Into Autumn

First Overhead Balloon of the Season

Another season turning: better weather, a bit of rain, lingering hot days (but cooler nights). It's a few days past the equinox, a few days short of the full Harvest moon, and I'm getting ready for eye surgery which will put me out of commission for a week or so, but should preserve the sight in my left eye.  In preparation, I've been taking it easy, pottering about the garden, and trying to ignore the news. Molly has taken to spending time with me on the backyard table when I go out to drink my morning tea, so I get a dose of companionship and cuteness before the mozzies figure out that I haven't bathed in repellant. 

Sunday in the Garden with Molly

Nylah is usually over behind the garage, keeping watch for errant dogs or babies who might stroll by. Although basically quite intelligent, her Great Pyrenees genes tend to keep her in "big dumb mop"* mode, more ornamental than useful. She is pretty to watch, but seldom photogenic enough to capture. The last photo I took was in June:

Nylah Lounging in Woody's Garden

In terms of holidays, the Celts celebrated the transition from summer to fall at the equinox, and through to Samhain (which marks the midpoint between the autumnal equinox and the winter solstice, and coincides with Halloween)--when cattle were brought down from summer pastures. I'm wondering just how long it will take the current weather patterns to complete the change, given all of the climatic upheavals we seem to be "enjoying." 

One of the seasonal markers that occur fairly regularly here in the northern part of Occupied Mexico is the Plano Balloon Festival, which takes place about ten miles south of here, near where we lived while my kids were growing up. This year it coincided with the equinox (September 21-24), and the opening photo for this post (taken on September 18) probably represents someone practicing before the event. I'm not sure how much ballooning actually got done because of high winds and other kinds of threatening weather, but we haven't attended the event since The Beloved Spouse began tennis coaching, because by then the whole thing had become a circus and the team got wrangled into participating. 

Celebrations of all kinds seem to have run amok in the last few decades, in part because they've become huge cash cows for businesses. The market-capitalism greed machine has overtaken the communitarian aspect of seasonal goings on, and now they all appear to run together, and the hype begins earlier and earlier each year. 

A couple of days ago, while I was looking through old posts for a family recipe, I revisited the first year of this blog. The November 27th, 2007 entry (entitled "Enough") ruminated on greed--so it's clear that things haven't improved much. 

Nevertheless, I keep finding small indications that some shifts might be taking place. An article in the New York Times on young Luddites (from December of 2022) suggests that technology may not have quite the grip that some of us fear, at least among Gen Z. These kids actually remind me a bit of a group of rather pretentious intellectuals from the local boys' Catholic high school and the public school I attended. We all got grounded around graduation time because we stayed out all night at one guy's house reading T. S. Eliot, discussing The Little Prince, and listening to a couple of them playing Chopin etudes--and there weren't even flip phones for us to call home with.

An article in this week's New Yorker, Sam Knight's "A Young Architect's Designs for the Climate Apocalypse"  quoted from an essay by architect Anthony Dunne in the journal, Reading Design: "A Larger Reality," wherein he quotes from Ursula K. Le Guin's acceptance speech for the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2014, where she enjoined science fiction and fantasy, and other "writers of the imagination" to challenge the profiteers of the written word who dictate what should be written and rewarded:

Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom — poets, visionaries — realists of a larger reality. (Copyright © 2014 Ursula K. Le Guin)

With this in mind, I'd like to recommend two small books that provide us with a glimpse of a possible future that avoids Armageddon and turns away from climate apocalypse: Becky Chambers's A Psalm for the Wild-Built and A Prayer for the Crown-Shy (Macmillan 2021 and 2022). For a nice essay that shows why I might be recommending these books, see Molly Templeton's "The Refreshing Hopefulness of Becky Chambers' Monk and Robot Books."

See you on the other side. Or, as Capt. Mal Reynolds would say, "Y'all gonna be here when I wake up?"**

*Not an entirely coincidental reference, because I just finished my second reading of A Prayer for the Crown-Shy last night, I found this passage describing Sibling Dex's family dogs to be a particularly appropriate description of Nylah's lineage and demeanor: "There were three of them, all shaggy herders painted in soft swirls of brown and black, smart as hell when they were at work and big dumb mops every other hour of the day" (113). It's also appropriate that the photo of Nylah I included was taken in the little garden dedicated to one of her two predecessors, Woody--of Woody and Arlo fame. Both were border collie mixes, of which breed Nylah is about half, all of these three also big dumb mops when they're not busy being herders.

