No matter how hard he tries, our old friend and long time Keloland TV anchor, Steve Hemmingsen, just can’t resist sitting down to the nearest keyboard to record his observations…his spin..on things. For years, people figured his vision was focused primarily on news of the day and politics but those of us who’ve known Steve a little more personally..well, as personally, as anybody can know him, have come to appreciate his take on music, art, humor and love of the language. So with Steve’s permission, I’m sharing a recent bit of prose he shared with his e-mail friends this past week.
I wax poetic about fall every year, probably because it’s my favorite season.
The boats and paraphernalia of summer are safely rolled up on the lawn or tucked away in the garage, immune from the occasional savage winds that surround the solstice and the ambiguous rise and fall of lake levels.
As an old farm boy on Public TV describes it, in our part of the country, all seasons are nothing but a build-up to winter survival. My brother-in-law in the North Woods spends all summer chopping wood to burn all winter until next spring when the whole cycle starts again, the bracing for bracing for another winter in the recliner and 500 channels of mind-wrecking cable TV.
But, I’m ahead of myself. None of these things have happened yet, except for the chopping of the wood.
I do think fall is ahead of itself this year. As I write this, and let the record show that it’s July 29, I proclaim this the first day of fall. It started last night when I noticed the sun fading at 9:30 instead of 10:30 as I read my Kindle on the deck. And the sun seemed lower this morning, more at eye level. propelled through my windows by a brisk West Northwest wind. I probably wouldn’t have noted any of the above except for the dry rustle of the cottonwood leaves; a crisp noise I swear wasn’t there yesterday even though we’ve had three inches of rain in the last few days. At least not audible to the human ear. Now, a dog’s ear is a different story.
I’m sure Cockleburr, my faithful black Lab (mostly) of 10 years, noticed all this way before I did.
She’s been shedding windrows of hair for weeks…and just acting weird, although with her it’s difficult to differentiate between “normal” weird and “seasonal” weird.
Or maybe it’s just because I moved “her” couch to the garage. Or maybe we are headed for an early fall and winter, but it might not be a bad winter since an El Nino is forming in the Pacific.
And you know what that means for us. Wait a minute; what does it mean? I think I’ll go with El Cockleburr and El Cottonwoods and guess at an early fall.
But, I say this every year. I actually like the rattling of the now-mature leaves that, just weeks ago, were mint-colored sprigs of spring, semaphoring the coming of our always-too-sort summers here on the 9,999th of Minnesota’s 10,000 lakes, out here on Minnesota’s western frontier
