Monthly Archives: August 2013

The End of Summer

28 Wednesday Aug 2013

Posted by in Agriculture, Autumn, Farming, Nature, Seasons

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There’s this funny thing that happens to me once in a while. I’ll be out somewhere, at a store, a movie, at work, and someone will pass and for a moment I think it looks like someone I know. ‘Oh, there’s Joe!’ I’ll think to myself, or ‘There’s Donna!’ But then I realize it’s not Joe or Donna, but someone who simply looked like or called to mind those people. And then, here’s the odd part, sometime within the next few hours I will see Joe or Donna. It’s just strange, like the occurrence of deja vu.

I experienced the seasonal equivalent of this phenomenon the other day. I was walking up the driveway and I saw, in a gust of breeze, a cluster of yellow leaves flying away. It struck me that I was seeing the first notice of the end of summer, the onset of autumn. But once my eyes focused on the sight I realized it was not leaves, but a group of yellow butterflies coursing over and beyond the barn, really quite lovely, but not the harbinger of autumn. And then, an hour later, while driving down a side street toward work, I saw yellow leaves being blown across the road–actual leaves this time, cast down from a tree and scattering in front of me.

There is a heat advisory this week, with heat indices above 100 degrees. It certainly does not feel like summer is drawing to a close, except in the very cool mornings, before the sun has climbed above the horizon and begun its fierce work. In the American Midwest we usually have summerlike temperatures deep into September, so I don’t nurse any illusions about sudden breaks in the heat pattern. But the cicadas are filling the dusk with their vigorous song these days, and I know that time marches on.

I know I’m kind of new at this, but I am ready to offer one opinion about ‘country life.’ Summer is the season least accommodating to the experience of nature. Why? Too much to do. During the autumn and winter, despite household and barn chores, I found myself on many weekend afternoons dressing warmly and walking through the woods, down paths, across fields, finding out what this land holds. In summer, I spend that time on the lawn tractor, trying to keep ahead of Mother Nature, whose goal it always is to reclaim my patch of land for her own empire. It is a weekly, a daily fight. Then there’s the garden, the blackberry patch, the fruit trees and more that need attention.

Of course, to many people, tending a garden and fruit trees is experiencing nature, but I have never thought so. To me, horticulture and agriculture are applied technologies. Yes, you are on the land and getting your hands into the dirt, but gardening is a matter of controlling nature, not experiencing it. And while spring is about planting and autumn is about harvest, summer is the season most intensely involved with agriculture, not nature.

I will miss summer as it goes by, but I am also ready for the cool days and colors of autumn. Next summer I will do better. I will control the grass better, and grow more fruit, and plant more things in a larger garden. This summer was kind of an experiment. I have all autumn and winter to look back on it, to make plans, and to have a great summer next year.

In Which the Seasons Literally Change

23 Friday Aug 2013

Posted by in 4th of July, Autumn, Calendar, Change, climate, Fall, Mythology, Nature, Religion, Science, Seasons, Spring, Summer, Weather, Winter

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My life in the country, for the first several months, was beset by a troubling literalness. Like I was living the pages of a Country Life calendar showing what to expect month by month. We saw a significant thaw towards the end of February. In early spring robins made their appearance with an almost pedantic regularity, and by late spring, does with fawns crept tenuously across the fields. Asparagus jumped up in April, and strawberries too. We ate radishes planted earlier than other crops, and harvested tender lettuce by the middle of May. Throughout the month of May we saw clouds of Mayflies, and I saw my first June bug–literally saw my first June bug–on June first. It’s like these creatures were being paraded out by a stage manager in response to the verses of a song. I almost expected fireworks to spontaneously generate on July 4th.

Then something funny happened. Summer came on, pretty much on cue. But it failed, and continued to fail, in heating up the way summer does. It rained and rained. As a matter of fact, we have only had the hoses out to water our lawn or garden once or twice this year, and everything is as green and ripe as can be. Now we are setting record low temperatures for late July. We have not turned on the air conditioning this week. This morning I am sitting on the porch while a slow drizzle wets the screens, and as the sun comes up, everything in the distance is a blur in thick fog.

People’s reactions to all of this are interesting. Those who claim to doubt the reality of climate change scoff and say, ‘so much for global warming!’–but of course we have seen many record high temperatures broken in the past ten years. This is the first time we have set record lows for a long time. Many people like the lower summer temperatures, but they regard it all warily: ‘We’re gonna pay for this, just wait and see.’

But having spent the past several months researching the myths and the deities who over time have been thought to control the seasons, my thoughts turn to other peoples in other times. What would people three thousand years ago, who counted on a long hot summer to provide bountiful harvests and good hunts to fill larders for the winter months, have thought of all this? What happens if Persephone leaves her mother and returns to assume her throne in the Underworld months too early? Why did it happen? Did we omit some crucial obeisance to Demeter? Did our ceremonies to resurrect Adonis not work?

