Milkweed seed season #phenology

We're very, very close to mid-Autumn. Using the start of meteorological Autumn as the benchmark, we'll reach mid-season early next week. During the week that's now ending (on Friday the 13th), one of the surer signs of the end of early Autumn has appeared in our fields. Milkweed seed pods burst open and exposed their contents to the winds of change.

a promise of new life

Photo by J. Harrington

Late Spring, early Summer's riotous growth is marked by dandelion flowers morphing into seed heads that beg to be blown by those who believe in fairies. Milkweed seeds like wise mark a magical end to a longer growing season and the promise of renewed life next Spring. As we traveled toward the northern end of the county to pick up our Community Supported Agriculture shares box yesterday, we noted a number of soy bean fields have been harvested (still drying corn, not so much). In fact, several were being harvested as we drove past. If you've ever noticed a combine with a bean harvesting head driving a township gravel road, the combine takes up pretty much from ditch to ditch. We haven't yet seen a mid-afternoon head-to-head encounter on a township road between a combine and a school bus during harvest time, and hope we never do. It would be much like an encounter between an immovable object and an irresistible force.

and then there was one

Photo by J. Harrington

The woolly bear caterpillar we had our eyes on has moved on before we could arrange suitable quarters for it. Probably just as well since the Daughter Person, in a very unromantic, uncurious way asked why we wanted to raise a moth anyhow. Every once in a while, we get a slight sense of having failed as a parent, but then she never showed any indication to absent-mindedly leave small snakes in her jacket pocket when she was young, not that we know of any of her progenitors that might have exhibited such behavior in their own youth.

The Cows at Night

Hayden Carruth

The moon was like a full cup tonight,
too heavy, and sank in the mist
soon after dark, leaving for light

faint stars and the silver leaves
of milkweed beside the road,
gleaming before my car.

Yet I like driving at night
in summer and in Vermont:
the brown road through the mist

of mountain-dark, among farms
so quiet, and the roadside willows
opening out where I saw

the cows. Always a shock
to remember them there, those
great breathings close in the dark.

I stopped, and took my flashlight
to the pasture fence. They turned
to me where they lay, sad

and beautiful faces in the dark,
and I counted them–forty
near and far in the pasture,

turning to me, sad and beautiful
like girls very long ago
who were innocent, and sad

because they were innocent,
and beautiful because they were
sad. I switched off my light.

But I did not want to go,
not yet, nor knew what to do
if I should stay, for how

in that great darkness could I explain
anything, anything at all.
I stood by the fence. And then

very gently it began to rain.

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