Slower and Faster

Last week things slowed down in some ways and sped up in others. We came to the end of our summer guests, which made things seem slower, but harvest time is upon us and that makes things seem to go faster. That's how August goes as we fly through the last full month of summer.

On Monday a group of us (not me) drove down to the Pennsylvania Grand Canyon. They took a short walk along Pine Creek and then played in a small stream that feeds into the creek. They didn't play long because a storm came through. This was a big storm. There was tremendous thunder that rolled on almost continuously. The rain poured down for more than an hour. Here at home, I was out in the garden when it arrived. I made a mad dash to the house, but got soaked anyway. The Grand Canyon group also had to run for their cars. Then they drove into Wellsboro and had lunch at a restaurant called The Frog Hut. And yes, they do serve frog. And yes, Hazel ate some. She said they were good. I'll take her word for it.

Playing in the creek.

Hazel eating frog legs.

The rain down at Sarah's house.

We had a happy but very brief visit at the beginning of the week. Our friends Kathy Birch and her daughter Anna arrived on Monday afternoon to spend the night here on their way to Boston. Anna is taking up residence there and they traveled from Utah with a U-Haul towing Anna's car behind. We had a brief and happy evening together and then they left to continue on their way on Tuesday morning. Their visit was too short, but Kathy said that now that her daughter lives on the East Coast, she'll be out this way more. We look forward to more visits in the future.

Kathy and Anna.

On Monday evening Kathy, who is a professional genealogist, showed me some work she did on one of my lines, the Schneider family. Kathy is an expert at German genealogy. I haven't done research on my German family lines in a long, long time. After what she showed me, I'm going to get back to it.

Tuesday was also departure day for the Thayns. After having the younger four children here with us for the last  three weeks, and Rachel and Hazel here then gone then back again, this departure seemed a bit jarring. We'd established a routine starting with Russell up first in the morning wanting a bowl of cereal and then on through the day with all the activity and energy that comes with children and summer and cousins next door.

Next door, our niece Missy and her family also left for home on Tuesday. It was so fun having them here. Their children and our grandchildren played so well together. So Tuesday felt a little too quiet. After everyone left, the compound seemed so empty and forlorn. There were no children on bikes, gators, and go-carts zooming around. No bustling clusters of children planning and playing. That left just the Atwaters over at Kurt and Julie's house and those three children didn't have any cousins to play with anymore.

A pumpkin blossom.

I kept myself distracted through the day with mowing, trimming, and weeding. Miriam and I spent time during the afternoon tidying the house. We're done with guests now, so things needed to be put away – the extra bedding, the toys, the books. It was nice to have the house back in order again, but it was a sad reason to have it so. After working hard in the garden most of the day, I went out at sunset just to sit and enjoy the moment. The sunset was beautiful.

Sunset on Tuesday.

I never plant enough zinnias.

Wednesday morning was incredibly quiet. It was the first morning with no grandchildren here and I missed Russell's breakfast request. It was a chilly, foggy morning, so I did some family history research while I waited for it to warm up and clear. Finally, at 9:30, I went out to work. I spent the day working on the stone path I'm putting through the center of the long border. The border is too wide for me to easily reach the center, so I'm making a stone path that will give me better access to all parts of the flowerbed. I have a pile of flat stones that I've collected. I'm slowly digging out the center and placing the stones. It's hard work. I'm half done with it, but won't finish until the early fall. I have to remove plants that are blooming now and I will wait until they're done before I proceed.

Phase one of the stone path through the long border.

After dinner, we went next door to the Foster's to work. We began burning the large pile of branches from the trees they had cut down. The pile is too close to powerlines, so we have to drag the branches over to the burn pile at the edge of the orchard. It will take us a long time to burn all those branches. We also expanded the chicken yard around their barn. We had to move the existing fence and then add more fence.

Wade helping the branches burn with a leaf blower.

Working on the expanded chicken yard.

The finished expansion. The branch pile in the background.

