We had a good, productive week. Monday was a great day. It was cold and frosty in the morning, but that’s just how things are now. After the sun was up for a while it warmed up and eventually hit the mid 60's – perfect for what we needed to do that day. The Thayns were still here and we had a Big Work Day planned. I wanted to finish most of the projects on my Getting Ready for Winter List. The items on the list for that day were:
All day long we worked. Miriam started and tended a fire to burn weeds and fallen branches that Tabor and others gathered from all over the yard. At the end of the day it felt so good to look over it all and see what we accomplished. The Thayns left for home at 5:00. I’m so thankful for all their help. It would have taken me weeks to accomplish what they did in one day. They will be back at Thanksgiving.
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| Hannah power washing the front of the house. |
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| Hazel, Tabor, and Kurt working on the woodpile. |
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| The woodpile. |
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| Burning weeds and branches. |
Tuesday was another fine day. Miriam and I were both home and we continued to work on more items on the Project List. We finished wrapping the trunks of the littlest fruit trees with hardware cloth to protect them. I cleaned out raised beds in the vegetable garden. In the afternoon Miriam, Hannah, and I spread straw over the garlic bed over in the big garden. It was another good, productive day.
Wednesday was cooler, but still nice, especially for mid-November. I spent the morning doing autumnal things in the house – processing pumpkins, canning applesauce, making a batch of apple butter, and I processed tomato seeds. I managed to finally finish the pumpkins. They are all steamed, mashed, and in the freezer now. The applesauce I canned was made from my Winter Banana apples. They’d been sitting on the back porch for several weeks and it was time to use them. They made a nice smooth, very fragrant sauce. I had some sauce leftover and decided to make a batch of apple butter. I grew up with apple butter. We ate in on toast and sometimes put a dollop of it on cottage cheese. I love it. But my family doesn’t especially. I think living for so long out west where it isn’t commonly used, they just don’t know how good it is. I’m hoping when they taste this batch they will become enthusiasts like me.
Processing the tomato seeds was disgusting. To get good seed from tomatoes, it’s best to let the fruit rot. I selected three of my best varieties weeks ago and put them in containers on the back porch where they rotted and got moldy. On Wednesday I poured out the putrid, soupy mess and strained out the seeds. I let the seeds dry a few days and then put them away until next spring.
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| Drying tomato seeds. |
At noon that day I went out and did some weeding and mowed the lawn. I’ve vowed several times that I was done with mowing for the year, but I couldn’t resist one more time. There were some spots where the grass was uneven and taller and there were drifts of leaves here and there. I mowed it all smooth and even and ground up the leaves. I’ve never mowed this late in the year before. Now I really am done mowing. Really. And the whole time, I enjoyed the sunshine. It was a mellow day.
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| The front lawn after its last mowing of the year. |
While working in the house all week, I listened to Brahms. I have always associated the music of Brahms with autumn. It’s an association that goes back a long way. I “discovered” Brahms in the fall of 1975. I was seventeen. I think I was a strange teenager, well, stranger than teenagers normally are anyway. My love of classical music began very early when I first started listening to my parents’ record collection and accelerated rapidly during my teenage years. But my appreciation for certain composers developed over time. I loved Mozart right from the start and he still ranks in my top ten. Mozart, Chopin, Beethoven, and Mendelssohn were all early loves. Bach came a little later and immediately rose to Number One, where he has remained. Other composers came even later as my musical experience and tastes matured. I didn’t tackle Stravinsky until I was in my early twenties. My love of Brahms blossomed in the fall of 1975. My journal entries indicate that I was a bit moody that autumn. I was beginning my senior year of high school. I was unsure of my future. Relationships with my friends were changing. I felt left out and lonely a lot. And then there was Brahms. His music felt perfect. Sometimes it was lighthearted and harmonious, often it was darker and emotionally powerful. And I resonated to it. The Violin Concerto in D Major, the Variations on a Theme by Haydn, the piano Intermezzi, and especially the symphonies. He only wrote four symphonies and I explored them in order. Symphony No. 1 in C minor was amazing to me. I listened to it over and over again. In the fourth movement when the French horns play just before the famous “Allegro Non Troppo” finale theme starts, it still makes my heart ache. Symphony No. 2 in D that flows back and forth from serene harmony to energetic melody is lovely. Symphony No. 3 in F is my favorite of the four. It is filled with huge sweeping melodies, and the perfectly beautiful, melancholy third movement, “Poco Allegretto” is my favorite piece of Brahms. Symphony No. 4 in E minor is full of darkness and drama. My adolescent soul feasted on all of this. And my late middle aged soul does too, especially in the autumn.
