“They’s something kindo’ harty-like about the atmusfere When the heat of summer’s over and the coolin’ fall is here— Of course we miss the flowers, and the blossums on the trees, And the mumble of the hummin’-birds and buzzin’ of the bees; But the air’s so appetizin’; and the landscape through the haze Of a crisp and sunny morning of the airly autumn days Is a pictur’ that no painter has the colorin’ to mock— When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder’s in the shock.”
Years ago, I gave each of my children $5 once they’d memorized Hoosier poet James Whitcomb Riley’s homage to autumn, “When the Frost Is on the Punkin.” The verses are my delightful ear worm every fall. Like a seasonal soundtrack, the lines randomly erupt from my lips in the car, on walks or wherever I take in the sights and smells of the season.
This past spring, when it seemed it would rain forever, my yard was fenced in to keep neighborhood dogs from leaving me unwanted presents while also keeping my dogs from dining at a buffet of cat food one neighbor daily places on the ground. Though installed as a matter of function, the fence immediately gave the feeling of outdoor “rooms” in my now private yard.
I didn’t birth several sons because of how much labor they could one day provide, but it’s worked out nicely. My adult children returned home Memorial Day Weekend to paint fences both new and old, refinish patio furniture, divide and reposition hydrangeas along the new fence and plant new trees and bushes, including a genie magnolia. The sodden spring ensured everything we planted was happily established by mid-summer when drought set in.
Every morning, I meet up with other dog owners in a park where we walk two miles with our eager pups. Once the drought hit, I spent half an hour watering the gardens after each morning walk. And while the drought prevented the dogs from becoming muddy, it turned the trails into fine dust that water alone cannot wash off their fur. I stationed a vat of dog shampoo next to my hose in July and my three dogs quickly became accustomed to the post-walk wash drill.
As happens most years, we had a brief foretaste of autumn at the end of August before the heat of summer returned. The first weeks of September, I arose at dawn to get the dogs to the park before the sun yanked the mercury up. Yet because it was September, the days grew shorter and the last heat wave of the year could not settle in for an extended stay.
When the heat lifted and autumn truly began, the last stanza of Riley’s poem, where he declares that if angels were to come a-calling he’d want them to arrive this time of year, resonated as it always does. Tree leaves first hint at, then explode in a color show. Sunlight becomes golden; nights are cool enough to leave the windows open. If you kept up with watering, many flowers continue to bloom, particularly dahlias and zinnias. All of this makes it a joy to be outside for any reason and I’ve served more meals on my patio in the past five weeks than I had in the prior five months.
The first autumn I lived in Akron, it snowed on Oct. 4. I remember standing in my house slack-jawed at the sight of flurries outside. More than two decades later, winter consistently arrives later and leaves earlier. Climate change is a fact with horrible consequences, which is why I feel a twinge of shame for relishing the mild weather that now gloriously extends well into October.
Sir Leif with his damsel, ClairePrincess Lyra with her best punkin, Adeline
My 15-year-old son, Leif, has loved Halloween from the moment he was old enough to understand it. Every year, he’d want to set up Halloween decorations as soon as school started but I’d make him wait until the last weekend of September. This year, I hung a glittery skull face on the front door but it seems Leif has outgrown his passion for all things Halloween − except dressing up in a costume. Plastic skeletons, ghouls and zombie flamingos remain boxed up in the garage while chainmail and swords go on the boy.
Everything transitions.
However glorious and temperate autumn is, its poignant beauty heralds the coming death, albeit temporary, of garden, leaves and grass. Soon we will stay mostly indoors, where some of us will eagerly plan next year’s gardens. Snow will arrive, bringing its own sparkling beauty, blanketing the earth while she rests, collecting energy for spring and all that it, too, brings.
This was first published in the Akron Beacon Journal on Sunday, October 26, 2025.
The return of children to school in late August always sneaks up on me. It’s still summer, vegetable gardens are at peak production, swimming pools are open and filled with cavorting water babies of all ages. Soon thereafter, however, Mother Nature usually sends Northeast Ohio a save-the-date sample of autumn weather. This year, it arrived last weekend. Sweaters, jeans and ankle boots were pulled out after months of wearing T-shirts, skirts and sandals.
Fall in my part of the world is a treasure. Forests filled with trees of multihued leaves rival any found in New England. The humidity, which is never that bad here, evaporates altogether leaving cerulean skies decorated with pretty clouds unique, in my observations, to the Great Lakes region.
