Don’t let those lovely calendar images of spring fool you. The gorgeous photos of tulips, daffodils, dogwoods, and any other flowering plant or tree may last all month in the picture hanging on your wall. But you better hurry outside to see them before they rudely disappear.
That’s Spring in a nutshell. It can be as fickle as the weather because the weather, especially in the age of rapid climate change, affects when things bloom and for how long. Throw in a heavy frost or two, and the blossoms’ purposes are lost until next year.
I don’t mean to be sounding doom and gloom. After the long, dark, and in many places, cold and snowy winter, we celebrate Spring’s arrival. But we need to get out and enjoy it while we can. We can easily take the many blooms and fragrances for granted until they are gone.
I’m as guilty of that as anyone. The older I get, the colder I get. Consequently, I avoid being outside too long on blustery, chilly days. I know. My age is showing.
I’ll admit that I’m a fair-weather kind of guy. I need the sun to keep me warm no matter how many layers of clothing I wear. Still, I love taking in the rapidly changing spring scenes. The leaves start to unfurl once the blossoms fade. Depending on the species and the weather, it is not long until the plant or tree leaves are in their fullness. As the leaves mature on some plants and trees, they darken into a rich green.
We are fortunate here in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. The first spring blossoms show themselves in the forests in late winter. Witch Hazel blooms can easily be overlooked. The white snowdrop petals are easier to see against the burnished leaf litter.
This year, February and March traded their weather. Varieties of daffodils and crocuses bloomed early and stayed late. As Spring progressed and the weather cooled, they became the exception. Pockets of the Glory of the Snow, Spring Beauties, Bloodroot, and Coltsfoot soon joined them.
The Redbud trees were gorgeous unless back-to-back freezes nipped their pretty pink blossoms. The impatient leaves soon pushed the petals to carpet the ground. Even the maples were in a hurry to begin their chlorophyll duties.
Soon neighborhoods, roadsides, and forests were ablaze with color in April. The azaleas, rhododendrons, Virginia Bluebells, tulips, wild geraniums, and poppies put on a show. The pollinators buzzed high and low.
So, here we are in May. The dogwood blossoms have faded, while their leaves stand ready, awaiting touches of sunshine and rain. They need both.
Together let’s pledge to get out and enjoy whatever is blooming in our neck of the woods. If we wait too long, we’ll only have the calendars to remind us of what we missed.
The calendar didn’t change, but the weather sure did.
Wheat shocks glow in the evening sun in Holmes County, Ohio.
August came early this year. The calendar didn’t change, but the weather sure did.
The three H’s customarily associated with August, hot, humid, and hazy, have been around off and on since this June. Unfortunately, the dreaded trio has been mostly “on” all across the continent and beyond.
The results haven’t been pretty or even healthy. Record high temperatures fed massive wildfires, more typical for the fall months. The fires have been burning all across the West and in several Canadian provinces. A wildfire completely obliterated the small town of Lytton, B.C.
The wildfires have fed the brilliant sunrises and sunsets in recent days. Brisk winds aloft have spread soot particles eastward, creating that giant orange ball in the sky that we usually can’t look at directly. The August haze is extra heavy from Maine to Florida.
A wildfire-enhanced sunset.
August’s weather seemed both more predictable and tolerable a half-century ago. Global warming and climate change weren’t household phrases back then. They are now.
In those days, the school year ran from the day after Labor Day until Memorial Day weekend. The school district seldom used up the permitted allotment of snow days. So, we knew we had the whole summer season to enjoy.
As a youngster, I always welcomed August even though it was the last month of school vacation. The neighborhood gang of baby boomers took the hot, hazy, and humid weather in stride.
You are never too young to help husk corn.
We were content to sit beneath giant shade trees and play cards and board games instead of more strenuous adventures. We saved our more energetic shenanigans for cooler evenings. I’ll skip the details since the statutes of limitations haven’t expired. No harm to life or property occurred, however.
August always gave us suburban kids pause. August was our reality check. It forewarned us to use our last remaining days of freedom wisely. We usually didn’t.