**False alarm. My retina surgery has been postponed. But thanks for any concern.

 

Spring in War Time

Mammatus-ish clouds after this week's storm

Seasonal changes always cause mischief around north Texas. This year's wind- and hail-storms and wildfires on the cusp of spring seem more frequent and more intense than usual, although I'm too lazy to look up the stats. Counties to the east are burning, and under emergency evacuation notices. We've had two thunderstorms (with golfball to baseball sized hailstones in some areas) in the last two weeks, resulting in swarms of roofing companies in local neighborhoods with offers to repair roof damage that's "visible from the street" (it is not, in most cases). Our big cable-spool picnic table out back has been artfully polka-dotted, but we've avoided any major damage--although in a previous windstorm a very large elm branch broke off and knocked things about, fortunately missing the greenhouse. 

But today is lovely. Daffodils are fully in bloom, and the grape hyacinths are popping up all over. Both have been naturalizing over the property during the last twenty years, and their numbers have increased significantly. It's as if our old house is gussying herself up to celebrate her centennial this year. Our "house clock" seems to be off by a day this year (the first sunrise appeared through the window yesterday), probably because of precessing equinoxes, but the shift to Daylight Saving Time has meant extra time in the evening to potter around and get things done in the garden. 

Clocks have been on many minds these days, especially since there may be a significant change in the works. For many, many years now I've been seasonally annoyed by the spring and fall changing of our clocks to and from "Central Standard Time" to "Central Daylight Time." I get so discombobulated by the shift that I've often grumbled about why we still do it at all. This week, however, the United States Senate agreed with me and voted unanimously to make Daylight Saving Time year-round. I like having more sun in the evening to enhance Animal Companionship Time when the weather's fine, so I'd rather this be the choice--even though sleep experts seem to think that standard time is preferable. And if we want the entire country and its territories to be uniform, we should adopt uniform standard time, so that those who don't ever follow daylight time won't still be different from everybody else. I don't really care; I just want to stop switching back and forth. Every year it seems to take me longer to adjust, although that seems a trivial complaint these days.

The usual celebrations of spring around this house have been severely muted by the war in Ukraine. We've stayed up later at night watching commentary from Hungary and elsewhere about the plight of the Ukrainian people, and feel no real impulse to celebrate anything (even though Purim, St. Patrick's Day, and Holi were all on the menu). We're sending money that would otherwise go to frivolities (like more books) to charities we regularly support that are also aiding the relief effort in Ukraine, as well as to international animal welfare groups trying to rescue lost and abandoned pets. There's not much more we can do, except perhaps share our concern with fellow bloggers and readers, and urge people to rely on news organizations that report factually and avoid the ones that don't. Newspeople are risking their own lives to get the story out, and I'm particularly sympathetic to what their families must be going through. My own mother was a foreign correspondent during the aftermath of the second of the Taiwan Strait Crises (1958-59), and my father had been deployed to Taiwan at the last minute (we were scheduled to go to the Philippines) because of the threat of war. I'm not sure why the whole family was allowed to go, but I grew up with photos of the damage done by the shellings and a political climate colored by the possibility of nuclear war. The Russia-Ukraine conflict is currently being compared to that of the recurring China-Taiwan issues, so it all seems uncomfortably familiar.

In addition, recent events keep reminding me of my maternal grandfather, who served as a medic toward the end of WWI in France. I've finished transcribing his letters to my grandmother, and have lately remembered a poem Sara Teasdale published in 1917 in response to reports of casualties in Europe. I stole the title, "Spring in Wartime," for this post.

I feel the spring far off, far off,

    The faint, far scent of bud and leaf—

Oh, how can spring take heart to come

    To a world in grief,

    Deep grief?

The sun turns north, the days grow long,

    Later the evening star grows bright—

How can the daylight linger on

    For men to fight,

    Still fight?

The grass is waking in the ground,

    Soon it will rise and blow in waves—

How can it have the heart to sway

    Over the graves,

    New graves?

Under the boughs where lovers walked

    The apple-blooms will shed their breath—

But what of all the lovers now

    Parted by Death,

    Grey Death?

I hope fervently that by the time the autumnal equinox rolls around (and preferably much sooner) there will be cause to celebrate, and that the wanton killing will have ended, and the Ukrainian people will no longer be threatened by autocratic ambition and hunger for power. The fortitude and resilience of Ukraine's president and citizens is profoundly inspiring. May it be rewarded with peace and freedom.

Image note: Almost-mammatus clouds after last week's hailstorm. Mammatus clouds are often a tornado omen, but these are rather less threatening. They provided for a gorgeous sunset, and folks to the north were treated to a huge double rainbow. But we had better clouds.