Lughnasa College Moon
All those stunned freshmen I saw at the UofM on Labor Day have begun to settle in, trying to balance free-time spent socializing with furthering their study. This mix often settles a student’s chance of academic success. If you have a student making these choices right now, sometime in October would be a good time to sit down with them and discuss how it’s going.
Lughnasa College Moon
The boxes are in the house for the final round of book packing for right now. Over the long weekend we plan to clean out our sheds, repair the fire pit, remove the wires from the fences put there to foil dogs and get a soil test done for the next steward of these lands.
There will be a three-ring binder with planting maps, options for caring for the fruit trees and shrubs, the perennials and utilization of the raised beds and other vegetable growing areas. A small library of Minnesota specific gardening books will be on a shelf. A well-functioning lawn tractor, bee-keeping start-up kit, a hydroponic kit for seed starting and a crystal chandelier in the kid’s playhouse will all stay behind, no longer relevant to our mountain home.
If certain decisions we’re making now prove fruitful, we could buy a new home in January, moving one, or even both of us out there that month or the next. I know, moving to Colorado in the winter, from Minnesota. Sounds like madness, but there may be some very good reasons to do it.
Lughnasa College Moon
The rain and cool have come. The sun is lower in the sky. We will have lost 23 degrees of declination from June 20 to September 20. We have already lost 2 hours and 25 minutes of daylight June 25 through yesterday. The slide toward the Winter Solstice has proceeded and will accelerate on Mabon, September 20th, when the hours of night once again exceed the hours of daylight.
All of this is good news. Especially this year. Both Kate and I are ready to have a smaller property with less growing season work. Not because we don’t love it, but because we want more time now for other matters, like grandchildren and our creative work. The coming of the fallow time means the last garden here and movement toward a new year. 2015 will find us creating a new outdoors life in the Rocky Mountains.
Lughnasa College Moon
On the other brutal atrocity. America’s death row. The release of the two brothers in North Carolina, after 30 years on death row, only adds to the growing list of miscarriages discovered before the fact of execution: 146 since 1973. Death Penalty Information Project. The same source of information found ten cases in the same time period where there were grave doubts about the executed person’s guilt.
While the barbarity of severing a living man’s head with a hunting knife is self-evident, frying someone on an electric chair, poisoning them with cyanide, hanging them so their neck breaks, shooting them with rifles or that mockery of medical procedures, lethal injection on a Naugahyde cross is on the same continuum, not a “more humane” method, just a different method.
It’s important to see the log in our own eye as well as the log in that of ISIS. We do not come to them with clean hands or pure hearts. We too are compromised and fall short of the glory that could be the human race. This is not to point to a particular solution for either one, but simply to call out the truth.