A few of us, of course, had jobs associated with youth, like paper routes and mowing lawns. My older brother and I both delivered newspapers. In those days, I had ink on my fingers and not in my veins.
County fairs and street fairs began in earnest. Our county fair was always the last week of August and ended on Labor Day. When the fair closed, the schoolhouse doors opened.
Our father usually grew a garden well away from our suburban home. After supper, my siblings and I crowded into the family car, and off we would go to help hoe, weed, and hopefully pick my favorite vegetable, sweet corn.
If we had a bumper crop, we headed to a strip mall parking lot, popped the trunk, and sold our excess at a dollar a dozen. Dad usually threw in an extra ear for free, the gardener’s equivalent of a baker’s dozen.
Back home, our dear mother had the pressure cooker ready. All we had to do was husk the corn. It’s another job that I still relish. My wife says I will be applying that apt skill as soon as the bi-colored corn is ripe.
Occasionally, Dad would also load the family into the car, and we headed to Holmes County. I always admired the platoon of golden wheat shocks standing at attention in the fields of Amish farmers.
I had no idea then that I would be spending most of my adult life living there. It served as a foretaste of many good things to come for me.
I look back on my lifetime of Augusts with pleasant memories. None of the three H’s can bake, wilt, or obscure them.
I’m glad this year we would all like to forget is coming to an end.
I know we still have a few days to go in 2020. I figured summing it up early would help us get a head start on the coming New Year.
As is my custom, I recorded some of the newsy pieces that didn’t make the headlines. Consequently, there is no mention of the U.S. presidential election.
January
1 – Soot from raging wildfires in Australia turned glaciers black in New Zealand
5 – The BBC reported that 4 million hectares or 9.9 million acres had burned in Australia’s New South Wales since July 1.
14 – NOAA reported that 2019 was the fifth consecutive year that the U.S. sustained 10 or more $1 billion weather and climate disasters, including fires, flooding, and hurricanes.
15 – NOAA and NASA jointly released a report that showed 2019 to be the second warmest globally since records have been kept in 1880.
16 – The San Francisco Giants became the first Major League Baseball team to hire a female as a full-time coach.
22 – It was so cold in southern Florida that the National Weather Service warned citizens to be alert for stunned iguanas falling from trees.
28 – A team of international scientists discovered four new species of sharks that use their fins to walk off the coast of northern Australia and New Guinea.
February
6 – The temperature in Antarctica reached a record high 65 degrees Fahrenheit, the warmest the continent has ever been.
10 – A scientist from Ohio State University reported finding byproducts of the Industrial Revolution in the Himalaya Mountains deposited long before anyone ever climbed that high.
17 – A pair of armed men robbed a delivery man in Hong Kong of hundreds of rolls of toilet paper due to the coronavirus.
21 – A published study identified a bird found in permafrost in Siberia as a horned lark that lived 46,000 years ago.
24 – After taking an 88-year-old Rochester, Washington man to the hospital with a broken hip, three Emergency Medical Technicians returned to the home and finished mowing the yard where the victim had fallen.
29 – Junior Heaven Fitch became the first female in North Carolina to become a high school state wrestling champion when she defeated seven boys to win the 106-pound division.
March
10 – A driver in Slidell, Louisiana pulled over for license plates that expired in 1997 told police that he was too busy to get them renewed.
12 – Snopes.com reported that the average American uses about 100 rolls of toilet paper a year, with most of it manufactured in Canada, Mexico, and the U.S.
13 – The Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C. announced that all 16 fragments of scripture that they had on display were discovered to be modern forgeries based on independent research.
29 – Smash-and-grab robbers stole a priceless Van Gogh painting from a Dutch art museum.
April
2 – It was announced that a record 6.6 million people in the U.S. applied for unemployment benefits the previous week due to the coronavirus pandemic.
14 – The organizer of a challenge to sew 1 million face masks for workers on the frontline of the COVID-19 crisis reported that globally volunteers had sewn 20 million masks.
