Turkeys and other stuff

September really is a lovely month in the Northwest.  You wish it would last forever. We need rain, but this seemingly endless string of mild, dry days has spoiled us. What a memorable summer, in many ways. So often, October feels like a curtain coming down. I don’t look forward to the dark time. 

As usual, once I left Seattle (an hour from our house just to the freeway) the solo drive was OK. It always feels good getting out of Seattle. When I finally got to the downtown exit for I-90, a crazy person was running through the stop and go traffic in the middle of the freeway. No one paid the slightest attention. Between the homeless camps, the graffiti and trash, the traffic and noise, Seattle feels more and more dystopian. 

After the long drive, pulling into this little place by the river is a haven of peace. Despite all expense and hassles (endless!) of owning a second home, nothing compares to that wonderful feeling of opening the door and finding everything just as you left it. Once I got the car unloaded and things put away, I realized we have just about everything we need now to be comfortable.  Enough, but not too much.

The girls only have a half day of school Wednesdays, to the great annoyance of working parents. I picked them up yesterday, and chatted with the grandma of Maya's best friend, also on duty. Karen lives just down the street. She is a lovely person and we hit it off. What a pleasant surprise making new friends at this stage of life. I've met many nice people in Twisp already, including our neighbor who will plow the driveway this winter.  A relief to check that off the to-do list. 

Wildlife. The deer ate some young trees the previous owner planted by the garage. Goners. The turkey family still doing their turkey thing, the kids nearly as big as the parents. Otters live across the river in the bank, and I saw one swim over to "our" beach for the first time. We jokingly refer to it as the "Twisp community beach." The river is as low as it gets now, and there are fishermen passing by, trying to coax trout out of their hidey-holes.  

John gets here tomorrow, his first big spin in the new Honda. All is well.

Peck of peppers

 

Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers;
A peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked;
If Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers,
Where's the peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked?

Peter and his famous pickled peppers first appeared in John Harris's Peter Piper's Practical Principles of Plain and Perfect Pronunciation, 1813.

That's an easy one. The toughest English tongue twister? “The sixth sick sheikh's sixth sheep's sick" according the the Guinness Book of World Records.

A big tomato crop from just two potted plants, and now hundreds of little hot peppers all turning fiery red.  One or two sure perks up a stir fry or noodle dish.

 

In other rather depressing news. How many people can you cram on an "island" in the middle of a transportation bridge crisis? 

This is what passes for a "backyard cottage" in Seattle. A big ugly box looming up over the most private part of our yard. Bang, bang, bang all weekend long.

Silly me, I planted those Leyland Cypress to block the view of condos a couple blocks away, as if that mattered. I never imagined something going up right across the alley. Our new view from the deck.

That's OK.  I'm headed over to the other deck for a few days, where the view is nothing but peace and quiet.  

Another birthday boy

 

Happy Birthday, John. And congratulations on the first new car you've bought in many years. This weekend we traded in "Little Beep" our old CRV for "Big Beep," a Honda Passport with all the bells and whistles.

And good thing you're a smart guy, because the user guide is over 450 pages long.

Did someone say snow? Ha! 

A special birthday

 

Happy Birthday, Dad!  You've kept that same great smile for 97 years now. Have a wonderful day, topped off with a nice glass of wine and your favorite pepperoni pizza. We're thinking of you and Marji with love and much gratitude.

Backyard cottage

 

 

That's an example of a fairly attractive backyard cottage. Most look more like oversize chicken coops. It's called an ADU (accessory dwelling unit.) 

The permitting process is complicated and expensive, but Seattle encourages homeowners to build them to supposedly help with the affordable housing crisis. I don't know about that, because they start at about $300,000.  I think people do it because they want extra space, and it transforms single family homes into a property income asset.

Anyway, they're building one right behind us on the alley. We don't know these neighbors or what they intend to do with their cottage. That's pretty typical in this very dense (and somewhat unfriendly) neighborhood. 

They tore out a good new garage to make space for the cottage, which bothered me because our pitiful "garage" is ready to fall down. The construction workers show up late in the day (John thinks they're on overtime) so the banging starts when we sit down to dinner. 

This is not a quiet place!  On the west side, construction started on the big new school addition. The kids are back in school with all the extra traffic that goes with that. Late at night, you can hear the trains and shipping down on Harbor Island. And usually a car speeding by 60 mph after the bars close. No wonder my ears ring in Twisp at night. What's that strange little sound? Just the river talking to itself...

A soft and gleaming season

 

September already? The hottest, driest summer on record gently draws to a close. 

No wonder so many poignant songs and poems have been written about September. 

When you’re young you prefer the vulgar months, the fullness of the seasons. As you grow older you learn to like the in-between times, the months that can’t make up their minds. Perhaps it’s a way of admitting that things can’t ever bear the same certainty again.

Julian Barnes
From "Flaubert's Parrot"

 Absolute September

How hard it is to take September
straight—not as a harbinger
of something harder.

Merely like suds in the air, cool scent
scrubbed clean of meaning—or innocent
of the cold thing coldly meant.

How hard the heart tugs at the end
of summer, and longs to haul it in
when it flies out of hand

at the prompting of the first mild breeze.
It leaves us by degrees
only, but for one who sees

summer as an absolute,
Pure State of Light and Heat, the height
to which one cannot raise a doubt,

as soon as one leaf's off the tree
no day following can fall free
of the drift of melancholy.

-Mary Jo Salter 

 

 From the late Washington Post garden columnist Henry Mitchell:  

There is no need to think of September as the trash bin of the year, with just scraps of leftover things in the garden, because many things are only coming to perfection at the end of summer--a soft and gleaming season.