A Change in the Weather

 

Even without seeing the weather forecast, I knew when I woke up early this morning that we were in for a change in the weather.  The sun was still low in the east but the wind was blowing leaves past my window and the sky had that dull grey color that means rain.  The dogs were already outside, zooming and wrestling while Scout lay on the picnic table overseeing the activities.  Since the nights have been cooler, he has abandoned the air conditioning vent for the cold air outdoors.

It has been a long slow fall, with warm days and cool nights.  We have not even had a killing frost yet.  The trees are decked in their bright party clothes and the early morning sunlight turns the big maple across the road into a massive golden sphere.  My husband and I planted that tree when we built our house, about fifty years ago.  The dogwood we planted nearby is a midget in comparison and burns now with dark red foliage.  The chrysanthemums are giving up their bright colors while the hibiscus and roses are bravely clinging to their last few blooms before their winter.  It’s supposed to freeze tonight and I cut off those remaining blooms to give them a few more days to survive. 

The wild geese fly over the house almost daily, honking their goodbyes as they look to the south.  The other morning I caught a whiff of wood smoke when I walked outside, and the hum of the machinery in the fields has taken on a note of urgency.  Hunters haunt the local restaurants after a morning in the woods, and a bounty of acorns, walnuts and pecans keep the squirrels busy. The nights are quieter now, or as quiet as they can be with a pack of collies living here.  The night birds are silent and the katydids have put away their fiddles.  An occasional owl hoots from the holler and the dogs issue their challenge when coyotes howl in the distance.  Even the mornings are quieter, the hush broken only by the crows raiding the pecan trees.  That will change when I fill the bird feeders, welcoming the chatter and challenge of winter birds eager for a meal.

Halloween was a perfect night, with shirtsleeve temperatures and a hump-back moon.  Our town has become known as a Halloween Town, with a parade before the actual October 31 date, a haunted tour and a display of skeletons around the square during October. 

On Halloween night, there is a haunted firehall with free hot dogs, several streets are blocked off for trick or treaters, and people come from all around to go door to door collecting enough candy to put everyone in a diabetic coma.  Neighbors compete to see who can have the most over-the-top spooky yard and the streets are filled with goblins, witches, pirates, princesses, dinosaurs, aliens and every other kind of costume imaginable.  My favorite this year was a Cabbage Patch doll in a box.  It’s a far cry from the plastic masks and bed sheet costumes of my childhood.  Another impressive group was Alice, the White Rabbit, the Cheshire Cat and the Queen of Hearts.  They should get extra candy for knowing the story! My young cousin was a vampire, with a cape, white face make-up and a black wand.  Her baby sister, who had no idea that it was Halloween or what Halloween is, was a spotted calf.  She tolerated a trip around the block then fell asleep in her mom’s lap. 

When Halloween arrives, we seem to mount a galloping horse that takes us in a headlong rush to Christmas, with a short pause for Thanksgiving.  I try to close my eyes to Christmas decorations until the end of November, giving that day of family and gratitude its chance to shine, but at church, the choir is working on Christmas music and the aisles of shiny decorations in the store lure me to “just look.”  I wish I could slow down that galloping horse for a few weeks, to savor the jewel tones of the autumn trees, the pumpkins and scarecrows; for just a little longer.

   Photo by Eames Harris

                                           

The Persimmon Tree

 

I found a persimmon tree today.  I had no idea it was there – pretty close to my road, although in a place I’m not sure I can get to because it’s steep and full of bushes and probably briars.  My mama, when she was still about my age now, would have managed but she was a tougher person than I am.  At my age she was still climbing barb wire fences and wading through brambles to pick wild blackberries.  I guess it helped that she was small and wiry where I am fat and clumsy.  We will see.  Mama used to make persimmon cake and I think I still know where the recipe is.  Another important use for persimmons is weather forecasting.  If you break open the seed, it will tell you what kind of winter it will be.  A spoon shape means a lot of snow and a knife means a sharp, cold winter.  I don't know how reliable it is, but probably about as reliable as anything else. 

I was out on the RTV, giving the dogs a good run.  After seeing these persimmons in a totally unlikely place, I decided to ride around my horse pasture to see if by chance there was another tree along the fence line, where gathering would be easier.  While I was at it, I would check to see if the crows have left any pecans and how the walnuts are doing.  I picked up a grand total of four pecans and found maybe a dozen half eaten by the crows and several which fell prematurely, still in the green hull.  There were no pecans last year and no walnuts.  The trees in my backyard that usually bomb the yard with nuts were bare. 

There are a lot of walnuts this year, already littering the ground and hitting the tin roof of the garage.  The dogs think we are under attack when they hear them and rush out to bark at the invisible shooters.  They have tried to play with the walnuts but apparently don’t like the taste of the hulls.  I’m grateful for that; otherwise, they would have my living room littered with them too.  They brought in and tried to eat a crabapple back in the early summer,  and were sorely disappointed in the taste of it.  I watched Joey and Jace roll it back and forth on the floor, seeming to say, “you eat it … no, you do it.”  When I picked it up, I saw that they had chewed on it a little, but only a little.  Crabapples are not in their diet.

