Turn, Turn, Turn

Partial Eclipse of the Sun; Deb Marshall artwork

The world turns, the seasons turn, the garden turns, and memory turns.

Today was the solar eclipse – only part of it here, and the Husband and I were outside, looking at the shadows the sun threw through a colander’s holes when our peak was at its peak. It was possible to see the cover of the moon in the colander shadows, but it wasn’t very exciting, and in fact, the whole thing wasn’t very exciting – it sort of looked like 5 pm at 2:45 pm, which isn’t very different at this time of year. The critters didn’t even notice. I had a headache that didn’t go away until after the eclipse resolved, but that may have been coincidence. The Tall Dude showed up at about 3 pm with his welding helmet (rated 10 on the won’t burn your eyes scale) and a piece of something square and black from another gadget (rated 6 on the won’t burn your eyes scale) and we put on the helmet and held the black square up in front of our eyes inside the helmet and had a look at the bite out of the sun that the moon took – that was a little more exciting – then the moon moved over, and  the world turned.

Last week I found the first red leaf – the season turned, and you can see it in the late afternoon shadows, hear it in the crickets’ chorus and in the birdsong, feel it in the coolness of the breeze when the day’s hot. This week there are several branches of swamp maple blazing red, visible from the wart. The winter squashes have suddenly gotten big; the green, yellow and purple beans have finally stopped producing flowers and I’ve begun to pull the plants as I divest them of their last pods. The shell beans  are thickening up, and Buzzy Boy, the hummingbird, is very, very busy protecting the scarlet runner flowers and his feeders from all invaders. Most importantly, our decade-plus old peach tree produced an amazing crop of fruit for the first time ever this summer, and the peaches got ripe this week. If you stand under the tree, your head becomes filled with the perfume of peaches; and there are two baskets of peaches on the dining room table waiting for us to eat or freeze them. We’ve had peaches to eat every day for the week, sweet peaches with juice that runs down the arm and tastes like the end of summer. 

The biggest garden surprise this summer is that my seckel pear tree has produced one perfect pear – a first for it, also, and especially surprising because I don’t have a second pear tree with which it may share pollen. Morning glories are finally and beautifully covering the gardem fence, the sunflowers have dropped their heads and are busily turning flower to seed, the potato plants died back and onions, too, so I’ve been digging and plucking those, and the garden has that special quality about it that only happens in late summer, when everything is at its fullest and the heart swells and nearly breaks with the bitter-sweetness of it all. There are moments of pure perfection, fleeting and tender. The garden turns.

The Historian came by a few days ago with a box of apples from his trees, and a long answer to a couple of questions I’d asked him about incidents in my own family history that I was too young to understand clearly when they happened, and that I didn’t think to get explanations about before my grandparents and father died. This is one of the wonderful things about living in a small town, where pretty much everyone knows or knows about everyone else, and there are long-time residents who are repositories of all the history of the area. 

Love Lies Bleeding and Sunflower; Deb Marshall photo

Last year when I was working on the Plastic Bin Project, I became curious about a murder that happened when I was quite young. My father’s cousin, and her children and her husband’s children from his first marriage were murdered one day by her husband/their father. I was young enough when it happened that I wasn’t told all the details of the murder, and picked up only a few more details when I was a little older, but it wasn’t something the family discussed in front of children when it happened, or at all, years later. It had nearly slid out of my memory until I started working on a family tree and going through my Nana’s bin of family stuff; I was  surprised that amongst all the obituaries and other newspaper clippings she’d kept about family members, there wasn’t a single item about the murder. 
This struck me as odd, especially since, carefully preserved, there was a long clipping about the death of my grandfather's younger brother, who burned to death as a child. Was the lack of news about the murder not because of the fat of horrible death, but that the means was murder rather than fire? Then a few weeks ago I found a photo my father had taken of what appears to be the five coffins lined up in one grave – but no explanation written anywhere,  just a date. The Niece and I had both searched on the Internet for old newspaper stories about the murder, and found only a couple of short, slightly contradictory pieces – one of them from a newspaper in California! 

It’s a curious thing to look back into family history and discover that there is more than one mystery, and some were within reach of being solvable had I – or someone – known to ask the right questions when the people who knew the answers were still living! I vaguely remember my first cousin once removed, and one of my second cousins who were murdered – but he was a boy, and we were young enough that we didn’t really play together and the other kids were either enough older or enough younger to be of no interest to me, and his mom was an adult and so mostly out of the sphere of a kid my age at the time. But now – memory turns. Enter The Historian.

As I read his recounting of what he remembers about the murder, I found myself realizing that some of it was stuff I knew, once; and some of it’s brand new. There are now more questions than before. 

Written for the blog, 21 August 2017

Wowie - this is a sunflower! Deb Marshall photo