Labor Day weekend ponderings

Within the next couple of weeks, I expect maple and oak leaves to begin showing color. Staghorn sumac began a couple of weeks ago. The three weeks or so between the start of a meteorological season and the beginning of its astronomical equivalent is, or at least has been, a defined transition period between seasons.  wonder if our reset on climate will be sufficient to trigger a revised definition of when actual seasons start. Since the astronomical seasons are based on the relationship between Earth and the sun, that’ll probably stay the same. Could warmer, longer summers become dominant enough to move the beginning of meteorological autumn to October 1? The nice folks at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Centers for Environmental Information have some helpful background information if you want to consider a plunge into the black hole of potential, unreal season change. Follow this link.

staghorn sumac in autumn colors

Photo by J. Harrington

It’s been too many years since I’ve hunted ruffed grouse or waterfowl, and so the knowledge I’d gathered about weather, game movement, and related phenology has diminished with lack of use. This fishing season I’ve yet to wet a line, and if that happens again my awareness of aquatic insect hatches by season will, no doubt, slowly erode. Remember the old saying about “use it or lose it?” Knowledge of and sensitivity to natural events is based, in part, on our dependence on and active participation in natural, out-of-doors occurrences. I’ve yet to hook a trout or shoot a goose while sitting at home looking out a window. People who live “closer to nature”, those who are both  hunters and gatherers, those who forage, are much more likely to know when the local blueberries are ripe than those who gather blueberries by the prepicked pint in a grocery store.

Yesterday, mid-afternoon, I got a glimpse of great numbers of vehicles headed north on I-35 in Forest Lake. I presume many of those folks were headed “up north to the cabin” for summer’s last weekend. Then there’ll be a weekend or to to close up that cabin for the winter. That made me wonder why it is that an exceptional population such as we have in this country can’t find a way to arrange life so that much more pleasure is experienced closer to home. Wouldn’t that help reduce carbon footprints and miles travelled? Might it not also help reduce an urban-rural split? Think about it while you enjoy a healthy, happy, safe Labor Day weekend.

Labor Day

By Rodney Koeneke

So I say to my friend at the day job

“We are bored sometimes, and scented like realtors

but if everyone’s equally disconsolate

under labor’s gooey caul

then nuance can be stitched more vividly

to secrets lodged inside of everyone

until it becomes your own country

with highways that carry you silently past the jetty

which, from their heavy drinking, the case managers come out to

failing to be stable and badly attempting to sing”

We’re pushing our barques past the mansions

as I say this, near the dwellings of persons

whose lives have no mooring

outside the slow fact of our passing—

huddled arrogantly under their air-conditioning

they want us to be users

moved by advertisers

enticing the constituency

to join them and sit there and weep

But we’re too busy pulling

toward centers where workers assemble.

While time for them is a melody

played at long intervals across condominiums

we who are the power

know our systems so much better

now come to this hour outside it

now give it new form on guitar

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