Saturday Gardening Post – In Which The Times, They Are A’Changing – UPDATED

Greetings, my fellow port swillers!

A surprisingly cool and gray day for the dead-red middle of August.  One might very well have been up ta Maine and not in Northern Virginny.  My porch thermometer didn’t even crack 80 degrees, and by late afternoon I even put on a sweatshirt.

Not that I’m complaining, I assure you.

Yesterday, Ol’ Robbo was looking at the sunlight on the trees out back and thinking to himself that he’s definitely beginning to see that change in the light which signals that we’re now on the backside of summah.  It’s the shift in the angle of the sun’s arc across the sky relative to the wood-line, which faces southwest.  I’m not sure I could actually describe the way the reflection on the leaves changes.  I just know when it happens.

Again, I’m not complaining.  As regular friends of teh decanter have long known, summah is Ol’ Robbo’s least-favorite season, and even the first hints of its impending exit always make me happy.

Not that I had much to complain about this year, real summah coming fairly late and staying relatively comfortable with only a few stretches of what I would call really hot weather.  And even then, my thermometer hasn’t broken triple digits all season.

I’m sure my Betters will tell me that my lying eyes are all wrong and that Science! proves this has been, again, the Hottest Year in the History of the Woooooorld!!!  But I know which one I choose to believe.

Oh, as for gardening?  I didn’t do any.  Instead I flopped down in my hammock and spent the afternoon reading and watching the world go by.  (For those of you interested, Ol’ Robbo is on his geology kick again.  I finished up Simon Winchester’s book about Krakatoa and started in on my umpteenth reading of John McPhee’s Annals of the Former World.)

Good times.

UPDATE:  Only up to 74 degrees for Sunday!

Friend of the decanter RJB reminds me about the big “derecho” that slammed the Midwest earlier this week.  I gather a lot of crop damage was done, along with other property loss and some deaths.

I dunno why the weather-folk feel compelled to use the term “derecho”.  Maybe it just sounds sooper-spooky (like “Arctic bomb cyclone”).  Maybe it’s just that “squall with unusually strong straight-line winds” is too much of a mouthful for practical reporting purposes.

As a matter of fact, I first heard the term when we had one come through here about eight years ago.  I remember Port Swiller Manor being without power for four or five days after that, and the upstairs becoming so miserably hot that I had to sleep in the basement.  I also remember quickly giving up trying to read in the evening by candle-light and just going to bed with the sun.  (About eventually having to clean out the deep-freeze full of spoiled foodstuffs, I choose not to remember.)