October Delights
Little River Falls, in early fall
October 25, 2024
This is the fourth week of the month, so technically I suppose it should be the last week, but the first five days of October were in one week, which started with the last two days of September, and the last five days of October are next week, which will end with two days of November. This is not something I normally would pay much attention to, but I’m trying to figure out some sort of content calendar for these posts, so it’s concerning.
Next week is special. We will move into the festival of Samhain, or Álfablót (the Norse version), the ancient holiday marking the New Year, the end of harvest season, and the beginning of winter.
Maybe for my content calendar, the fifth week of any month that has one will be given a special topic. For this fourth-but-not-final week, I’ll review some delights of the month.
B and I traveled for the second month in a row, following our September trip to the beach. A third trip is happening in November. This much travel is highly unusual for us, especially together. We’re homebodies, and until a year ago we had an aging dog who always needed at least one of us at home. Add to that the fact that we have different traveling styles, so trips together involve lots of negotiation and compromise.
Nonetheless, we were excited to visit my brother Steve and sister-in-law Chris in Alabama. They picked us up at the Birmingham airport and took us to see the Civil Rights Institute, an interactive museum in which visitors walk through history including scenes from a segregated city in the 1950s, a replica of a Freedom Riders bus, and the actual door of the jail cell in which Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote his “Letter From Birmingham Jail.” Along the way we heard recordings of contemporary music, Black speakers, and some horrifying diatribes from White speakers defending “our way of life.”
After a lunch stop we drove to Steve and Chris’s family farm in the countryside. It’s cotton country, and we passed large fields dotted with white. Cotton grows close to the ground, and from my privileged seat in an air-conditioned vehicle I tried to imagine what it must be like to pick cotton all day, bent over, in the sun.
Alongside the cotton fields we drove past stands of deciduous and evergreen trees, including native maple and oak varieties and possibly Eastern Red Cedar and Shortleaf Pine, which are native. Probably we also saw some invasive plant species. Leaves are just starting to show their fall colors, this far south.
Arriving at the farm we were enthusiastically greeted by eight dogs. I wouldn’t know anything about the breed that Steve and Chris raise and sometimes show, were it not for their enlightening me. Whippets look like greyhounds, but smaller, and they are affectionate, calm, playful companions. Actually, the dogs at the farm are seven whippets and one Cirneco, an ancient breed from Sicily.
My niece, her husband, and their three young children and two dogs came to spend a day with us, as I reported last week. All the time we spent with our family, the animals, and the life of this farm and countryside were the main delights of this month.
Another delight is a bit of indoor gardening I’ve done since we returned home a week ago. There’s this window in my office. It was just a regular window when we moved into the house 34 years ago. The room then was a small dining room, and the first home improvement we made was to hire someone to put in a garden window. It’s like a bay window but too high to sit in, because it’s just the regular window space bumped out.
The window faces south, and in all these years I’d never dedicated time and attention to finding houseplants, other than succulents, that can survive the full sun it gets. Until now. Cultivating an herb garden last summer led to a forehead-slapping moment: of course, herbs can live in that window.
After a failed attempt to pot cuttings from the garden, I bought rosemary, marjoram, and sage plants at the local farmers market. This was just before we went to Alabama, and the rosemary died while we were gone. At the market last Sunday I replaced it and added a parsley plant.
Repotting plants is such a messy business. I’m a clean freak beyond anything reasonable for health or sanity, so mucking around in the dirt is excellent therapy. I’m even learning to enjoy the process, not just the (after cleanup) product.
So far, all four plants are still alive! — and they make of my garden window, in every present moment, a peaceful green respite from the anxiety I feel when I think about the future.
