Winter didn't wait for the solstice

Today it's time to say good-bye to November, since tomorrow we welcome the arrival of December. Signs of Thanksgiving past arrive later today in the form of hot turkey sandwiches for tonight's dinner, while the Christmas season arrived earlier this week in the form of snowflake lights and wreathes adorning the house and reflecting in the snow from the two separate storms we had this last week. In fact, another snow shower has started since I began writing this post. Sometimes we get too much of a good thing.

Christmas cheer comes in many shapes and sizes

Photo by J. Harrington

Juncos are back at the feeder, probably for the rest of winter. There's a pair of cardinals that occasionally arrive at the feeder just as dark is setting in. Maybe, if we ever shake the chronic cloud cover, they'll show up during the day to bring bright Christmas color to the woods. Male cardinals agains a snowy background are about as cheery as winter woods get, it seems to me.

The Better Half [BH] and I have yet to select a home grown Christmas tree from the woods around the house. The aforementioned snow storms required enough snow blowing and shoveling to preempt woods wandering. I'll try a reconnoiter tomorrow and see if I can spot some candidates for the BH's approval. We've been cutting our own, on our own, for several years now and it's become a fun tradition.

Another holiday season tradition around here, blooming amaryllis, was renewed today when the BH put three separate, newly arrived, bulbs into three planters on the south-facing window sill. I''ll be curious to see how long it takes them to blossom. I should have paid more attention in years past.

This is supposed to be a season of peace to men of good will and / or peace, good will toward men. Holding aside the archaic, sexist phrasing, peace and good will seem sparse this year. Perhaps, if each of us tries, just a little bit harder, as Janis used to urge us, we can make this season a pleaasant memory for many more of both young and old than would otherwise be the case. It's worth a try, don't you think?

Since this is the last day of Native American Heritage Month, let's have Joy Harjo help us welcome winter and December.

 

Grace

Joy Harjo   1951 –

                                    For Darlene Wind and James Welch

I think of Wind and her wild ways the year we had nothing to lose and lost it anyway in the cursed country of the fox. We still talk about that winter, how the cold froze imaginary buffalo on the stuffed horizon of snowbanks. The haunting voices of the starved and mutilated broke fences, crashed our thermostat dreams, and we couldn't stand it one more time. So once again we lost a winter in stubborn memory, walked through cheap apartment walls, skated through fields of ghosts into a town that never wanted us, in the epic search for grace. 

Like Coyote, like Rabbit, we could not contain our terror and clowned our way through a season of false midnights. We had to swallow that town with laughter, so it would go down easy as honey. And one morning as the sun struggled to break ice, and our dreams had found us with coffee and pancakes in a truck stop along Highway 80, we found grace.

I could say grace was a woman with time on her hands, or a white buffalo escaped from memory. But in that dingy light it was a promise of balance. We once again understood the talk of animals, and spring was lean and hungry with the hope of children and corn. 

I would like to say, with grace, we picked ourselves up and walked into the spring thaw. We didn't; the next season was worse. You went home to Leech Lake to work with the tribe and I went south. And, Wind, I am still crazy. I know there is something larger than the memory of a dispossessed people. We have seen it. 

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Season's greetings to you and blessings upon you!

It's Thanksgiving week. Around here we are starting the week with well above average temperatures and look like we're going to have snow cover for Thanksgiving. The thirty-day forecast suggests that snow cover may last until January thaw or what passes for spring in our North Country. That's why we're behind schedule posting this. Yesterday was committed to changing the oil and checking out the snow blower (and cleaning up most of the mess I made in the garage) as well as cleaning up more fallen leaves plus the dead plants from the front porch planters that will soon (before the soil freezes) hold Christmas angels and greenery. By Thanksgiving, the "back yard" may look like this:

November usually brings a "dusting" of snow

Photo by J. Harrington

We've already started shopping for Christmas presents and received our first "holiday greetings" card. The weekend after Thanksgiving is traditionally when we put up lights. A pair of poinsettias is perched on the piano already. My long-standing dedication to deferring all Christmas activities until after Thanksgiving is being eroded by retail temptation, especially since the family is going to do our best to honor the Black Friday / Cyber Monday boycott from Thanksgiving until December 2, shopping only local and with cash (if stores still accept that😉).

We Ain't Buying It

Today we're planning on changing the oil in the tractor without increasing the mess in the garage, we hope. Then we get to mostly sit and watch what Mother Nature delivers late Tuesday and early Wednesday. We promise not to complain at all if the storm misses us entirely. That would give us something else to be grateful for come Thursday.

Many decades ago we lived a little north of the former Plimouth Plantation. It looks as though they've been increasing recognition of Wampanoag contributions to the first celebration since I moved to Minnesota. I'm please to see that during this Native American Heritage month. Check out Plimoth Patuxet this week but first, enjoy Joy Harjo's Thanksgiving poem:

Perhaps the World Ends Here

By Joy Harjo 

 

The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live.

The gifts of earth are brought and prepared, set on the table. So it has been since creation, and it will go on.

We chase chickens or dogs away from it. Babies teethe at the corners. They scrape their knees under it.

