Tag: Fall

Cruel Aesop

photog Life in Dunwich, photog's Corner , , ,

The last two weeks have been unseasonably warm here in Dunwich.  And believe me I’m not complaining.  Summer-like days and mild nights is wonderful.  Not to mention I must be saving money on heating oil.  And it means we can enjoy the summer activities a little longer.  For instance, the raspberry bushes are still producing fruit.  Not as many as last month but enough to enjoy a treat from time to time.  And I can still go out and take some macro shots of insects and the few flowers that haven’t completely died.  In fact, the wolfbane is about to bloom in the next week or so.  And every night when I bring the dogs out for their final walk, I can hear the crickets chirping away.

And there is an enormous number of them because the sound is everywhere and it is fairly loud.  But at the same time, it has a different sound in the fall.  This is based on the air temperature.  The lower temperature means the sound will be lower pitched and slower.  It’s almost like a power hum that has fallen an octave.

And to my subjective ears it sounds sad and confused.  It’s as if the crickets don’t understand that they are preparing to die.  Unlike Rutger Hauer’s character in “Bladerunner;” Roy Batty, they don’t realize “it’s time to die.”  And that’s exactly the vibe I get when I see the last of the dragonflies moving around the fields.  They’re confused and slowing down and it’s as if their programming is failing.  It doesn’t cover the case where the weather stays warm after they’re supposed to have died from freezing.

It’s also the case of the preying mantises.  They’re still walking around the gardens trying to find food or mates but they’re running out of steam.  Their eyes are already dark and they’re going through the motions but they’re already the walking dead.  Even if I handed them food, I doubt they could eat it.

The only insects that haven’t succumbed to seasonal despair are the honey bees.  They still go around visiting the last living flowers gathering pollen and nectar to bring back to the hive.  And that’s because they have a future and a plan.  They’re filling up the remaining cells in their combs with food to keep the hive going right through winter and into spring.  Their program hasn’t run out.

Now, I am aware that this is just my emotional response to the realities of insect life and its relationship to seasonal variation.  Evolution has crafted the life cycle of most insects in the non-tropical regions to include the death of adults in late fall.  This is the result of millions of years of evolution and it’s a fact of life.  But humans are affected by these facts and have speculated about them going all the way back to Aesop in ancient Greece.  He talked about the ant and the grasshopper that brings up the same exact dichotomy that I see between the honey bee and the cricket.

And humans anthropomorphize these creatures making the ant a hard-working and thrifty fellow and the grasshopper a lazy, hedonistic good-for-nothing.  Well, Aesop was preaching.  While I find the cricket and even the dragonfly sad figures.  After all, don’t we all eventually find our lives winding down?  And even if it is the circle of life, it has a certain tragic aspect.  Well, just a bittersweet reflection on the beautiful Indian Summer that we’ve been gifted with this year.

A Golden Fall Day

photog Current Events, Life in Dunwich , ,

I look out on the golden sunshine on this summerlike day and rejoice that whatever madness the psychos on the Left have inflicted they still haven’t altered reality.  There are still seasons and sunsets.  The beginning of October means the last of the roses finish off and the Montauk daisies are beginning to bloom and, in a week or two, the wolfbane will open its purple petals and the lycanthropes of Dunwich will assemble to howl at the moon and pull up Camera Girl’s vegetable garden.

But out in the big world all kinds of crazy things are going on.  Republicans and RINOs are engaging in jousting contests to see who will control the Speaker’s gavel.  This is a situation without precedent in the modern age of Washington.  We’re in completely unknown territory and virtually anything seems possible, all the way from incredible disaster to surprising improvement.

Meanwhile, Biden and his handlers are attempting to convince their paymasters that it’s too late to change horses in midstream.  But the rank and file of the Democrat party are seasick from all the turmoil that Dementia Joe’s policies have engendered.  They look at the polls and realize they’re part of an enormous chunk of the country that wants it to stop.  The food and gas inflation, the sky-high mortgage rates, the food costs, the endless billions being shoveled into the Ukraine war, the violence in the cities, the rolling blackouts and the attacks on normal parts of life like gas stoves and gasoline cars, the homeless and the illegal aliens living on the streets and in the parks.  Even Democrat mayors and governors want an end to the millions of illegals flooding their cities.