17 – NASA satellite images showed a 30 percent drop in air pollution during the three-weeks of stay-at-home orders on the U.S. east coast.
21 – A team of scientists sailing off the coast of Western Australia discovered the longest animal ever recorded, a 150-foot gelatinous siphonophore.
May
1 – The U.S. Census Bureau reported that one-third of Americans already felt some depression and anxiety from the pandemic.
8 – The U.S. Labor Department reported April’s unemployment rate at 14.7 percent, the highest since the Great Depression.
15 – A new study published in the journal Landscape and Urban Planning found that planting and caring for a garden boosts people’s mood as much as walking and cycling.
18 – Lawrence Brooks, the oldest living U.S. veteran of World War II at 110-years-old, was featured on the cover of National Geographic Magazine.
19 – A study published in Nature Climate Change showed a sudden 17 percent drop globally in greenhouse gases during the lockdowns due to the coronavirus.
June
2 – Irene Triplett, the last person still receiving benefits for being a dependent of a Civil War soldier, died.
3 – Scientists discovered the cleanest water in the world in the Southern Ocean, the body of water that surrounds Antarctica.
5 – A large asteroid swept by the earth closer than the moon is to our planet, and it wasn’t detected until two days later.
9 – Kathryn Sullivan, the first woman to walk in space as a NASA astronaut, became the first woman to reach the deepest part of the Mariana Trench.
11 – It was revealed that a Siberian power plant leaked 20,000 tons of diesel fuel into area rivers on May 29, turning the waters red.
21 – The temperature in Verkhoyansk, Siberia reached 100 degrees Fahrenheit, a record high reading.
24 – After being furloughed from her job because of the pandemic, Michelle Brenner, used her $1,200 stimulus check to buy ingredients to make 1,200 pans of homemade lasagna, which she gave to first-responders, hospital workers, strangers, and single parents.
30 – A report stated that Americans annually shoot off a pound of fireworks for every adult.
July
1 – People in Prague, Czech Republic, one of the first countries to require mask-wearing, celebrated the end of coronavirus restrictions by dining at a 1,600-foot -long table that wound its way through streets and across the Charles Bridge.
9 – Tropical Storm Fay became the earliest “F-named” storm ever recorded when it formed along the eastern Atlantic Coast.
15 – A research study published in Lancet revealed that the global fertility rate had dropped to 2.7 children per family in 2017.
17 – Queen Elizabeth II knighted 100-year-old World War II veteran Tom Moore for raising more than $40 million for National Health Service charities by doing laps in his backyard garden.
26 – Olivia de Havilland, the last surviving star of the classic film “Gone with the Wind,” died at age 104 in Paris, France.
August
3 – Mildred “Gerri” Schappals, 102 of Nashua, New Hampshire, survived COVID-19 after having also survived a severe flu during the 1918 pandemic, in addition to two bouts of cancer
14 – A report said that globally people use 200 billion plastic bottles annually, and most are not recycled.
16 – The National Weather Service in Reno, Nevada issued the first-ever Firenado Warning for a tornado caused by a firestorm near Lake Tahoe, California.
20 – A scientific report showed that Greenland lost 586 billion tons of ice from an extremely warm 2019.
22 – Researchers found pesticides and industrial compounds, likely from the U.S., in the snow atop four high-elevation pristine sites on the Norwegian archipelago, Svalbard.
28 – Guinness World Records declared Julio Mora Tapia, 110, and Waldramina Quinteros, 105, of Quito, Ecuador, as the world’s oldest married couple.
September
1 – Three different airline pilots reported seeing a man in a jetpack flying near their planes as they landed at Los Angeles International Airport.
3 – The production of a new Batman movie was shut down when the actor playing batman tested positive for COVID-19.
7 – A 33-year-old Arkansas man found a 9.07-carat brown diamond at Arkansas’ Crater of Diamonds State Park.
8 – The Pew Institute released a study that showed that for the first time since the Great Depression the majority of young adults ages 18-29 lived at home with their parents.