It is here that children are given instructions on what it means to be human. We make men at it, we make women.

At this table we gossip, recall enemies and the ghosts of lovers.

Our dreams drink coffee with us as they put their arms around our children. They laugh with us at our poor falling-down selves and as we put ourselves back together once again at the table.

This table has been a house in the rain, an umbrella in the sun.

Wars have begun and ended at this table. It is a place to hide in the shadow of terror. A place to celebrate the terrible victory.

We have given birth on this table, and have prepared our parents for burial here.

At this table we sing with joy, with sorrow. We pray of suffering and remorse. We give thanks.

Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing and crying, eating of the last sweet bite.

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Reading into the season

Winter is approaching, a time for slowing down and storytelling. For some of us that also means more reading, although I suspect the Better Half is dubious that, for me, more reading is possible. She may have a point but I'm now working hard to limit doomscrolling and reading more positive content. You'll see what I mean below when you get to the cluster of links.

some years the deer don't wait 'til after Halloween

Photo by J. Harrington

The pumpkins and jack-o'-lantern have been put in the field behind the house so deer can feed on them. The local firearms season ends today so no one is likely to be accused of hunting over bait. I didn't hunt this year (again) and the Son-In-Law only hunted here one day after we saw a wonderful buck just before dusk one afternoon this past week.

This year I've done a much better job of managing and mulching leaves than I have in years past. We've got lots of bare ground that needs reseeding with shade-tolerant grass. Maybe next year I'll look for shade-tolerant sod. Is there such a thing?

The replacement serviceberry bushes seem to be surviving. Their leaves changed color this past week. I may try to water them once more before the snow sets in. The local weather forecasts have been including showers that never arrive so I've been holding off watering in hope that....

There is a wonderful, thoughtful "featured essay" in The Guardian. I urge you to take some time to read Megan Mayhew Bergman's The last frontier of empathy: why we still struggle to see ourselves as animals. I particularly enjoyed it since I've recently started reading David R. Boyd's The Rights of Nature. I suspect there's a number of folks who might be more comfortable if such themes were reframed as the responsibilities of humans. A long time ago I was taught that having rights incurs corresponding responsibilities, a lesson that seems to have been lost on all too many of our "leaders."

Ada Limón captures many themes related to nature and rights in her wonderful poem Startlement, from her new collection of the same title. See what you think as you read the version printed in a recent interview with her.

Startlement. It is a forgotten pleasure. The pleasure of the unexpected blue-bellied lizard skittering off his sunspot rock, the flicker of an unknown bird by the bus stop. To think, perhaps we are not distinguishable, and therefore, no loneliness can exist here. Species to species in the same blue air, smoke, wing flutter buzzing, a car horn coming, so many unknown languages to think we have only honored this strange human tongue. If you sit by the riverside, you see a culmination of all things upstream. We know now we were never at the circle's center. Instead, all around us, something is living or trying to live. The world says what we are becoming, we are becoming together. The world says one type of dream has ended, and another has just begun. The world says once we were separate, and now we must move in unison.

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November's heritage: memories and memorials

It was fifty years ago tomorrow that the Edmund Fitzgerald sank in Lake Superior. Gordon Lightfoot memorialized the tragedy with his song The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. Please pause for a moment of silence after following the link and listening to him perform. Then check some interesting background to the song.

Minnesota's Split Rock Lighthouse on Lake Superior

Photo by J. Harrington

Locally, on November 10 the Split Rock Lighthouse and the Minnesota Historical Society will host a memorial to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Fitzgerald's sinking, as has been done for the past four decades or so.

Our area's firearm’s deer season opened yesterday with colder temperatures than we’ve seen so far this season. Warmer days are forecast for later in the week. One of the reasons I was more of a grouse and waterfowl hunter than a whitetail seeker is that I can't manage to sit still enough to blend into the landscape when experiencing the frequently cold temperatures we get during deer season in the North Country. Plus, when I tried deer hunting back in New England, before moving to Minnesota, I did it with a mixed group of bow hunters and bird hunters. It rarely failed that the bird hunters spooked deer and the bow hunters watched grouse strutting around their stands.

UPDATE: Local ponds are forming ice cover. First snow of the season is falling as graupel and forming snow snakes along the roads.

Since November is Native American Heritage month, as well as the season for early gales on Superior, and since Lightfoot referred to Superior by her Ojibwe/Anishinaabe name, Gitche Gumee, it seems fitting to close today with a Kimberly Blaeser poem. Water, in Great Lakes and elsewhere, has long been a source of both life and death.

Wellspring: Words from Water

A White Earth childhood water rich and money poor.
Vaporous being transformed in cycles—
the alluvial stories pulled from Minnesota lakes
harvested like white fish, like manoomin,
like old prophecies of seed growing on water.
Legends of Anishinaabeg spirit beings:
cloud bearer Thunderbird who brings us rain,
winter windigo like Ice Woman, or Mishibizhii
who roars with spit and hiss of rapids—
great underwater panther, you copper us
to these tributaries of balance. Rills. A cosmology
of nibi.  We believe our bodies thirst. Our earth.
One element. Aniibiishaaboo. Tea brown
wealth. Like maple sap. Amber. The liquid eye of moon.
Now she turns tide, and each wedded being gyrates
to the sound, its river body curving.
We, women of ageless waters, endure;
like each flower drinks from night,
holds dew. Our bodies a libretto,
saturated, an aquifer—we speak words
from ancient water.