On Thursday morning I went out to check my morning glories. There was a bud the day before that looked like it would bloom that morning. There it was, a single, huge, beautiful blue and white flower, the variety is called Flying Saucers. It was closed and shriveled up by noon, but there are hundreds of little buds yet to open.

My first morning glory.

I spent the day working in the orchard doing some summer pruning. The trees had water sprouts and suckers that needed to be removed. I could have waited and cut them when I do my late winter pruning, but it's easier to cut them when they are green. I also trimmed out some dead branches and took off a few low branches that hit me in the head when I mow. Working in the orchard on a warm summer day is happy work. The trees give light shade. When I prune them, I can smell the apple-ness of the wood. There is a little bit of fruit on a few of the trees. I found a ripe apple on the Sops in Wine tree and ate it. Its rarity made it especially delicious. When I finished pruning, I had quite a few piles to clean up, but I was tired and left them for later in the evening when it had cooled off a little.

Piles of pruning waiting to be cleared away.

In the early afternoon, I changed jobs and worked in the flowerbeds. I had a lot of flowers that needed deadheading. I did an afternoon Japanese beetle hunt. I dug up two peonies – they were old and weak and on their last legs. They had botrytis blight and I didn't want them to infect the other peonies. Now I get to select two new peonies to plant in their place.

After deadheading flowers.

Later, after dinner, Sarah was next door in the garden and we went out to help her with some harvesting. We picked a huge load of cucumbers, several big zucchinis, a big bag of green beans, two nice cauliflowers, and a bag of basil. We worked until it was dark. It was nice working in the cool of the evening. We've been blessed with a good harvest for some things. We're still waiting for the main tomato crop to ripen. They need some heat. We also have watermelons, cantaloupes, squash, and pumpkins that look good, but they also want some good hot days. And the sweet corn is in silk now, so we'll have corn on the cobb soon. The early potatoes are ready to be dug up. And tomorrow Miriam and I will harvest some cabbage and start a batch of sauerkraut.

Thursday's cucumber harvest.

Purple green beans and yellow wax beans.

A couple of nice cauliflowers.

We had a cricket take up residence in our bedroom on Thursday night. I like crickets. Stacey does not. I told her that in some cultures it is considered good luck to have a cricket in the house. The Chinese and Japanese regard them as harbingers of wealth, good fortune, and protection. They even make fancy little cages and keep them as pets. She said we should catch this cricket and send it to Japan. Even though I like crickets, having one in close proximity was too much. A Field Cricket's chirp can reach 100 decibels – that's the same noise level as a chainsaw. Male crickets make their chirp by rubbing their wings together, called stridulation. One wing has an edge called a scraper, other wing has a toothed ridge called a file. They chirp to establish territory and attract a mate. Through the night, this cricket moved around in the room stridulating at full volume, sometimes under the bed, sometimes across the room. I slept mostly oblivious to the noise, but I woke up at 1:00 A.M. and I could tell Stacey was awake. I could tell that cricket was across the room under the desk. I got up and put on a headlamp and went in search of it. I found it right away. It was tiny and black, crouched on the carpet against the wall under the desk. How could such a small insect make such a loud noise? I think the light from my headlamp stunned it. It didn't try to hop away. I caught it and took it out the front door and tossed it into a flowerbed. We went back to sleep in blissful silence.

Field Cricket (Gryllus bimaculatus).

An antique Japanese cricket cage.

Down at the Foster's house (the one they are renting, not their house next door) there is a young bear that comes regularly to raid their bird feeder. Their dog, Maverick, goes crazy barking at the windows when he sees it. but they never let the dog out unsupervised so there hasn't been an encounter. They called the game commission, but they said that unless the bear is behaving aggressively and poses a danger, they won't do anything about it. The little bear is never aggressive, just hungry. And it looks like it loves sunflower seeds.

Things really thinned out here on Friday. Kurt left that morning to go on a fishing adventure out west. In the afternoon the Atwaters left to return home to California. Miriam and Hannah also left in the afternoon to go down to the Thayn's. So in just a few days we went from having two housefuls of guests, to practically no one.

