Batten down the gutters and light the driveway

6:15 pm, a fall evening in Monument. The store, the post office, and the school are all closed by now. The light is fading and the street lights pop on and start buzzing. The streets are completely deserted. A lone SUV drives through town. A stranger, or a tourist. You can almost see kitchen curtains fluttering as folks discreetly peek out to see who it is.

The sky is darker than usual tonight. A thick, greenish, bumpy cloud cover has rolled in, bringing a still humidity with it. The talk of the town today is that the weather service says we're getting our first big fall storm this weekend. We haven't been through this yet, so we don't know if the predictions of 1 inch of rain are exaggerated. The reports also say that there could be freezing rain or snow above 5000 feet. So, we may not be going anywhere this weekend.

I feel like there's so many summer things we haven't done yet, and so many things we were supposed to get done. I wanted to go back out to the orchard and pick some more of those incredible peaches, and some pears too. I hope the rain doesn't ruin them. Maybe I could can enough jam that I'd actually be willing to give some of the bounty away. The river has been really low since we moved here, but we still haven't gone fishing. We could go down to the pond, and we haven't done that either. I think I've only gone swimming in the river once since we moved. I haven't even gotten on my bicycle. And I feel like I owe our dog a lot of long walks that were promised to him before we moved up here. Somehow I thought I'd have all this time on my hands, and somehow it's just not working that way, at least not yet.

We have made one sightseeing trip out of town. We went up to the Tamarack fire lookout last week. It was a fun little day trip. We got lost in the forest and ended up way out on some unmarked logging road. I got to really exercise the 4x4, even put it into granny gear a couple of times. That was fun! It felt like we were really, really out on the edge of nowhere, until we saw this sign:

I felt a little bit of triumph; I'm not sure how many people have ever seen this sign. And then we turned around and bounced back to the main road, and took the right road to the lookout. The side road up to the lookout was almost as bad as the unmarked road, if not worse, so I got to do some semi-technical driving. I'm not sure if Gavin had as much fun as I did or not. He stayed pretty quiet and held the dog on his lap. The tower itself was kind of anticlimatic. The view is hugely expansive, mountainous, green, but somehow not very dramatic. The most interesting part of the tower is all the inscriptions people have left over the years. If you want to leave lasting graffiti on a galvanized structure, use pencil.

Back home in fall chore-land, the storm is threatening and the wind is kicking up a little. We scurry around the yard, trying to take care of things that have been ignored for too long, before those big cold drops come splashing down. I cleaned out the gutters and downspouts. This would be a small job, but it expanded to include raking the roof of probably 10 years' worth of debris. The debris is backed up from the gutters to the low slope roof over the deck. Then it is backed up onto the high slope part of the roof too. When I rake it off, I find a huge patch of rust on the roofing. Must be from all the years of moist leaves leaching acids onto it. I hope that cleaning off all the stuff doesn't cause it to leak.
The downspouts are so clean it looks like no water has ever been in them. Which is possible, judging from the years of thick, mossy layers of leaves in the gutters. The downspouts drain directly onto the shallow foundation of the house, which is badly eroded. Our eventual plan is to fix the grading of the yard and fill the holes in the foundation with concrete, but we haven't gotten there yet. For now, I am attaching some roll-out things to the ends of the downspouts and hoping that some of the water will seep into the ground instead of running right back under the house.

We spent some time this past week trying to eradicate the puncturevine from our driveway. They call it goats-heads here, and that's an apt name, since the thorny seed looks like a goat's head, and the "goat" part of the name sort of suggests the devil, and he must be behind the design of these things, for they are pure evil. They pierce feet and shoes and bury themselves in carpet only to emerge in the middle of the night. The thorns are longer and pointier than a rose thorn, and are prone to breaking off under the skin. Each vine bears about a million seeds, and it is impossible to pull up a vine without stabbing yourself bloody and scattering the seeds all over the ground. We pulled up almost all the vines, leaving a solid layer of thorny pods on the driveway, ready to sprout next spring. We already know that Roundup doesn't work on these things. We were thinking of using a propane torch to burn the seeds off the driveway, but apparently they like fire. Something called 2-4-D will kill the plant, but the seeds still remain viable for up to 5 years. We could salt the driveway and they wouldn't come up there, but then we'd just track the seeds everywhere and we'd never be able to go barefoot again. After this rain, I hope that the dust on the driveway will settle and we can use the shop vac to vacuum the seeds off the gravel driveway. This sounds a little odd, but maybe it will work. Seemingly our only other option is to walk across the driveway and then pick the thorns out of our shoes, over and over again.

I spent a lot of the rest of this week reading Square Foot Gardening and planning our vegetable garden for next year. The author suggests that the novice gardener should begin with one 4-foot square plot the first year. I've got about eight plots planned out. Is that too ambitious? I am having these visions of quart jars full of delicious tomato juice, dill pickles, and green beans, fresh sweet corn on the grill, juicy red tomatoes warm from the sun, and roasted acorn squash. It's like Norman Rockwell and my grandmother have hijacked my imagination and won't let it go till I ransom it with bushels of green things. I am also looking forward to trying some things I've never seen in a store- Cucumis melo promises to be an exotic new fruit, luffa provides food and scrubbing sponges, and who knows what else I will have to have once the seed catalogs get here. Maybe I do have time on my hands.