16 – The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported that summer 2020 was the warmest ever.
October
2 – The Irish Supreme Court ruled that the sandwiches made by Subway contain too much sugar to be legally considered bread.
5 – British Lincolnshire Wildlife Centre had to separate five gray parrots because they kept swearing at visitors.
14 – NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information reported that globally September was the warmest on record.
23 – For the second time, a Dutch researcher correctly guessed the password for President Trump’s Twitter account as “maga2020.”
24 – Anika Cherbrolu, a 14-year-old freshman at Independence High School in Frisco, Texas, discovered a compound that can bind the coronavirus, inhibiting its ability to infect people to win the 3M Young Scientist Challenge and $25,000.
26 – NASA scientists announced that they had discovered water in the form of ice on the moon.
November
2 – The driver of a train was saved from injury near Rotterdam, Netherlands, when the front carriage crashed through an end section of the elevated rails and landed on the tail of a giant whale sculpture.
10 – The National Hurricane Center reported that 2020 was the most active year ever for named tropical storms and hurricanes with 29 named storms.
16 – A 71-year-old Florida man was arrested for grand theft when he strapped a downed steel power pole to the top of his car and drove away, hoping to sell the pole for scrap metal.
18 – A Saw-whet owl, that apparently traveled from upstate New York in a large Christmas tree to midtown Manhattan, was rescued from the pine tree at Rockefeller Center in New York City and taken to a wildlife rescue center.
30 – A report showed that online spending on Black Friday jumped 22 percent from last year.
December
7 – The International Olympic Committee announced that beginning at the 2024 summer Olympics in Paris it would include breakdancing as a medal competition.
8 – Swedish retailer Ikea announced that after 70 years it would no longer print its annual catalog, which was the world’s largest.
9 – A humpback whale made quite a splash in the Hudson River, breaching in front of the Statue of Liberty and other New York City icons.
Here’s hoping that the New Year will be better than the old one in every way. How can 2021 not be?
Residents of the Northern Hemisphere are on the eve of yet another autumnal equinox. Autumn officially begins at 9:30 a.m. EDT on Tuesday, September 22.
Autumn has given us plenty of warnings even before her arrival. Instead of turning red, many of the leaves on our backyard maple have simply been falling off one-by-one for weeks. We can thank the leafcutters for much of that.
The crazy weather of this insane year has also played a role in the dying leaves, along with other climatological irregularities. Let’s count the ways.
In late spring, an extended spell of chilly, wet March-like days did their damage. The steady damp weather kept farmers out of fields over much of the U.S. east of the Rocky Mountains.
Some bird species even delayed nesting because the weather was so foul. If birds did nest, naturalists found hatchlings dead because their parents couldn’t find enough insects to feed them.
Then just like that, it got hot and dry. Here in western Virginia, the furnace was on one day, and the air conditioner the next. Vegetation flourished in such conditions, causing the humid, hot wind to carry various pollens far and wide. According to my allergist, I wasn’t the only one sneezing.
The day the rains started in mid-July.About the time Major League Baseball finally began in July, the heavens opened up. The rains canceled games, and so did COVID-19 because too many players tested positive.
Record rains pelted the full length of the Shenandoah Valley. August usually is a hot and dry month here. Not this year. The weather was more like June should have been. We mowed our lush lawn twice a week for several consecutive weeks.
All the while, fall kept creeping upon us. Butterflies, relatively scarce during June and July, began to arrive. So did the ruby-throated hummingbirds. Now they are all filling up their tanks for their annual southern migration.
Juvenile male Ruby-throated Hummingbird.
The yellow, green, and black Monarch caterpillars have morphed their way into magnificent orange and black butterflies. Predators have learned to avoid dining on them since the Monarch’s appetite for milkweed renders them bitter, according to lepidopterists.
That dreaded F word, F-R-O-S-T, has already made appearances across the northern reaches of the U.S. Can the rest of us be far behind?