To me, this is poetic speculation. I know that Canadian cool fronts have been making their way across the American Midwest in response to erratic shifts in the jet stream, and that this pattern will only hold for a while; that summer will return with all its fierce heat and humidity–that we will indeed pay for this. Writers and poets in modern times often evoke myths like Demeter and Persephone or Aphrodite and Adonis, but they are metaphors in their hands, images to enhance poetic vision. There was nothing metaphorical to the ancient people who believed these myths: the winter was quite literally caused by Persephone’s return to the Underworld, and spring by her return to her mother’s embrace. If the spring did not arrive on time, or if signs of an early end to summer were apparent, it was cause for worry. Not knowing the natural causes of meteorological changes, people worked out their own rites and rituals aimed at effecting the desired changes. One can only suppose they approached these rituals with all the fervency of true believers.

Someone (exactly who is still in question) once said that ‘everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.’ This is an ironical acknowledgement of what we knew by the late 19th century, that the weather is ruled by natural forces, that there is nothing you nor I nor any mythical agent can do to change it. The seasons change, they are not changed. We get what we get, even though we expect certain things at certain times, like the pages of a calendar: look it’s April, here are the showers! Look it’s May, here are the flowers!

Wasting My Time and Yours?

07 Wednesday Aug 2013

Posted by in Blogging, Creativity, Imagination, Seasons, Writing

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There’s this commercial I’ve been seeing that bothers me greatly. It is a commercial for a telephone (as most commercials seem to be these days). The commercial says that this phone is used to take more photographs than any other telephone. It features people in many and various daily situations, at work, play, recreation, family events, public observances and more, all of them snapping away at things with their little telephones, ‘recording the moment,’ I guess, or grabbing something to post on Facebook or Reddit or Pinterest or whatever. This they can do with a click, seamlessly, so in an instant everyone they know (and plenty of others they’ll never suspect) can see what it is they’re doing, or seeing.

It used to be there was something special about photography, even snapshots. We took photos at birthdays and on Christmas Day, we took photos on vacations. When people visited we sat them on the sofa or at the kitchen table and got out the photo albums. Now everything (everything!) is photographed and posted online. Something special has become tedious and mundane. I cannot recall the last photograph that I thought was special. People ask me to come and look at what they’re looking at on their laptop, which I find a bother. I don’t want to stand here leaning over your shoulder watching a slideshow of little or no consequence. There are a million photographs where there used to be one, and still it’s only that one that’s worth taking the time to look at.

When I first came to blogging I was surprised by how many blogs are dedicated to the photographs of their originators. Many people believe themselves to be photographers. In the end, of the hundreds of ‘photographers’ whose work I have looked at, I only follow two. Why is that? Because photography is an art, not a pastime. Just because you have a camera doesn’t mean you have an eye.

It’s much the same with writing for blogs. I am a librarian, and I read a lot. I am known as a literary snob. I think that writing is a very special skill and only a few people have it. It’s not just writing, but having something to write about. There’s nothing worse than the blogger who takes up the challenge of writing something every day. God save us.

For a long time writing instructors have advised neophyte scribes to compose a daily journal. Writing something every day keeps the writing muscle limber and strengthens the imagination. But one’s journal is not for public consumption. Some days, you just don’t have anything to say; you write about what you had for breakfast, what chores you ran that day, what the weather was like. Then you close your journal and hope for better inspiration tomorrow. This self-censorship does not figure in the work of many bloggers. I have read 800-word pieces about how sad someone is today; I have read pieces overflowing with purply gilded adjectives about a walk in the woods in which nothing happened aside from one foot being placed in front of the other while all about nature glowered. If that’s all you have to say, then why not just enjoy the walk?

My subject is the seasons, and obviously, the seasons are all about us. Sometimes they are tiresomely literal, as in the showers of April, the flowers of May, the many-colored leaves of autumn. But sometimes they jump up and surprise us, like this summer is doing in the American Midwest, with its cool nights and rainy days, especially following last summer which broke all kinds of high temperature records. But do I need to write about that? Like you can’t see it as well as I can? And if I have nothing to add, no particular insight, isn’t writing about it little more than small talk?–how about that weather!

So I have been enjoying the summer, spending time working on my lawn and garden, sitting on my porch on cool mornings reading, not writing too much. In the end, isn’t experiencing the seasons more important than struggling to come up with something clever to say about them? Can you ruin something by pretending to a deeper understanding of it and trying to render that understanding to other people? And is this all a rationale to excuse myself for not getting down to work and finishing what I’ve started?