A Strange and Restless Month
Apologies for not getting around to blogging on the 1946 August Farmers Almanac entry—August is like that, very distracting with all that sunshine and grilling salmon and visitors and gardening. Now that I look at the 1946 August calendar for farmers, I see it touts the value of the herbicide 2-4-D, which we know today as one of the ingredients of Agent Orange.
Moving right along, the September entry appears similarly uneasy, but unusually poetic. Autumn must do that to people:
Now will the porcupines take their fill of the ripening apples and the deer munch the fine green beans we have tended so carefully. Now will the red fox look to the hen roost and the skunk rattle the lid of the garbage pail. In their wild hearts the coming of autumn is a hunger and a restlessness; for in the turn of the leaf, in the stronger, deeper scent of things in the cool twilights, in the dusty, harvest-breathing afternoons, they can sense even now the coming of winter, the dead season when only the drifts will move.
To man, also, it is a strange and restless month, and unfulfilled interlude, an uneasy expectation of harvest home (yet not home), and hope and expectation are false harvest indeed.
Will there be time enough and hands enough for all there is to do?
I took this picture hiking in England’s Lake District several years ago.
By September 1946, it had been a year since VJ Day—peacetime life was perhaps not meeting expectations. The parties were over; the people who could come home had done so. For the friends and lovers of the people who didn’t, their “hope and expectation” became a “false harvest indeed.”
My parents were part of the lucky ones, busily doing their bit to create the post-war baby boom.My mother would be finishing up her second trimester and probably feeling pretty good—I wasn’t so big that I caused much physical discomfort and she had made it through the hot part of the year. We were living in my grandparents’ house still. My parents must have been thinking about names. Grandmothers-to-be were knitting tiny sweaters and I was sloshing around in a perfect environment without a care in the world.
The post A Strange and Restless Month appeared first on Kit Bakke, author of Dancing on the Edge and Miss Alcott's E-mail.
