Weather Change

I told you in the last post to pay attention to summer while it was still with us.

Now click on the arrow in the orange circle to hear a report of the moment.

No complaints. We can use it. The woods have been tinder-dry. Or, at most, one small complaint. We’ve exchanged long-lingering dust for sudden mud. Of the two… ah, well, it’s hard to choose, isn’t it?

Timing could have been better (this is not a complaint, just an observation), as we are in the middle of excavation for drains.

These are long drains, extending from the floor of the greenhouse, the lowest level of the house, downhill to the edge of the wood. They’re so long because, though the land slopes down from the house, the greenhouse floor is below grade. The drain field has to “catch up” by running a long way to maintain a downward course. With the heavy rains of yesterday and today, and some more expected tomorrow, the excavators will have a thick time of it when they come back next week.

My friend Barbara and I found a remedy for cloudy skies yesterday. We drove off down the valley, as we do from time to time. This day we made for the small town of Canby and the annual Dahlia Festival at Swan Island Dahlias.

Oh. My. Even amid showers, this is an intoxicating experience. Acres of dahlias in bloom stand up to assault the eye. Row upon row upon row of colors, some subtle,

some bold

washed across the cone receptors of my eager eyes. Golly, my optic nerves jumped into action, and sent the spasm to my optic chiasm, where the nerves met and information crossed over from one side of my brain to the other. In a trice, it went on through the optic tracts, entered the thalamus, and synapsed at the lateral geniculate nucleus! Shazam! My visual cortex, back in the occipital lobe, was ready to receive this blast and got to work making it into vision. The human eye can distinguish about 10 million different colors. I think most of them were present in those fields, and all of them attempting to seduce the unwary gardener into rash, unplanned purchases.

The weather probably thinned the crowd, but those who came were the stalwarts who either don’t care much about the rain or came prepared to make their way through muddy fields. They wore a design sampler of weather wear:

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Though I took mine along, it’s a good thing I didn’t choose to slip into my boots.  I could never have competed with the stylists in the gardens.

Homely though they are, these boots have their place. These boots are made for ditch-hoppin’. These are chicken yard boots. Sheep yard boots. Mud and hay boots. These are definitely not struttin’ boots. Not even, let’s admit it, not even faintly cute boots. They are, in the defining words of Merriam-Webster, homely: 3 a : unaffectedly natural.

I can’t seem to pull this week’s post together in any organized way. It’s raining. It’s muddy. The dahlias are bright anyway, and they put me in mind to have my garden in some kind of shape. That is, they put me in mind to wish I had any garden at all here, where we have construction dirt in ditches and heaps. I’m resisting the urge to fill out an order form, to fill the yet undefined beds with bulbs to be delivered next spring. I’ve learned in this year not to anticipate a finish date, not to believe in the possibility that items purchased now will find use or destination before they perish. I’ll stick with my mud boots for now.

One more song; click the arrow:

Summer Moving on…

We see clear signs the summer is coming ’round to an end. Weather is still warm and bright, but suddenly it is no longer light when the alarm goes off in the morning.

I found this in our woods. It’s a fragment of what had been a fairly large paper wasp nest.

Here’s a view of the interior, the living quarters.

Someone was bold enough to knock it from its location in the treetops, probably to harvest the larvae in the nest. You can be sure it was not me! I happily engage honeybees. Vespids are another story.

These were probably Bald-faced hornets:

This is not my magnificent photo. It comes from the Wikimedia Commons, courtesy of  PiccoloNamek. The Bald-faced hornet is not as fierce as she looks — I’ve encountered them many times with no sense of aggression from them. That doesn’t mean you want to walk up and mess with their nest in late summer! They will protect their home with every intention to drive you away.

The Yellow-jackets, on the other hand, have been fierce these late summer days. The other morning one of the men on the construction crew came hurtling up the slope, swatting and cursing. He’d found a nest under a pile of pipe and neither he nor the Yellow-jackets were one bit happy about it. He called them ‘bees,’ and I was stern in my insistence that those were not bees; they were wasps. He didn’t seem to appreciate the distinction. Bees take the rap for Yellow-jackets all the time.

Meanwhile, the gone-wild crab apples are hanging thick on their branches in waste areas.

Turkey Vultures (Cathartes aura) are molting their flight feathers, one by one. It must affect the rise and soar of the birds, but they stay up there anyway. I’ve seen several of them recently with serious gaps in their wings and tails, and a generous shedding of feathers onto the ground. These are big feathers — a foot or more in length.

Empty husks are appearing in the woods, a sign someone has been squirreling away nuts.

Crickets have begun to sing.

And the woods overall have a scent of rich balsam. The orchard has begun to exhale that perfume of slightly fermented, nearly rotting windfall fruit in the grass.

Everything is sighing at the end of the season, casting its seed, gathering itself for winter.

Here’s something new from WordPress: audio files embedded in the post. Click the Go arrow, and listen to Summertime while there is still summer in the season.