The Last of August

We're already slamming into the last week of August. I say that because it feels like slamming to me. The beginning of summer arrives in June, cool and lush, eases into warm, and then teases with a bit of heat. July runs on steadily with long days and fine high summer weather. August starts with some of July's leftover grace, and then slams me with irrefutable evidence that summer is almost over. The hot days, which are becoming rarer now, remind me that cold days are coming. They'll be here sooner and stay longer than I like. August's is a bittersweet sort of glory. The gardens still have some beauty, but are starting to look tattered and tired. It's harvest time and we're busy reaping the fruits of our long labors, but the work is tinged with sadness, reminding me that these are endings, not beginnings. The green world is preparing to shut down.

The month of August was originally called Sextilis by the Romans because it was the sixth month in their old calendar that only had ten months that began with March and ended in December. In 700 B.C. they revised the calendar and added January and February which bumped Sextilis to the eighth month. Then in 8 B.C., they changed the name to August to honor Caesar Augustus. The Anglo-Saxons in Old England called the month Weodmonað, the month of weeds. I understand that. It certainly is. The weeds go crazy in August.

Yet, tired and weedy as it is, August is a month of abundant blessings when the earth yields up rich treasures to us. All the long weeks of work – planting, tending, watering, weeding – and the nurturing of the sun and the rain, have rewarded us with food. We've harvested the garlic, onions, shallots, and potatoes. We're picking raspberries and blackberries. There are a few cauliflowers left to cut. We're working our way through tomatoes, broccoli, cucumbers, cabbage, peppers, carrots, beets, green beans, corn, squash, melons, pumpkins, and apples. There is always something being canned, frozen, fermented, freeze dried, or waiting its turn to be processed. It's hard work. I'm glad when it's finally over and everything is cleaned up and put away. That won't happen until October.

Phlox.

Last week in my restful moments, during my daily siestas and at night before bed, I read a book I checked out from the library, Nick, by Michael Farris Smith. It's a sort of prequel to The Great Gatsby and gives the back story of Nick Carraway, the narrator in that book. You only know a few things about him in Gatsby. He's from the Midwest, he went to Yale, he fought in World War I. This book was on a list of recommended titles. I approached it with some skepticism. I first read The Great Gatsby in high school when I was fourteen years old in ninth grade in 1972. It was an assigned reading. I really liked it even though I found the teacher's analysis of it tedious. Then in 1974, I went to see the movie version of it starring Robert Redford and Mia Farrow. I loved it. It had style. In fact, it started a 1970s fashion craze – the Gatsby Style, those three piece suits in soft colors, gray tweeds, the famous white flannel suit, pastel colored sweaters, and drop waisted dresses for women in homage to the Roaring '20s. I was a victim of the craze myself. That's why I went to prom in a pale green tuxedo.

I didn't read The Great Gatsby again until ten years ago. I was on an F. Scott Fitzgerald reading binge. I read my way through his other novels, This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned, and Tender Is the Night, and enjoyed them all. I saved The Great Gatsby for last because I'd already read it. It turned out to be my favorite of all of them, maybe for nostalgic reasons. In 2013 a new Gatsby movie came out, this one directed by Baz Luhrmann starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan. I went to see it in high hopes. The teasers were impressive. It was big and glitzy, but I didn't like it as much as the 1974 movie. DiCaprio didn't have the right blend of mystery and elegance that Robert Redford had. I cringed every time Leo said "Old Sport." It just didn't sound right. The thing that I liked least about the 2013 movie was the soundtrack. In Baz Luhrmann style, he ignored the fabulous music of the 1920s appropriate to the era, and instead used hip hop, which ruined the feel of it for me. (Don't get me started on the atrocities Luhrmann did to Romeo and Juliet.) I enjoyed reading Nick for the most part. The author could have done just about anything he wanted with the story. He imagined a much harsher, violent, and sad life for him than I remember Gatsby suggesting. But I haven't read Gatsby in a long time and don't remember so much about Nick's character. Smith's depiction of Nick's experiences in World War I were some of the best I've read – and I've read a lot of WWI history and fiction. I'll give this book a tentative recommendation. I'm going to read The Great Gatsby again and maybe my opinion of Nick will change. After I re-read The Great Gatsby, I plan to watch all the available screen adaptations and render judgment on them again.

There are four film adaptations of Gatsby, a 1926 silent film, now lost, a 1949 version that I've never seen, and the ones in 1974 and 2012.

