Gatherings

Amur Maple

September is almost over. I'm standing at the sink, looking out of the kitchen window. It is nine o’clock already, but the sun has not quite made its way to the top of the poplar trees across from where I stand; it is much further to the right, too, than it was a few weeks ago at this time of day.

Robins are out in great numbers on the frosted swaths of grass left from the last mowing. The night brought the first real frost of the season. There are a lot of young birds with still mottled breast plumage and only a hint of red, but they are as big as their parents, and when they fly up to the trees when the dog startles them I see that they are as quick on their wings as the older birds. They have to be: now it is only a matter of time before they start their journey south. Flickers, the red neck patch and yellow tail feathers flashing brightly, are still here, too, and the chickadees’ voices – their winter-feeder voices, it seems to me – mingle with those of white-throated and chipping sparrows. Soon only the chickadees will be left, and the blue jays and woodpeckers, of course.

Yesterday the poplar bluff came alive with a sudden large invasion of crows. Dozens of them gathered on the tall bare trees, dead, but still useful as roosts, riddled with holes that mark the nesting sites of woodpeckers and other cave breeders, and of course a source of food for all kinds of creatures of the forest. Every fall there is a day or two like that when the crows arrive for a visit. No timid knocking on doors: they can be heard from a fair distance. It is not a pleasant sound, drowning out all the other bird song for a while, but I don’t find it threatening either, like one might when faced with such a crowd. Why do they come? Why do they leave again not even a day later? Where do they go from here? Are they saying good-bye to their summer quarters, visiting each site once more before they move on? Already the ravens are showing up here and there, bigger cousins, maybe hardier and more suited to our harsh winters.

Everything is readying itself for the long winter. Some, like blue jays and squirrels, gather supplies and build stashes. Some gorge on the rich food supply to build up strength for the strenuous journey south. And then there is the lady bug I found on the counter, brought in with the sunflowers I cut late last evening, thinking it might be the last of the season if the frost hit too hard. There is no getting ready for winter for the lady bug. It simply lives out its life, moving a bit about when it is warmed by the rays of the mild autumn sun, trying to hold on to a swaying leaf when the winds blow in, sitting in one spot, legs drawn under, when it gets cold.

I tend to get caught up in the gathering, picking apples and late strawberries, digging carrots and potatoes, cutting off the long stalks of delphiniums and monk’s hood, iris and lilies, so full of life and colour only a short while ago, but now dead and unsightly. So many tasks waiting to be done, and winter looming ever closer.

Not yet, however: there are still robins and flickers keeping me company, the sunflowers haven’t succumbed to the frost, and the strong winds of the last few days have not yet managed to bare the golden and orange trees.

So today, when I am in the garden doing my gathering and preparing, I will also gather what cannot be stored on shelves and in cellars: birds' voices and glowing colours, the humming of bees on their way from one sunflower to the next, the scent of dill, the taste of a fully ripe strawberry on my tongue, the excitement of watching skein after skein of geese strung out in the sky.

I know that, in the months to come, these preserves will sustain me as much or more as the ones I will dig out from the freezer or pull off a shelf. 




There is beauty even in the humble
Swiss Chard



No days off on the farm

Thursday night

Tomorrow is another day on the combine. I'm tired, and need a shower, though I would like to postpone that till morning. I'm going to sleep outside tonight, just like last night - finally! I've been waiting for that all summer, and at last there are not too many mosquitoes.

Sunday morning

Believe it or not I have the day "off" after a very busy harvesting week: there are more people available and willing to help on the weekend. Yesterday was very frustrating since, thanks to the incompetence of a partsman at the local machinery dealership, I drove to Red Deer and back (almost five hours altogether) to get two parts that turned out to be wrong. The right ones were available here in town all along – imagine!  The joys of farming… 

Although I have the day off there is much to do, especially since I had last night off too and found another 4 gallons of cucumbers (of which I passed on more than half to my daughter-in-law Courtney), 2 gallons of beans, and half an ice cream pail of strawberries. Don't even ask about the apples Maya and I picked at the beginning of the week to prevent them from all being bruised in the fall: there must be a hundred pounds, much, much more than that tree ever produced before.

