September 5 - September 9 Cool Nights Come to Stay

                                           A stringbean tree

2010-I’ve had to give in and close the windows at night as the temperature drops into the forties.  The bright cloudless mornings promise  a warm day but as clouds come in it may not materialize, yesterday stayed quite cool, especially while the gigantic dark grey clouds were covering the sun.  Every time it broke through was like a benediction.
Leaves have begun to color up, some ash behind the garden are showing red among the yellow and what looks like a maple at the back of the next door field is sporting orange tips in some places.
I continue bringing in and processing harvest-tomatoes, mixed greens (kale, collards and chard) string beans, squash. The scallions are yellowing but I am not sure how to keep them.  Blanched and frozen I suppose, like everything else, to be used in cooking.  The apples are not quite ready and there are not so many as last year.  The cardoons are tied up to blanch before they are harvested at the end of the month.
The hummingbirds are still here, suddenly interested in the butterfly bush and shoving the swallowtails and silverspots and monarchs out of the way. I have seen no traveling geese as of yet.
2011- A hurricane on August 28 created more havoc up here  than I have ever seen.  Trees large and small down everywhere and along with them telephone and electric wires.  There was no power for over a week and when it returned it was followed by remnants of another storm that brought days of heavy steady rain. The landline is still out. Today the sun is shining but the rivers and streams are still rising and the flood warnings continue. I was feeling disappointed in the garden this year but the feeling has deepened to almost fear. If I had thought I could replace loving a human with loving nature, now I have seen another, unexpected side. I am having a hard time; I have lost the feeling of connection.  It feels in waves, too cold, too hot, too wet; I just want to shrink away from it and back into myself. Yesterday I felt something while gathering chanterelles and noticing all the little orange newts and magical colored mushrooms; coral, oyster, boletes-(who knows what else, though I would like to learn.) But it’s like I have been disappointed in love and am sulking.
I will go out to the garden later. The string beans have begun to produce though the plants are tiny. Beets and celeriac are still small. The limas are hard to catch while they are green so maybe I will just dry them all. The are few and small, anyway. The tomatoes just burst and rot with all the water. A few squash are growing though many of the female flowers don’t seem to produce fruit. The eggplant plants look good but produce little. Some of what they do produce just drops off rotting while small. The potatoes were small and blighted, the okra barely grew, the cardoons have all shrunk away and the onions are staying small.  The cucumbers, greens, parsnips, Brussels sprouts and broccoli are doing fairly well.
2013-The praying mantises (manti?) are trying to tell me something. I’m finding them everywhere and they seem to especially like clinging to the window screens and peering into the house. There’s one on the front door, the back door, and the kitchen 2013-The praying mantises (manti?) are trying to tell me something. I’m finding them everywhere and they seem to especially like clinging to the window screens and peering into the house. There’s one on the front door, the back door, and the kitchen window. What do they want?
It’s boiling hot and humid today, summer’s last gasp perhaps but the coloring trees tell a different story.  A sad thing- a hummingbird got caught in the screen of the garden gate, but unlike the one a while ago, did not survive. I need to find another way to keep creatures out of there.

August 31 - September 4 Harvest

2010-I like the suggestion that the period between Labor Day and the equinox allows one to get used to the idea that the summer is over.  You would think that the amount of constant work required by the harvesting and processing of all the garden’s bounty would make one long for a respite and look forward to the end of the growing season.  But I like the heat and seem to have gotten more used to it than I was in July. Baking in the almost 90 degree kitchen doesn’t really bother me. What I do feel is a welling up of the grief that is always in me but is now coming to the fore, even appearing in my dreams. It seems connected to the coming of fall but I don’t know why.  It is good to have time to ease into it.
2012-This year I find myself looking forward to cooler weather. It will be possible to do some real gardening work, digging, transplanting, etc.  The front gardens are completely overgrown and neglected. The days are an even thirteen hours-hard to believe it will be an even twelve in two and a half weeks. Getting up in the dark is something I suppose I will always hate.
2013-The light is draining from these days like water through a sieve. At the reservoir I notice

Foxtail grasses glow,
Each hair clasping grains of light
Burning like sparklers.

