I’m late sending this out today. We left right after church and drove up to Rochester to the home of our Stake Patriarch. Josiah received his patriarchal blessing today. After that we stopped and ate a picnic lunch on the Erie Canal. Then we dropped Hannah off at school. We didn’t get home until just a while ago. We drove through some short spells of rain, but most of the drive was beautiful, especially on the way home with the sun shining low in the sky and the trees in their first stages of fall color.
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| Josiah feeding ducks on the Erie Canal. |
Twice last week the weather service issued a frost warning, on Sunday night and Thursday night. Usually if it’s going to frost anywhere, it will be here in Gold, so Josiah and I spent an hour both evenings covering what we could – the peppers, basil, and dahlias. The weather service was wrong both nights. The temperature only dropped to 40° or so. From now on we’ll have to watch for frost more and more. It usually comes sometime in the second half of September.
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| Preparing for frost. |
Josiah and I dug up our potatoes on Monday after school. It was a pitiful harvest, probably no more than ten pounds of small potatoes from the whole bed. It’s a good thing we live in potato country where lots of farmers around us grow them and we can buy them at a good price.
Stacey and I canned pears on Wednesday evening. Our bushel gave us 16 quarts. I love pears. I love how soft and fragrant they are when they are ripe. I have five pear trees in my orchard but they are still too young to give me a good harvest. Maybe next year.
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| Pears and pickled beets ready to go down cellar. |
There are still apples in the orchard that are not ripe. Some of the trees – the Yellow Transparent, Duchess, and Sops-of-Wine apples – are done for the year. Others, – the Snow, Jonagold, Golden Russet, Caville Blanc, Cox’s Orange Pippin, and Norther Spy will be ripe soon. Some of these late apples we will can as pie filling but most of them will become cider. We just drank the last gallon of last year’s cider last week (we froze thirty gallons), so new cider will be a welcome treat for us.
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| Some the apples still waiting to be picked. |
I was talking to someone about books last week (one of my favorite topics) and they asked me if I ever read books more than once. I do. They wanted to know which books were good enough for me to want to read them two or more times. Besides the scriptures, which I’m continually reading and re-reading, there are several books I’ve read more than once. My most re-read book is The Once and Future King by T. H. White. I’ve read it at least six times and will, no doubt, read it a few times more. The first time I read it was when it called to me from a shelf in the Junior High School library when I was in 7th grade. Fascinating, funny, sad, magical, profound – I could use a dozen adjectives to describe it. I love that book. To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee is another of my favorites. I’ve read it four times. Several works of Charles Dickens qualify for my multiple read list – David Copperfield (three times), Great Expectations (three times), and Dombey and Son (twice). I’ve read Dune by Frank Herbert, Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine, and Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh twice. I’m sure there are others that I don’t recall. Lately I’ve had trouble finding a book I want to read even once. So many of the novels I start with high expectations disappoint me in the first few pages with unwanted profanity and vulgarity and I put them down unfinished. I guess that’s why my most re-read books are mostly Classics.
Saturday was wing clipping day down at the barn. It was time to move the young hens in with the big flock. Up to that point they’d spent their whole lives inside the barn completely enclosed and before we could put them in the big coop we needed to clip their wing feathers so they can’t fly over the chicken yard fence. Wing clipping is always a big deal. The hens don’t cooperate, of course. I let Josiah chase them and catch them and I do the clipping. I just snip off half of the primary and secondary feathers. It doesn’t hurt them, except maybe their dignity. So now the flock is integrated. There will be a ruckus for a while as they adjust the pecking order to include the new hens, then things will settle down again. The next big job at the barn is the big pre-winter cleaning. We’re waiting until Daniel comes home to do that.
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| Clipping wings. |
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| Josiah with our Polish Crested hen. |
One night last week I woke up in the wee hours with a dry mouth. I got out of bed and made my way through the dark house to the kitchen and as I was standing at the sink drinking, I looked out the window and saw the constellation Orion rising over the tree tops to the east. I had to stare at him a while before I went back to bed. Orion is a bright and beautiful constellation, one of the first I learned to identify as a child. I love the names of his brightest stars, Rigel on his left foot, Betelgeuse on his right shoulder, Bellatrix on the left, and the three stars on his belt, Alnitak, Alnilam, and Mintaka. But Orion is a winter constellation and seeing him glowing there in the night sky made me think of the long cold days that loom ahead. He will rise earlier and earlier as the cold days come. As beautiful as he is, I was not happy to see him so soon.
Tomorrow at 10:29 p.m. we will arrive at the Autumnal Equinox. Tuesday is the first day of fall. Day and night will be roughly equal in length. After that, daylight will retreat and night will grow longer until we reach the Winter Solstice three months from now in December.
