Summer's lease hath all too short a date.

Eating ripe peaches on the porch at Aunt Julie's.

Today is the first day of September. This is not a month that ranks very high on my favorite month list. May, June, and July are at the top of the list. January and February are at the bottom. The rest float around depending on how June-like or February-like they turn out to be. Technically there is still some summer left in the month. The first day of autumn doesn’t officially arrive until the twenty-third. But there is usually more of autumn than summer in our average September here. There might be a few more warm days, but it starts to get pretty chilly in September. And we almost always have our first frost before the month is through. The trees will start to turn in September and that will be beautiful, but the best of the fall color belongs to October. And that beauty is short lived. And what comes afterward taints it. I’ve always wondered why it takes so long for the earth to warm up, but it cools off in a flash.

Black-eyed Susans.

Ripe raspberries.

I used to dread the first frosts of fall. I used to fight them. I would go to great pains to cover plants to protect them. I’d go out on frosty mornings and water plants to try and minimize the damage. If the frosts come especially early, I’m still inclined to do that. But most years now I welcome the frost. It kills the garden and gives me the green light to move in and clear it all away. And best of all, it kills off the insects that I hate – Japanese beetles, mosquitoes, and lily beetles. Unfortunately it also makes the insects that I love disappear – crickets, katydids, and bees. After the frost comes, it seems too quiet and empty without their noise and movement in the garden.

Speaking of bees, I had an incident last week. For years I kept honeybees. I kept them until I started having bad reactions to the inevitable stings I got now and then. I was sad when I gave them to an Amish friend who also kept bees. I still miss them. I miss them buzzing in the flowers and in the blooming fruit trees. I miss the honey they gave us. Since giving my hives away, I don’t see many honeybees in the garden. There was a wild hive in a tree up in the hollow last year, but it isn’t there this year. I think they either died out over the winter or swarmed away to some other place. But we do have a lot of bumblebees. Bumblebees are not big hive builders like honeybees. They live in nests on the ground in a colony of about 50 bees, ruled by a queen. The entire colony dies in the winter, except for the queen who hibernates. In the spring she lays eggs and starts a new colony. I like bumblebees. I like their largeness and their fuzziness. They are great pollinators. Unlike honeybees, bumblebees can sting multiple times. But they are usually gentle, not inclined to sting. I’d never been stung by one – until last week. I was working in the garden and the flowers were full of busy bumblebees. One bee kept landing on me and I kept gently brushing her off. After a while she got more aggressive, buzzing and flying at me. Then she landed on my shoe and tried to climb up my sock into my pant leg. I shook my leg and she went down into my shoe and stung me on the heel. I tore my shoe off and hopped around. It really hurt for about an hour. I was worried that I’d have another bad reaction and swell up, but I didn’t. My heel throbbed for the rest of the day. I don’t know why she went crazy on me. So now I’ve had my first, and hopefully only, bumblebee sting.

Bumblebee in the snapdragons.

More bumblebees in the the snapdragons.

Bumblebee on the sedum.

We’ve had an appliance situation at our house. Our oven stopped working two weeks ago. For a family that lives on homemade bread, that’s a serious situation. It was an old stove – well 15 years old, which is old for appliances these days. Stacey, always the one to try and fix things herself, took a look and determined that the pilot was broken. She ordered a part, and we waited and waited and waited for it. When it finally arrived she found that that was not the problem after all. She then suspected that the thermocoupler was broken. She finally admitted defeat and called The Man (remember that episode of The Andy Griffith Show when Aunt Bea wouldn’t call The Man to fix her broken freezer and it just got worse until she finally gave in and called him?). Well, The Man came down on Monday and confirmed that it was indeed the thermocoupler. The problem was, he doubted he could find a replacement part and if he did, he said it would be expensive. The stove was all gas – nothing electric on it. Apparently they don’t make stoves like that anymore. They all have electric pilot ignitions now. Well, Stacey remembered that when we got this stove (a gift from her father), she gave our old stove to our friends up the hill, the Goodenoughs. They had it in their garage intending to use it for summer canning. It was still there and it still worked. Or so we thought. We got rid of our old broken stove and retrieved the one from the Goodenoughs and installed it. It worked fine – except for the oven. So on Tuesday Stacey went to negotiate with The Man for a new stove. It will be delivered on Wednesday. We can hardly wait. We’ve been without our sourdough bread for too long.

The township continued to work on our road last week. As they progressed, I realized they were probably going to smash the stand of milkweed that grows along the road by the barn. I knew there were monarch butterfly caterpillars in those milkweeds, so on Thursday morning I did a caterpillar rescue. I found six of them of varying sizes and relocated them to some milkweeds growing in my flowerbeds. Later, after the township had trampled the milkweed patch, Hannah, Josiah, and Stacey conducted another search and rescued five more. I hope the township finishes their work soon and that it ends up looking better than it does now.

Work on the road.

 

Rescued caterpillar.

More caterpillars.

And still more.

It was time to make another batch of pickle relish so on Thursday afternoon I drove out to our friends the Joneses to get some peppers. Nancy had beautiful peppers ready for me and also gave me eggplants, sweet corn, tomatoes, and enough cucumbers to make two more batches of relish. They grow great produce! Saturday afternoon, we finally had time to begin preparing another batch. Josiah, ever the happy grinder, ground up the peppers, cucumbers, and onions. I salted it and set in the refrigerator to cure over Sunday. Tomorrow I will finish it. I love the smell of relish.

One of my dahlias.

The rose-of-sharon blooming at last.

I got called in to school on Friday – the first time this school year. Somehow walking into school for the first time after the break makes it seem like summer never happened.

On Friday evening the Thayns arrived to spend the weekend with us. We love it when they come to visit. Saturday morning Tabor and Josiah went fishing down on the Allegany River. The rest of us started a Big Project and Josiah and Tabor joined in when they returned. We’ve talked for a long time of taking down three half-dead pine trees in the Shillig’s yard. Julie gave us the go ahead, and it was perfect to have the Thayns here to help. But Tabor’s chainsaw is broken and we didn’t know what to do. Then Stacey had the idea to call our neighbor Ziggy Dunn who helped us cut down trees the last time. He came over at 9:00 and, in a few hours, he had all three trees down and cut in pieces. It was great watching him work. He knows how to take down a tree. When he was done, the rest of us spent most of the rest of the day hauling branches to the burn pile and stacking logs. We put the logs down by the road with a sign saying they are free for the taking and a neighbor up the road stopped to say he’ll take them. So the Shillig’s yard has been transformed. It seems more open and tidy without those trees. It’s great to have good neighbors like Ziggy.

One tree going down.

Then another tree.

Burning the branches.

The Shillig's yard sans pine trees.

The log pile.

Saturday while everyone else kept working, Stacey and I took a break and drove up to Genesee to attend a surprise birthday party for our friend and neighbor Carol Goodenough, who turns 80 this week. She was very surprised and it was great to see many friends, family, and neighbors there and meet some new ones.

Ornamental kale (the only kind I like).

We’re back from church now. It looks like it’s going to rain. We’re having biscuits and gravy for lunch – Tabors’ special request. There’s a rumor that there may be homemade donuts later. Tomorrow is Labor Day and there is no school, so the Thayns are staying another day. It looks like tomorrow will be rainy too, maybe even a thunderstorm, but we’ll find things to do indoors. There are plenty of games to play. We’ll be happy to spend the day playing games, enjoying just being together. And then the normalcy of September will set in as we watch the summer fade away.