Smoke Gets In Your Eyes

Sun shining through smoky sky.

I'll start this week's Journal with a mental ramble that actually came about later in the week, but explains how most of the week went for me. There are over 800 fires burning in Canada that have filled our sky with smoke. The smoke arrived here midweek and changed everything. Because of the smoke, my brain latched onto the song Smoke Gets In Your Eyes and began playing it in a continuous loop starting on Wednesday. It's still there. I'm just ignoring it. I first heard the song in 1973 when I went to see American Graffiti and it was on the soundtrack, which I then bought and played over and over again through the remainder of my high school years. That version was performed by The Platters, who recorded it in 1958, the year I was born.

The song was written in 1933 by Jerome Kern and Otto Harbach as part of a stage musical, Roberta. It has been performed and recorded many times by some very famous singers like Helen Forrest, Nat King Cole, Jo Stafford, Eartha Kitt, and Sarah Vaughan. My favorite version, besides the one by The Platters, is by Kiri Te Kanawa on her album Kiri Sings Kern (1993) which is full of beautiful renditions of Jerome Kern's songs.

So it's been a smoky week, but more about that later.

Monday started off with a doctors appointment. Not the best way to start the week, but it was a routine visit, nothing notable. When I got back, I spent the day in the garden. It was time to start pulling up spent flowers that have gone to seed, dropped their seed, and turned brown. It was mostly lupins and common poppies. As I pulled them up, I shook out any remaining seeds into the flowerbeds so they will grow and delight us next year. The flower beds are on the edge of a lull right now. There are a few bright flowers scattered about, mostly marigolds, but the big high summer show is about to begin as the tall phlox, zinnias, cosmos, and dahlias start to bloom. It's hard to believe we're already at this point in the season. We're past the middle of July already.

Tuesday was mowing day. I started early before the day got hot. I began with an hour of weed whacking. That was pretty strenuous. After that, riding the mower for an hour and a half was almost relaxing. By the time I finished, it was 89°. Miriam was going to the gym and I went along. I made no attempt to exercise, but went straight to the steam room. Even though I was hot from working in the heat, the steam room, along with alternating cold showers, was very refreshing.

I'm trying a new strategy with pest control in the vegetable garden. I got some sticky traps for Squash Vine Borers and Striped Cucumber Beetles. They are bated with pheromone plugs. They arrived that afternoon and I hung them, one each in my raised bed garden and out in the big garden. I also read that Cabbage Moths are territorial and one way to dissuade them is to make fake moths and place them near the brassicas. So I cut out little paper moths, drew on the appropriately positioned spots and dangled them near the rows of cabbages, broccoli, and cauliflower. The Cucumber Beetle traps were effective right away. So far I haven't caught any Squash Vine Borers. I know they're out there. Maybe their breeding season is done and they've already laid their eggs. And I still see plenty of Cabbage Moths, so maybe they don't care about my paper decoys.

Cucumber beetles caught in my trap.

One of my Cabbage Moth decoys.

In other garden news, Sarah bought a new drip irrigation system for the big garden and we spent several days in the evenings setting it up. It's nice. It runs on a timer. Now we don't have to water everything by hand.

Wednesday morning I was working in the garden pinching tomatoes when a neighbor up the road stopped to say our peacock was walking along the side of the road down on highway 49 almost to Burrell's. I grabbed a stick and headed down the road. The peacock was not very cooperative. After some violent coaxing, I got him back on our property. I don't know where he thought he was going. He has become a nuisance, eating the strawberries before they are ripe, nibbling on my lettuces. We had to cover the brassicas and celery with netting to keep him from devouring them. And now wandering. He could have caused a traffic accident.

Later in the morning on Wednesday, the sky began to grow dark. We weren't expecting rain and the darkness didn't look like rain clouds. It was that smoke from Canada blowing in a plume that stretched from Ontario to the Atlantic Ocean and we were right in the middle of it. Because of the smoke, the hot temperatures we were expecting for the second half of the week never arrived. The sun was veiled. At first the smoke cast a yellow haze over everything, then it rolled in like fog.

The sun veiled by smoke on Wednesday afternoon.

On Thursday the smoke was worse. When I woke up at my usual rising time, 5:30, it looked like a winter morning. The sky was dark, the air was gray. When I went out on my morning rounds, it was like walking in a dim and foggy twilight. The air smelled bad. Down at the barn, the automatic coop door, which is  programed to open when the morning light reaches a certain intensity, was still closed. I had to open it manually. Then, as I was coming into the house, I heard the peacock. 

