Still Busy After All These Years

We are waiting for our dock to be removed. And soon, I will get a text from the guy who shuts off the summer water to the field and behind the barn. I don’t think people put up shutters anymore, but the arrival of the dock and summer water teams conveys the same message, the message of closing up for winter.

Next it will be hammering in the plow stakes. We’ve had some cobble come up in the driveway that I think we should try to excavate before the plows drive down. There is no telling until we try whether the stone is the tip of an iceberg, or simply a smaller rock making its escape from middle earth.

I have done nothing so far this year about extending our brush fence another couple of rails. I’d like to have something to show for the wood we set aside in the spring for the project before the ground freezes and snow comes.

We’d like to finish staining the wooden porch, which runs along a section of the cabin that never sees the sun. When it rains, it takes at least two days for the boards to dry out. The porch is finally scraped and sanded. If it stays dry, maybe by the end of the week we will have it done.

The leeks are still in the ground, along with plenty of carrots and some onions. We collected two handfuls of green beans yesterday. More are on the way. There is another week’s worth of lettuce, too, I think. Tomatoes are gone. Apples, pears, and peaches are off the trees, most of them gnawed halfway through in places and left scattered on the ground by our porcupines. One thing is for sure, the porcupines had a good summer. We don’t expect any complaints from them, except about the dog. But even in that case, nobody lost any quills, and we didn’t have to make a trip to the emergency vet in Concord, as we did the last two years.

I am noticing the first leaves on the ground, which will get chewed up by the lawnmower when I get the desire and energy to mow once more. This time of year, I can push mowing to about once every two weeks. In which case, I should mow today, or tomorrow, since it was two weeks ago I mowed before leaving for Canada, and my 50th high school reunion.

We are just waiting for the brown-eyed Susans, and the hairy and New England asters, to finish the course so we can bring in the brush mower and take down the field. It seems an age ago that the crocuses sped across the finish, followed by the daffodils. Right now, we are closer to when they will bloom again than when they last appeared. Our field of wildflowers and grasses elevated its game considerably this year. I can give you a partial list because, secretly, you want to know: lupine, Queen Anne’s lace, wild bergamot, garden catchfly, purple coneflower, goldenrod, hairy beardtongue, sweet William, lance-leaved coreopsis, black-eyed Susan, least evening-primrose, common evening-primrose, and bigleaf hydrangea. Plus the asters, this and that. As delighted as we have been with the proliferation of color this year in the field, I look forward to several weeks of being able to tread across the whole of it, freely. Before the snow comes.

As things close up, get tucked in, we can return to splitting and stacking wood for next winter.

Huckleberry’s mind is on none of this. Right now, he is sound asleep on his slightly tattered, fluffy gray bed, which he spent five minutes bunching into a folded square shape before landing. His head hangs off the side on the rug. It looks uncomfortable. Yesterday, to be helpful, I intervened. I took the bed, straightened it, and lay it out neatly in about the spot where I felt he was intending to move it. I’ve done this before, and been treated to the same answer, a dumbfounded expression that says, “Haven’t you got other things to do?” Whereupon he digs at it again until it is the folded shape of things that come out of my pocket, and goes to sleep.

I guess I’ll go empty the rain gauge. It helps to stay busy in the wake of my 50th high school reunion.

Published in the Monadnock Ledger-Transcript