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| My autumnal friend Johannes Brahms. |
On Thursday the weather started to get colder. That morning I canned another batch of applesauce and made some apple jelly. We’re processing the last of our apples now, a wonderful French variety called Caville Blanc d’Hiver. It makes great sauce and jelly. With our nights so often in the twenties now, I was worried about the potted plants I’d brought into the back porch a few weeks ago. Some of them, like rosemary and pelargonium, are very tender. So I moved them all indoors for the winter. It took some rearranging to fit them all on the plant shelves in the music room. That’s the best spot for plants in the house with its west-facing windows and the grow lights I have set up there. Now with the outdoor garden done and dormant, my horticultural energies will be focused on my indoor garden. Thursday afternoon the wind began to blow hard and the temperature began to drop. That night it rained hard and the wind blew all night long. Cold weather was coming – I could feel it in my bones.
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| My crowded plant shelf under the grow lights. |
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| One of my Christmas (Thanksgiving?) cacti is blooming. |
Friday was chilly, but pleasant with a bit of sunshine. I’m still not used to being on standard time. It seems when I get home from school, I have to hurry and do the chores before it gets dark. The chickens are always anxiously waiting for me to feed them. They rush to eat and then go into the coop to start settling in for the night. Friday after school, Miriam left to visit the Fosters for a few days. She will come home later in the week. I miss having her here.
Yesterday was a gray day. I woke up to a cold, lowering sky that brought us rain with snow mixed in it. First thing in the morning, just before the wet weather arrived, I covered the woodpile with tarps. While I was doing that I noticed that my bird feeders were in need of some attention. They were dirty and parts of them were clogged with seed husks. I brought them in and scrubbed them. When they were dry, I refilled them and hung them back in their places in the crab apple tree outside the kitchen window. Watching birds at the feeders is one of my chief sources of delight and distraction during the winter. As soon as the feeders were up, chickadees arrived and soon after that, cardinals, nuthatches, and finches. Just before noon the snow tried to accumulate, but wasn’t successful. I worked during the morning on tidying the back porch and woodshed. I’ve seen a mouse in the woodshed several times lately. It discovered where I was drying some sunflower heads and was helping itself to the seeds. I removed the sunflowers and swept up the mouse mess and set a trap. I hope to despatch the wee, sleekit, cowrin, tim'rous beastie before it settles in to raise a family (sorry Robert Burns).
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| Yesterday. |
I think the pre-holiday tidiness bug has bitten me. I spent yesterday afternoon sweeping, dusting, and rearranging things. I took out the window screens and put in the storm windows. I moved the front porch furniture to the upper part of the barn for storage. The house is feeling more battened down and tidy for winter. I like a tidy house at all times, but especially during the holidays. I can’t abide the thought of decorating an untidy house. And we will soon start decorating. As I was tidying, I had the Celtic Christmas albums playing. We always start listening to Christmas music in November and I always start it off with a week or two of Celtic Christmas. After Thanksgiving we’ll move ahead, adding more and more Christmas music to the queue that is almost continually playing in the house.
It snowed during the night. Not enough to look pretty, just enough to look cold. And it was cold, freezing, in fact – exactly 32°. There was a pale pink sunrise, but it wasn’t bright enough to tempt me to walk out any further than the front porch to photograph it. At church today we sang the great Thanksgiving hymns, Prayer of Thanksgiving and Come, Ye Thankful People. I’m the one who selects the music for our meetings. We would have sung those hymns next week, but that is our Stake Conference and I don’t choose the music for those meetings and I wanted to be sure we sang these hymns. I especially love this verse:
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| This morning. |
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| Sunrise this morning. |
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Dan
