MAGICAL SEPTEMBER HAS ARRIVED!

              "By all these lovely tokens, September days are here.
              With summer’s best of weather and autumn’s best of cheer.”
                                                                – Helen Hunt Jackson 

Magical September has arrived. She waltzes in with her cooler temperatures and autumn splendor.  

Let’s remember to:

• Admire September’s magical sunsets and the harvest moon.
• Enjoy the beauty of goldenrod along our roadways.
• Appreciate the last green leaves before Jack Frost hauls out his paint box.
• Take a few minutes to watch the rolling fog lift itself from the land.
• 
  Drink a glass of refreshing apple cider.
• Call a friend and grab lunch to share in the fall merriment.

If I were to ponder the summer of 2022 and all its finery, I’d have to admit we had a hot humid season
with temperatures rolling upward near ninety degrees many days. But a sizzling summer has its positive points. Hot summers are for taking a nap, or finding the perfect spot to relax and chill, or eating ice cream, or enjoying your favorite summer sport.

Central Pennsylvania received just enough rain to encourage every weed in our flowerbeds to flourish. I grew a horse weed plant taller than I am. I filled buckets with purslane, plantain, dandelion, dollar weed, quack grass and clover. Humid conditions during the day and hot muggy nights encouraged white mold on many plants’ leaves, but our ferns went crazy, loving the humidity. Ironically, my tomato plants were stubbornly lazy and didn’t produce as well as they had in other years.

But now, it’s time to watch September spin its magic as it blows a farewell kiss to August. Hummingbirds disappear. Acorns plummet to the earth with a plop. Milkweed pods burst open and send tiny seeds sailing into the air on fluffy floss. Pleasing scents fill the air: smoky fires, pumpkin pie, hot chocolate, cinnamon and nutmeg, roasts in the oven, and apple pie.

September is also jacket weather on cool nights. Dry leaves rustle beneath our feet; and overhead, geese honk a good-bye as they wing their way south. In many northern states, September delivers the first frost of the season and signals autumn is approaching.

Do you have a favorite sign of the upcoming season? Share it with others in the comments below. And watch out for those falling acorns!

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HERE COMES AUGUST!

“August rain: the best of the summer gone, 

and the new fall not yet born. The odd uneven time. 

                                                                                                     ~Sylvia Plath 

 

Here she come comes…August and her last days of summer. I don’t know how those days flew by so fast. My husband saw some sumac changing to red on one of his many jaunts around the area. For many, myself included, it’s one of the harbinger of fall.

 

And who doesn’t think summer is sliding to an end when our local Clearfield County Fair gets underway? If you are anywhere in the vicinity of the fairgrounds during fair week, you can smell its presence. The sweet smell of cotton candy and waffles dunked in sugar wafts in the air with the flavored smoke of hamburgers, hotdogs, beef, and hot sausage cooking on burners under the concession stands. Anyone who owns land near the fairgrounds have lawns and driveways that look like parking lots. Children gather in groups to lose their money on games of chance or to ride any fast moving mechanical apparatus that swings its riders high into the air and twirls them around and around.                                                                                                             

Speaking of lawns in Central Pennsylvania, they are morphing into shades of light brown—which means less mowing, less gasoline consumed, and less work. Scott is not heartbroken over this occurrence, even though he agrees a thunder storm once in a while is a welcome relief from the heat we’ve been having. 

 

August is the month of reaping what we sow. Tomato plants, scattered around in my flowerbeds, are dressed in bunches of still green tomatoes. But if you’re lucky, you can find a handful of small red cherry ones to whet your appetite or to use for a treat on your salad. Why do the flavor of fresh juicy tomatoes from the garden taste better than any you can buy at a store?

This year, we tried a bucket garden again, concentrating on spices. We now have parsley, lemon thyme, rosemary, sage, mint, along with two buckets of marigolds and a bucket of lettuce. I also have chives in a bed and a container of basil on our patio. What get used the most? Ironically, it’s the chives that come up each year without fuss or coaxing. 