Monday began with a very pretty sunrise. It was a cool morning. I had to wear a jacket on my morning walk, which made me a little sad.  It was a bright, sunny day, but there was a wind blowing out of the north that kept the temperature low. I worked most of the day with my hoodie on. That shouldn't happen in August.

Sunrise on Monday.

Meanwhile, down at the barn – the two broody hens have stayed on their guinea eggs, with a few readjustments. We discovered that several of the eggs were not fertile. Now one hen is sitting on six eggs and the other is only on two. Nineteen days to go to hatch day. The guinea keets in the middle pen are getting big and are old enough now that they are starting to make their noises. According to things I've read, one of the best ways  to tell which are males and which are females is by their calls. The males make a one syllable call that sounds like "wheat!" and females make a two syllable call that sounds like "buckwheat!" I'm hearing both calls in the pen, I just can't tell which ones are making which call.

Monday afternoon, Sarah came by to "shop" in the garden. We picked carrots, beets, basil, peppers, and tomatoes. She also took some onions, garlic, and shallots. She was having a canning and fermenting day on Tuesday and needed the ingredients. 

Some of Sarah's garden shopping.

Sarah's Tuesday output: two jars of fermenting hot sauce, fermenting carrots, and refrigerator pickles.

Tuesday was a gloomy day, overcast and cool. It set the tone for most of the rest of the week. We didn't see much sunshine again until Friday and even then, it didn't warm up much. It felt too much like fall. It smelled like fall. So many leaves have dropped because of the dry spell we had. Those leaves, damp from the dew and the bit of rain that fell, gave off a purely autumnal fragrance. All of that put me in a fall gardening mood. I've been cleaning up the flowerbeds bit by bit, but now I want to start ripping the whole garden apart, clearing out, transplanting, preparing for winter and next year. I had to remind myself that it's too soon. There are still warm days ahead, so I need to leave things alone a while longer. I hope there are still warm days ahead. There might not be. It's happened that way before. You never know.

Brown leaves on the brown lawn.

Tuesday after I did the morning chores, I did one of my annual late summer clean-ups – I gathered all the feathers the peacock has shed. According to the experts, a mature male peacock, which ours is, has about 169 feathers in his train. In the late summer, Poesy, our peacock loses his train feathers as he wanders around the property. Being a bit of a tidy freak, I don't like seeing them lying about. So after he's done discarding his glory, I also wander around the property and pick them all up. I counted how many I gathered on Tuesday, 102, far short of the expected 169. I don't know where the other feathers went, I only care that I don't see feathers laying about anymore. We keep some of the nicest feathers and use them as decorations in the house. There is an old tradition that bringing peacock feathers into the house is bad luck. The "eyes" on the feathers are supposed to invoke the "evil eye." Some believe that they doom unmarried women to spinsterhood. We have lots of peacock feathers in our house. I won't go any further with that.

Poesy's fallen glory.

I had a haircut appointment later that morning, so I didn't want to start any messy work in the garden. With an hour or two to kill, I decided to watch two of the YouTube broadcasts I enjoy. The first one was Words Unraveled with Rob Watts and Jess Zafarris. They do a weekly podcast/show where they explore the English language. The episode I watched was all about Samuel Johnson's 1755 dictionary. You might think that sounds a bit dull, but they make every topic they discuss interesting and fun. The second broadcast was Baumgartner Restoration. Julian Baumgartner restores damaged paintings and I find what he does fascinating. If you want to while away an hour or two, these are two broadcasts I recommend.

Tuesday afternoon I worked in the garden. I tied up tomatoes, weeded, deadheaded. I've stopped deadheading some things now, calendulas, cosmos, and nigella, so I can get seeds from them for next year. I noticed as I worked that I don't see very many Japanese beetles anymore. That means they've gone on to their next phase and have laid their eggs in the soil and died. They're getting ready for next year too. That's one garden pest I won't have to fight for a while. We have plenty of others. The voles have been abundant this year. They've been pretty destructive, chewing into melons and carrots, digging tunnels through the raised beds. Kurt has devised a great system for killing them. He baits a mousetrap with a piece of apple that he ties on with a piece of dental floss and dabs it with a bit of peanut butter. The voles find it irresistible. He's caught at least a dozen so far. A bigger pest, in size if not in numbers, are the deer that come into the orchard every night. I wouldn't mind them if they just ate fallen apples. I like it when they do that because then I don't have to rake them up. But they also eat the leaves and lower branches on the trees. That doesn't harm the big trees too much, but it's devastating to the little dwarf trees.

One of several deer that visit the orchard every night.

