Waving goodbye to summer
</element><element id="paragraph-1" type="body"><![CDATA[Hurricane Ike dumped all the walnuts in the yard. The wind bent the cornstalks.
The stalks now have that Halloweenish eeriness about them like long, crooked skeleton fingers reaching up from the dirt. The cornstalks stand in gnarly silhouette against the final full moon of summer.
Monday is the autumnal equinox, when the length of the day is the same as the night. But after that the night will begin to grow, the air to cool and eventually the woods will take on the sweet scent of leaf mold. The hunting aisles are stocked with bottles of hunting urine and cruel-looking devices like the thing called a "Butt Out" that you'll just have to examine for yourself. I'm wincing, recalling the diagram on the back.
There is a bumper crop of bright yellow goldenrod growing in the yard of the cabin. The air has a faintly sweet smell of goldenrod and ragweed pollen. That pollen caused me much suffering as a boy. The various allergens didn't make me hack and sneeze so much; they gave me blinding migraine headaches combined with violent nausea. I missed a lot of school. Some school workers believed I was overdramatizing my condition and rather than allow me to call my parents to take me home to rest, they made me sit in the office with a pack of ice on my head.
I resented this treatment and would sit sobbing in pain and frustration and would eventually vomit on the office floor. Finally, my condition got through to the workers and they agreed that if I said I had to go home to sleep and get better they knew I wasn't kidding around.
I guess I should have appreciated this allowance, but I didn't and to this day have an extreme distrust in authority figures.
But now I can sniff that goldenrod pollen all day if I want and never feel a thing. Either this is due to a battery of allergy tests and shots or simply growing out of it.
The fall used to make me ill. Now it gives me a mixture of excitement and melancholy, which is probably the way most people regard it.
Winter isn't too bad when we're in the middle of it. But there is a primal anxiety in the change from lush, green, humid summer to stark, starving, dead winter. It is something in our makeup. We aren't supposed to live in cold climates. If we were, we would be born with thick yak hair that we would shed in the summer time. Without tools and the ability to provide insulating clothing for ourselves, we would be frozen to death every single year.
We really ought to thank our local businesses for low prices on warm coats, gloves and hats. We wouldn't be here without them.
When I was in school it wasn't "cool" to wear coats. We "cool" kids got by on as little insulation as we could possibly stand. We were either trying to be tough or be grunge. Now, I look at students who aren't wearing warm coats and shake my head.
Sure, you can get by without coats if you are only outside between the time you leave the vehicle and enter the school, or leave the vehicle to enter the home, but what if something goes wrong? What if the school bus crashes down a hollow (a very realistic fear on my old bus route), the driver is killed before he radios his location and suddenly you are stuck for a hours waiting for rescue?
Do you want to look cool without a coat? How cool can you be shivering with your hands stuck in your armpits?
Maybe I'm getting old.
Kids don't apply "what if" scenarios to situations. Me, I anticipate disaster around every corner and believe it's best to be ready for it.
Kids should wear a coat and carry a pocketknife. But they shouldn't take a knife to school because its against the rules and they will get in big trouble for it, unfortunately.
But I carried a knife in my pocket to school every day and still carry the same knife everywhere I go.
In the winter, I stuff my enormous down parka with survival gear including a plastic emergency blanket, flashlight, multi-tool pliers, matches and pain pills. For most winter days this may be gross overpreparedness, but not last winter when the ice storm sent me on a 2-mile round trip trudge every day from the cabin to the car and back.
Maybe that is part of the depression so many suffer from in the fall, not so much dread of the brutal cold, but that carefree summer is now interrupted for a need to work to prepare for the cold. Get out the window plastic. Put the bean-filled wiener dog thing back under the door for the draft.
The swimming pools are too cold to swim comfortably. The season of hat hair, lip balm and hand moisturizer is approaching. The days of nude frolicking are going to give way to athletes foot for not changing our socks.
The days are getting shorter and the dark is getting darker. So, for that matter, are some of the news headlines.
Here locally, a baby was accidentally un-buried at the cemetery due to a grave marking mistake made decades ago before the city took charge of the property. The body laid on the ground for several months. It was because of hurricane Ike the body was found as a woman chased after flowers blown from a grave into an apparently rarely scrutinized corner of the cemetery.
Weird sidebars of Ike's mischief are popping up like Bluesman Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown who popped out of his burial vault and may be sailing the coastal waters of Texas back home to Slidell, La., where hurricane Katrina had forced him to flee in 2005.
Bellarmine University in Louisville, Ky., has booted all students from their dorms, leaving them to travel back home or seek refuge in emergency shelters as the power is out and the dorm cafeteria cannot feed everyone.
Humans have come a long way in the last hundred years with the role of electricity evolving from convenience to survival necessity.
Oh, well. The fall festival season is in full swing and not even Monday's fiery destruction of the Eldorado Town and Country Days Committee headquarters can disrupt the festival there. So go buy a corn dog as we wave goodbye to summer.
-- DeNeal is a staff writer for The Daily Register in Harrisburg, Ill., and The Daily Journal in Eldorado, Ill. He may be contacted at 253-7146 ext. 230 or by e-mail at bdeneal@yourclearwave.com.