It was a fizzle of a year for tomatoes, as most of my neighbors agree, and now in the waning days of September I am pulling the vines to add to the pile of yard waste waiting for the city crews to clear away. Along with the vines, the pepper plants, egg plants, and bean vines I am getting rid of the weeds. There will be more to add to the pile, as I like to be sure I do my part to add to the crew’s job security.
. Already a few trees on the hillside are beginning to show the first signs of color, and that means October is already nipping at our heals. With the changing climate, the arrival of the arboreal color seems to arrive later than it did a few decades ago.
There is something disquieting about October. It seems to have that edging feeling of impending doom. As we wash the windows for the last time and take down the screens to put up the storms, mow the lawn and fertilize for the last time, or as we do several other tasks it almost seems that more is ending than beginning. A short time ago we were reveling with a leafy canopy overhead; now we are getting ready to rake them up, and we don’t even have the satisfaction of burning them on quiet evenings. It seems almost like a nasty reminder that the clock is ticking on our lifespan. We need to get on with the things we want to do.
Whole generations of children have grown up without the acrid smell of burning leaves, and they don’t even know what they are missing. Instead, they get to hear the roar of one or more gas powered leaf blowers. We ‘olds’ miss it, too. Perhaps we’ll slip around behind the house, a couple of old dry leaves in hand, light them and then blow them out, just to recapture the aroma of our past.
As a friend from Minnesota tells us, is a month that requires courage.
It won’t be long, and the news media will move away from the passing of Queen Elizabeth to the controversy over Columbus Day. Growing up in Minnesota Columbus was never much a Big Deal. We all knew that Columbus was a Giovanni-come-lately who arrived a few centuries after our Viking forbearers landed in Newfoundland and then hiked west to Minnesota. Chris C got a day of celebration that dates to the tenures of Presidents Harrison and Cleveland when Italian immigrants wanted a day of their own. The Irish had their day in the middle of March, and the Italian immigrants wanted in on the fun.
As descendants of those stout-hearted Norsemen and Danes, we went along with this Columbus Day business, but our heart wasn’t in it. We had our own way of observing our heritage when we trundled off to a rural Lutheran church lutefisk dinner. For the unknowing, lutefisk is cod that is filleted, soaked in lye and then sundried until being shipped to Minnesota. It is rehydrated and washed until the lye is out of the meat. The church basement kitchen ladies boil it until it is the consistency of jelly, with a smell that can take the roses off the wallpaper. Eating it brings about an intense spiritual relationship with our ancestors, and know we are better persons for it.
The Vikings had courage to get here and make a go of it. It takes courage to sit down to a platter of lutefisk and leftsa (the Norwegian version of a soft shelled taco but made out of cold mashed potatoes.) But it is the tonic required of October. It bolsters the courage, and as I just wrote, October is a month that takes courage. We have some good examples of that attribute.
This is the month, back in 1781 General Washington and the Marquis Lafayette cooked up a courageous plan that soon sent General Cornwallis back to England. Cornwallis and his redcoats were at Yorktown, Virginia when the French navy slipped in behind him. Washington ordered his troops in New York to join him in the south, and by the time the gun smoked cleared, we were well on the way to independence. It took courage to come up with a plan like that. And it took courage for Cornwallis to be a true gentleman and hand his sword to Washington instead of crying that the victory was stolen from him, and he had really won the day, and everyone said so.
Later on, this month Protestants will solemnly sing A Mighty Fortress in commemoration of another fellow with tremendous courage. Martin Luther was an obscure Greek professor at a fourth-tier university in Saxony (now southern Germany) when some fellows dropped in to see him. It seems that they knew had some mates who had slipped across the border to buy Writs of Indulgences.
Basically, they were get out of jail cards sold by the Church of Rome. If a young man decided that Friday night he was going to a rip-roaring whoop-em-up and so other naughty-no-noes, he could pay the fine in advance. Martin’s friends wanted to know what he thought of the scheme and suffice it to say he was not impressed.
This idea of buying one’s way to getting sins forgiven stunk, and Luther had the courage to pick up his quill pen and dip it into an ink pot to write out his 95 Theses or questions. He wanted a scholarly debate, but what he got was the fight of his life. A man lacking in courage would have kept quiet about the subject and gone back to explaining Greek verbs to his students.
They set examples, all good examples, for the rest of us.
Courage is picking up one’s rake and settling into a few hours of shifting leaves, even if we know there is a fair chance the wind will blow them all back, or that we will need to do it again tomorrow. Courage is cutting back flowers and shrubs and bushes, believing that they will survive and grow back next season. It takes courage and faith to believe we’ll be around next year to enjoy them.
And courage is putting a big black “X” through another square on the calendar, knowing we are one day closer to blizzards and cold weather.
But it is October Courage that makes us stronger, and probably healthier. We feel sorry for those poor unfortunates who are hurriedly loading their cars to go to warmer climes. They are missing out on all our fun. If any of them want to come back north for a while, we will welcome them, and I have some spare rakes if they want to join in the fun.