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Listening for the land to speak

The November section of our Minnesota Weatherguide Calendar and Almanac has a timely epigram from Linda Hogan:

There is a way that nature
speaks, that land speaks.
Most of the time we are 
simply not patient enough,
quiet enough, to pay
attention to the story.

November is Native American Heritage month but, with the federal government shut down since the beginning of October, most .gov websites haven't been updated. November is also the month when the North Country begins to accelerate its slide from autumn into winter. As I was poking about the corners of the internet yesterday, looking for some North Country phenology material, I came across the University of Minnesota's Center for Community-Engaged Learning's Sites of Resistance and Resilience in the Twin Cities on the UMN's Season Watch Resources page. The fortuitous discoveries above remind me of the old dictum: "No amount of planning will ever replace dumb luck."

early November North Country snow [2013]

Photo by J. Harrington

Winter, among those who live close to nature and her seasons, is often a time for quiet hunkering down and storytelling. We're headed in that direction. Summer's ants are disappearing and winter's mice are looking for warm places to nest. If this year is near typical, our "permanent" snow cover will begin about a week before Thanksgiving. If you haven't yet come across a copy of National Geographic's 1621 A New Look at Thanksgiving, I suggest you try to order a copy from Birchbark Books. I'm going to start this year's (re)reading later today.

Harvested cornfields are being gleaned by growing flocks of swans and Canada geese. A few of those waterfowl may winter over on the St. Croix river near Hudson WI. Most will migrate south as open water grows ice cover and harvested fields are covered by more and more snow. Since we lack a snow bird's cottage in the warm south, we'll practice a lethargic, hibernation-approximating existence, as much as we can get away with, until the seasons change again and spring returns.

Map

Linda Hogan

This is the world
so vast and lonely
without end, with mountains
named for men
who brought hunger
from other lands,
and fear
of the thick, dark forest of trees
that held each other up,
knowing fire dreamed of swallowing them
and spoke an older tongue,
and the tongue of the nation of wolves
was the wind around them.
Even ice was not silent.
It cried its broken self
back to warmth.
But they called it
ice, wolf, forest of sticks,
as if words would make it something
they could hold in gloved hands,
open, plot a way
and follow.

This is the map of the forsaken world.
This is the world without end
where forests have been cut away from their trees.
These are the lines wolf could not pass over.
This is what I know from science:
that a grain of dust dwells at the center
of every flake of snow,
that ice can have its way with land,
that wolves live inside a circle
of their own beginning.
This is what I know from blood:
the first language is not our own.

There are names each thing has for itself,
and beneath us the other order already moves.
It is burning.
It is dreaming.
It is waking up.

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Approaching Samhain

This Friday morning past, the wind was finally calm after a hard frost night. I watched the maple trees in front of the house drop leaves like oversized snow flakes. Soon, what passes for our front lawn was colored yellow. Today we mulched the lawn's leaves. Yesterday and today we had collected windrows of leaves along the south side of the driveway and dumped several garden cart loads at the wood's edge behind the house. Most of the oak leaves are still hanging on. Autumn is my favorite season except for leaf fall.

While emptying one cart load of fallen leaves, I tripped over what at first I thought was a dead branch that turned out to be a mouse-eaten four-point antler, shed from a white-tail buck that would have been an eight-pointer. First time in my life I've come across an antler shed. It's now a keepsake.

may only friendly spirits visit you

Photo by J. Harrington

From what I've noticed during my recent drives, all of the soy beans and most of the corn has been harvested. Fields and treetops are looking more and more bare by the day. As we approach Samhain at month's end we recognize we're entering the dark half of the year. The cycle continues through the Circle of the Year. I was contemplating some of those kinds of thoughts and accompanying feelings when my Jeep's music system started playing Joni Mitchell's fantastic song The Circle Game. All the thoughts and feelings mixed together were enhanced because our granddaughter had recently celebrated her fifth birthday.

It seems to me that we would do well to live so that we are more aware of the passing seasons and what's seasonal. Such an adjustment might help us to more readily live in the moment. Ms. Mitchell captured the essence of that in her song Big Yellow Taxi. "Don't it always seem to go / That you don't know what you've got / Till it's gone...."

You''re right, I've stayed away from politics and world events in this posting. remember the old advice about not saying anything if you can't say something good? Now is the time for me to share below these much better than good lyrics and thoughts from Ms. Mitchell and wish US all a Happy Halloween and Blessed Samhain.

