FALL RITUALS

I'm not short of apples.  Even the two apple trees that have been reluctant to produce up to now, two of the four trees, have decided to offer samples of what they could  do.  Only a sample though.  Four or five apples on one, a single one or two on the other.  I've no idea what took them so long.  Nor can I imagine what they might do if they really got going.

Skyler is fond of apples, proudly bringing a couple of them inside every day. When he's especially excited about an apple catch he will bring it to me––I'm never sure what he's expecting me to do with it––then after I look at his effort with appreciation––yay, wonderful!–– he will run around the house with it and deposit it somewhere.  Maybe in his bed, maybe on the floor, maybe on another bed.  Sometimes he will eat the whole thing.

Skyler's find, on one of the guest beds.

He is also really fond of pears.  My pear tree is way overgrown, possibly the biggest pear tree I've ever seen, years past its prime.  I've found that when I pick those pears at what should be the right time they don't ripen any further, they stay hard and all at once go completely soft and rot.  There is no in between.  Skyler eats them, too, seeds, stem and all.  So far, fingers crossed, he hasn't thrown up.

Unfortunately, all my apples are misshapen.  That translates into a peeling chore for pies, applesauce or whatever I might make.  They do taste good, though, despite the bother.  What they'd be best for, I suppose, is cider.  My family next door made plenty of that last week.  All their materials for cider making are improvised, with the exception of the old cider press.  First the apples are rinsed and cut in half, and then, with the help of an old wiffle ball bat, shoved into a garbage disposal and dumped as apple mush into the bucket below.  The mush in turn is dumped into the cider press which has been lined with an old sheet that serves as a filter and holds the mush together.  The cider is strained as it's being poured into old milk jugs, some to drink fresh, most of it to be frozen.

Grandson Hans' hand steadies the press while Chris turn the press wheel.

An iconic seasonal act and a chore for everyone who lives near trees is, of course, leaf raking.  I never have to rake leaves.  This may seem nothing short of amazing, given that there is forest all around and a couple of trees near the house.  The reason is wind, wind coming from just the right direction and that direction is primarily northeasterly.  So it neatly blows the leaves into the woods. I have no complaints.

I've been assessing the flora recently, the kind of stock-taking you do in the fall when the need for weeding slows down and you see the shape of things more clearly.  Here's an example.  All summer long I've been fighting this enormous hedge-like shrub that was lined up under the kitchen area windows.  To keep it in shape through the growing season meant getting a ladder into the damned thing on a regular basis, only to find it sending up shoots again with great enthusiasm only days later.  Okay, I decided one day last month, I'm done with you. I'm not doing this anymore. You're over.  So I cut it down and dug it out.

This is the one: an overgrown forsythia that long ago gave up blossoming in order to concentrate on growing taller. Dianthus fills areas around it.

(Parenthetically...

...uh-oh, comparing the 2019 photo above and this 2010 one, pre-porch, made me
notice that the house needs to be re-stained. Badly.)

As I was saying, I replaced the overgrown forsythia "hedge" with three dwarf winterberries and one hydrangea. Winterberries need a male plant nearby if there are to produce those red berries. The male plant is diminutive and looks like a different plant entirely.  None of them should be able to reach window level height, ever.

The berry-less male plant is hiding behind. Wire tomato cages around the bases are to keep Skyler, drawn by the odor of bone meal, from digging.  They should look better by next year. 

Besides the plantings, there's one major new thing:  a woodshed.  Last winter I was fed up with digging out wood from under a snow and ice-covered tarp, stepping on pallets that sometimes broke under my feet, and generally stumbling around to gather a pile of logs.  The piled up kindling was even harder to grab, not to mention first locating it under a foot of snow.

The shed (Chris Huston's design) easily holds four cords of wood, leaving the space nearest the house free for storing the recycle containers, kindling and other odds and ends. Stacking was easy, compared with making a free-standing pile.

There's still a short walk from the woodshed to the back porch where a day or two's worth of wood is stacked,
 but that shouldn't be much of a challenge.

After I removed plants and old woodpile pallets and did the usual shrub trimming I ended up with a good-sized burn pile.  That's what we call yard waste that's bigger than leaves plus miscellaneous wood.  Next I'll pick a day with a forecast of little to no wind and get a burn permit from the town and fire it up.  This promises to be a big one.  Maybe some cold damp day in November?  Or maybe it'll be a bonfire event.

The current burn pile, on the site of last year's.  The longer it sits there the bigger it gets.

When I looked at the 2010 photo of the house, the one that told me it was tie for repainting, I was impressed by how different the house looked, nevermind the structural additions.  Aging color.  I was also impressed by the changes to the landscape.  Aging flora.  It's not only the house that looks different now, but almost ten years of growth have made their mark.  It kind of snuck up on me.  Aging me.

This old photo looks like it could have been taken at the edge of a golf course:

The pond, looking toward Snake Mountain. Photo taken in fall 2010.  

By the end of our first winter in 2011 when we were building our new porch a few shrubs had to be moved, so we relocated them on the other side of the pond and added a river birch next to them.  We decided to let the pond edge be natural, letting it go wild.  It gives better cover to pond creatures and there's no need for edge trimming.  A few years ago during a lull in sugaring sons-in-law Cliff and Chris built a bridge over the place where meadow seepage fills the pond, a sometime brook. You can hardly see the bridge when the grasses are this high.

The same view, September 2019.  Big difference, huh?

There are plenty of other signs here and there of time passing as measured by plantings.  Trees seem to have grown almost surreptitiously.  I was surprised when I saw a photo of what this maple looked like when we arrived, compared with how it looks today.  

Spindly adolescent, that tree. Atop the hay bale in the background are grandchildren, along with our dog Harry and two Huston dogs.  Photo taken in spring 2011. 

Same tree.  The shade gives a sense of its size.

The first frost arrived this morning, layering the field and everything in the house's early morning shadow with a touch of sparkly white.  The basil, still at its peak this late in the season, is probably finished now.  I hadn't bothered to cover it last night because so often the frost forecast is for everywhere else except the Champlain Valley.  Soon it will be time once again to take off the screens, put away the sun umbrellas, take down the porch blinds, cover up the porch cushions, set mousetraps in the basement, do the final mowing, and trim the plants around the pond before it ices over––at least a month away––and wait for winter.

So it goes.