilligs came for pizza that evening. After dinner we picked raspberries. The raspberries this year are more abundant than they have ever been. We have five gallons of them frozen and waiting to be transformed into jelly and sauce some chilly late autumn day.

Yesterday was one of those busy, tedious, and rewarding days. We had a long list of things to do—continue shelling beans, processing tomatoes into salsa, digging up potatoes, processing grapes, bringing in the squash from the big garden to store. And on top of all that, there were the usual Saturday chores—laundry and cleaning the house. With grapes cooking in the steamer, the house smelled wonderful. I'm way past the point where cooking tomatoes smell good, but grapes! A mouth-watering aroma. Shelling beans was tedious, but the beans are pretty and, in the end, hefting a bowlful of beans felt very rewarding.

Our processing lineup on the dining room table.

Grapes in the steamer.

Pretty beans, a variety called King of the North.

Hauling in the squash.

We ended up with four gallons of grape juice, four quarts of beans, nine pints of salsa, another four hundred pounds of potatoes, and several dozen winter squash. Kurt had his tractor out helping to dig up potatoes and when we were done with that, he went on to till the now empty parts of the garden. 

Grape juice ready to go down cellar.

Squash in the woodshed.

There was a spectacular sunset last night. Unfortunately, I only saw the very end of it when I went out to close the barn for the night. It was fading, but still beautiful. From the photos my friends posted, it was amazing earlier.

The last of what was a gorgeous sunset, so I heard.

I wish I'd gone out earlier to see it in its glory.

Today at church, Sarah and I were the speakers. I did something different for my talk. Last week Geoffrey, who is on the High Council in his stake in Utah, gave a great talk that he shared with us. When I read it, I decided I would use it as my talk today. Many of the members in our branch remember Geoffrey from his growing up years here. I thought they would appreciate hearing his talk. Plus the topic of his talk was just what I'd planned to speak on. Our talks went well. Our meetings were good. It started raining on our drive home. The trees on the hills are changing rapidly now and it really feels like fall. Lunch is almost ready. While we wait, Miriam is at the piano and Hannah has her violin and they are making music. I love afternoons like this. 

I'll have to go down and do the afternoon chores in the rain, but I don't mind. The coming week will be busy as we try to wrap up all the processing of food from our harvest. After this rainy spell, the week looks good with cool, sunny days, perfect for the work we need to do. And then it will be October.

Changing Seasons

The week seemed short. Arriving home from the Thayns' house on Monday afternoon seemed to clip off part of the week and speed up what was left after it. I found myself scrambling to find time for all the things I wanted to accomplish. Summer is over. The equinox doesn't arrive until Tuesday, but the season has already departed. I'm not ready to face the cold days yet. Am I ever?

On Tuesday morning, I stepped out just before dawn intending to take my walk. I was in short sleeves. The cold was like a slap in the face. I went back inside and checked the temperature. It was 35°. I put on my fleece-lined hoodie, but I didn't resume my intended walk. Instead, I turned on the heater by my desk and hunkered over it while I checked my emails, the news, etc. When Stacey and Hannah left for work, there was frost on the windshield of the car. I went out to the garden and couldn't see any sign of frost. I came back inside and didn't venture out again until 9:00 when the world had finally warmed to 55°.

While I waited for the warmth, I worked at transcribing my old journals. I had reached 1987 by then, the year that Rachel was born. It seemed fitting, having just been to the birth of Rachel's sixth child. They have finally settled on a name for her, Iris Elizabeth Thayn. As soon as I found out, I went online and looked for varieties of iris with 'Elizabeth' in their name. There are several. I want to add them to my garden. All of Rachel's girls have a floral element in their names. In my gardens I already have hazels and roses (Hazel Rose), a juniper (Juniper Louise), and ferns (Mabel Fern). I don't have a myrtle (Florence Myrtle) because they don't grow here. Maybe I should try growing one in a pot. So adding some 'Elizabeth' irises is perfect.

Iris Elizabeth Thayn.

The dew was finally dry at noon and I had to mow. September is usually when mowing grass turns into mowing leaves as the grass stops growing and the leaves start falling. The leaves are falling, but the grass is still growing like it's May. I finished with my yard, but the Shilligs' and the Fosters' yards needed it too and I was tired of sitting on the mower. When Stacey got home, she said she would mow. She's never used the Cub Cadet before, so I gave her a quick lesson and off she went. By dinner time she'd finished everything but the front of the Fosters' property where the bank down to the road is scary steep.

Wednesday was a warmer day, but with the warmth came rain. It didn't arrive until later in the day, so I had time to work in the garden. I'm at the ripping up, tearing down, and clearing out stage for a lot of things. I pulled up spent plants, tore down collapsed vines, and cleared a bed for planting garlic. Our main tomato crop was severely damaged by blight. We lost nearly all the fruit. The tomatoes in my raised-bed garden have survived the blight so far. We picked a bucket of them Wednesday afternoon and made sauce. The cauliflower and broccoli are done and I've begun pulling them up and sending them to the compost pile. We've harvested all the corn. The green beans are gone and the dry beans are almost ready to pull up to dry. I cut all the pumpkins from their vines. Most of them will be processed for food, the rest will be decorations.

My pumpkin harvest.

In the flowerbeds, almost everything is finished or at least past its prime. The zinnias and cosmos still look good. The colchicums have started to bloom. They are the flower season's last hurrah. They're a little early this year. They usually don't bloom until the end of September and beginning of October. I won't take their earliness as a sign of any sort.