And yet, unlike the other season of dramatic change, spring, there is a poignancy to fall. Summer flora is winding down and though it will be many weeks before the last garden bloom turns brown and gifts its seeds to the ground for the coming year, some are already wrapping up their colorful shows. Crickets chirp ever longer each day and spiders have gone berserk making webs like Amish barn builders in competition.
The term spring cleaning comes from an era when homes were heated with wood and coal, fuel that left ash and soot throughout a home. When the cold of winter receded for the warm, wet days of spring, it was time to take down curtains and wash them along with bedding, rugs, windows, floors, walls and all the contents found under a roof.
Springtime fills me with an urgency to go outside and garden. It is fall, in which I make way for everything that must come inside, that has me sorting and editing my possessions. Garages need cleaned out to make space for outdoor furniture. Potted plants, including some flowers, such as begonias, need interior real estate near sun-filled windows. Closets are culled of items outgrown, worn out or plainly no longer in style (though that last one becomes less of a concern with time and age).
One of my favorite things to haul inside is the produce I’ve grown, gotten in my CSA share or purchased at a farmer’s market. I spend several weekends putting up the sweet tastes of summer while imagining the joy it will bring when served on future cold and snowy nights.
Jars of peaches that I canned last year, the succulent syrup sweetened with local honey, still fill an entire shelf in my cellar. I’m glad of this because I’m not sure when I’d have time to put up a new bushel given all else I need to process. This has been a banner year for just about everything in the garden, both flower and vegetable.
Across the United States, people have raved about 2024’s hydrangea blooms and mine are no exception. Two tree-like hydrangeas have for years provided the most delightful privacy scrim when I sit on my front porch. Bouquets of their flowers have filled vases for several weeks, and I’ve also given many to friends. But you could never tell looking at them as they remain laden with white blossoms the shape of grape clusters. In the backyard, round hydrangea bushes produced the first flowers since 2020 — round, multicolored blossoms.
The past several years, I planted several basil plants, mostly Genovese, only to have them fizzle by mid July no matter how much I watered them. Remembering that, I only bought three plants this year, which was a good call because they each grew a yard high, nearly as wide, with leaf-covered branches. A batch of pesto requires two tightly packed cups of basil leaves. I’ve put up two batches and easily have enough basil left for three or more batches.
Established on a section of one basil plant is an intricate funnel web and its arachnid weaver, a member of the Agelenidae family. Unlike many people, spiders don’t bother me. Quite the opposite — I admire their handiwork and industry in hunting and devouring pesky arthropods, i.e., insects like Japanese beetles.
Last Sunday, I put on a new-to-me album, “Another Dimension” by pianist Charles Bell and the Contemporary Jazz Quartet (1963), and then spent the better part of the afternoon chopping tomatoes, onions, peppers (hot and mild), cilantro and garlic. I squeezed the juice of several limes, mixed it all together with freshly ground Himalayan salt and when I had finished, salsa filled an 8-quart pot.
I took one of several containers of my salsa fresca straight away to my next-door neighbors. They ate half of it with chips and used the other half to make meat loaf, a slice of which they gave me the next day when returning my container.
And I think to myself, whatever the season, life in my Akron home is good.
This was first published in the Akron Beacon Journal on Sunday, September 15, 2024.
After what felt like a winter without end, spring has finally arrived.
I typically expect November and early December to be the busiest time of the year. For the most part, I don’t think of the holidays as something to survive, but when they are over, January seems indulgently quiet. A lady farmer, who lives across the street from the Waldorf school, once told me that January is the one month she relaxes. With the crops harvested and slaughtering season completed, it is too early to sugar the maples or prepare next season’s crops. Sure, there are animals and machinery that need tending, but mostly life is as quiet as snow falling on a windless day.
Then spring hits and there is no rest for the weary, be they farmers or mothers and I don’t know why, but it surprises me every year. Last spring, we had an unusually warm March, and found ourselves in our gardens seemingly moments after ski season had ended at the local slopes. It was our first spring in the new house and we abruptly discovered that the yard and gardens had been cursorily tended for a couple of years. Translation: an abundance of weeds of all varieties—milky, woody, low to the ground and high to the sky—appeared as if by magic after the first warm days that March. Pregnant with Lyra, I was not much help in the garden. I trimmed dead branches off of the hydrangeas but otherwise mostly pointed out the weeds to Max because bending over made my heartburn rise. At the end of our driveway, Earth N Wood landscaping company dropped mountains of mulch large enough to be seen on Google maps. Seriously. For the rest of the spring and summer, Max pulled weeds, moved plants, mulched beds and ripped up English ivy, which grows with the destructive rapidity of the title character of The Blob, the 1958 Sci-fi movie classic (extending the metaphor: Max=Steve McQueen).
