Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
(Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act V, Scene V)
Time does not creep in a petty pace from day to day for me anymore. It feels most times like a swiftly flowing river, sweeping me along like an aging bit of flotsam. I tend to grow moody in September. Can you tell? We are in the thick of harvest time and I have plenty to do to keep me busy, but all of it seems too final as the summer wanes. Those endless seeming summers of my younger days now pass by me in what feels like hours. I’ve always felt uncomfortable with time. Even as a child and especially during my teenage years, I was very aware of its fleeting nature. That led me to often begin to mourn the passing of things long before they’d passed. I could show you many moody entries in my youthful journals to prove it. I still find myself doing things like lamenting over the end of summer at its beginning. Time seems uncooperative and even cruel sometimes.
I believe that, as beings who once lived in eternity (although we cannot remember it), we often feel constrained by these brief years of mortality. We find ourselves wishing that time would slow down or speed up depending on how happy or hard the hour is. For me these days, it seems to only speed up. It feels like it is out of control, which, of course, it is. We can’t control time.
It seems the nature of time is not completely understood. If you want to spend a confusing hour, try looking up information on Newtonian time, the Spacetime Continuum, Einstein’s General and Special Theories of Relativity, and Planck Time. Wow. It all makes my head spin. From the vastness of the universe to the subatomic level of quantum mechanics, time seems impressively elusive. Then try to imagine living in a condition where there is no time. Revelation 10:6 and Doctrine and Covenants 84:100 both tell us that at some point, temporal existence will cease and there will be no more time – a condition unimaginable to temporarily temporal beings.
Speaking of the vast universe, I read recently that, using the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have discovered the most distant single star ever seen. It is called WHL0137-LS, but they nicknamed it Earendel, which in Old English means “the morning star.” [J. R. R. Tolkein fans will recognize Eärendil, a half-elf who possesses one of the Silmaril jewels called the Morning Star.] This star is 12.9 billion light-years from Earth. That means that traveling at 186,000 miles per second; 671 million miles per hour, it took the light from that star 12.9 billion years to reach the Hubble’s mirror. I cannot comprehend that.
Now from the realm of great and mind boggling concepts, I return to the little world that I inhabit – a few acres of land, a house, a handful of people with whom I interact, a place where the seasons move in their proper order – most of the time. These things seem mundane after such lofty contemplations, but they are all the world to me.
The last days of August were chilly. Daytime temperatures only rose into the 60s and at night we dropped into the 40s – a disappointing end to what should have been the hottest month of the year for us. I’m hoping that September will bring us some late season heat and an Indian Summer that will linger on into October and November, but it didn’t begin that way. Friday morning, the first of September, it was 36°. Just a few degrees colder and we would have had a garden disaster.
So August’s final days were not so summery. I had plans for Monday. The weather forecast predicted rain after 4:00 p.m. I was foolish enough to believe it and thought I’d harvest some cabbages and start a batch of sauerkraut that morning. But the rain came at 8:00 a.m. and it was chilly and I didn’t go outdoors at all. Instead I sat at my desk by the electric heater(!) and read for most of the morning. I left off reading The Age of Voltaire for a while and turned instead to Shakespeare. It seemed like a Shakespeare tragedy sort of morning. I chose Macbeth, a gloomy and violent play (and the shortest of his tragedies), a perfect match for my mood. Whenever I read Shakespeare’s plays, I read them aloud. It helps my brain digest the words to feel them on my tongue. If you ever happened upon me in the middle of reading a play, sitting alone, using different voices, you’d think I was insane. Macbeth was great and when I reached the famous soliloquy in Act V, Scene V (above), I started pondering on the nature of time, which lead me to my opening paragraphs.
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| Lady Macbeth by John Singer Sargent |
Later that afternoon the rain stopped for a while and I went out to inspect the garden. The rain had toppled some plants that I had to brace up. The gladiolus were bending and about to break so I cut what I could and brought them in. I emptied the Japanese beetle traps, cleaned them, and put them back in place. They are doing a good job of catching hundreds of beetles a day, but there are always more. No matter how often I empty the traps, they are full a day later. Then it started to rain again and I retreated to the back porch where I sorted through the garlic and shallots that I just harvested and picked out the nicest ones to save and plant for next year. By then it was time to do the chores and it was raining harder, of course. The chickens were all inside and grouchy. They don’t like cool, rainy August weather either.
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| A sunset last week. |
For dinner that evening, we invited the Shilligs over and had burritos made with rice, beans, cheese, and salsa, and fresh corn on the cob from the garden. It was a nice, warming repast for a dreary day. At sundown, the sky finally cleared a little and put on a show for us.