We used to look forward to picking up walnuts in the fall.  At one time, we could sell them by the pound, and we filled up hundreds of sacks from the trees all over the farm.  Daddy would haul them to the Co-op where they hulled them and gave us a check.  Of course we didn’t sell all of them – we kept plenty to crack and use for fudge and pies.  Mama used to make a walnut pie, made just like a pecan pie but with walnuts.  It was even better than pecan!  I think she said her mother used to make a good walnut cake, but she somehow lost the recipe.

We hulled the walnuts by pouring them out in the lane that led to the barn and letting the trucks and tractors run over them for a few days.  Then we picked up the nuts and let them dry.  We cracked them with a rock on top of the old cistern in the back yard and brought them inside to pick out while we watched television or sat in the porch swing. 

The pecan trees came from Arkansas.  My great grandmother’s brother lived there and they brought them one year and planted them in the orchard.  I was just a little girl when they got big enough to bear anything, and now others have sprung up around the house, along the garden fence and even at the edge of the front yard.  If you can keep the crows from stealing them, they are easier to shell than walnuts.

Sometimes we would luck out and find a hickory tree with nuts on the ground.  Hickory nuts are even tastier than walnuts and make a killer fudge.  But if there's anything on earth harder than a hickory nut shell, I don't know what it is.  My mama was a natural born forager and would make Daddy or me stop anywhere in the world if she saw something edible along the road.  We once found a bed of morel mushrooms beside a trail in a national park and she gathered them  up while I worried about spending the night in jail for theft.  It would probably have been worth it if they had let us keep the morels but I bet they would have taken them for themselves.  Luckily we escaped detection and got rid of the evidence by eating them for supper.

The orchard, other than the pecan trees, has played out years ago, but when I was a little girl, it was still providing plenty of apples, cherries, pears and peaches.  In my great-great grandfather’s ledgers, I found an entry where he received a batch of apple trees to plant, about the time he was building this house. 

I suppose those were the same trees I remember.  They had names like Seek No Further, Kinards Choice, Harvest and Red June.  I remember the apples that the family called June apples. Some of the apples were “cooking apples” and some were “eating apples.”  There was one tree I remember on the west end of the orchard that had the best apples to eat but I don’t know which variety it was.  I just know it was a speckled red and green apple that was tart and crisp. I talked to Alice, who grew up on the next farm and spent a lot of time here, about the apples and she got a dreamy look on her face when she remembered the apples.  Her daughter Annie, who practically grew up on this farm being babysat by my mama, didn't remember apple trees but she did talk about getting scolded for eating too many of the cherries that still grew on a tree in the yard.

 My great-great Grandfather died in 1888.  I hope he lived long enough to sample some of the apples.  Especially that one tree on the far West end of the orchard.

 

Sleeping with the Window Open

 

I have always wanted a sleeping porch. I used to love going camping, sleeping by the creek in a tent, with the water rippling by and listening to soft splashes of the fish and frogs and other night creatures.  That was pretty close to a sleeping porch, but now the best I can do is sleep with the windows open. 

My bedroom has three big old-fashioned windows.  I have to wrestle the old double hung windows up, holding my breath that I won’t break one of the irreplaceable bubble paned glasses.  The sash weights on these windows are long gone, so I have to prop them up with a stick, and most of the storm windows are not in the best condition either.  But it’s worth it to me to lie in bed listening to the far-off calls of the hoot owls, the tree frogs and even the slightly annoying cicadas on summer nights.  I can almost tell the seasons by the night sounds from my windows – spring peepers, katydids, and the song of the wild geese in the fall.  Then there are the rainy nights – too few of them lately, but the rumbles of thunder in the distance bring hope of a shower with the dance of raindrops on my tin roof and the clean scent of the rain on the breeze.  Some of the best times are the early morning rains, just about sunrise.  One window faces slightly southwest and that is where most of our rain comes from.  If I’m awake and there is enough light, I can see the showers moving across the pastures coming toward the house.

Scout likes to sleep under the open window too, when he is not sleeping on top of the air conditioning vent.  Every now and then he will sit up and look out the window, making sure nothing is creeping up through the yard to attack us.  With seven dogs in the house right now, nothing much can ever creep up, but one never knows and a collie has to stay vigilant.  His young sons, still waiting for their forever families to find them, follow his example and I’ve noticed that often times he lets them run first out of the house to bark at night creatures, only following if he thinks it’s a serious incursion.  

I remember as a child hearing a distant train whistle in the night – trains have not run through our county in several years now.  And I remember lying on that same bed in that same room with my grandmother, who I called Nanny, for naps in the afternoon.  I’m not sure how much napping we did – I was probably talking most of the time and telling stories I used to make up.  But I have great memories of the breezes that came through the window in the afternoon as we lay there.  It was a precious, simpler time, when dreams were still a possibility and I had my whole life ahead of me. Maybe that’s why I still love sleeping with the windows open.