Possessed by Possessions
The long summer turned into a warm autumn and I thought I’d never get Max back into the house. But as I mentioned in What We Keep, finally in December, we resumed tackling the ongoing project of merging the possessions of two households into one. For this reason, I was not entirely unhappy to see winter linger with hopes of extending our focus on building shelves, emptying boxes and taking things to Goodwill and Habitat for Humanity’s ReStore. Larger items, or things we haven’t decided whether to keep or part with, have been hauled to the back garage for re-evaluation in the summer when we work on de-cluttering the garage. I imagine some day our spare time will not be primarily pre-occupied with managing our possessions as it has been for the past two years. But I cannot predict when that day will arrive. And I ask myself if a deadline is in order.
Before the weather turned warmer, however, our weekends no longer found us like ants busily working in a nest while the frigid winds blew outside. Since Claude came home for his spring break in March, all of us have been pulled back to life outside of our home. Annual spring benefits for our favorite non-profits started popping up like dandelions in the lawn and last week alone, three were on our calendar (we made it to just one). Track season began at the Waldorf school and, as all parents who’ve been there know, any sport that employs the word “meet” as opposed to “game” is a sport that will relieve you of an entire day every weekend of the season. Tax season took away at least two of our weekends. And through it all, Lyra has at least one appointment a week with her doctors or therapists or county caseworkers or the Down syndrome clinic. In order to manage our schedules, emails go unanswered, calls unreturned and spontaneous get-togethers can’t happen. I start each day by looking at the Google calendar. And when I forget to, as I did this past Monday, I unexpectedly found the Summit County DD case worker and physical therapist on my doorstep at nine in the morning. Thank heavens I was dressed.
Far from Perfect
For me at least, it’s been hard to find my balance these past two months. I think of a quote I recently saw: Make sure to meditate at least fifteen minutes a day unless you are busy. In which case, meditate an hour a day. I smiled when I read this knowing, however ironic, that it is true. During these hectic days, meditation is like a staff planted firmly in the earth, a pole that does not stop the chaos, but rather allows me to stand still and observe the chaos without getting swept away by it. I am reminded of the wizard Gandalf who powerfully pounds his staff on the ground with one swift movement as he forcefully tells the demonic balrog, “You shall not pass!” Gandalf does not appear to kill the balrog, but he does prevent it from consuming his friends, insuring that they continue on their journey.
In one of my earliest posts, I described the mom-blogs that intimidate me with stories and pictures of serene adults with sweet children in clean (handmade) clothes making butter with the milk from the goats they keep in their yards while their kitchens look as organized as Martha Stewart’s but more artsy, an aesthetic cross of Waldorf schools-Garnet Hill catalogs-Merchant Ivory films.
Those moms probably don’t forget to go to the monthly meetings of their Down syndrome support group. Certainly not two months in a row. Nor do they forget to patch their daughter’s lazy eye (I won’t say how many times) and I imagine they do an hour of physical therapy three times a day so that their child with Ds meets all the “typical” baby benchmarks, like sitting up at six months. Those moms don’t ask with panicky voices at 5:30 p.m., “What are we going to feed everyone for dinner?” because they have organic and delicious meal plans extending weeks in advance. And while their kids may occasionally pull outfits out of a basket of clean laundry waiting to be folded, I doubt they ever dig into the dirty laundry to seek the least muddy pair of pants to wear to school that day.
True Confession: I sometimes think about what my life would be like if I only had one child. Or two. Or three. Or four. I consider what I would be doing with my days if my only child were away at college. Or if I had just one at home and the other at school, and down the list I go. I don’t think of it often, nor do I dwell on it when I do. This in no way means I ever wish to be without any of my children in this life and pray that they all die after I do, because to lose any of them is something I do not ever want to imagine, let alone experience. No, when I think of life with fewer children it is in the way Robert Frost describes life in “The Road Not Taken.” Frost acknowledges that our choices form our lives and wonders how different choices would have forged a different life. Possibly, I wonder, even molding the person so differently as to make him or her someone else entirely. In the film Sliding Doors, Gwyneth Paltrow’s character has two different lives based upon whether she misses or catches her train to work one morning. What I do know is that last year, before I had Lyra and I was working at the Waldorf school, I was not writing with any regularity. For a number of reasons, she keeps me at home and I make it a priority to write every week as much as I can.