I spent the day on Friday mowing. Usually by August the grass has slowed down. In fact, many years August is hot and dry and the lawn goes brown and dormant. Not this year. It hasn't been very hot and we've had enough rain to keep it green and vigorous. We're still mowing twice a week. Friday was a big mowing day – weed whacking, mowing the orchard, and the lawn. It took me four hours. But I like mowing. I find it is a sort of meditation for me. I ponder on profound things while I mow, like the role of fungi in keeping the world alive (the lawn was full of mushrooms). Sometimes I sing. That day I ran through my repertoire of songs from My Fair Lady (don't ask me why, it's just what popped up in my brain).

Friday evening Stacey and I went to the movies to see Spider-Man: Brand New Day. It was pretty good. A bit long, but I liked it. I always think the fight sequences are too long in these sorts of movies. They should trim them down to a maximum of five minutes per fight. I'm a Spider-Man fan from way back, beginning with the Saturday morning cartoon in the 60s (I can sing the theme song word perfect), which led to collecting comic books (all of them lost, alas, before we realized they would be worth more than the 12 cents I paid when I bought them). I've liked all the movies so far. Tom Holland is my favorite iteration of the Spider-Man.

With the bounty of cucumbers we've been blessed with, we made our first batch of relish on Saturday. We had all the ingredients fresh from the garden, twelve cukes, twelve bell peppers, twelve big onions – we used the sweet Walla Walla onions I just harvested. We ground it all up in the morning, salted it and let it sit all day and then cooked it and canned it in the evening.

Relish ingredients waiting to be ground.

Cooking the relish.

Twelve pints finished.

We also processed beans and peas. I spent part of the afternoon shelling peas and snapping green beans in the kitchen while watching My Fair Lady, a carryover from my mowing songfest on Friday. I have a long love for My Fair Lady. As a very young child, I listened to and learned the music from a lot of Broadway musicals and movies from my parents' record collection. At the age of four and five, I could sing songs from South Pacific, West Side Story, and The King and I. In 1964, my Grandma Rathfon, knowing how much I loved musicals, took my sister Hollie and me to see My Fair Lady at the West Shore Theater, down the street from our house on Bridge Street. I was only six, Hollie was ten, and it was a nighttime movie, not a matinee. I was enthralled. My parents bought the soundtrack album and I added those songs to my musicals repertoire and acquired the ability to sing with a Cockney accent. I also fell in love with Audrey Hepburn. All of those associations came flooding over me as I shelled  peas and snapped and blanched green beans on a perfect summer afternoon.

1964 movie poster.

Eliza Doolittle on her way to the Embassy Ball.

Later in the afternoon Stacey and I drove up to the cemetery in North Bingham. It was a beautiful afternoon and we drove via backroads to the cemetery on a hill at the border between Pennsylvania and New York where I have many relatives buried. 

Howe graves in the North Bingham cemetery.

The view from the cemetery looking north into New York state.

Today was our Stake Conference. Our Stake Center is in Jamestown, New York, famous as the birthplace of Lucille Ball and Roger Tory Peterson. Jamestown is two hours away. We left at 7:45 this morning and arrived home at 2:00 P.M. The drive there and back is pretty. We follow the Allegany River part of the way. We listened to a Come Follow Me podcast on the book of Psalms as we drove. Our meeting was good. On the way back, it started to rain – just a light drizzle. Now we're home. We need to have some lunch. I need to do the chores. Maybe I'll have time for a nap. Hannah and Miriam will be home later in the evening.

The week ahead looks sketchy as far as the weather goes. Not hot enough. Chances for rain on Monday and Wednesday. I'm making a list of the things I want to accomplish during the week. Harvest time is gearing up. I think I'll harvest carrots and beets and dig up some potatoes. There will be more cucumbers, green beans, and chard to deal with. Maybe a few tomatoes, but they are slow in ripening, lacking the heat they need. And I'll have to mow again. Maybe twice. I'll be busy and that's the way I like it.