My poem, Farm Sale, tells about the day my parents held a farm sale, prior to their move from farm to a house in town in 1982. The poem was published in The Sea Letter Journal
The photo is blurry because it’s from 1982, taken on a tiny point-and-shoot camera and because my hands shook watching my parents’ lives auctioned away. Many people from the community came to the sale. Cars and pickup trucks lined the road that March day.
I also took some pictures that day of the pasture where I spent a lot of time day dreaming during my adolescent years. Those photos are clearer. I took more time and steadied my hand to photograph the waterways I loved.
Mom liked living in the town they chose. Dad missed the farm. He missed the cows and working in the fields. He passed away two years after moving to town.
September is glorious sunrises and sunsets, warm days, open-window cool nights, and a sense of time stretching forever. It’s a time of transition from summer to fall, air conditioning to heating, garden harvest to preserving food for winter.
I had a large apple harvest this year. I made a lot of applesauce.
In Autumn, September’s warm, balmy days switch to October’s variability. October can be a glorious display of tree colors, visits to pumpkin patches, and bountiful fall harvests. October can also turn into soggy, overcast dreary days stretching into an early winter. October is a time of Halloween parties, fun decorations, and playing dress-up for kids of all ages. October is usually a combination of all those transitions moving us gradually or suddenly toward winter in the northern hemisphere.
We move from fourteen hours of daylight in August to ten by the end of the October. I move my houseplants back in the house after a summer in the bright light. Most of them have adjustment issues in the dimmer indoor light. When plants have difficulty adjusting to less light, drop their leaves, and become semi-dormant, it’s an alert that people face the same challenge.
Depression is a difficult mental health condition for many. With the lowering of light levels during the winter months, depression can heighten for those already challenged. Known as Seasonal Affective Disorder or SAD, winter depression affects people who feel fine in the summer months but lapse into depression in the winter. These folks often dread winter for many reasons. Getting up in the dark, shoveling snow, traveling on icy roads, and coping with everyday challenges is heightened during the dark months ahead.
Help is available
Counselors can help their clients make these transitions and prepare for low light conditions. Knowing that last’s years depression can return with the change in light level, helps people know that it’s time to check in with their mental health professional, begin to care for themselves, and consider adding extra light to one’s routine; e.g. setting a timer to your bed side light so it lights your room before the alarm begins your day. Each person’s situation often has multiple challenges. It’s always a good idea to talk over your issues with a professional.
Gardens, lawns, fields, roadsides, right-of-ways all provide vital habitat for monarchs and other pollinators. How we manage this habitat must be done with care to help protect our monarchs!
by Rebecca Chandler Garden Educator, Naturalist and Ethnobotanist
So many things depend on timing. I am reminded of this by the radio in my sewing room that reliably turns itself on at 8:00 am every day, runs for a few minutes, then shuts off. I’ve tried to re-program it without result. I’m writing this from my office, a floor above the sewing room, where sound carries surprisingly well. I could turn down the sound, unplug the radio, or, gasp, read the radio’s directions, but I’m leaving it alone because the alarm has a role to play in my day.
As the author of the Mowing for Monarch 101 article states so well, we can manage our green spaces to promote butterfly life. I believe we can manage our time to create a more peaceful life, and we can support each other during good times and bad.
This year there’s some monarchs, a few yellow swallowtails, and a flamboyance of painted ladies in my yard. They draw nectar from lilies, phlox, swamp weed butterfly plant, and asters that are just coming into bloom. When I stand still in the garden, they light on my shoulder and in my hair.
Swamp weed butterfly plant loaded with butterflies
Time spent outside away from social media is good for young and old alike. Ordinarily, I’d be outside taking care of pruning, harvesting, or mowing on a sunny August day, rather than writing this blog. However, it’s one of those 90 degree days with high humidity that makes it feel close to 100 degrees. It’s as if Mother Nature is having a hot flash and just wants to be left alone. I’m happy to oblige her and let go.
Welcome, new visitors to my blog. I typically write about country life, and as the readers who follow my posts are aware, I live on a ranch in a rural area, remote from most urban settings.
Last weekend I ventured into Minneapolis with a friend. We saw the musical, Guys and Dolls, at the Guthrie Theatre, spent a day at the Minneapolis Art Institute’s special exhibit of Native Women’s Art, and attended the air show, Wings of the North, among other urban adventures.
It’s tough to get used to so much traffic, Minneapolis’ complex interstate system, and limited or expensive parking when my daily drive is usually over gravel roads and parking is never an issue. The only obstacles in my area are slow-moving tractors conveying large equipment from one place to another.
Guthrie Theatre Signunder a full moon above & stage set for Guys and Dolls below
A windowless hotel room, conspired with my touch of vertigo, to disrupt my sense of direction in the city. Thanks to GPS, we got to our destinations, even though I believed west was east the entire time. My internal direction-finder began to function again, as we drove toward home, in bright sunshine.
