Fall Cometh

August 31, 2009 by Dick.

All people have the right to starve.
We ought not take away people’s rights.

A friend in the Philly area reported it was 70̊ at his home this morning. “I really LOVE Fall,” he said. Keats did, too.

While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue…

I like the colors of autumn — its images take a disproportionate corner of my gallery — but I don’t like the end of the weather that keeps us alive and the beginning of weather that tries to kill us.

Autumn isn’t supposed to start until September 21 and it should stay with us until December 20 but the locust leaves started turning and dropping late last month and the temperature here won’t get out of the sixties today. Our apple tree is overproductive this year; it started dropping fruit about the same time the locusts began their seasonal death. By the end of “Autumn” North Puffin will have had at least two snowfalls and we can expect the thermometer to have kept us burning wood for weeks.

I started stacking firewood and putting up preserves last week. We heat with a combination of a modern oil-hot water furnace, a new pellet stove, and a 70s-era airtight wood stove. We’ll burn about 700 gallons of fuel oil, 4 tons of pellets, and a couple of cords of wood to keep this old farmhouse habitable for six months or so. Firewood warms us several times. I stack it on the hill in sun and wind for a year or more to dry and season it. That’s out there a long walk from the wood stove in my bunny slippers, so at this time of the year I restack the winter supply in the woodshed attached to the house. When it gets properly cold outside, we add it one or two chunks at a time to the stove which will burn around the clock.

On the other hand, I’m an optimistic, endless summer kind of guy. I know I will win the lottery, that my hair will grow back, and that (thanks to the liberal super-majority in Washington) the free ObamaFuel plan means free heating oil in our tanks, the free ObamaCare plan will instantly fix our impending loss of spousal health insurance, and that the free ObamaFeeds plan means no one will starve in America this winter.

Yay!

I still have a whole lot of summer left. I can put my feet up and rest a while!

Click here for the entire Fall collection.

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