First Frost

We had our first and then almost immediately our second frost.  The tender crops are headed for the compost.  We’re still eating from the garden, but only the hardy crops like lettuce and Brussels sprouts.  I pulled the dead plants in my garden.  Then I dug up the summer bulbs – calla lilies, dahlias, and many acidanthera.  If you don’t know what that is, it’s a relative of gladiola, but only the leaves resemble that flower.  It blooms very late August till frost with open white flowers with purple throats and a sweet perfume.  I love them and the bulbs are always cheap and easy to plant.

I wrote three poems this week and sent one to the Monthly Review, where I send most of my political poems.  in addition to my regular length poems, I have been writing several short poems lately, both last week and this week.  It’s a different discipline and I’ve been enjoying it.

We’ll have a small Thanksgiving this year, I suspect, although not like last year, when we had two friends over and ate on the unheated sun porch in our coats.  We’ll have a more normal Thanksgiving in the dining room.  I’m planning the menu and figuring out the grocery list.  I have selected the pumpkin, a big blue very pretty one, for the potiron tout rond, a recipe I’ve adapted from Julia Child and make every year.  I already cooked and pureed a regular New England pie pumpkin for the pie.  We’ve ordered a 12-pound turkey from Friends Market (small, because Woody likes to cook it rotisserie-style).  I doubt the salad greens will last till thanksgiving.  If they do, I’ll serve that.  But otherwise I have a salad compose I make for Pesach that’s excellent.

We had a storm yesterday, hard rain and gale force winds, but nothing like the 93 mile an hour winds we endured recently when we were without power for three days. But a tree did go down on our road.  Woody helped another man move it, a pitch pine like the one he had to cut out of the lower garden by himself. 

I hate going off daylight savings time.  In very hot weather, I go out early to work in the gardens, but I prefer to do garden work in the afternoon, once I’ve done my own work in my office and/or any household tasks. Turningg dark so early depresses me at least briefly and curtails anything out of the house except getting in the car and going off.  Tonight we’ll have dinner with Gigi and Ralph. not at their house in Brewster but at her gallery.  Gigi’s Cross Rip Gallery is in Harwichport in the house she grew up in.  It has a usable kitchen and diningroom.  Once when we were sitting outside in the summer in the yard, a fox came very close to us, playing with a mouse it had caught.  It was not afraid of  us at all, the same confident way our resident fox used to behave.

 Woody got his booster shot Thursday afternoon.  I had received mine the week before.  I was out of it for 36 hours, and it seems to be the same way with him except not as debilitating.  By this afternoon, he was doing his regular exercise.  I’ve been recording the Monica Lewinsky series, Impeachment. Thursday evening, after my booster, we watched the segment where the FBI and the Republican prosecutors are essentially torturing her.  It as so hard to watch that all night I had fever dreams where I was advising her how to escape and handle the horror of it.  It just went on in a loop all night.