August 26 - August 30 A Good Year for Apples

2010-It is time to come to terms with the end of summer.  These days, 90 degrees as they might be, are not July. There is a sere quality to the landscape and the smell--the smell of ripeness, almost of something cooking. The smell of dying.  The days are shortening with alarming speed.  The end of summer seems abrupt to me, but that is the product of living a school year for so long.  In reality there is no abrupt end but just the gradual day by day changes.  I try to let myself relax into them, into appreciation of them and allow myself to discover there is no impending horror (the fear bred out of dislocated memories of endless seeming frigid winters and forced labor).  This anxiety is learned and it is time to teach myself some new tricks.
2012-For the first time I am not suffering from pre-school dread. I am open to the possibility that fall may turn out to be the best season of all-the plentitude of harvest, bracing pleasant weather, and the energy to enjoy it. Someone mentions ‘the calendar of nature’ in reference to the changing activities of birds as they prepare for migration. Isn’t that what I am trying to learn to follow?
2013- I’ve been seeing a praying mantis around the place for a couple of days, and yesterday I watched it eat another insect alive, starting from the head.  Preying, indeed.

August 21 - August 25 The World Begins to Quiet

2010-I hear on the radio this morning that the genetic code for wheat is 5x longer than the human.  What if plants are the superior beings?   I imagine a world where the humans act for the maintenance and betterment of the superior vegetable world and are rewarded with the harvest.  Perhaps that’s how it  once was.  Perhaps it is even true.  We imagine angels in human form but perhaps they look like flowers and seeds and waving grass. 
Why do people feel so much better out in nature?  Isn’t it the same way they feel in the presence of the so-called enlightened beings?  How would a person live if they took this to be true?
2011-I have been feeling a little differently this summer; something implacable/impersonal in nature. There is an element of fear in it and the sense of horror of nature torn from its cycles in the extremes we’ve been experiencing--extremes of water and of heat, an earthquake, and now the biggest hurricane in 70 years headed up the coast for us. Extremes of drought and heat in other places, hundred year floods; are humans responsible or is it just a bigger cycle?
The garden has been disappointing this year-very few potatoes and blighted, few tomatoes and half rotten, few peppers, more eggplants than ever (but that’s not saying much). The collards look good but even the kale is small and peaked. The cardoons barely grew-most of them died away. No fava to speak of but good broccoli and onions, lots of little pumpkins early and promising Brussels sprouts.  But even the patty pans are flowering but producing very little. I had been thinking about living from the garden but it is very humbling.
2012-My not very effective binoculars turn astonishing when I point them at the Pleiades. A blurry little spot resolves into a tight little clump of clearly visible stars.
2013-Even though it’s still August, the words of ‘September Song’ keep running through my head.  “Oh the days dwindle down to a precious few…” So I feel about summer’s end. In an attempt to slow down time, I am not listening to the radio (again) at all as I go about my daily activities, inviting time to hang heavy on my hands so as to feel every second. I immediately notice the constant background music of shrill cicada calls and that hummingbird buzzing actually sounds exactly like a cat’s purr. I think when all is over, I won’t regret anything left undone, but I will be sorry for every minute I was not fully present.

August 16 - August 20 Hot Nights End

2010-Each leaf, because of its particular shape and size reacts to the breezes in its own way.  I am watching the long slender nectarine leaves shiver in a breeze so slight it affects nothing else.  There is something in the movement that seems so alive, and isn’t it?  Perhaps it is the movement of the leaves that stirs the breeze.

Long nectarine leaves
Dance in the shivering breeze.
Which of those came first?

Leaves are falling already and there are spots of red and yellow amongst the trees; the result of a long drought as well as the first cold nights.  The ash I girdled in the spring to allow the blueberries more light is finally succumbing.  I am not proud of it though I deemed it necessary and it is raining down yellow leaves which I find beautiful.
2011-A year later the ash still lives, though it seems to lose its leaves earlier than other trees.  The blueberries were disappointing this year. Actually, everything seems muted.  There is much foliage because of the rain, but the fruits and flowers are less than usual.  I noticed yesterday the Queen Anne’s Lace is blooming almost alone which makes it easier to appreciate what a beautiful flower it is.
This close observation is slowly changing my point of view but with unexpected consequences. The grass must be mowed--but must it? Yesterday I steered that violent noisy machine over a patch of the very same lacy flowers I just claimed to love. Crickets and spiders living in the lawn scrambled out of the way. I think the lawn looks nice but does it really?  I commiserated with P when she complained of hearing the sounds of the cutting down of trees in her neighborhood, but isn’t mowing the same thing on a smaller scale?  I’m very attracted to Fukunawa’s theory of no plowing, no weeding, no fertilizing farming, I.e. following nature’s methods of growing.  Just look at healthy weeds! But to take the idea a step further, wouldn’t it be ideal to learn to live off what is already, naturally, growing?
2012-Again I am looking at the flourishing weeds and they call to me more than the cultivated plants. Perhaps this is a late summer phenomenon- I’m just tired of ‘making’ things grow.
2013-The meadow next door, waiting to be mowed, glows in rich golden colors; mellow late-season foliage and bee-swarmed goldenrod flowers.

