Daily Archives: August 19, 2011

Humanities

In a Deep Hole

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Lughnasa                                                                 Waning Honey Extraction Moon

And here I thought things were going well.  My translation this morning was far, far off the mark.  It was, Greg said, a combination of things.  I don’t know the story.  The poetry makes difficult constructions even more difficult to suss out and there were points of grammar here I hadn’t studied.  Still.  I felt like I had been wading at least in the muck, a marsh maybe, but this morning I dropped into a deep Latin hole.

Sigh.  Even though I know the only solution is to swim back to the surface and try to find the muck, at least, it was disheartening.  No wonder I couldn’t find any entries for the commentary.

Of course, I didn’t start down this ancient trail because I thought the journey would be easy.  And, I was right.

Garden

The Late Summer Garden

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Lughnasa                                                          Waning Honey Extraction Moon

Working in the late summer garden.  Those creepy pre-beetle organisms continue to gnaw on my potato plants and I gnaw right back.  So far the invasion has not gained a significant beach head thanks to soapy water and the occasional visit to prune out bugs.  Parts of the garden where harvest has happened need to be weeded and green manure sowed.  That’s a weekend task.  The onions didn’t do too well this year.  I think the bed they’re in just doesn’t get enough sun anymore.

Our tomatoes have matured or are close, but we’ve only had a few ripe ones so far.  Too cool.

Kate planted decorative squash.  I took some time to look at them today.  Their tendrils reach out and grasp other branches, stalks, leaves, curl around them and seal themselves off.  These tendrils though look like springs and function like springs.  They give the squash plant some give as winds and rain put tension on the various connections.  It was easy to see how a clever blacksmith could have looked at this plant and been inspired.

With the vegetable garden in a slow period we returned to the three tiered garden in our patio area.  I worked there for an hour and a half or so this morning and it felt like being with an old friend.  I’ve spent many hours on my hands and knees among these plants, each one of which I put in the ground myself.  Well, not the trees and the dogwood, but everything else excepting Kate’s squash and zucchini.