The Circle Game

by Joni Mitchell

Yesterday a child came out to wonder
Caught a dragonfly inside a jar
Fearful when the sky was full of thunder
And tearful at the falling of a star

Then the child moved ten times round the seasons
Skated over ten clear frozen streams
Words like when you're older must appease him
And promises of someday make his dreams

And the seasons they go round and round
And the painted ponies go up and down
We're captive on the carousel of time
We can't return we can only look
Behind from where we came
And go round and round and round
In the circle game

Sixteen springs and sixteen summers gone now
Cartwheels turn to car wheels thru the town
And they tell him take your time it won't be long now
Till you drag your feet to slow the circles down

And the seasons they go round and round
And the painted ponies go up and down
We're captive on the carousel of time
We can't return we can only look
Behind from where we came
And go round and round and round
In the circle game

So the years spin by and now the boy is twenty
Though his dreams have lost some grandeur coming true
There'll be new dreams maybe better dreams and plenty
Before the last revolving year is through

And the seasons they go round and round
And the painted ponies go up and down
We're captive on the carousel of time
We can't return we can only look
Behind from where we came
And go round and round and round
In the circle game

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Autumn, weather or not

Recently I've found myself wondering where's the liberal, progressive, Democrat equivalent to Project 2025. Eventually I realized Will Rogers anticipated the question and provided an answer many decades ago when he noted "I am not a member of any organized party — I am a Democrat." He also shared a number of other still trenchant observations that indicate how unfortunately little our politics and culture have changed over time.

Yesterday the Better Half and I joined several hundred others in downtown Lindstrom, MN to protest in favor of "NO KINGS" for US. The weather and passers-by were both generally supportive although there were several pickup drivers wearing red caps and raising middle fingers to demonstrate they're among the fat, dumb, and sappy locals.

October brings peak color to the neighborhood

Photo by J. Harrington

So far this Autumn we’ve seen one woolly worm that was predominantly red and, a week or so later, another mostly black. Given the way we’ve had well above average temperatures this fall, it’s hard to guess whether La Nina or global warming (or something else) will dominate weather patterns this winter. Meanwhile, we’re at or neat peak color this weekend and the wind for several days has been doing its best to spread the vibrant colors in the trees onto the ground.

Halloween is rapidly approaching. I bought three pumpkins this past week, although the flower pots they usually stand in are still full of living plants. No killing frosts yet. Will we see one by month’s end? Hard to say this year. At least so far neither deer nor rabbits have nibbled on the pumpkins. I’m grateful for that.

October

Paul Laurence Dunbar
1872 – 1906

October is the treasurer of the year,
    And all the months pay bounty to her store;
The fields and orchards still their tribute bear,
    And fill her brimming coffers more and more
But she, with youthful lavishness,
    Spends all her wealth in gaudy dress,
And decks herself in garments bold
    Of scarlet, purple, red, and gold.

She heedeth not how swift the hours fly,
    But smiles and sings her happy life along;
She only sees above a shining sky;
    She only hears the breezes’ voice in song.
Her garments trail the woodlands through,
    And gather pearls of early dew
That sparkle, till the roguish Sun
    Creeps up and steals them every one.

But what cares she that jewels should be lost,
    When all of Nature’s bounteous wealth is hers?
Though princely fortunes may have been their cost,
    Not one regret her calm demeanor stirs.
Whole-hearted, happy, careless, free,
    She lives her life out joyously,
Nor cares when Frost stalks o’er her way
    And turns her auburn locks to gray.

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As we were saying...

Today's windy and cloudy weather feels threatening, sort of like the regime in Washington, D.C. I've been trying to track events and developments fairly closely during this past week and I've ended up with more take-aways on what NOT to do than what to do. I'm taking that as an opportunity to claim it's time to remember the parable of the babies in the river. [check it out, we'll wait right here]

There's also the quote from Ursula Le Guin's Left Hand of Darkness: “Almost everything carried to its logical extreme becomes either depressing or carcinogenic.” I believe we've reached the logical extreme end of capitalistic oligarchy as exemplified by the current crew in D.C. To borrow a dictum from my time as a planner: "More of the same never solved a problem." And who was it that claimed "Life must be lived forward but can only be understood backwards"?

"We the People"  No Kings 10/18/2025

We aren't, I believe, likely to get ourselves out of the mess we're in by trying to return to anything like an old normal. The old normal was too extractive and, as we all know, "there are no jobs on a dead planet" and "there is no planet B." We need a transformative change so our society is no longer primarily dependent on growth and GDP as indicators of success. Let me once again share one of my all time favorite quotations from a 1968 speech by Robert F Kennedy:

Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product - if we judge the United States of America by that - that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.

It is, I believe, time for us to head upstream and see who's throwing the babies in the river and stop them. This is neither an original nor a new idea. Wendell Berry writes of a similar approach in today's poem (if you allow for a certaain stretch of poetic license).

Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front

by Wendell Berry

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.

And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.

When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something
that won't compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.

Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.

Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.

Listen to carrion -- put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as Women do not go cheap
for power, please Women more than men.

Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?

Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.

As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn't go.

Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

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Ban hate, not books

This week, Oct 5 - 11, is Banned Books Week. Please try to read at least one from the lists of thousands of books banned during the past year. Remember, an idle mind is the devil’s workshop. Keep your mind busy by reading. Disobey Big Brother and The Party!

