Happy Autumn, if you Fall for that stuff 🏈 🍁🍁🍁

By the time this is posted, we will have officially attained the Northern Hemisphere’s Autumnal Equinox. I’m sure of that because I control when the daily blog gets posted and today that will be after 1:50 pm CDT. 

woollybear caterpillar (Isabella Tiger Moth)

Photo by J. Harrington

Still no signs of woollybear worms, but the Climate Prediction Center already claims we may have a warmer, drier winter than normal, thanks to El Niño. Of course, their forecast is framed as a 40% to 60% chance. As I figure it, that averages at 50%, which equals a coin toss, which isn’t much of a forecast. In fact, it’s about as helpful as the banding on a woollybear caterpillar, which doesn’t foretell winter’s severity, or lack thereof, according to the U.S. Weather Service. Normally, I’d be heartened by the prospect, no matter how slim, of a milder, drier winter, but, over the past few years, I’ve noticed that warmer winters usually bring more freezing rain and ice storms than we used to get pre-Anthropocene. I can blow snow or scrape wet snow with the tractor’s back blade. Freezing rain leaves me with no tools except prayer that it melts soon.

a nice collection of prior year pumpkins

Photo by J. Harrington

Back to autumn: looking toward the week ahead, one of our goals will be to get a few pumpkins. I saw the first ones for sale yesterday as I drove past a local feed and grain store. When we dropped off the Daughter Person’s CSA portion yesterday, I saw a couple of pumpkins on their front steps and instantly suffered some pangs of jealously. But, as I’ve learned over the years, it’s good to have at least one goal in life.

Football Weather

By Paul Carroll

As a kid I tried to coax its coming

By sleeping beneath light sheets

Weeks before

The funeral of the summer locusts in the yard;

Then when Granny peeled down the crucifix of

     flypaper that dangled from the ceiling of the

     kitchen

Magic wasn't needed any longer

To fill the air with pigskins.   The air itself

Acrid, lambent, bright

As the robes of the Chinese gods inside their

     house of glass

In the Field Museum by the lake.

Even practice could be fun—

The way, say, even sepia photographs of old-time

     All Americans could be pirates' gold

Like my favorite Bill Corbus, Stanford's "Baby-

     Face Assassin" crouching at right guard, the

     last to play without a helmet on—

And the fun of testing muscles out 

Like new shoes; the odor of the locker room

     pungent

As the inside of a pumpkin;

And the sting of that wet towel twirled against

     bare butt by a genial, roaring Ziggy, Mt.

     Carmel's All State tackle from Immaculate

     Conception Parish near the mills;

And then the victory, especially the close shaves,

     could feel

Like finally getting beneath a girl's brassiere

She'll let you keep

Unhooked for hours while you neck

Until the windshield of your Granddad's Ford V-8

Becomes filled by a fog

Not even Fu Manchu could penetrate.   Jack,

Next football weather my son Luke will be in high

     school,

Bigger than I was and well-coordinated—but

Couldn't care a plenary indulgence

If he ever lugs a pigskin down the turf

Or hits a long shot on the court.   At times, I wish he

     would.

So he might taste the happiness you knew

Snagging Chris Zoukis' low pass to torpedo nine

     long yards to touchdown

And sink archrival Lawrence High

45 years ago come this Thanksgiving Day.   Still,

He has his own intensities

As wild as sports and writing were for us:

Luke's the seventh Rolling Stone,

His electric guitar elegant and shiny black

As a quiet street at night

Glazed by rain and pumpkin frost.

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