If you listen to the jingles and jargon on TV, this is pumpkin spice everything season. Despite the marketing ploys, I’ll gladly stick to my decaf mocha lattes. They’ll taste just as robust when the first freeze hits.
Of course, hurricane season peaks in the first few weeks of fall. The National Hurricane Center has already increased its predictions for both the numbers and intensities of those tropical storms.
Out west, you can’t breathe the air. It’s so oppressively hot and thick with smoke from record-breaking fires that have caused death, destruction, and devastation to humans, wildlife, and entire towns. More than 10 percent of Oregon’s population has been evacuated as of this writing.
Unfortunately for those millions of west coast folks, the sky has glowed an apocalyptic orange for all the wrong reasons. A good frost or even a lovely blanket of snow would greatly help those tired firefighters slow the infernos.
Autumn, of course, abounds with fiery colors, orange included. In addition to the winged creatures, mums, maples, pumpkins, and gourds are but few of the things that warmly usher in fall.
Climate change has undoubtedly played a part in stirring up 2020’s weird and wild weather. It’s been a universally strange enough year already all the way around.
Let’s welcome fall with a blissful hope for more normal global weather patterns. The right kind of orange.
March snow in the mountains.
March is famous for its variable weather. After all, the familiar saying, “In like a lion, out like a lamb” references the month of March.
There’s a good reason for that. It’s easy to imagine our log cabin ancestors being more than ready for spring after enduring snowstorm after snowstorm. However, pioneer-era folklore was based more on hope than meteorological compilations.
They professed that if March began with yet more lion-like elements, then it had to end with gentler, calmer, warmer, more welcoming weather. Who could blame them?
It’s only natural to want more appealing weather than another cold spell. In animalizing weather, it’s much safer to deal with a lamb than a lion, especially if you were a 19th-century settler with a bad case of cabin fever.
Likely, there was more to it than that. Those hardy people believed in a balance of life. Aristotle’s “moderation in all things” was their mantra. So, they logically applied that theory to the weather as well. If March was harsh in the beginning, it should be mild by month’s end.
Unfortunately, the weather doesn’t work that way. We take what we get, and given what we have gotten in the past, March’s weather could be a doozy. A lot of factors come into play.
Welcome to March, 2013.
Shoveling.
During the storm.
A foot.
Snow bed.
Building the snowman.
Those expressions!
March’s normal weather, whatever normal is these days, has historically played hijinks with global societies. March is known to deliver every variety of weather in its 31 days, and not always where or when you might think.
My family has personal experience with March’s fickleness. Seven years ago, we traveled from Ohio to Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley to babysit our three grandkids, then ages eight, six, and three. Their parents went on a much-needed vacation to Florida.
Shortly after we arrived, a strong cold front moved through the eastern U.S. causing chaos. While Florida froze, the storm dumped a foot of heavy, wet snow on us. Babysitting was never so much fun as we frolicked in the winter wonderland. Sled riding, building snow forts, and snowmen filled much of our time.
When we returned home a week later to Holmes County, Ohio, the weather was dreamy. Under sunny skies, Amish farmers were plowing fields with horses. Now those seem like the good old days. When we arrived home.
It’s easy to be nostalgic about March. I always thought of the third month as the bridge between winter and spring. Hoes and rakes replaced sleds and ice skates. The snow on the daffodils never lasted long.
It’s much harder to face the reality of the Marches of the 21st century. Now, severe storms are occurring more frequently and are much stronger than in previous times.
More than a hundred years of industrialization have drastically changed global climate patterns. Tropical areas that usually receive regular rains have been drought-stricken, resulting in catastrophic wildfires. Think Australia and California.
Globally, the last 10 years have produced nine of the warmest years on record. In fact, this January was the warmest ever. That could explain in part why many skiers, ice skaters, and ice fishermen far and wide had to feel abandoned by the nearly winterless winter weather.
That said, March will still be March. It just might be wilder than in olden years. Our forebearers rhymes may have had some wishful reasoning to them. The reality in the early 21st century may deliver more dramatic climatological results.