If you think you don't have enough time and/or money to tackle a whole banned book, you can at least take a crack at following this link and reading: Why Intolerance and Extremism Happen (and how to protect democracy in a divided world). I haven't quite finished it yet, but I'm pretty sure you'll find it worth your time.

After today, actual temperatures should approach a more seasonable level than the windy mid- to upper- 80s we've been experiencing, at least most places other than Washington, D.C., where folks are busy exhaling hot air and blaming someone else rather than actually solving problems for anyone other than pedophiles or the top 1% of wealth holders.

According to the Minnesota DNR, locally we should experience peak leaf color about the end of the week, so next weekend would be a good time to put down the banned book you've been reading and got for a walk or drive and do some leaf peeping. While you're doing that, you might want to think about how Joy Harjo has managed to not get any of her books banned.

This Morning I Pray for My Enemies

by Joy Harjo

And whom do I call my enemy?
An enemy must be worthy of engagement.
I turn in the direction of the sun and keep walking.
It’s the heart that asks the question, not my furious mind.
The heart is the smaller cousin of the sun.
It sees and knows everything.
It hears the gnashing even as it hears the blessing.
The door to the mind should only open from the heart.
An enemy who gets in, risks the danger of becoming a friend.

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Autumn, approaching

I missed posting yesterday. The day was devoted to celebrating the birthday of a certain 5 year old granddaughter and I obviously failed to plan ahead and post on Saturday in anticipation. The celebration(s) was / were successful and everyone enjoyed the party, presents and cake, especially the guest of honor.

Over the past week or ten days I’ve noticed half-a-dozen or so new dandelion flowers along our roadway and three or four (common?) lilac bushes in bloom in the area. This is not the Minnesota I moved to about fifty years ago.

a hint of color tints nearby trees

Photo by J. Harrington

As we enter October in a day or so, temperatures are forecast to exceed 80℉ and approach ninety℉ by Friday.The regular waterfowl season opened Saturday last to weather too warm to get serious about duck hunting. Local leaf color looks to be about 5% so far, maples showing best. The bur oak at the end of our drive is dropping leaves faster than changing color.

Someone (deer?) knocked over and off the wire protector cage from one of the replacement serviceberry bushes. Neither bush is showing any color yet but at least they’ve lived longer than last spring’s plantings. Our fingers remain crossed these bushes will make it through the winter and beyond.

And Now It’s September,

By Barbara Crooker

 

and the garden diminishes: cucumber leaves rumpled

and rusty, zucchini felled by borers, tomatoes sparse

on the vines. But out in the perennial beds, there’s one last

blast of color: ignitions of goldenrod, flamboyant

asters, spiraling mums, all those flashy spikes waving

in the wind, conducting summer’s final notes.

The ornamental grasses have gone to seed, haloed

in the last light. Nights grow chilly, but the days

are still warm; I wear the sun like a shawl on my neck

and arms. Hundreds of blackbirds ribbon in, settle

in the trees, so many black leaves, then, just as suddenly,

they’re gone. This is autumn’s great Departure Gate,

and everyone, boarding passes in hand, waits

patiently in a long, long line.

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Stop the bleeding!!!

Welcome to Sun Day! There's an (in)famous quote about news: "If it bleeds, it leads." Doom-scrolling social media, reading the US edition of The Guardian, and watching tv news leaves too many of US with the impression that everything's coming apart or, as Yeats tells US "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;"

Blue Marble, our only home
Image Credit: NASA/NOAA/GSFC/Suomi NPP/VIIRS/Norman Kuring

I've never, to my knowledge, been accused of being a Pollyanna, but I confess that  my sense of doom and gloom has been overdeveloped recently. There's more good and interesting work being accomplished these days than is readily conveyed in Mainstream Media (MSM). I reached this conclusion earlier today when I came across the Climate Action Now website. Check it out, we'll wait.

My email inbox and snail mail box are daily filled with pleas / please to help fund this or that effort to save the world, or at least bits and pieces thereof. The aggregate effect, too often, leaves me with the impression that almost any donation is part of a largely hopeless effort to shovel s_ _ t against the t_ _ e. What is missing from most of the requests is a positive vision of what's to be accomplished. Overturning Citizens United or presidential immunity would be the restoration of a former (imperfect) status quo instead of a positive step forward such as mandating pubic only funding for campaigns or prohibiting anyone convicted of a felony (misdemeanor?) from serving as president, VP, or in the cabinet.

Before starting today's posting, I tumbled into the Sun Day announcement as I was trying to decide if I wanted to reread James Lovelock's Gaia. While skimming through inline reviews, I found Book review – On Gaia: A Critical Investigation of the Relationship between Life and Earth. That in turn led me eventually to BECOMING EARTH, HOW OUR PLANET CAME TO LIFE, which I intend to order from my regular, local, independent bookstore and read instead of rereading Gaia. I wish I had known about evolutionary biology when I was in college but then it might not have been much more than a hypothesis back in those days.

Let's see if these days we can do more and better and prove Yeats a pessimist now that we're almost through the first quarter of the twenty-first century and still have no home but planet Earth.