And the Justice Department and the FBI have made a mockery of justice by their openly partisan and obviously concocted indictments against Donald Trump.  Every week they come up with a stupider basis for attacking the former president.  Now they’re going after him because they say he overvalued his properties when he used them as collateral in a loan application.  As if corporations don’t do their own due diligence when they loan money!  This charge is so absurd, that it boggles the mind that they could find a prosecutor corrupt enough to claim it.

So, as we march on into the fall, the drumbeat of doom and gloom echoes throughout the land.  Well, that’s as much as to say, situation normal.  There’s really nothing much for our side to do except avoid taking any responsibility for the trainwreck the Democrats have created.

The only positive act that can be performed is refusing to feed Zelensky any more money for his minions to steal.  Let that murderous boondoggle play itself out without us taking an accessory role.

Wait a minute, there is one other thing.  Refusing to approve an extension to the Patriot Act seems like the only really important accomplishment that the Republican House can perform.  Let it expire finally.  The fallout will probably be a false flag attack by the CIA.  But what can you do?  Our side can announce the expected attack ahead of time as a likely ruse and assume the American people have seen enough in the last few years to recognize when they’re being had.  After all the CIA is allowed to spy on foreigners.  They should have stopped the 9-11 hijackers before they ever got on those planes.  Any attacks by foreigners, including illegal aliens is handleable by the FBI without the need for the domestic spying built into the Patriot Act.

Well, that’s enough for now.  There are still a bunch of razzberries and grape tomatoes to pick and I’m waiting for the HVAC guy to replace the oil pump on my heating system.  I leave everybody to enjoy the rest of the day and contemplate the “state of the union.”  It should be an interesting season.

A Cool Drink of Water

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And just like that fall happens.  It’s been raining all day and the thermometer has barely cracked seventy degrees.  And people put away their shorts and pull out a sweatshirt and air conditioners go into storage and soup returns to the menu.  Once the kids are back in school adults start talking about how expensive food and gas and everything is.

For the last few weeks, Democrats have been hailing the “Inflation Reduction” law and finding polls that claim that Joe Biden isn’t the most unpopular politician since Caligula and making believe gasoline has always been $4 a gallon.  But now that the silly season is coming to a close people start looking at the bills they piled up during the vacation and remembering who’s responsible for their poverty.

We’ve gotten a couple of inches of rain so far today and the ground is soaking it up like a dry sponge and you can almost hear the earthworms and the mushrooms and the grass roots sighing with relief and drinking in the water from every pore.  There are these parasitic plants called Indian Pipe that live underground in the roots of trees and wait for the heat to end and the rain to activate them.  Then they sprout up and flower.  Since they’re parasites they don’t need chlorophyll and so they’re white instead of green.  Very strange looking things.  I try to photograph them each year and so far, they haven’t appeared.  But now I bet I’ll see them sprout.  It’s funny how these little natural events become a part of your life.

Monotropa uniflora, Indian pipe, ghost plant, corpse plant, Sony A7 III with Minolta 200mm f\4 Macro lens

The fallout from Liz Cheney Ejection Day continues apace with even the Democrats agreeing that no one can actually think of a reason to keep her around after she’s unemployed.  I feel like it’s up to the Democrats to give her a goodbye party and a gold watch or something and then shove her onto a slow train going nowhere.  I can see her standing on the back of the train looking sad and morose and waving slowly as the train pulls out of the station in DC headed for Loserville.  It’s quite touching.