We've reached the point where the zucchinis have gone out of control. The plants are huge and their leaves are so enormous, I can't navigate around them easily. Those are perfect conditions for the squash to grow to colossal sizes before I find them. I found ten of them on Tuesday. They are stacked on back porch stairs and will be chopped up and fed to the pigs.

An embarrassing bounty. My foot for size comparison.

 

Stacked for pig food.

Wednesday was gloomy and damp. We had drizzling rain through the morning, not enough to quench the garden's thirst, but welcome nonetheless. The afternoon was gray. I puttered around the garden not doing much, looking busier than I actually was. I foraged among the raspberries. I didn't bother to collect them to use for something grand, I just ate them as I found them. There was a lot of noise around 3:00 p.m., Canada geese making a commotion from down the road where they've been gathering around Burrell's pond. The last time I passed by there, there must have been fifty or more on the lawn and the banks of the pond and in the water. I think they are preparing to fly south. With all the noise, I expected to see them take off and fly over, but they didn't. Maybe they were discussing flight plans, giving instructions to this summer's grown up goslings.

Wednesday evening after dinner, we finally got some substantial rain. We were upstairs watching Alone: Africa when we heard it thrumming on the porch roof. I love that sound. The rain continued off and on through the night. When I went out on Thursday morning, the sweet smell of the rain soaked earth was wonderful. It was a gray and chilly morning, perfect for staying indoors and reading.

Thursday was my weekly appointment with my acupuncturist. That meant a drive to Olean and back and that meant a couple of hours in the car. It would have felt like a wasted day except that I like my sessions with the acupuncturist and it was too wet to do anything in the garden.

Friday morning was cool and foggy and very autumnal. I took my morning walk and stopped along the beaver pond to watch the beavers swimming and diving. When I came back up through the big garden, I walked past the pigpen. They were sound asleep and didn't stir when I walked past. I went through the meadow and along to the back of the house and the long border. By then my hands and feet were chilled through. It was a pretty morning, but more suited to October than August.

Friday morning walk: the beaver pond.

Friday morning walk: the meadow.

Friday morning walk: the long border.

The fog burned off and the sun broke through and the day warmed nicely. I weed-whacked and mowed, weeded and deadheaded, and enjoyed the warm sunshine. Miriam and Hannah left on Friday after dinner to spend the weekend at the Thayn's house. 

Early Saturday morning, Stacey and I left to go to the temple. The only session we could reserve was at 9:15 and that meant we had to leave the house at 6:30. It was a beautiful drive. We had a nice experience at the temple. On the way home we decided to drive by way of Penn Yan to go to the Windmill Market. We'd heard about the Windmill Market but when we got there, it wasn't quite what we expected. First of all, it was packed with people. There were acres of parking lot and all of it was full. There were several buildings full of vendors selling lots of crafts and food. But it was all stuff that nobody really needs. The produce looked good, but it was pretty expensive. We walked around, didn't buy anything, and left for home. The drive from Palmyra to Penn Yan and then from Penn Yan to home, was gorgeous. It was farmland and small towns, Keuka Lake off to one side, vineyards, forest – idyllic Western New York. I think the Finger Lakes area of New York State is about the most beautiful area in all the USA.

Selfie at the temple.

Selfie in the Sacred Grove.

At The Windmill Market.

Selfie at Keuka Lake.

We arrived home in time for me to do the chores. After that, I did a little mowing. I mixed up a potion and sprayed my smallest apple trees with a deer deterrent. Some of them have been heavily damaged. Stacey picked a basket of tomatoes for Sarah. We didn't do much else, just had a quiet evening preparing for the Sabbath.

This morning when I looked out the window, there were three deer crossing from the garden to the other side of the road. They were very pretty, but I wish they'd stay on the other side of the road. After I dressed for church, I took a walk around the property. It was overcast and cool. I inspected the trees I'd sprayed to see if there was any new damage. There wasn't any. But then, they didn't really have any more leaves on them for the deer to eat.

What deer do to little apple trees.

We're home from church. We had good meetings, good talks, and good lessons. The day has warmed a bit and it is sunny. Our lunch is almost ready. Then I'll have time for a quick nap before I go down to do the chores. We're having dinner over at the Shillig's later in the evening. The Fosters are coming too. I don't think Miriam and Hannah will be home in time for that. The week ahead looks like it will be cooler, mostly in the 60s, which is too cool for August. I saw on the national weather map that there is a frost warning for upper Minnesota tonight. I hope it doesn't drift south. Keep the cold in the north for a few more weeks, maybe months, please. I don't want to deal with any of that yet.