I got home at 3 a.m. Saturday from the trifecta trip: D.C. sightseeing, FinCon19 and a visit to my brother’s. Very little sleep and not much to drink on the long trip, so I attributed my slight sore throat to fatigue and the dryness of airplane air.

After about five hours of sleep I spent a lovely, quiet day with DF, including a trip to Glen Alps in the city’s Hillside neighborhood, for a little fresh air and a short walk to enjoy the view.

When I left everything was still unnaturally green due to warmer-than-usual summer, but there’s definitely an autumnal feeling now: leaves turning gold, a coolness in the air, a lowering angle of sun, the sharp scent of highbush cranberries and dying vegetation.

Our back yard is dying back, too, but a ton of tomatoes still peep out from the tangle of outdoor vines. It’s pretty astonishing that they’re doing as well as they are, given that they’re varieties like Stupice and Czech’s bush rather than Siberian hybrid tomatoes.

The outdoor cucumber vines are yellowing but still producing; also unusual, but welcome, since the greenhouse vines are spawned-out. The pea vines are definitely on the wane, yet I picked enough to yield a full pint of shelled fruit, which will make the coming year’s turkey pies that much more succulent. The pods went into the boiling bag, to yield yet another container of soup stock with a definite sweetness.

And oh, the pumpkins, whose vines started slowly but have now produced five or six behemoths that will remain in situ until just before the first frost. Most will be divided among family and friends, with the proviso that we get the pulp scooped out during the jack o’lantern process. We’ll save a few seeds to plant and roast the rest, and add the squishy parts to the boiling bag.

By early evening I realized that I still had the sore throat, along with some congestion and headache. No elevation in temperature, though, so I figured it was a virus that I could kill with fluids and rest.

Sleeping for about 10 hours didn’t drive it away, so this morning DF bundled me back into bed with a couple of heated rice socks and an Advil PM. For almost the next six hours I slept deeply, and woke still under the weather but definitely stronger, albeit somewhat Rip Van Winkled by the loss of most of a day.

And then DF built the first fire of the season.

 

When you’re feeling a bit fragile, temps in the mid-40s and pouring rain seem a lot worse than they are. A crackling fire was just the thing, since it provides heat and a chance for a bit of mesmerism. (My nephew calls it “the fire movie.”)

 

The home fire, burning

 

Currently DF is burning mostly lumber, part of a recent reorganization of scrap wood. He kept some for various projects, such as the risers he built and stained yesterday to lift a futon off the ground; DF hopes to store things under it. He’s also done a hanging rack that hooks onto the top of a kitchen cabinet; it gets things like loaves of bread and bags of homemade honey-mustard pretzels off the counters.

Soon, though, we’ll bring in armfuls of logs from the shed next to the house. This is wood we got from other people, so it’s free heat except for the expense of renting a splitter to create stove-sized pieces. The log rack is a gift from one of his sons, who welded it from pieces of scrap steel from a job site. (Super-useful gift, as was the fireplace bellows given by his other son.)

We don’t have fires every night in the fall and winter months; in fact, we probably won’t have another for quite a while. This one was therapeutic, though, warming me physically and also easing me into the notion that cold weather is waiting tiptoe in the wings. Never mind that I just left temperatures in the high 80s/low 90s in New Jersey. Our weird summer is more or less over, and the daytime highs in the 50s and 60s will soon give way to much cooler weather.

Here’s what our backyard garden looked like in early August, photographed from the roof by DF (who was up there to clean the chimney):

That greenhouse window was propped because the temperature had reached 90 degrees or more in the structure; the front door was open, too. The raised beds hold peas, carrots, lettuces, tomatoes and cucumbers, plus some rogue quinoa that sprouted from seeds dropped by a previous year’s crop. Behind the greenhouse you can get a glimpse of the raspberry patch; to the right of that are our two apple trees, surrounded by a chain-link cage (to keep moose away). Half a dozen five-gallon buckets and one plot of ground nearby nurture Magic Molly purple potatoes. In front of the cage, although hard to see, are the pumpkin vines.

Soon those pumpkins will have been brought in, wiped with a mild bleach solution (to forestall bacterial decay before Halloween), and stored in a cool place. The pea and tomato vines will have been ripped out and tossed into what I call the “passive composting” area (a low spot in the yard that we hope to level up with a ton or so of fill next year).

The carrots will be pulled and canned, the potatoes dug, the raspberry canes severely pruned, the strawberry plants mulched with straw, the rhubarb trimmed and buried under a layer of compost. Once again we’ll be acknowledging, if not outright welcoming, months of cold, snow and darkness.

Not just yet, though. For now we have gold trees and still-green grass. Never mind that we may see termination dust when the clouds lift tomorrow. A few weeks of pleasantly autumnal weather might still be ours. We might take a driving trip in the week to come, assuming that I get my freelance schedule back in order. And, of course, assuming that the virus goes away.

(Note: You have until Wednesday evening to enter to win a $100 Airbnb gift card, a little FinCon souvenir from the folks at Ally. Even if you don’t use Airbnb or plan on any travel in the near future, the card would make a nice holiday present or maybe a good wedding gift.)

 

Related reading:

• Summer on the wane
• Wedding crashers
• Tree music