Now that the rule of law has ended and the kids don’t have to go back to school anymore in the cities I wonder if there is any change in the type and amount of crime that goes on after the summer.  I wonder if they stop playing the knockout game and go straight to knifing and shooting their victims in September.  It’s obviously an important question to know the answer to when you’re purchasing your fall wardrobe.  I guess it could be as simple as helmet/no helmet.  I suppose body armor should be a constant but it’s so darn heavy that you might want to skip it in the hot summer months when blows to the head are more or less standard operating procedure for your young urban thug.  I mean, no one likes to be overdressed.

And speaking of urban crime Lori Lightfoot is up for re-election in a little over six months and I’m wondering how does that work?  With all the people who were able to flee already gone maybe at this point the street gangs can control the vote in Chicago.  And since Lightfoot has made them all-powerful maybe it’s in their interest to make sure she wins re-election in perpetuity.  If you think about it, it’s a pretty sweet deal for both sides of that arrangement.  Of course, it’s pretty close to hell on earth for any law-abiding residents but how many of those can there be left?  Half a million, maybe a million?  That’s practically a rounding error in a country as big as this.  And they say adversity builds character, so there you go.

The voters have the next few months to contemplate what life in these United States will be like under the Democrats and decide if maybe they want to change it up.  It seems like it should be a slam dunk to me.  But I guess I’m not a woke millennial or a career woman still wearing a COVID mask and looking for the government to protect her from Donald Trump and viruses.  Perhaps there just aren’t enough people left who think like me out there anymore.

Well anyway, listening to the rain on the metal roof outside my kitchen is soothing.  And knowing I don’t have to water any plants is great.  We picked about twenty pounds of butternut squash yesterday and I bet Camera Girl will makes some chicken soup with it soon so life is good.

Goodbye summer heat.  I think I’ll celebrate fall by watching a summer movie.  I think I’ll put on Rear Window.

Guest Contributor – War Pig – Fall Color Ride in Ohio

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Takes a little longer for the change (which comes from East to West) to get to Ohio. our best leaf-peeping times are mid to late October. To remember mom, I go on a fall color ride in October at peak color and take a few pictures. She loved for me to take her after she could no longer drive. We made a day of it. I’d pick her up early then meander our way to the Hocking Hills area. We’d go usually on a Saturday to avoid rush hour traffic. We’d eat breakfast at McDonald’s (she loved the McGriddle sandwiches) and I made sure to brew two big thermos bottles full of black coffee for us on the road to refill our insulated travel cups.

We’d drive and look and comment. She’d remind me of stories from my youth and told me stories of her youth. I told her stories of the far-off lands I’d seen in my military career. How Bavaria in Germany looked a lot like Ohio during the fall colors. We’d eat lunch in a sit-down diner, then hit the road again, stopping as necessary as dictated by mom’s water pills. See the colors, stop at roadside rests and breather the crisp air. Refill the travel mugs and go on. We’d stop at an Amish restaurant for supper that had superb baked steak in gravy with home fried potatoes and German chocolate cake for dessert. Mom always got another baked steak diner to go and I put it in a warming chest that plugged into my rear electric outlet. More driving, more leaves, more color, seeing the buck deer with full crowns, seeing the geese and ducks fly south for the winter in squadron formations. I’d get her home after dark (later, it was to the nursing home). She’d then eat the second baked steak dinner as I had more coffee. I’d leave her and she’d go on to bed.

Autumn for me has always been the color of the trees. That’s what I hated about Vietnam and the Middle East. No bold change of the seasons, wet or dry, hot or very hot. No crisp days when apples still on the tree were as sweet as nectar. No gathering of hickory nuts or black walnuts or butternuts. No toasting of pumpkin seeds for snacks. No fresh apple or pear cider. The Amish restaurant is still in business and I still stop for a baked steak dinner in mom’s memory. I talk to her as I drive even though she’s not there. Been gone 14 years now. The Amish store bowed to using electric cash registers as the state got pissy over sales tax receipts. I miss the ring and cha-ching of the old mechanical registers.

One day it will be my last ride. Being over 70 that day is closing in on me but I’ll hang on as long as I can. I’m like Slade in Ghost Rider. One day I’ll have one last ride in me. I hope to make it a good one.