August 11 - August 15 Stars and Sky

2010-The Perseid Meteor showers are August 12.  The fact that they fall on the same calendar day every year(within a day) seems to indicate something right about the way we mark time.  The days have begun to shorten by two and even three minutes and as we plummet towards fall the image of a pendulum comes to mind.  The low point is the fall equinox and then the pendulum sweeps through going upwards, gradually slowing down until it pauses at its high point, the winter solstice and then reverses direction, gaining speed again through the spring and then pausing at the alternate high point of summer.  Gravity becomes the force that prevents our living in either eternal winter or endless summer. These two images of time, the pendulum and the circling of my other essay together create a complexity that could not be more different than the straight linear movement usually conceived.   If I could mentally grasp the shape of a pendulum imposed over a spiral I think I would have the picture of time as it appears in four dimensions.
2012-A window opened in the cloudy night sky and I saw five meteors in about half an hour. One was spectacular-big and bright and trailing long. It left a red afterimage in my eyes.
2013-I woke up at 3 last night and was trying to decide whether to get up and go to the bathroom or just go back to sleep when I remembered that I wanted to see the meteors. A crisp hazeless, moonless night in mid-August is not that common and I was rewarded with the sixty or so promised each hour. Most were very short and many were faint and of course they always seem to appear where you’re not looking, at the periphery of your vision. But there were a handful of long bright ones leaving lasting images. What struck me most though was recognizing how speeded up even my intentionally slowed down and simplified life is compared with an activity like just lying there watching the sky. (Do people even do that anymore?) I was thinking that if you didn’t know better, you could believe the sky was a flat lid over us and the stars pinholes in that solid sheet letting the light from the ‘room’ beyond leak in. Then someone could teach you what people now believe is the reality and while your eyes would perceive exactly the same picture, your understanding would have completely  opened. That is what it must be like to shift into seeing four dimensions

August 6 - August 10 Nectarines

2010-
Shivering poplar,
And the ash keys soft clicking
Give the wind its voice.

Of the dozens of nectarines that formed on the tree, I have tasted not a single one. Most of them fell prey to a mold when they were little more than a pit with a skin.  The tree is abnormally dense, almost genetically mutated in appearance, and I’m thinking I should, in future, prune it back to open it up.  The few fruits that escaped the mold grew to ping pong ball size and fell victim to the resident chipmunk before they were even ripe.  He liked to bite into them and test for ripeness and then leave the ruined fruit lying on the deck. I finally picked the last four and brought them into the house to ripen but they seem to be just shriveling up. I bought the tree for its flowers and told myself that the fruit was just an unnecessary bonus, but to have seen so many form and to have lost every one is definitely frustrating.
The hummingbirds are in full force and charging at the feeder all day long.  It is too early for stoking up to migrate, it must be that the heat makes them extra thirsty.  With their constant buzzing, dive-bombing and u-shaped shrieking commotion, they seem the very essence of pure life force highly concentrated in that tiny feathered form.  Then every so often when one sits quietly on a branch tip, it seems unbelievable; and the stillness doesn’t last long.
Last night I saw two monarch butterflies mating in the grass. After several minutes, they clumsily flew up into the ash tree, still joined.  I hope it is a sign that their numbers will increase and that the warnings about their sudden population drop was just a misunderstanding of some natural cycle.  Though can anything now be said to be natural (if what I mean by that is ‘untouched by man‘)?
2011- I’ve since learned that the fruit needs to be thinned out on nectarines though this year none formed at all.  The monarchs do seem to be slowly building their numbers though I haven’t seen one bat. Can they disappear without the whole circus collapsing?
2012-No nectarines this year either though I blame it on the early frost just after they had flowered. I have had an insight into what an affirmation feels like when you take it inside and are not merely mouthing it. Very tentative though and it feels like I might lose it. An explosion of hummingbirds this year too-perhaps the babies.
2013- More nectarines than ever before this year, even after thinning them out. Waiting for them to ripen, I watch one after another fall prey to shriveling, rotting, molding or cracking. Will any survive to harvest?