Well, we made it. You and I have traveled yet one more year around the sun. True to form, 2019 was full of wonder, mistakes, successes, and a smorgasbord of conundrums and craziness.
As usual, I kept track of a few of the lesser but still extraordinary events and findings during the year.
January 20 – A meteorite was recorded striking the surface of the moon during the Super Full Blood Wolf Moon total lunar eclipse. January 22 – According to a report from nonprofit Oxfam, the world’s 26 wealthiest people are worth the same amount of money as the world’s poorest 3.8 billion. January 30 – The temperature dropped to -48 degrees with a wind chill of -65 in Norris Camp, Minnesota, making it the coldest place in the lower 48 states. Early morning sky, January 31. February 1 – The BBC reported that January was the hottest month on record in Australia and that five days were among the top 10 on record for the warmest. February 7 – NASA reported that the last five years have been the hottest since records began being kept in 1880, with 2018 the fourth warmest year. February 13 – NASA announced that it had declared the Mars rover dead after being unable to communicate with it following a massive dust storm on the red planet. March 25 – A British Airways flight bound for Dusseldorf, Germany, instead accidentally landed in Edinburgh, Scotland, because the company filed the wrong flight papers. March 26 – UPS began an experimental delivery system using drones in North Carolina. March 27 – Airbnb, the online home-sharing site, surpassed Hilton Hotels in annual sales. April 11 – A standup comedian in England died halfway through his comedy routine, only the audience thought it was part of his act. April 19 – A 10-year-old Fredrick, Maryland girl born without hands won a national handwriting contest. April 22 – The BBC reported that 23 million people use 123456 as their password for private online accounts, with 123456789 as the second most popular password. May 22 – The last known ship to bring slaves to the U.S., the schooner Clotilda, was discovered in a remote branch of Alabama’s Mobile River. May 23 – Longtime Marietta, Georgia, mail carrier Floyd Martin retired, and on his last route, residents decorated their mailboxes and held a block party after he finished his deliveries. May 31 – After 20 rounds and running out of hard words, the National Spelling Bee in Washington, D.C., crowned an unprecedented eight co-champions. June 5 – Tom Rice, 97, of Coronado, California, reenacted his pre-D-Day 1944 jump into Carentan, France, as part of the 75th anniversary of the Allied invasion at Normandy. June 11 – Kraft announced that it was selling salad frosting, which was French dressing disguised in a colorful bottle to get kids to like it. June 19 – A survey by YouGov reported that 39 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 hadn’t used deodorant in the last 30 days. July 3 – The American Automobile Association estimated that a record 49 million people would be traveling the U.S. highways on the Fourth of July holiday. July 12 – A report on British roadkill showed that badgers were the mammals most likely to meet their end on the highway, although pheasants led the animal roadway mortality rate. July 22 – Officials near Sandpoint, Idaho removed turtle crossing signs because thieves kept stealing them as soon as the unique warning signs were replaced. August 14 – A 12-year-old boy attending a family reunion found a rare Ice Age wooly mammoth tooth by a creek near the Inn at Honey Run near Millersburg, Ohio. August 15 – A new study released by the U.S. Geological Survey showed that 90 percent of rainwater samples in Colorado included microplastic shards, beads, and fibers. September 6 – A new international study showed that 90 percent of the time eyewitnesses would assist someone assaulted in public. September 7 – Miami Marlins pitcher Brian Moran struck out his young brother, Colin, pinch-hitting for the Pittsburgh Pirates. September 21 – When a car fell on his neighbor pinning him, Zac Clark, a 16-year-old high school football player from Butler, Ohio, rushed over and lifted the 3,000-pound auto, saving the neighbor’s life. One of my proudest moments. October 7 – After falling at his home in Plains, Georgia the previous day, former President Jimmy Carter, 95, with a bandage above his left eye and a visible welt below, still helped build a Habitat for Humanity home in Nashville, Tennessee. October 18 – NASA astronauts Christina Koch and Jessica Meir performed the first all-female spacewalk when they ventured outside the International Space Station for five and a half hours to replace a faulty battery charger. October 30 – Firefighters in Simi Valley, California successfully saved the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library from a wildfire with assistance from a herd of goats brought in earlier in the year to eat away the brush surrounding the library. November 3 – When midnight shift workers didn’t show up at a Birmingham Waffle House restaurant, several customers jumped behind the counter to help the lone employee serve 30 other customers. November 8 – The last survivor of the Hindenburg Disaster, Werner Gustav Doehner, died in Laconia, New Hampshire, at age 90. November 18 – Police in Goddard, Kansas, discovered a camel, cow, and donkey wandering along a rural road. December 9 – A New York City man removed and ate a banana from a Miami, Florida art exhibit that had sold for $120,000. December 10 – A 43-year-old Monroe County, Louisiana man, was arrested for fixing the bingo game he was calling so his relatives could win. December 20 – Emily Williams, a wildlife ecologist in Alaska, was late for work because a moose was licking the salt off of her car.