Smoky Thursday morning.

When the sun came up on Thursday.

His call seemed to come from far away. After his wandering the day before, I thought I'd better see where he was. I walked in the direction that I thought his call came from, but saw no sign of him. I walked across the property and up the road toward Burrell's. I heard him call distantly again from the other direction. I came back to the house and got Stacey. We got in the car and drove up and down the roads, up highway 49, up the 449, up the Rapley Road, with the car windows open, calling to him, hoping he would call back. By calling, I mean we were making his loud "peeyaw" cry. And it was just 7:15 in the morning. The neighbors probably thought the smoke had gone to our heads. We didn't hear any response and drove back to the house. As we got out of the car, we heard him call again from somewhere closer. I headed out to the big garden and Stacey went toward the Shillig's house. There he was, on the far side of their house by their air conditioning unit. I don't know if he'd been there the whole time or not. His calls didn't seem to come from there before. I chased him back home through the orchard. Two peacock adventures in two days. Crazy bird.

After that, I decided it was best not to do any outdoor work that day. It's not good to exert yourself when you can see, smell, and taste the air you're breathing. But what to do indoors on a summer day in the middle of July? Reading was, of course, my first choice. I'd just finished the book I was reading, Terry Pratchett's Discworld book sixteen, Men At Arms, and was ready to go on to the next one in the series, but thought maybe I'd take a little pause from them. I went to my shelves to look for some inspiration. As I was glancing over the spines, two authors caught my attention and sent me on a mental journey. They have the same last name. They both used their initials. Other than that, they had little in common except that I loved their books. They are T. H. White – Terrence Hanbury White, who went by the nickname "Tim" – and E. B. White – Elwyn Brooks White, who went by the nickname "Andy".

I first encountered E. B. White (1899-1985) when I read Charlotte's Web in third grade. I loved that book. I claim it as the first book that made me cry (there have been many since then). Sometime after that, I also read Stuart Little and Trumpet of the Swan, but I was done reading E. B. White by the end of elementary school. I didn't look at him again until the 80s when I was in college. I was in a writing class at Cal State, Northridge, and the professor recommended I read E. B. White as an exemplar of excellent writing style. I was surprised and said, "You mean the guy who wrote the children's books?" She was shocked at the limit of my exposure. She loaned me her personal copy of Essays of E. B. White. I read it through twice, and my love and admiration for White was deepened. After I returned that borrowed copy to her, I spent months visiting used book stores looking for a copy to add to my library. It was out of print then and that was in the days before the internet and Ebay and Alibris and all those other online booksellers. I finally found it in a bookstore in Burbank. Every few years I reread it, but it's been a while now. Because of E. B. White, I tolerate spiders in the barn, we once had a dog named Fred, and I once had a flock of geese.

E. B., his three children's books, and his essays.

My first encounter with T. H. White (1906-1964) happened when I was in seventh grade at Tallmadge Central Junior High School in Tallmadge, Ohio. I had study hall in the library. My assigned seat was at a table at the back where the shelves – fiction, alphabetical by author – stood right in front of me. One of the books on those shelves caught my eye – The Once and Future King by T. H. White. I don't really know why it called to me. It didn't have a flashy cover. It was thick to the point of intimidation. I took it from the shelf and started to read it at my table and was immediately captivated by it. I took it to the desk and asked the librarian to check it out for me. She told me that she thought it was above my reading level, but reluctantly let me have it. I devoured that book, and the rest, literally, is history. Since that first reading, I have read it over and over again – at least a dozen times. Through my teenage years, I wore out a paperback copy. I replaced it with another paperback copy and then, over the years, acquired a nice hardback copy, and then a set of the books in their original separate volumes. Because of T. H. White, I fell in love with all things medieval, read countless history books, and got a B.A. degree in Medieval European History.

T. H., the edition I first read, the first paperback, the second paperback, the fancy hardback.

So after a morning of browsing my shelves and pondering on my relationship with the Whites, who did I finally choose? Neither of them. I do want to read them again, but slowly, enjoying once again my long love for them, savoring the experience. During garden season, I don't read like that. And I knew the smoke would not last long and the garden would draw me away again. So I added them to my Winter Reading List (shudder). Yes, I've started a Winter Reading List already, and the two Whites are now at the top of it. They may be the only reason I have to make me look forward to winter. No, not even that. So I continued on with Discworld book number seventeen, Soul Music.

