It was 88 degrees in our valley today, although, given that we are a valley of forest overhangs and microclimes every couple of miles or so, it varied by a degree or two. The Fiesingers, a family 2.7 miles east of us, are always calling to ask about the weather. They could have rain while we have sunny skies. Most of the rest of the world was in the nineties or even the hundreds. Unbearable, except for here. Here, however, it is still somewhat unnerving. Leaves are already falling to the ground. These are not the leaves of Fall, just Spring leaves that didn’t take. Some do have color, clues of things to come.
It’s only mid July, and we just put in our third cord of firewood. It's green now, however, by the time we need it - late January, early February - it'll be cured enough to burn. My daughter and I plan to take another cord off the property ourselves, mostly ash. A lethal beetle has infested the ash trees - literally, a death sentence - so we’re going to put the dead ones to good use as firewood. It’s a very hard wood and burns slowly. Babe Ruth’s baseball bat was cut from ash. (Remember the old 'Louisville Slugger'?) A brand new chainsaw has become the latest family treasure. Fuel oil is the problem, and I don’t know how the people up here who mostly depend on oil for heat are going to manage. Four cords of ash, oak, and maple ought to get us through the winter, but oil is our back-up, so we’ll feel it as well. Silk long johns are washed, folded, and stored where we can nab them quickly when needed. Goose down and fleece are readily available for when the temperature drops to near zero or below.
Winter! It’s mid-July, nearly ninety degrees, and we’re already thinking Winter. I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again. Evolution has played us a dirty trick. When we’re young, time seems eternal. When we’re older, time thunders around the speedway, and, the older we get, the more records we break. "Wait a minute. What? What happened? Where’d it go? Weren’t we just…? Didn’t we just…?" Time flies whether you’re having fun or not.
The rhubarb and daffodils are long since gone as are the lilacs and rhododendrons, but the lilies are blooming as are Queen Anne’s Lace, columbine, goldenrod, daisies, wild grape…Next time you see Queen Anne’s Lace pull it out by the roots, scratch the roots with your fingernail, and sniff. Smells like…Carrot! That’s what it is. A primitive carrot, not yet cultivated. What is cultivated is growing nicely in this year’s garden - the usual suspects - lettuce and tomatoes, of course, kale, peppers, peas, radishes, squash, sunflowers…My daughter and a close family friend have taken over most of the grunt work, but I’m in it for the fine tuning.
The Druids used to consider groves of trees as holy places. I have a grove I’ve been planting for years now. Each tree represents someone in our family - a macoun apple for my son, planted 34 years ago on his first birthday; an exotic crab apple with bordeaux-colored leaves and dark red berries for my daughter with auburn hair; an oak tree first planted for my grandson on his birthday is now branching out into the giant it will become; a pear tree for me and Jamie because we’re the Pair that engendered all this. We also planted three new trees - two young peach in the grove, one weeping cherry behind the house, visible from the dining room. The cherry will weep curtains of pink-white blossoms for years and years, a hundred, maybe, more. I read somewhere that one who plants a tree is an optimist. Guilty. I think of the pleasure those trees will give season after season to folks I will never know and who will never know me. But, they will know my trees, and I know now what they will know then. Another apple, a weeping peaseblossom, and a white birch as gateway complete the grove. We’ve had to wrap the new trees in burlap because soon the deer, now still in velvet, will start to itch and use the delicate trunks of the peach trees to scrape the velvet off.
Last year the crop was bountiful. Not so much this year as the bounty alternates from year to year. We’ll preserve what we can with the new fruit dehydrator we just bought, and, while I certainly don’t wish the summer away, I look forward to eating an apple just plucked from my son’s tree. The pear tree will bear first. None of these fruits have supermarket aesthetics. They are not perfectly shaped, certainly not blemish free, but to bite into fruit fresh plucked is to blast one million taste buds into orbit. We can walk through the fields and pick wild strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, and, soon, blueberries.
There is still a pattern to all this.
We know what’s coming next, but “When” varies with the weather. Yes, of course, Fall still follows Summer; Winter still follows Fall; Spring, Winter; Summer, Spring, but there’s give and take all the way through, a temperature change either way, on time, more or less. It’s exciting to simply open the door. It could be seventy in January and fifty in July instead of the usual ten and eighty. We had a huge moon a few nights ago, the largest of the month. I stood in the middle of our garden and watched it looming over us. I swear I could hear the plants growing. Come dawn, you could see that they did.
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