When I sit down to write this, the temperature has dropped and the hot muggy days of high summer have already started their slow recession into the backs of our minds. I have to remind myself four times what day of the week it is. I think I can safely admit that I've failed my 2017 resolution of weekly blog posts. Somehow it's been four months (really four?!) since the last one, and I can't even really provide a good excuse. The specific quotidian excuses for not keeping up with this blog amount to an exciting-to-us-but-boring-to-the-world day-by-day account of our wacko 2017 summer, so I'll spare you the gory details. The briefest summary possible: we've been... busy.

We're in the unique and relatively short season when high summer harvests overlap with the almost imperceptible suggestion that fall is on its way. The truck is weighed down by boxes of tomatoes and crates piled high with eggplants and peppers, but the crisp morning air quietly tells a different story - one that we know to expect but somehow never quite believe about how, as long as the earth revolves around the sun, sweater-cool fall will always follow summer. This morning I was wearing actual SLIPPERS.

Summer is definitely waning now though, we have to admit it. The sneakiest cool breeze whispers through our trees in the evening. Every day we are positively shocked by how early it gets dark, how few evening hours we have before night falls hard and we're forced inside or, more often, forced into a huddle around the barn sharing the dim light to make bouquets and pint tomatoes and sort the cooler contents late into the night.

From the deck of the infrastructure department:
We're very excited to have received a state grant to build a new wash station and cooler building this fall and all of our most modest dreams are coming true. A wash station with a concrete floor and proper drainage! A cooler that is more than twice the size of our current one, which we outgrew about three years ago! Drop-down shades that block the afternoon sun instead of the shabby white bedsheet we use now! Bigger sinks and tubs to replace the 3/4 length bathtub that was taken out of the Taylor family house during the Great Botched Renovation of 2015 and repurposed into a wash station basin. Now all we have to do is... tear a hole in the time space continuum in search of an extra month this fall to build it before the ground freezes?

The eclipse was a rare opportunity to gather outside in the middle of the day and sit in the grass to marvel at the cosmos. We enthusiastically seized the opportunity and, though it was pretty hazy and we didn't get to see the crescent shadows of the sun cast through dappled tree canopy, we were impressed and humbled by the eerie golden tint of the briefest 60% evening in the middle of the afternoon.

Completely magical photo by Andy Heist of the Milky Way above Rachel's house on the night of the solar eclipse.

And lastly, the smallest update with the longest range migration: our perennial butterfly weed bushes have been taken over by a small army of monarch caterpillars! We tiptoe around them desperate to not disturb their delicate chrysalis-making, and will do everything we can to protect them until they migrate in an incredible feat of bio-location and endurance.

August

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