I did go outdoors to do the chores and I took a late afternoon walk around the garden. I was sorry for all the things I should have done, but didn't do. It felt like a mostly wasted day, at least in the garden.

Thursday, late afternoon.

Because the smoke blocked the sun, the earth didn't warm up much on Thursday and Friday morning it was a chilly 45°. I didn't like that. I want heat in July. When I stepped out that morning, it seemed like the smoke was worse. I didn't take a morning walk, I just did the morning chores and came back in the house. I checked the smoke map. This was what it looked like:

Miriam and Hannah left at 8:30, along with Chase's crew next door, to spend the weekend at the Thayn's house. They had plans to visit some antique shops and to go to the Highland Festival on Saturday. So I was alone all day. At first I began to despair of yet another day of limited work outdoors and having to find something to keep me distracted. But then things began to change. Around 9:00 the breeze shifted, the sky cleared, the haze diminished a bit, and the sun began to warm the earth again. I checked the particle pollution map and it said we were still in the "Unhealthy" zone, but I went out anyway to do a little, not very strenuous, work. I began with a snail and Japanese beetle patrol – not strenuous at all. I found lots of snails, but very few beetles. Next on the list was to harvest the garlic. I knew rain was coming on Saturday and I needed to get the garlic out of the ground before things got wet. It wasn't hard work. I pulled them up and set them to dry in the sun for half an hour, then I trimmed them and tied them in bundles, and hung them in the woodshed to cure. I didn't plant as much this year as I have in the past and that was probably a mistake. We use a lot of garlic. I'm hoping we can freeze-dry most of it and turn it into garlic powder.

The garlic patch before harvesting it.

Garlic drying in the sun.

Trimmed and hanging in the woodshed to cure.

While trimming the garlic, I encountered a pest I'd never seen before, the Allium Leaf Miner (Phytomyza gymnostoma). I didn't see the actual fly, just the small brown pupae in some of the leaves. The adult just looks like one of the many sorts of flies I see in the garden. I don't see that they did any damage to the garlic bulbs. I only found them in the stems. They looked like tiny brown grains of rice. I crushed them whenever I found them. I'm always learning about new things in the garden.

This is what the pupae looked like (not my photo).

This is the adult. It just looks like a fly.

By the afternoon it had warmed up nicely to 82°. The air was still a bit hazy. I came in for lunch and a little siesta and didn't go out again until chore time.

Sarah came over after dinner and said that Runnings was having a bucket sale. Everything you could fit in a five gallon bucket, 15% off. She, Stacey, and I went up to Wellsville to shop. This weekend is Wellsville's annual Balloon Rally and as we came into town, there were hot air balloons every where. We stopped in a parking lot at the edge of town to take photos. Then we drove on to Runnings and filled three buckets with garden supplies, hardware items, and toilet paper, and checked out just as they were closing.

On our way into Wellsville during the balloon rally.

Rain came yesterday morning and began to wash the air clean. I appreciated that. It's still smoky, but better than it was. Plus the garden needed a good soaking. It did put a damper on our plans to go to the big Amish auction out in North Bingham. It rained off and on all day and I did a lot of nothing all day. During a break in the weather, we did do some harvesting out in the garden. Sarah was here for some chard. The chard is in my raised bed garden and it did really good this year. We picked a big batch and then went out to the big garden and picked some basil, cauliflower, zucchini, and peas. I love this time of year when we have things to eat right from the garden and also plenty to freeze and freeze-dry for storage.

Pickings from the garden.

Towards evening we had a thunderstorm. It wasn't much, just some distant rumbling. I never saw any lightning. It rained hard for ten minutes. The rest of the evening was very quiet. With just Stacey and me here, we keep things pretty calm. Later this week we will have a houseful again, so things will get more lively.

There was a touch of low fog this morning, but it wasn't smoke. I was glad for that. The fires in Canada are still burning, but the smoke seems to be blowing some other direction and I hope it stays that way. There are things happening this week and I don't want smoke to interfere. Miriam and Hannah will be home later today. Rachel and her children arrive on Tuesday. There is a trek midweek involving Sarah and Tosh, Hazel, Ava, and possibly Miriam. With the grandchildren here, we need to be able to do things like go swimming and play outdoors and I have plenty of things to do in the garden without worrying about breathing.

We're home from church. The drive to and from was beautiful, picture perfect summer scenery. Lunch will be ready soon. Then a nap, the chores, the usual summer Sabbath afternoon, restful and reinvigorating. And then onward into a new week.