 

For some odd reason, instead of writing, my wandering mind and body heads off to do other chores that need my attention. I think it’s called procrastination. It’s one of my many talents. Do you have an activity or special summer chore you put off despite the nagging of a little voice inside your head? 

 

I’m always curious to hear how others enjoy the end of the summer season. Drop me a line in the comment section below. And, let’s enjoy August as summertime in all her sunny glory abdicates and autumn splendor ascends the throne next. 

 

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SUMMER ON MY SWING - Pondering Answers

“Hot July brings cooling showers, apricots and gillyflowers.” - Sara Coleridge

I admit as a writer I enjoy time alone to sit and think which is why I like July, why I like summer. My patio swing calls me to rest, enjoy the warm days or balmy nights, and ponder the world. It’s said curiosity is instrumental in driving our thought processes. It’s when I’m wrapped in that solitude when I ask questions which may or may not have answers: 

• Why can’t we see the wind? 
• How does the song sparrow learn its many different songs?
• Do woodpeckers get headaches? 
  
• What do northern squirrels think when they eat their first southern peanut from my bird feeder? Can they have an allergy to them? 
• Fireflies flash in patterns that are unique to each species. Have they ever learned another pattern like we learn second languages? 
• Why was the daisy chosen to be the flower plucked with the chant: He loves me, he loves me not?

 And my weird wondering brain chugs along…

Maybe in our attempt to explain things in nature, we need to accept there are mysteries which may never have explanations. As humans, we like explanations. We like plans. We like the predictable.

And, we like to ponder.

After all, isn’t that what creativity really is? The use of our imaginations or original ideas in the production of an artistic work?

So I leave you with this July wish: Take time to rest, relax, and contemplate the world around you. And if you get a bizarre or curious thought, drop it in the comment box below so we all can ponder the answer!

 

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CELEBRATING BARN DAY – July 10th

The second Sunday in July is designated “barn day,” when the importance of barns in the farming communities in the United States is observed. Barns are historically the center of the farm, built to accommodate animals, grain, hay, and equipment. The word barn originates from the Old English word for ‘bere,’ or barely, and ‘aem,’ which means storage space.

           Throughout our lands, there are many different types and styles of barns, built and designed to reflect the type of farming that occurred there. In northeastern Pennsylvania, where I grew up, our dairy barn was a bank barn which meant it was built into a bank allowing for easy ground access to both the upper and lower floors. The upper floors accommodated haylofts where first loose hay and then baled hay were stored for the cattle housed on the lower floor.      

          Most barns in northeastern Pennsylvania were constructed of hemlock, a very hardy wood which seasons to a light gray color. The eastern hemlock is the state tree of Pennsylvania and large, plentiful stands existed in the 1800s.

        By design, our barn was fashioned after a design called the Dutch Barn with its hip or gambrel roof which had two symmetrical slopes on two sides, with the lower slope steeper than the upper one. However, the barn itself was more rectangular, like the English and German barns, and the broad expansive side had wide doors on tracks that opened and allowed for wagons to enter directly into hay loft, making unloading the hay load easier.                                            

How did they get the hay into the barn? A long rail or track ran along the inside length of the roof, from peak to peak, and accommodated a double harpoon hay fork, pulleys, and trip rope. Once the fork, with its two giant tines, was secured into a bundle of hay, a horse—and later a tractor—pulled the stack of hay up and onto the track. After delivering it to the proper location, a yank on an attached rope would trip the hay fork to release its load. I often worked the mow. Using a pitch fork, I dragged layers of hay to the far corner and edges of the loft to even it out.

         Because we found newspapers from the Civil War, used as insulation in the attic, we knew the barn was built before 1861. However, we also knew the Irish Potato famine of 1845-49, brought many skilled Irish immigrants looking for work when they arrived in the United States. It was said they went from farm to farm, seeking shelter and food—and in return, cleared stone from fields and built the stonewalls in Northeastern Pennsylvania. We have many of these sturdy walls still standing on our property.

So what do you do on Barn Day? Why not take a ride in the country and go looking for old barns? They are a disappearing structure on our rural landscape as the farming industry has slowly faded over the years and the barn buildings have gone to disrepair. 

  

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