Here’s hoping 2020 will give us both a better year and better eyesight in all that is happening around us.
In case you’ve been too busy to notice, surprise! It’s October!
October is famous for its surprises, especially political ones like in the current presidential campaigns. Both natural and human-generated events are said to sway the election’s outcome. Given the tone of this election, nothing will shock me.
That aside, this year has seemed to have just melted away for me. That’s certainly been no surprise at all given the record-breaking heat and the significant changes that cropped up in my life.
Globally, we’ve had 11 straight months of record warmth. When it comes to climate change, misery loves company. No one was exempt.
The transition process of going from living in Ohio to moving to Virginia has been both exciting and fatiguing, especially mentally. After residing in the same house for nearly four decades, a lot of decisions have had to be made, sometimes rather quickly.
We can opine about those situations all we want. That still won’t change the fact that October is here. For me, that’s a good thing. October has always been one of my favorite months.
Our granddaughter would likely agree. Maren turns seven soon.
Mums the word.As we begin the year’s 10th month, we know in general what to anticipate. We won’t know the particular details, of course, until they unfold.
In the Northern Hemisphere, harvest season is peaking. Field corn is drying on the stalks or in shocks on some Amish farms. Apples, pears, pumpkins, squash, gourds, fall flowers and the last of the vegetable garden crops brighten kitchens and spirits alike.
In the Southern Hemisphere, the anticipation of spring is over. Our October is their April. That seems only fair. As life ends in one locale, it begins anew in another.
As their leaves unfurl, ours start to drop. The central question reoccurs from New England to the southern Appalachian Mountains and far to the west. What will the persistent dryness do to the leafy colors?
Fall colors and textures.Produce farmers earnestly watch the weather forecasts for any hint of first frosts. October is often the scene of that crime. Most folks relish the finer, more favorable weather. It should come as no surprise that I’d be leading that pack.
Start to finish October often is a handsome month. Golden leaves against cerulean skies dotted with patches of cottony clouds create a natural beauty that even the most sullen person can’t ignore. If they do, it’s surely their loss.
Sports enthusiasts are in their glory, too. Football is in full swing. Basketball is about to begin. Golfers revel in the perfect days but curse the cold in the next breath.
For me, October baseball still rules. The Cleveland Indians are playing once again in the playoffs. It’s the first time in three years, and even then that joy only lasted until the mighty Casey struck out in a one-and-done event.
That won’t happen this year. The Indians are Major League Baseball’s American League Central Division champions. I know for many, many folks, that was indeed an October surprise. Not to me, faithful, perpetual, loyal fan that I am. I’m ready for some post-season baseball.
Remember back in June when I sort of tongue in cheek suggested the Chicago Cubs would play the Cleveland Indians in the World Series? Well, wouldn’t that be a magnificent October surprise, the kind that any red-blooded American baseball fanatic could only dream of, except me?
I won’t be surprised at all. But if that does happen, it definitely will be an October for many to remember.
Roadkill Crossing 
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