The Second Coming

By William Butler Yeats

 

Turning and turning in the widening gyre   

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.   

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out   

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert   

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,   

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,   

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it   

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.   

The darkness drops again; but now I know   

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,   

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,   

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Sometimes, days just hummm!

Even though Minnesota has an early season for teal and geese, I don't (won't) hunt waterfowl when the temperature's in the 70's and 80's. It would feel so unright to not be freezing sensitive parts of my anatomy while in a duck or goose blind. The current forecast includes temperatures at or above 80℉ through mid-week. Archery deer season opened yesterday when the high reached 82℉. That's weather for standing in a trout stream, maybe even wet wading, rather than sitting and sweating on a deer stand. At least that's according to me but judging by the number of parked vehicles in the area, some folks see it otherwise.

female ruby-throated hummingbird at feeder

Photo by J. Harrington

Speaking of deer and warm weather, I'm please to note that the replacement serviceberry bushes are still showing green leaves inside their wire protective cages. Deer and/or rabbits and/or pocket gophers haven't yet done any obvious damage. Our fingers remain crossed but, to be honest, with the current state of the world, I feel a little like Merwin in the poem below. I heartily look forward to being proven wrong by events (or lack thereof).

Despite the return of summer after a recent cold front, I don't think I've seen a hummingbird at the feeder for a day or two now. It's about that time of year, for them to follow orioles south. UPDATE: as I was typing the previous sentence, a female ruby-throated hummingbird landed on the sugar water feeder. That pleases me almost as much as yesterday's discovery that we have some wild asters (perhaps silky asters) in bloom up on the slope behind the serviceberry bushes. I noticed them as I was watering the bushes.

Perhaps fall weather will arrive, and stay for a while, as we get to the autumn equinox a week from tomorrow, at 1:19 pm CDT. I've had enough of heat, humidity, and wildfire smoke for this year. Maybe cooler weather will also help cool some rhetoric and hot heads. That would be a help to avoid triggering the last day of the world.

Place

By W.S. Merwin

On the last day of the world
I would want to plant a tree

what for
not for the fruit

the tree that bears the fruit
is not the one that was planted

I want the tree that stands
in the earth for the first time

with the sun already
going down

and the water
touching its roots

in the earth full of the dead
and the clouds passing

one by one
over its leaves

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Please be kind to each other while you can.

In service to the Serviceberry

Last Spring, about the time our pear tree was in bloom, I finally stumbled onto a local source of serviceberry bushes, of a species noted for producing good fruit, Saskatoon serviceberry (Amelanchier alnifolia). I drove to northern Dakota county and bought two at Gertens. Some time thereafter, I managed to plant them in accord with the directions. Several weeks later, despite watering them regularly between rainy spells, both bushes were leafless and dead. Rabbits? Deer? Pocket gophers? I wasn't sure but I was unhappy since the bushes were, to my mind, expensive plus the physical cost of planting them. I was slightly consoled by remembering the story by one of the Aldo Leopold kids about planting, and replanting, hundreds or thousands of conifers on their sand county farm.

pear tree in bloom, May 2025

Photo by J. Harrington

I spent bits and pieces of the Summer mumbling and grumbling about Amelanchier failures until the Better Half got tired of listening to me and called Gertens to confirm that my bushes were covered by a warranty. I could get replacements if I showed up with a receipt and photos of the dead bushes. Several weeks after getting the confirmation, I did so and the replacement process actually went better than I expected. It was smooth and pleasant.

Today's plantings added the prompt installation of wire cage protectors and the addition of bark mulch around the outside of each cage. The serviceberry bushes are supposed to show their own white flowers about the time the pear tree does, but won't grow nearly as tall. Now that the replacement planting is done, I'm now typing up this posting and will then keep my fingers and toes crossed that these bushes make it through the Autumn and Winter and Spring etc. Stay tuned and, if you haven't read Robin Wall Kimmerer's latest book, The Serviceberry, here's the original essay as a sample. It's the one that started me on this adventure.

Tobacco Origin Story, Because Tobacco Was a Gift Intended to Walk Alongside Us to the Stars

By Joy Harjo

From a story of how the tobacco plant came to our people, told to me by my cousin George Coser Jr.

It was way back, before there was a way back

When time threaded earth and sky.

Children were conceived, were born, grew, and walked tall

In what we now call a day.

There must have been two suns, a bright moon, somehow

We had more light than now, sheen

Of falling in love playing about Earth’s body

In a wild flicker which lit

Us up. We who were this planet and yearned for touch.

Every planted thought grew plant

Ladders to the stars, way back, before there was

No way back, Miss Mary Mack.

We used to sing along the buttons of her

Dress. Our babies are always

Our babies. Even back then when time waved through

The corn. We knew our plants like

Relatives. Their stories were our stories, there

Were songs for everything — I

Should say “are” songs for every transformation

They link between way back and

Now, the forever now, a time when a young

Mvskoke man and woman

Walked through the shimmer of the early evening.

They had become as one song.

They lay down when it was dark. I can hear their

Intimate low-voice talking.

How they tease one another with such gut love.

