For the past few weeks DF has been practicing the music for an ecumenical service that will take place near Thanksgiving. The song that sticks in my head most is “Harvest Home,” an 1844 hymn*. This quatrain in particular applies:
Come, ye thankful people, come
Raise the song of harvest home;
All is safely gathered in,
Ere the winter storms begin.
No storms yet, but it was 29 degrees when I got up the other day. We are thankful that all is safely gathered in.
It was a somewhat dismal summer for the second year in a row, and gardens were more than a month late in ripening. Some things didn’t produce well, or at all; for example, a local tree expert posted on Facebook that he didn’t get a single cherry from his five trees.
We didn’t get that many cherries ourselves: 28, to be exact. Then again, this is only the second year the tree’s been in the ground. Popular fruit-tree wisdom holds that “the first year it sleeps, the second year it creeps and the third year it leaps.” However, I can’t hope for too much in 2025 because a moose got into the yard last week. It harried all three of our fruit trees before DF could scare it off the property by banging a hammer on a shovel.
This isn’t the moose that got into the yard, but I bet he knows the one who did.
Fortunately, we’d already harvested the apples the previous week. Moose can be real jerks.
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