Glorious October

Morning on the first of October.

It’s October now, possibly the most beautiful month of the year here in Potter County – at least the beginning part is. The changing of the leaves is an annual miracle I look forward to all year long. How all that color has been hiding there, waiting to appear is amazing to me. It looks like our leaf season will be very short lived this year. The leaves started changing early in September. Our peak color usually comes around October 15th. It looks like this year it came on September 30th. I took a drive up to the Losey Overlook on the last day of September to take pictures. It was hazy, but I had a feeling there wouldn’t be a better day. I was right. On Thursday and Friday we had rain and wind and most of the leaves came down. Now we go from admiring the leaves to raking them up.

The view from the Losey Overlook.

The front yard.

I love the smell of leaf smoke in the evening.

With the rain came cooler weather. It looks like things aren’t going to warm up much again for a long time. Probably April. In advance of the cold, I picked all my peppers. We had a nice crop this year. Stacey cut them up and put them in the freezer to be used through the winter. I brought all my potted plants – geraniums, coleus, lavender, gardenia – in off the porch stairs and set them on the shelves on the back porch and shut the porch door for the first time in a long time. I will try to keep the plants alive for as long as I can. The ones that survive a week or two on the porch will come into the house. They usually don’t last long in the house, but I try anyway. I just don’t want to let go of the growing season.

Peppers.

As the cold days settle in I find myself thinking of food even more than I usually do. I like food – a lot. There are certain foods that we eat during this time of year I especially love. All the apple related foods – fresh cider, apple pie, and sometimes if I beg, Stacey will make me apple dumplings. I don’t make good pastry crust or I’d make them myself. My Great Grandma Showers made the best apple dumplings I’ve ever eaten. When Grandma Showers made apple dumplings, it was the whole meal. The tender crust, the spicy baked apple inside, the sharp cheddar cheese melted over top – it was heavenly. I haven’t had one of Grandma Showers’s apple dumplings in almost 50 years and still think about them.

The meadow.

This Tuesday is my Grandma Rathfon’s birthday (she is the daughter of Great Grandma Showers). Mary Elizabeth Showers Rathfon was born on October 7, 1906 in Port Royal, Pennsylvania. She would have been 106 this year. I was lucky that for the first ten years of my life, Grandma Rathfon lived upstairs and was part of my life every day. After we moved away from her, she came most summers to visit us for a month. She and I carried on a correspondence that stretches from 1968 until her death in 1987. I have all the letter we wrote each other. After I got home from my mission, I went to stay a month with Grandma and Grandad in New Cumberland. It was a great experience for me. Grandma thought I was too thin and every time she went to the market she bought a shoo-fly pie and a lemon sponge pie for me, even though there were still half-eaten pies at home. (Here I am thinking about food again.) She knew I loved them. She’d cut a piece of each pie for me to eat as dessert for every meal. I did my best to eat what I could. Grandma and Grandad made me all the foods I love while I was there with them. Grandad made his famous spaghetti. Grandma had a jar of pickled eggs in the fridge that she kept continually filled for me. We had sauerkraut and dumplings. She fried scrapple for me for breakfast. I wasn’t as thin when I went back to California. I loved being with them. I loved to sit and listen to them tell stories. Grandad was quite a character. Grandma was the kindest person I’ve ever known. She’s been gone for 27 years now. I still find myself thinking I should call her on the phone or that’s it’s been a while since I got a letter from her. I miss her.

My Grandma Rathfon.

This is General Conference weekend. To some it might seem strange that I would look forward to spending 10 hours in church in one weekend, but I love it. For one thing, the first session doesn’t start until 12:00 here on the East Coast and that gives us nice, leisurely mornings – no rushing to get to church on time. Which brings me to the next good thing – we aren’t actually in church. We get to watch the sessions on BYUTV at the Shillig’s house on a big screen TV while sitting on comfortable couches. And we don’t have to dress up. But the best things about General Conference are the wonderful messages and the music. With the world in such a state of upheaval it’s good to hear the words of prophets, apostles, and other church leaders bringing things back into proper perspective. And we get to hear the Mormon Tabernacle Choir sing in three of the sessions. We’ll be heading over to Shillig’s soon for today’s sessions and we’ll have lunch with them in between. You can’t beat that for a good weekend.

The first of October.