Saturday, September 23, 2023

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)
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 NiΓ±o. 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
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


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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Please be kind to each other while you can.

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