September Song

This is my sixth September in the little village of Valier, retired to the little green house I bought with my mother’s bequest. The patchwork that hid rotten wood and hornets’ nests in the wall has worn off now. I have a clearer idea of where there is not enough insulation and where the plumbing is dubious. My lists of repairs is as long as my list of improvements.

Smoke is rolling up from the Bob Marshall over in the Rockies. The air is yellow, even apricot, and smells of wood burning. Some of it is being allowed to burn -- the edge closer to towns is being doused by helicopter.

The village wells are down so low that we’re asked not to water if we can help it. I quit a month ago. I also quit mowing the lawn. One neighbor asked another, “How can you stand next to that raggedy lawn?” I tell them I’m going for “the meadow look” and assure them it’s very trendy in the cities.

The inches of rain we’ve received this year were about average, but it all fell in June. The authorities say they’ve had twice as many prairie fires as usual and half as many forest fires, because the early rain encouraged the grass to grow tall, then dried it, but much of the moisture hit the mountains as snow and kept the trees damp until late.

My task -- which is stretching out over days and weeks -- is putting new rolled roofing on top of my flat-roofed garage. Last year I waited too long and ended up with a big sheet of plastic, held down with nailed lath. This year I’ll fold that sheet in half and put it on my bunkhouse. This is the way you plan and squeeze if you have little money.

I also have not much muscle or even energy. Just going up the ladder is an adventure. There are thunderstorms passing through and I come down to keep from being a lightning rod. So far there has been no rain in the storm cells. The ground up whateveritis stuck into the tarred paper has a lot of sharp edges. Soon my hand heels feel grated. I brought up a foam pad for my knees. I work until my arm is too tired to make a nail go in straight. The secret of success is a lot of black tarry stuff on all joints, seams and edges.

When I was down, waiting for storm cells to go over, I checked my email. Most people unplug their computers on days like this, but I live dangerously. We’re arguing over what it means to be a Westerner or a newcomer and why the two kinds are always after each other and just where are the boundaries anyway? We do that all the time. I was loath to get tar all over my keyboard and had not worn my disposable gloves up to the roof, so I put on the gloves with the tar on the inside, then discovered that my hands were stuck in there.

In the middle of the day I stopped hammering for a funeral next door, the widow of the former mayor, both of them elderly long time residents of Valier. The Baptist congregation is very small and aged. This village was once a major town with hotels, livery stables, and a surrounding webwork of dryland farmers who supported the stores and formed an irrigation company. Early Jesuit priests in the vicinity found the land beautiful and persuaded whole Belgian villages to come.

Now the town shrinks. Since I came here, we’ve lost the tow truck, the handyman, the laundromat, one grocery store, the last bar and a car dealer. The Baptist minister is related to most of his congregation and doesn’t depend on the church for a living. Some blame the shrinkage on economics, others the five years of drought, and still others CRP, the government program that pays farmers NOT to plant because there is too much grain.

The spring wheat is harvested now and the rarely heard whistle and ka-chunk of the grain hopper cars echoes through the night. Some are planting winter wheat. It will sprout, then die back, and regrow quickly in the spring. It’s time for me to take my experimental bunch of sweetgrass out of the pot where it doubled in size over summer and decide where to plant it so it will winter. Sweetgrass is the only plant I know that is “zone one.” It will grow whereever there is dirt, and is a sacred plant to peoples right around the north pole. I’m drying a bit of second-growth alfalfa for tea. It’s second growth because I didn’t think of it until the first growth was gone.

The cats think there is some kind of varmint living behind the bunkhouse and surely the brush and grass is thick enough there for a fox to hide. When the roof is done, my next chore will be taking the grasshog to the thicket. In the hot weather it was a good place for a cat to spend a summer afternoon, but now they come stalking to the house full of indignation and grumbling. After dark they scream.

During the funeral I checked email again: my cousin told me her brother just emailed to her that he is also roofing today, except that he has a three story house in Edmunds, Washington, where he can see all the way to the ocean. My view is of the grain elevator and the Sweetgrass Hills, but that’s good enough for me. The poplar leaves, the first to fall, are spinning yellow leaves onto the roof, gold coins stuck in the patent leather black tar.

The Baptist bells begin to toll the end of the funeral, steady clangs evenly spaced. Then in a bit it’s three o’clock and after striking the hour the carillon launches into its usual vigorous hymn. Since hundreds of years ago, since Belgium wasn’t even a country yet and Baptists hadn’t been invented, the bells in churches have marked the sacred hours: midnight, 3 AM, 6 AM, 9 AM, noon, 3 PM, 6 PM, 9 PM. This one only begins at 9 AM and shuts down at 8 PM. I like it because it tells me the time even when I’m on the roof.

I went looking on the Internet to find the names for the bells -- vespers, compline, angelus -- which is which? What I found is a long essay that begins, “In the fourteenth century the ownership of time, the control of time-keeping, passed from the Church to the merchant classes.” The writer’s epigraph is:

"Gooth now youre wey", quod he, "al stille and softe,
And lat us dyne as soone as that ye may,
For by my chilyndre it is pryme of day
Gooth now, and beeth as trewe as I shal be"
--- Chaucer