Golden opportunities, missed again #phenology

The Minnesota State Fair is going on. The upcoming weekend will bring Labor Day. Overnight temperatures have been dropping into the low 50's. Another Summer is almost gone. In fact, one week from tomorrow is the start of meteorological Autumn.

black-eyed Susans or sunflowers or ...?

Photo by J. Harrington

I remember my mother telling me, time and again, to "stop wishing your life away," so we'll focus more on the here and now. We we believe are black-eyed Susans have been coming into bloom this past week, although there are a number of similar yellow flowers that also bloom at this time of year and, as we've noted before, botany isn't our strong suit. We might have been looking at one of the native sunflowers or one of many yellow wildflowers that come into flower at this time of year. Maybe this Winter we'll actually park our butt long enough to study fundamentals of botany. We've been threatening for years to do just that. We've yet to rise to our own challenge.

prairie coreopsis or sunflowers or ...?

Photo by J. Harrington

On the other hand, we've been telling ourselves that we have to notice before naming. Form many years we paid little or no attention to plants that weren't injurious to us or likely to attract whatever it was that we might have been hunting any given Autumn. In Minnesota, we learned about aspen and grouse. Back in New England, we were more likely to look for abandoned apple orchards that attracted both grouse and whitetail deer. Rarely did we pay attention to wildflowers. These days we're taking a more holistic perspective although we still lack much motivation to study local grasses and forbs. But, we don't have to start there.

The End of Summer

By Rachel Hadas

Sweet smell of phlox drifting across the lawn—

an early warning of the end of summer.

August is fading fast, and by September

the little purple flowers will all be gone.

Season, project, and vacation done.

One more year in everybody’s life.

Add a notch to the old hunting knife

Time keeps testing with a horny thumb.

Over the summer months hung an unspoken

aura of urgency. In late July

galactic pulsings filled the midnight sky

like silent screaming, so that, strangely woken,

we looked at one another in the dark,

then at the milky magical debris

arcing across, dwarfing our meek mortality.

There were two ways to live: get on with work,

redeem the time, ignore the imminence

of cataclysm; or else take it slow,

be as tranquil as the neighbors’ cow

we love to tickle through the barbed wire fence

(she paces through her days in massive innocence,

or, seeing green pastures, we imagine so).

In fact, not being cows, we have no choice.

Summer or winter, country, city, we

are prisoners from the start and automatically,

hemmed in, harangued by the one clamorous voice.

Not light but language shocks us out of sleep

ideas of doom transformed to meteors

we translate back to portents of the wars

looming above the nervous watch we keep.

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