LOOK OUT!! FALL!!

http://www.artsjournal.com/gap/2009/08/ominous-music-heard-nationwide.html

The Valier ominous early morning music, a high whine quite a lot like a giant vacuum cleaner, is a grain siphon moving wheat either into or out of the storage bins as big as houses. In fact, not too long ago, grain bins WERE little reinforced houses and it’s not hard to find ranch dwellings composed of several of them fastened together. But the newer metal bins are corrugated, round, and mostly inhabited by pigeons who live on them as much as in them, appreciating the scatter of grain always around them. The bins are so numerous they form whole neighborhoods of tin.

A grain siphon or auger is a long pipe on wheels, one end resting on the ground when not in use, and with a screw inside that will lift the grain as though it were water. Moving grain is quite a lot like moving water and one can even drown in a bin of loose grain. But just as dangerous is that screw inside the pipe. If it catches your sleeve cuff, you will be missing an arm. Not the arm of the shirt -- YOUR arm. There’s always been a macabre and ominous side to fall harvest, Halloween as opposed to the midsummer festival when flowering, full of bees, is just shifting into things to eat.

After a cool and breezy summer we’re now into a spate of heat and our light is saturated with smoke, so that the sun comes up red in a red sky and the day continues slightly orange, metallic, the sky whitened and high, the Rockies missing. We see all the things that didn’t get done this summer and MUST be done before winter. The Farmer’s Almanac predicts an unusually cold and snowy winter, as though last winter weren’t. But the leaves aren’t down yet -- just turning now -- so there’s no point in cleaning gutters. The garden is either exhausted or full of root vegetables that can stay in the ground.

My big silverleaf cottonwood, which makes this house so pleasant, has sent fine droplets of sap down all summer so that the pickiup is sticky and so is that side of the house. Washing the windows is pointless. I’ve about eliminated flies this summer, thanks to plastic bag traps with baffles in the top. Even the wasps are trying to get in there, but can’t get through the baffle, so maybe next year I’ll use the kind for wasps, though I don’t mind them. The bait is different. The ants were worse this year and I’ve finally resorted to serious poison from Big R instead of the pet-and-child-safe traps. It appears that the strategy of using peanut husks and coffee grounds to fertilize the flower borders is a bad one. The ants are ecstatic. They ate my Explorer Rose from Canada.

Because it rained fairly often all summer, my sprinkler discipline went to pieces and some things just didn’t get watered enough. On the other hand, the grass has never been so vigorous, except for the sweetgrass, which I would want to encourage.

Because of so many years in school, in academic jobs and in the church, fall feels to me more like a new beginning than spring does. I’ve gotten over the impulse to go buy a new plaid dress (I don’t know why they were always plaid.) but I never recover from the need to buy new pens and paper. So I did. Normally my windows in front have cafe curtains on them, but I took them down to wash, and see eight-year-olds with big backpacks striding heroically off to classes. It’s very confused this year. School started last week, not after Labor Day in the old harvest tradition. Anyway harvest is very late because of rain storms, and Labor Day -- which feels as though it should have been last weekend -- is not until next weekend, the 7th, which is as late as it can get. (First Monday in September.)

I’ve spent every day furiously typing away in my little back bedroom office without even having to run a fan, which meant that energy was high, ideas were flying, and I produced a LOT of print. But now I’ve got to sort and match and fit in all the pieces that Tim wrote. The economy may be re-assembling, though publishing is changing so much and so quickly that no one knows what that will mean about books. The Blowhard called Donald at 2blowhards has a book about popular traditional-style artists who have been very successful but got rolled underfoot by the Manhattan Modernists. He says he’s just about to begin sending his query packet around. This Donald is a very conservative (even old-fashioned) fellow my age who has spent his life as a quant in a corporate environment, so his opinion counts.

But the politics are back to hand-to-hand combat, even with the martyred body of Ted Kennedy in their midst. (Did you see the photo of all the presidents in a row in a pew, looking adult and sober except for George W. making a little boy’s petulant face?) An NPR guest talked about “revanchist politics” -- a term from the French word for revenge. All the insane preoccupation with imagined horror stories is destroying any kind of dialogue -- with the justification being that they are equivalent to the real and proven horror stories of the Cheney years. Payback. (Forget Bush. He’s Pinocchio except he never escaped the strings into reality.)

In this village people anchored in the realities of the seasons, the work, the family, are still easily worried by talk about climate change, water entitlement, global markets, and the possible removal of farm subsidies that represent the only profit some people make. There’s even talk of closing down CRP, the payment for NOT farming that underwrites many retirements. The two old guys across the alley, one alcoholic and the other with an amputated arm, say they’re going to winter together in the trailer. I called the cops Sunday because of the shouting and pounding -- not the old guys, but the young men who try to take sanctuary with them because they can’t find jobs or places to stay. Their families don’t want them. They aren’t imagining it. They are the seeds of trouble.