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| Russell and pumpkins. (I wasn't there when this was taken, but I couldn't resist showing off.) |
by John Keats
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,
Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.
When I was in my teenage years I discovered John Keats (1795 – 1821). A high school English teacher introduced us. My first encounter with Keats was his poem Ode to a Nightingale. That moody poem and Keats’s tragically short life – he died at the age of twenty-five from tuberculosis – appealed to my moody teenage self and I indulged in his poetry for a few months. I even bought a paperback copy of his collected works that still sits on my library shelf with dog-eared pages to mark my favorite poems. But then I moved on to other literary adventures and paid no more attention to him. Last week in an article I read about autumn gardening, the author made reference to Keats’s poem To Autumn and, out of curiosity, I took my old book down and read it. It is a lovely poem. I think the autumns that Keats knew were milder than the ones we have here. We have the mists, the plumping hazel shells, and the stubble fields, but warm days are becoming pretty rare. We still have gnats (they’re actually fruit flies that hang out on the back porch where the tomatoes are ripening) and the crickets are still singing. There are full-grown lambs bleating in the neighbor’s pasture. But we haven’t had poppies in bloom since July and our swallows left in the middle August to fly south. I wish we had apples filled with ripeness to the core and a cyder-press oozing hours by hours. Autumn is a beautiful season full of nostalgia and pretty melancholy. I only wish it lingered a little longer.
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| John Keats. |
It’s October now and it looks it. The maple trees in the front yard are changing quickly, dropping their leaves by the millions. I read that a maple tree with a trunk three feet in diameter will have about 100,000 leaves. My maples have trunks that measure eight and nine feet in diameter and there are seven of them in my yard, so that figures to be about 2,100,000 leaves. Even if my calculations are off, it seems like millions when I’m trying to gather them up. My maples are not putting on a very colorful show this year. There is a little bit of orange, but their leaves are mostly a dirty yellow brown. Out on the hills and in other places the trees are looking better. There are some reds and oranges from the maples, yellow from the alders and aspens, and glowing reds from the sumacs and wild cherries. Next week the leaves should be at their best. We will see.
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| The front yard maples at sunrise. |
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| The garden with the wild cherry across the road at sunset. |
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| Colchicums in the long border at their best right now. My favorite fall flower. |
We continue to process tomatoes. I think we’re almost at the end of it at last. There are still some ripening on the back porch. The few still left on the vines are green and don’t look like they will ripen. We had a good harvest. There are still peppers that we are hoping will ripen to red before a hard freeze comes. The sweet corn is finished. The broccoli is still producing, but we are tired of picking it. And we still have more than a dozen cabbages to harvest. On Thursday I brought in the pumpkins and squash. Their vines were dead and I didn’t want to risk them getting frostbitten. I managed to get four big orange and four smaller white pumpkins for jack-o’-lanterns, seventeen Winter Luxury pumpkins that I will process to eat, four hubbard squash, seven butternut squash, and twenty delicata squash – a pretty good haul.
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| The pumpkins. |
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| The delicata and butternut squash. |
We continue to dig potatoes, the most back-breaking of all the harvest chores. I use my trusty garden fork, the one with one broken tine, to dig them up. I try not to impale any, but it happens – especially to the biggest spuds. They seem fated to be stabbed, but that means we have to eat them right away and I don’t mind. I’m hoping we will finish harvesting potatoes this week.
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| Me and my trusty garden fork. |
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| I sometimes scare visitors by standing like this. |
Friday was a canning day. I wasn’t in school. It was a damp, dreary day – perfect for staying in the warm kitchen with things bubbling and brewing. I made a batch of raspberry jelly first. The aroma of cooking raspberries is one of the best smells I know. After that, I started yet another batch of tomatoes boiling. They boiled all day and in the evening I canned more sauce. There were still a few dozen apples left from that bushel I bought a few weeks ago and they were starting to go soft, so I also canned another batch of applesauce so they wouldn’t go to waste. I love to can, but we’re far enough along in the season now that I’m ready for it to end.
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| Friday's canning. |
This is General Conference weekend. Yesterday we watched all three sessions – noon to 2:00, 4:00 to 6:00, and 8:00 to 9:15. It was fun to see the Conference Center full of people and remember that I was standing there just a few days ago with Geoffrey and it was practically empty. The sessions yesterday were great – wonderful and timely talks, excellent music. We were all sad that President Nelson and Elder Holland were not there. We will watch two more sessions today.
Although we spent almost six hours yesterday watching General Conference, we managed to get a lot of work done before and in between sessions. In the morning Stacey and I dug more potatoes. Then between the first and second sessions, Stacey, Hannah, and I bagged up the potatoes we’d dug up earlier. Between the second and third sessions, Hannah, Miriam, and I picked hazelnuts. Then we lit the bonfire out on the edge of the orchard to bid farewell to September.
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| The hedge is full of hazelnuts. |
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| Our first picking of hazelnuts. |
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| Our "Farewell to September" bonfire. |
Because we are watching Conference today and the first session doesn’t start until noon, we are having a very quiet Sabbath morning. There is no hurry to get ready for church. We don’t have to go anywhere. I slept in a little. I took a long morning walk. It was foggy this morning and it looked and smelled like the first day of October should, very autumnal. My walk took me down along the beaver pond. There were two beavers swimming around. I stood and watched them for a long time. One of them swam close to where I was standing and when I moved to take a photo of it, it slapped its tail and dove under the water. While I stood there watching the sun break through the fog, a flock of geese took off from Burrell’s pond up the road and flew over me making their sad and thrilling cries. They moved into V formation and flew off to the southwest. With the fog, everything was dripping wet and by the time I got home, I was soaked to the knees.
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| Sunday the first of October: my morning walk. |
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| Sunday the first of October: my morning walk. |
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| You can see the beaver in the gap between the bushes just before it dove. |
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| Sunday the first of October: my morning walk. |
It’s after 8:00 now and the rest of the house is just beginning to stir. The fog is gone and the sky is bright blue. Stacey is making cinnamon rolls for our Conference Sunday breakfast. A perfect start to a peaceful day. Then later, we will watch General Conference and, refreshed and more deeply committed to living the gospel, we will move on into October. Good Sabbath!