There are two more trees, one probably just as full, but both ripen a bit later and their apples are a bit better suited to storing. The cold room smells wonderful! But I'm afraid I will have to do something with them, too. What, I have no clear idea yet. So far we are eating as many as we possibly can.

Better change from my shorts to long pants now. It has cooled off considerably and might even rain, quite a change from the hot days we had all through this week. For a little while we could almost be fooled into believing that, as Keats says in his Ode to Autumn, 'warm days shall never cease'.

Amazingly, I read this poem for the first time earlier this year, and since, like some of the German Romantic poems, it so perfectly expresses all that makes autumn my favourite season, I decided to learn it by heart. This, as I found out, is a lot more difficult now than it was when I was a kid, but it was a great exercise. Now, a few months later, I am once again struggling with the last verse - time to review!


                  ODE TO AUTUMN

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness

Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun

Conspiring with him how to load and bless

With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;

To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,

And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;

To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells

With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,

And still more, later flowers for the bees,

Until they think warm days will never cease,

For Summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?

Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find

Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,

Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;

Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,

Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook

Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:

And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep

Steady thy laden head across a brook;

Or by a cider-press, with patient look,

Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?

Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,-

While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,

And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;

Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn

Among the river sallows, borne aloft

Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;

And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;

Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft

The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;

And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

Kites

According to the calendar it is still summer, but there can be no doubt that autumn is on its way. Nature has dropped little hints here and there for a couple of weeks already: a spider web drifting by, a certain crispness of the air, giving a slight edge to even the most summery looking day, morning fog lifting from the fields, leaving the slender delicate heads of the grasses bent with their load of sparkling dew drops.

Blue Jays are busy gathering food, robins and flickers, swallows and starlings gather in larger groups on the wires, conversing excitedly, no doubt making plans for their departure for gentler winter lodgings already - winged beings everywhere, even the crimson seed heads of the Amur Maple, proudly displaying fall colouring before the leaves turn and their colour will be no longer prominent, blending in with the backdrop.

The wind, too, has picked up: perfect weather for flying kites! Like so often it reminds me of the first time I lifted a kite high over my head to hand it over to the breeze.

My first kite was a beautiful piece of craftsmanship, built by my dad, with a little bit of help from my three or four-year-old self. He measured and cut the thin wooden frame and tied the crossbeams together so that they formed a cross, then made a shallow groove in each about half an inch from the end and ran a thin, but strong length of string through them that connected the ends diagonally, suggesting the kite shape already.

He then laid this contraption down on a big piece of sturdy coloured transparent paper and traced along the string outline, leaving about two inches of paper all around which he then folded back over the frame and glued it to secure it - voila! there we had much of our kite already. It was up to me to decorate it, give it a face, and also cut smaller pieces of paper that would be tied or glued to the tail - the most important feature, he told me, because without it the kite would never truly get airborne. He attached the big spool of kite string, and off we went to a stubble field on the outskirts of my home village of Goddelsheim. Stooks of oats, rye, wheat or barley were still scattered all over the field, for me to hug - my "brothers and sisters" - and to hide in: I was that small.

At first, however, they were of no interest to me: I needed to help fly the kite! I held it at the angle my father told me to and ran with it ("As fast as you can! Hold it high - yes, even higher!") and felt the wind pick it up out of my small hands. It soared so high that I had to put my head way back to see it hover, the giant orange paper bird now seeming to take its cue from the hawks it shared air space with. 

 I still feel the golden stubble under my feet, the wind tousle my hair, so short then that it didn't even blow into my face, still remember the conviction that my dad could do anything: after all, he could build a kite, and fly it, too!

 What a wonderful thing to be shown at such a young age what it means to soar, and hover, to be carried by the wind, and not have to come down for a long, long time.