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.