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| Dinner on Monday. |
The Murrays left on Tuesday. Their departure marks the end of our summer guests. But we already have plans coming up for weekend visits with family in Pittsburgh and Toledo. And plans for Christmas visits and even next summer are already being discussed. But for the time being, things have settled back into normalcy here – if such a condition actually exists.
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| Good-bye to the Murrays. |
Tuesday was another gloomy day, weather-wise. Overcast skies, intermittent rain, and a dental appointment cast a pall over the day. Wednesday was better. I had errands to run in Wellsville. It was chicken feed day. When I got home, I unloaded 200 lbs of feed. It was a little warmer and occasionally the sun broke through the clouds. I spent some time in the garden.
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| Black-eyed Susans. |
Wednesday was also Kurt’s birthday. He turned sixty-nine. The Shilligs invited us over for dinner and to celebrate. We had chili dogs and potato salad and birthday cake and ice cream. It occurred to me as we were sitting there eating cake and ice cream, talking and laughing, that I first met Kurt when he and Julie came to our wedding. That was almost forty years ago. I was twenty-six. He was twenty-nine. It seems a lifetime ago and yet only a few years ago. That’s time playing tricks on my brain again. After the cake and ice cream, we watched the final episode of Alone that Kurt recorded for us. Watching those last three men suffering in the icy Saskatchewan winter made me feel cold. I had to keep looking out the window to assure myself that it is still summer.
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| The flower garden. |
I was hoping to see the Super Blue Moon on Wednesday night, but it was overcast when I went to bed. The sky cleared during the night and a little toward dawn on Thursday I got to see it as it was setting. I went out at 5:40 and stood in the garden to gaze at it. It was 46° and very dewy. The moon was bright and beautiful, sinking behind the trees in the orchard, casting deep shadows across the lawn. There won’t be another Super Blue Moon until 2037. Who knows what the world will be like by then.
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| The Super Blue Moon. |
Thursday it was sunny, but still a little on the cool side. The temperature never hit 70°. I decided I couldn’t wait anymore, I had to process some cabbages before they burst and were ruined. I went out when the dew had dried and cut eight of them. I brought my sauerkraut bucket up from the cellar. Then Miriam and I sliced, salted, and pounded cabbage into the bucket and covered it. I put it on the back porch to ferment. In about five or six weeks the first kraut should be ready.
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| Cabbages for sauerkraut. |
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| Ready to make sauerkraut. |
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| The kraut ready to ferment. |
While I was out in the garden on Thursday getting cabbages, I found more cucumbers – enough for another batch of relish. So I picked them and some green peppers and some onions and brought them in. I waited until Friday morning to cut them up and grind them. It was nice to fill the house with a summer smell on such a cold morning. I salted the mash and covered it to sit for several hours. Then later in the day I canned fifteen pints. That might be the last batch we can manage. The cucumber vines are fizzling out early. Any more cold mornings and it will do them in.
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| Cucumbers for relish. |
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| Onions and peppers for relish. |
While grinding relish, I continued my contemplation of time. Grinding becomes automatic, just turning that handle, feeding the cucumbers, peppers, and onions into the hopper. Not needing to think about what I was doing, my mind was free for deeper things. For most of the week I’ve had a song stuck in my head – a song about time. It is called 100 Years by the band Five for Fighting that they released back in 2003. It’s one of those songs that I overheard my children listening to that resonated with me. I do sometimes like the music they listen to.
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| The night'blooming jasmine. |
Summer returned on Saturday. It was a beautiful, warm day. I spent most of it on the back porch. We store firewood on the back porch in the fall and winter. Every year we use it all up by December and then no one wants to trudge out to the woodpile to bring in more. I decided to rearrange the back porch so it can hold twice the amount of wood. I removed a lot of things. It looks very tidy now. I'm hoping we can get a couple of loads of wood over the next few weeks. It made me feel a bit sad to be focusing on our winter needs on such a fine warm day, but these are the days when we must prepare for what is coming.
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| The tidied back porch. |
While I was working on that, Miriam refreshed the flowers in the house. She went out and cut a huge bundle of glads and arranged them in three big bouquets. I love having flowers that I grew in the house. .
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| Miriam sorting glads by color for her bouquets. |
It’s been a lovely Sabbath so far. It’s Fast Sunday. Our meetings were good. We're having quesadillas for lunch in a few minutes, they are quick and tasty and I’m hungry. It’s warm and summery outside and it looks like it will be that way most of the week, even hot midweek when we expect to hit 90°. Tomorrow is Labor Day and everyone will be home. We’re planning a cookout, maybe the last one of the summer. I plan to labor all day working on projects, cleaning the woodshed and the barn. I’m scheduled to be in school later in the week, my first days back in this school year. Meanwhile, I will be making the most of these last bright summer days, harvesting and enjoying the fruits of my labor while there's time.