Some of my zinnias.

Cosmos.

A bed of colchicums.

I have three types of colchicum.

After much perseverance and a good amount of carnage, I think we've licked the rat problem down in the barn. I haven't seen any evidence of activity for two weeks now. I'm not taking any chances, though. I still have traps and poison bait set out, just in case. Since the rats are gone, chicken food consumption has decreased considerably. It looks like the rats were eating more than the chickens.

Thursday was warm and humid. It drizzled off and on through the day, a soft, misty drizzle. Wonderful weather. I worked in the garden and sweated all day and it felt good. I brought in all the pumpkins, washed them in vinegar water and set them on the back porch. We will wait until later to process the edible ones. 

Pumpkins on the back porch.

More pumpkins.

Friday was wet and gray. It rained hard during the night and the day never completely dried out. It felt very autumnal. I spent the morning working on transcribing old journals again. By then I was in 1990. I was in the bishopric in the Sylmar Ward and was released in May of that year. I got my undergraduate degree and began my postgraduate work. We already had Geoffrey, Rachel, and Sarah, and then Miriam was born in June. It was a busy time.

Working on these journals can be almost traumatic for me at times. Those early years of our marriage when we were so poor, and I was in school, and we had young children were hard at times—from what I wrote, maybe all the time. Reading my words now, I'd forgotten how much I agonized over things back then. The pages of these journals were my therapy where I wrote what I usually could not or would not say aloud. But there is a lot of happiness in them too. Those were times when most of my immediate family lived close enough that we could get together often. Now we are scattered across the continent and seldom all in one place at the same time.

By noon the sky had cleared and I went out at last. Everything was still too damp to do much. Later in the afternoon, Sarah came over and we worked in the big garden. We took down the protective arches we had made over the tomato row. Despite all our attempts to save them, the tomatoes in the big garden were wiped out by late blight. We barely got any fruit from them. 

Taking down the tomato covers.

Sad, blighted tomatoes.

We also worked on the fenced yard for her guinea flock. We covered it with net to keep them from flying out, and to keep undesirable things from flying in. We let them out into their yard and they were pretty happy. When it came time for them to roost for the night, they didn't know to go back into their pen. Sarah had to catch them and put them back. They aren't very bright.

Hannah left to go down to the Thayns' after work on Friday. Miriam was down there all week. So it was just me and Stacey here this weekend. On Friday night we went on a date to the movies. We saw The End of Oak Street. It was fun and sometimes gave us a jump scare, but it had terrible problems with time-travel paradoxes. That's something movies seldom get right. That always bugs me. But it was a fun date.

There was a beautiful sunrise yesterday. I could see the glow of it on the walls inside the house and dressed quickly and went out to enjoy it. While I was down at the beaver pond, I finally saw a beaver swimming around. I was glad to see it. I was afraid they'd abandoned their pond.

Sunrise on Saturday.

Sunrise over the beaver pond.

Later in the day on Saturday, Sarah and Tosh came over. We worked some more on making room in their chicken coop for their guinea flock. We divided the interior of the coop into two parts and made accommodations for the guineas in the new half. I also worked some more on dismantling the tomato row in the big garden. Stacey spent the day in the kitchen turning tomatoes into sauce. She finished twelve quarts.

Working inside the Fosters' chicken coop.

The new dividing wall.

Stacey cooking tomatoes all day long.

Twelve quarts of tomato sauce.

This Sabbath morning was dark, gray, and wet. It had rained all night. It was still drizzling when I went down to do the morning chores. I came back to the house and put on a long queue of Tabernacle Choir music to lift the mood. I love hymns. After I was dressed and ready for church, I sat down, as I do every morning, to look at the news. I only glanced at the first two headlines and stopped. I didn't feel like wallowing in all of that on the Sabbath. The day was already dark enough. Instead, I turned up the volume on my hymns.

This evening, just before sunset, Yom Kippur begins. It is the holiest day of the year for the Jews. When the Lord revealed His law to Moses, He commanded: And this shall be a statute for ever unto you: that in the seventh month, on the tenth day of the month, ye shall afflict your souls, and do no work at all, whether it be one of your own country, or a stranger that sojourneth among you: For on that day shall the priest make an atonement for you, to cleanse you, that ye may be clean from all your sins before the Lord. It shall be a sabbath of rest unto you, and ye shall afflict your souls, by a statute for ever (Leviticus 16:20-31). To atone is to suffer the penalty for sins and, through that suffering, be made clean and reconciled to God. It is the central doctrine of the gospel, that Christ, the only one capable of carrying the burden of our sins, paid the penalty through His suffering, and by our repentance and, through his mercy and grace, we can be redeemed and reconciled with God. Today in sacrament meeting, we partook of the emblems of Christ's death and suffering so that we can always remember what He did for us and strive to repent and be made clean through His infinite atonement. It is a beautiful and wondrous gift to us. I felt the power of it strongly today.

Church is done and we are home. Our meetings were good—good talks, good lessons, and good people. I love our little branch. I noticed trees with leaves changing already as we drove home today. Stacey is making lunch now. Later on, Hannah and maybe Miriam will be home. The day is still gray and drizzly, the perfect sort of day for an afternoon nap. The week ahead looks to be pretty rainy, but I'll do what I can to continue harvesting and getting the garden ready for its winter sleep. I hate to think about that, but it is coming, so best to accept it and prepare.