Earth makes a bed, with pillow

Mounds. And it is there as the night insects sing

They conceived their first child. They

Will look back as they walk East toward the sunrise.

The raw stalks of beginning

Will drink the light, root deeply dark into earth.

In the tracks of their loving

The plant-child emerges, first the seed head, then

Leafy, long male body and the white female

Flowers of tobacco, or

Hece, as the people called it when it called

To them. Come here. We were brought

To you from those who love you. We will help you.

And that’s how it began, way

Back, when we knew how to hear the songs of plants

And could sing back, like now

On paper, with marks like bird feet, but where are

Our ears? They have grown to fit

Around earbuds, to hear music made for cold

Cash, like our beloved smoke-

Making threaded with addiction and dead words.

Sing this song back to me, girl.

In the moonlight, tobacco plant had silver

Moon buttons all up her back.

We’re getting dressed to go plant new songs with words.

Our sun is dimming faster.

Mvto hece, mvto hvse, mvto e — 

Kanvchaga, mvto ah

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Thanks for visiting. Come again when you can.
Please be kind to each other while you can.

See sun's change

The pointillist leaf color changer is painting our North Woods. A few leaves here, a splotch there, first sumac, now maples, against back drop fields of goldenrod, ripening field corn, and soy beans. Tomorrow is the first day of meteorological Autumn. Even the weather is showing tinges of the changing season so today I finally did what should have been a Spring chore of washing the outside of some windows. Return of lower angle, late afternoon sun made the need obvious.

maple leaves trading chlorophyl for gold

Photo by J. Harrington

Hummingbirds are still coming to the sugar water feeders. I expect those birds to head south before autumn equinox (Alban Elfed to the Druids among us). Meanwhile, Minnesota's early season for teal and geese opens next Saturday, September 6th. I'm still contemplating whether to participate. It's been a few years since I've hunted waterfowl and I miss it but I'm also far out of practice. We'll see what the weather is looking like and how the chores are going.

Recently I stumbled onto a resource that looks like it may be increasingly helpful, the way things are going with the regime in Washington, D.C. In case you've been looking for something like The Anti-Autocracy Handbook: A Scholars’ Guide to Navigating Democratic Backsliding, click the link. A quick skim suggests it can be useful even to those who aren't scholars. If you scroll and click around a bit, you may well find some other helpful resources at the site. I'm getting more and more frustrated by the lack of really effective pushback at authoritarian Executive Orders combined with incompetence and malfeasance. American Democracy, even with all its flaws, deserves better protection and restoration than we're providing.

[Update, just discovered despite its 1993 publication: 

From Dictatorship to Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation]

Perhaps the World Ends Here

by Joy Harjo

The world begins at a kitchen table. No Matter what, we must eat to live.

The gifts of earth are brought and prepared, set on the table. So it has been since creation, and it will go on.

…It is here that children are given instructions on what it means to be human. We make men at it, we make women.

At this table we gossip, recall enemies and the ghosts of lovers.

Our dreams drink coffee with us as they put their arms around our children. They laugh with us at our poor falling-down selves and as we put ourselves back together once again at the table.

This table has been a house in the rain, an umbrella in the sun.

We have given birth on this table, and have prepared our parents for burial here.

At this table we sing with joy, with sorrow. We pray of suffering and remorse. We give thanks.

Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing and crying, eating of the last sweet bite.

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Thanks for visiting. Come again when you can.
Please be kind to each other while you can.

back to the future? again?

The field behind the house is full of Spotted Horsemint, with scatterings of black-eyed Susans and a few compass plants. Purple Lovegrass provides a colorful, mist-like understory, if prairie-like fields can have an understory. Our wet spring seems to have prompted an abundance of late Summer natural beauty for this last week of August.

a cluster of Black-eyed Susan flowers

Photo by J. Harrington

Speaking of late Summer, the weather has taken a definite autumnal turn. Highs are forecast to be in the 70s all week with lows feeling as cool as forties and fifties, thanks to freshened breezes and last night's (early this morning's?) cold front that came through. Good weather for getting caught up on some yard chores that've been deferred due to heat, humidity or thunderstorms.

The elderberry bush in the wet spot behind the house has numerous clusters of berries replacing its midsummer blooms. Our lilac bushes have a few small clumps of flowers that feel out-of-season. We think there's at least one rough(?) blazing star in bloom in a spot not visible from the house. Learning to appreciate little things and natural beauty around us is taking some effort but is worth it, especially during these days when there's so much ugliness in our world. 

From time to time I find myself drifting back to the 1960s and 70s when some of my close friends were semi-hippie, back-to-the-land types. My iPhone has lots of folk music from those days, copied from my CDs. So many of Bob Dylan's lyrics seem prescient and traumatically relevant to today's situations. Or, to quote a refrain from one of Pete Seeger's classics: "When will we ever learn? When will we ever learn?" Money isn't speech. Corporations aren't people any more than artificial intellligence is. We are all in this together and all of US need to learn to act that way, as of yesterday.

Back Up Quick They’re Hippies

By Lani O'Hanlon

 

That was the year we drove

into the commune in Cornwall.