Minneapolis Art Institute: Hearts of our People Native Women Artists exhibit https://new.artsmia.org/
Biplane pictured first. One of the two B-52’s still flying, from WWII, flew over the airshow, pictured second.
The special events were wonderful and I’m glad I was there, but my favorite stops were to the Next Chapter Booksellers https://www.nextchapterbooksellers.com/ and Dunn Bros coffee shop http://www.dunnbrosgrand.com/. I prefer to spend my book dollars in an indie bookstore, rather than online at a commercial giant, like Amazon. There’s nothing like a good cup of coffee and a treat, like this delicious tiramisu, after book shopping.
Both establishments are located across the street from Macalester
College https://www.macalester.edu/. The campus is tree-covered, and no doubt storied, for the
undergraduates of this liberal arts college. I love walking around
college and university campuses when visiting college towns or
neighborhoods. It’s fun to imaging having attended there. It’s
probably not a surprise that I feel “warm and fuzzy” about higher education.
After all, I graduated from two universities and worked for a college in a
third town, for nearly forty years.
We stopped at the Blue Bunny Ice Cream Shop in La Mars for a final
treat of chocolate cones before heading home. Terrific ice cream and fun
little blue bunnies are all over the shop. https://www.bluebunny.com/
I started my vegetable garden later than usual this spring due to the unusually cool, wet, spring in Nebraska. It’s taking off just fine now and is producing many veggies as well as inspiration for writing and therapy.
My poem Garden Therapy was published by Nebraska Life in the July/August 2019 issue. http://www.nebraskalife.com/
I try to spend some time in the garden every day, but especially when there’s a knotty problem to solve, or to help with loss of a loved one. A dear friend recently died after a tough bout with cancer. I wrote about her death in my last blog. I’m thinking about her again today as her family gathers in her home state for a second memorial service.
Gardening Sestina, another gardening-related poem, was just published in Fine Lines, summer 2019, Volume 28, Issue 2, Edited by David Martin and available at http://finelines.org/
I’m very fond of flower gardens. My rural place has many perennial beds. Something is always blooming in the garden from the season’s first tulips in April (occasionally as early as March), to the last of the October blooms. I have house plants that bloom inside during winter months to cheer those cold days.
My dear friend died at the end of May after a long bout with cancer. During her life, she organized trips around the world from Antarctica to Nova Scotia to Russia to China and many places between. This lady loved to research and plan trips. She held a master’s degree in History and as a long time teacher of high school and college students, she also taught her fellow travelers about the history of every place she visited.
I was privileged to travel with her to seven countries, seven states, and two Caribbean islands over a fifteen year period. She also shared many trips with her sister and her nieces.
June was lost time vacillating between tears of loss and celebrating our many adventures. Other friends ask me, “where’s your next trip?” It feels odd to think about traveling without her, but her sister wants to plant a “memorial” trip in her honor. There will be more about that trip as it unfolds.
Today, I’m celebrating the flowers of early summer, like the pink rose above and the yellow rose below. Yellow roses grew in my parents’ yard. I snagged a clipping before they moved to town in 1982. This tough rose keeps coming back every June, regardless of how cold the winter.
The California poppies bloomed with gusto this year as well.
The peonies in the featured image above bloomed just in time for my friend’s memorial service. I took peonies to decorate my parents’ graves on Memorial Day, as well.
July begins hot with temperatures in the mid-nineties but promises to be a good month.
I’ve been retired from full-time work since Christmas. Another retired colleague and I started a private-practice counseling center in our small town. We each allocate a couple days a week to the practice. This schedule leaves me a lot of time for spur-of-the-moment and random activities collectively called puttering for the purpose of this essay.
My colleague and I both experienced a steep learning curve in the transition from working at a state college where we had the privilege of not needing to ask students receiving counseling for money, to private practice where are trying to earn some.
We spent a lot of extra hours on our “off” days on the computer taking care of obtaining the correct licenses, insurance, legal status, taxes, etc. As most of that has now been accomplished, we are closer to our plan for this business which is to each work two days a week. I enjoy spending time in our sunny office. It’s great to set my hours, and not work within an institution’s expectations.
I’ve puttered with a bit more indoor gardening this year. My house plants are thriving.
I admire folks who can work full time and read a lot, but as much as I tried, rarely found time to finish a book when employed full time. In the past, when my book club moved to a new selection, I used to insert a bookmark in the unfinished book and move on to the next one. In the past few months, I’ve finished four of those set-aside books, and am now keeping pace with my fellow readers.
Reading, gardening and even a bit of quilting all feel like puttering. I’ve also been writing more and sending poems and essays to journals for publication consideration. I’ve used some of this puttering time to organize my writing submissions. As soon as one editor rejects my work, I sent it out to another. There are occasional successes.
Initially, there was a bit of anxiety that I wasn’t accomplishing much, but I’ve decided that puttering, as described in this blog, is an OK use of my time. It’s refreshing to have time to watch sunrises and sunsets like this one. Peace to all of you who find your way to this blog!