As Good As It Gets
Last night we sat on our veranda and looked down at Jules and his friend Liam. They had set up a tent on the lawn and were standing next to it looking at the stars with one of our telescopes. Still in his Old Carolina Barbeque uniform, Hugo was relaxing as Hugo often does—by playing the guitar. The babies were asleep when Claude, who the day before had returned to Ann Arbor to take his last final, pulled up in the Matrix. I called out to him as he walked into the backyard, surrounded by the boys and dogs, and told him to grab a beer and join us on the veranda. After he’d joined us, I asked Claude how he feels now that he’s completed first year of college. “I feel a lot less anxious about things and, you know what? I am really glad I’m at Michigan, it’s a great school.”
Jules and his serviceberry bush
Our lives at Whoopsie Piggle, the name of our home as much as this blog, continues to shape us just as we shape it. Our budding naturalist, Jules, has been eager to transform our yard and gardens to attract a variety of birds using native plant species. Max is his willing cohort in this venture and last fall they found a beautiful serviceberry bush on sale at a local nursery and Jules contributed $30 of his own money towards its purchase. It is now blooming and we are all eager to replace more non-native species with serviceberry bushes, spicebushes and red buds. But it is primarily Jules and Max who plot out and execute their now mutual dream of having a sustainable garden filled with native species, mirroring their own relationship in which stepson and stepfather are no longer foreign to one another but belong to each other as families can.
I enjoy being able to help in the garden this year with Lyra often nearby on a blanket. Leif, who turned three in February, already loves the yard where his dad built him a big sandbox last year. We had been trying to decide where to put a swing set that a friend has offered to us for the price of taking it out of her yard when then Hurricane Sandy took out two trees in the backyard. Using his new chain saw, Max is clearing the way to make our park-like yard even more kid friendly. With Claude home and helping, it won’t be long before we have our own playground.
Abiding Chaos
With Claude home, the large house is more full, but not entirely. We keep one bedroom as our guest bedroom. The plan is that one day it will be Lyra’s bedroom. With lavender walls and white trim it is a cozy room that is filled with afternoon sunshine and has its own bathroom where mid-century black and mauve glass tiles line the lower half of the walls. One friend in particular regularly comes over for dinner and stays late knowing she can sleep over in the guest suite. Early on, she stayed with us for a few months when she was between apartments.
Today we are awaiting the return of our friend, Nancy Wolf. Several years ago, Nancy left Akron to move to California where she followed some of her dreams. Now she is returning because her grandchildren are here, one of whom was born last December. While she resettles in our little city, Nancy and her two Labrador Retrievers will be staying with us. Will it make things a little more chaotic? Perhaps. But Nancy has stayed with us many times over the years when she’s journeyed back to Ohio. My kids love her. Just as important, I think, is to shake up the status quo and expose my children to other adults with whom they have different conversations than they do with us and also different from the conversations they have with adults who don’t live with us. There are as many ways to live life as there are people living it. Many of my choices in life may not be those my children are interested in for themselves. I’d be surprised if they were.
Nancy reads Whoopsie Piggle and often makes comments. After she read “What We Keep” she quickly sent me an email politely asking if we could hold off on shedding any more furniture until she returned. Truly able to let go of possessions, Nancy got rid of almost everything she owned when she left California last month, just as she had when she moved out there seven years ago.
The past nine months have not been without struggle as we learn to manage a family of five children with an eighteen year spread. Now we are upping that ante for a time while our friend and her dogs stay with us. But when she leaves, she’ll clear out most of the furniture and extra housewares stored in our back garage.
If we’re lucky, that is.
It Could Be Worse
All of this reminds me of a joke. There was a woman who lived in a small house in a shtetl. The woman was happy with her life until her widowed mother-in-law moved in with her and her husband. The mother-in-law had endless notions on how the woman could keep the house cleaner, make the meals tastier, teach the children better, and so on. Frustrated, the woman went to her rabbi and told him how her mother-in-law was making her life miserable. “Go home and move the cow into the house,” he told her and she did.
A week later, the woman went back to the rabbi, more frustrated than ever. Her mother-in-law was still unabashed in her running commentaries and now the cow was making it impossible to get around the small house. “Go home and bring your chickens into the house,” he told her and she did.
A week later, she again returned to the rabbi, at her wits end. “Go home and bring the goose into the house,” he told her and she did.
Days later, she came tearfully to the rabbi, telling him she couldn’t take it any longer, life at her home made her despair and she didn’t know if she could face another day. “Go home and move all the animals out of your house,” he told her and she did.
When the rabbi stopped by the woman’s house the following week, he asked her how she was doing. “I have never been happier,” she told the rabbi, “ever since you had me move the animals out of the house, my life has been so easy!” The woman made no mention of her mother-in-law who was sitting in the corner audibly complaining about anything she could.
Whoopsie Piggle 