Start of Autumn

Autumn is just about here, and it's not fooling around. We could here it roaring in the distance this last Saturday, when a sudden storm blew in with gusts in the 50 mph range. It's been so bone dry, with only a couple of real rains all summer, that the Puget Sound area looks more like southeast Oregon than its usual perpetually verdant self. The trees, in an act of self preservation, went into drought crisis mode and shunted what little moisture they had to their trunks. This left the branches dry...and brittle. You can guess what happened when that gale blew in.

We were across the bay in Port Gamble on Saturday, where History Pundit Spouse was giving his Historical Firearms talk at their first annual Steampunk Festival. It's a perfect place for something like that, it being a mid-19th century logging mill town frozen in time, one of the last real mill (company owned) towns in the country. Our "lecture hall" was the parlor of the Walker-Ames mansion, a magnificent pile in need of restoration but still in good enough shape for the occasional ghost walk or Steampunk convention. As I ran the Power Point for Gordon, I could look over his shoulder and see huge swells rolling northward up the bay, driven by the constant south wind. The power only flickered once (yay!) during the talk, in the wake of a massive gust that shook the house, and caused the projector to re-boot, but we made it.

A spot of tea sounded delightful, so we packed up our gear and repaired across the street to meet friends at the Tea Shop...and the whole town went down. The thoughtful chef bagged up some scones, jam, cream and lemon curd for us to take home. Stopping to chat with the fabricator of a spectacular Steampunk armored car, we snapped some photos and then noticed the power was back...so it was back to the tea shop for us! Many goodies and a veritable cask of Monkey Snow Plum tea later, we finally turned home.

The many, many downed trees and large branches we passed did not bode well, and sure enough our power was out when we pulled in to ye farm. Our one mechanical clock indicated it had gone out at almost precisely noon, which was about when we'd felt that giant gust across the bay in Port Gamble. We heat with wood, a stove we can cook on if necessary and the weather's cold enough to warrant stoking it, we have plenty of oil lamps and candles, but what we do not have is a water tower or hand pump for the well. When the power's out, we have no water. Luckily it was raining and the rain buckets and barrels were full, but it's still a pain when you're trying to get water to horses, chickens, and, most importantly, the toilet.

Apparently around 500,000 people were without power in the area. Yeah, Fall is pretty much here. It took three days and a couple of phone calls to get our power restored. Having no electricity delayed our already bumped episode of the History Files podcast. It also meant I wasn't able to start the detox/cleanse/healing diet I'd been longing to start the minute PAX was done, but it wasn't exactly a crisis.

The weather, despite the occasional thunderstorm, is actually pretty mild right now. I love this time of year and always have. I love going barefoot in warm weather, but I also love pulling on fluffy socks and wearing lots of loose layers. Fall means notebooks, pencils, art supplies, new clothes... ok, those are childhood happy memories, but Fall still means the smell of maple leaves, wood smoke, seeing your breath in the morning air, birthdays (for me and my sister), and the thrill of coming up with a costume for Halloween. The cats are growing their winter coats and are already starting to look fuzzy instead of svelte and shiny. The chickens are slowing down their laying, and the grass is greening back up after looking like the Sahara for months. I have a pile of apples to process in the kitchen, blackberries in the freezer to make something with, and the squash will be ready to start eating soon. I love this time of year.

Last Days of Summer

It's the middle of August here in the Pacific Northwest, the East side of Puget Sound, to be exact. This afternoon around 5:30 I stepped outside to give the chickens some scraps, and instead of a blast of heat at the end of a blindingly sunny Summer day, I was met with a soft, barely cool breeze. What a difference from the years I spent in Northern California, where I pretty much just hid for six months of the year until the heat wave passed. Right now in Stockton and L.A. and Sacramento people are cranking their air conditioners day and night, while up here we manage to keep things under control with an "open windows at night, closed and shuttered during the day" policy. Usually this means just closing up whichever side of the house is in sun at the moment, and leaving the other sides open to the breeze, unless it gets over 80 F at which point I batten the hatches and turn on a couple of ceiling fans.

As a native-born Washingtonian, this is a time of year I loathed in California. After months of unbearable heat which never seemed to abate, I was ready to jump in front of a bus by August, knowing that the worst was far from over and probably wouldn't be until darned near Halloween. As a little kid growing up near Seattle, my memories of Halloween involved much whining about having to wear a coat over my costume to go trick-or-treating. Now I'm just grateful that I'm back where Autumn actually means "cooler weather", and "back to school" clothes involved new sweaters, wool skirts, courderoy pants, and a new coat of some kind. Ordering socks and sweaters from the Sears catalog was an end-of-Summer ritual that heralded both the advents of the school and Holiday seasons, as well as in our household both my and my sister's October birthdays.

The landscape, especially this year with the crazy dry weather, is scorched and brown, but the daytime high temperatures are manageable for even this heat weenie. The breeze even at midday is refreshing. The sun is setting at a more reasonable hour. The leaves on the maple trees are browning early because of our unseasonably hot and dry Summer, which adds to a feeling that Fall is just around the corner. The apple tree is full, and it's just about time to get picking before the crows get into their annual "take just one big bite out of each apple" routine. Time to fill the kitchen with the smell of apples and cinnamon. Extra perk of not being a little kid anymore: I don't have to wear a coat over my Halloween costume if I don't want to.