Out on Bittersweet
When Lucy Maud Montgomery put the words; “I’m so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers…” in the mouth of her character Anne, I wonder if she laid down her pen, sat back, and smiled for a while. I would have. It’s a wonderful line. When October comes I’m always glad to live in a place like Michigan. It’s hard for me to imagine another place I would rather be.
Jerry Dennis, a northern Michigan author, wrote that springtime advances north at about 15 miles a day, about the pace of a steady walk. I wonder how long it takes the color to creep south in the fall? I think about things like this on short autumn evenings. Tonight the deer were grazing in the near north field, as they do every night year-round. Bats were flitting about over the back meadow in the cool dusk. I puttered around in the carriage house for a while. I have a project I’ve been planning there. When it is done it will make good writing so I’m sure I will tell you all about it, maybe even share pictures.
But thinking about October is getting ahead of myself, which one should never do in the fall of the year, the season of all seasons which we hope lingers well into November.
If you are tired of bad news all the time keep reading:
The Northern Michigan Relief Sale
This summer my friend, Paul Gardner, the director at Camp Barakel, attended the Northern Michigan Relief Sale at the Oscoda County Fairgrounds.
I attended the sale with a couple of my grandsons and was rewarded with warm, fresh, homemade cinnamon donuts and a first-edition hardcover of a Vance Havner title I didn’t have.
My friend, Paul attended the charity auction. He bid on a chair made of old camp skis. He won the bidding for the chair. He then bid on a coat rack made of additional parts from the skis but he was outbid by a group of young Amish men. After the auction was over he went to collect his chair and the young Amish men came over, claimed their coat rack, and then smiled and handed it to him.
“We want you to have it. It belongs with your chair.” They chuckled among themselves and walked away to tend to a booth where they were selling things.
My friend Paul, warmed by the gesture, bought a cold bottle of Pepsi for each of the young men and thanked them for their gift.
If you look for bad news you will find it everywhere, but all the news in the world is not bad news, especially if you live with an open heart.
Bittersweet Farm
September 16, 2019
