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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Please be kind to each other while you can.

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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Thanks for visiting. Come again when you can.
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.