“Jesus Jim,” mam said,

“back up quick they’re hippies.”

Through the car window,

tents, row after row, flaps open,

long-haired men and women

curled around each other like babies

and the babies themselves

wandered naked across the grass.

I reached for the handle, ready, almost,

to open the door, drop out and away

from my sister’s aggressive thighs,

Daddy’s slapping hands.

Back home in the Dandelion Market

I unlearnt the steps my mother taught,

bought a headband, an afghan coat,

a fringed skirt — leather skin.

Barefoot on common grass I lay down with kin.

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Thanks for visiting. Come again when you can.
Please be kind to each other while you can.

the best is yet to come

Lots of purple loosestrife in bloom along roadside ditches, in highway medians, and local waterways. During a drive today we noticed several hawks perched on highway light poles. Migration time nearing? Meteorological autumn starts two weeks from tomorrow. With any kind of luck, the change of seasons will be accompanied by a major improvement in local weather, although most of the recent batches of thunderstorms passed to our south or farther to our north. Update: we've recently been put under a flash flood watch from 10 pm tonight through tomorrow morning.

maple leaves in color on a railing

Photo by J. Harrington

Isolated patches of leaf color, except for sumacs that have largely turned red(ish), are showing up in other trees in the area. Autumn Equinox occurs locally on Monday, September 22, 2025 at 1:19 pm CDT. As the effects of climate change grow stronger, I become more enthused about enjoying my favorite season, Autumn. Cooler temperatures, lower humidity, fishing, hunting, color change, harvest feasts are far more to my taste than sultry, humid, lightning-flashed days and nights. When I was younger and still living on the Massachusetts coast, the approaching time of year left me feeing like a kid in a candy store as striped bass and bluefish schooled up and headed south in coastal waters while inland and up country ruffed grouse season opened and preceded duck season.

Meanwhile, thanks to the weather (storms, smoke, heat, humidity) I'm still working on last Spring's yard cleanup. It's looking more and more like this year's leaves will be falling before I've finished cleaning up last year's. And furthermore, I don't really care. I'm back to finishing reading Jenny Odell's How to Do Nothing, Resisting the Attention Economy. Much to my pleasant surprise, she has incorporated bioregionalism as part of her strategy. [Here's an essay of hers on the topic.] I've been running hot and tepid about bioregionalism for some years now, I suspect because I've been approaching it more mechanically than organically. Time to practice the old zen approach: "fall down seven times, get up eight." 

Testimonial

By Rita Dove

 

Back when the earth was new

and heaven just a whisper,

back when the names of things

hadn't had time to stick;

back when the smallest breezes

melted summer into autumn,

when all the poplars quivered

sweetly in rank and file . . .

the world called, and I answered.

Each glance ignited to a gaze.

I caught my breath and called that life,

swooned between spoonfuls of lemon sorbet.

I was pirouette and flourish,

I was filigree and flame.

How could I count my blessings

when I didn't know their names?

Back when everything was still to come,

luck leaked out everywhere.

I gave my promise to the world,

and the world followed me here.

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Please be kind to each other while you can.

It's all a circle, game?

There appears to be a relative abundance of hummingbirds at the nectar feeders with some trying to scare others away. Parents trying to protect resources for their own fledglings? Each year about this time I see a similar pattern that's no where as obvious earlier in the summer. Meanwhile, more and more yellowjackets are showing up to feed on the sweetness and limited numbers are getting themselves trapped in the feeding reservoir and drowning. Based on relative size and numbers, I'm guessing that woodpeckers are the ones consuming most of the sugar water and I don't think hummingbirds can scare even downy woodpeckers in the least.

bur oak acorn

Photo by J. Harrington

Oak trees around the house have begun to drop acorns. Scattered leaf color is showing on some of the bushes and trees in the neighborhood. The flocks of birds lining up on the telephone and electric wires are getting longer and longer. We're more than halfway between Summer solstice and Autumn equinox. Days are noticeably shorter as sunrise arrives later. Seasons keep repeating their cycles. Before we know it, I'll be posting complaints about cold and ice and snow. But first, we get to experience harvest and migration and autumn seasons. Perhaps political sanity may return as temperatures drop, if we get really lucky.

Next weekend the Better Half and I celebrate our fortieth wedding anniversary. I find it hard to believe anyone could have put up with me for that long. She's also doing a much better job tolerating the madness coming out of state and national capitols this year, possibly because she's had me to practice on for more than forty years.

Two

By Linda Hogan

 

The weight of a man on a woman

is like falling into the river without drowning.

 

Above, the world is burning and fighting.

Lost worlds flow through others.

 

But down here beneath water’s skin,

river floor, sand, everything

 

is floating, rocking.

Water falls through our hands as we fall through it.

 

And when a woman and a man come up from water

they stand at the elemental edge of difference.

 

Mirrored on water’s skin,

they are fired clay, water evaporating into air.

 

They are where water turns away from land

and goes back to enter a larger sea.

 

A man and a woman are like those rivers,

entering a larger sea

 

greater than the sum of all its parts.

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Thanks for visiting. Come again when you can.
Please be kind to each other while you can.