First frost

It frosted yesterday. Melon leaves are wilted. 

A melon field looks its worst the morning after the first frost.

By October I am ready for summer's end. It has been over 50 years since I have been in school, but the first cool mornings always signal the same thing to me, the switch from farm to school, from being outside to being inside. I miss the school bells.

I still grow a few melons to eat and give away, but most of my attention has moved to the eight acres of grape vines I planted on the pumice-soil portion of my farm. My 60 acres are a piece of the 180 acres my great-grandfather, a veteran of the Union Army, purchased in 1883. I am installing propane-powered wind machines that stir up the air on mornings when temperatures drop into inconveniently-timed frosts. In the spring, frosts might damage new buds. In fall early frosts can damage grapes before they are ready to harvest. Cold air drifts down off the two Table Rocks on its way to the Rogue River and settles on the ground at my farm. My farm is a "cold" one, meaning it gets frosts when other places, those alongside slopes where the cold air drifts off, do not.

Cold air is heavier than warm air, so sometimes frosty air is just hugging the ground and warmer air is above it. Those are "inversions," which we often get in this area. The propellers mix the cold ground air with the warmer air above it. Sometime it is simply cold all the way up and the machines don’t prevent damage. Wind machines are an imperfect solution to frost control.

The first frost is the real two-way-facing symbol in my life, not the Janus that gives the name to January and the new year. The first frost brings me memories of this time, August 1967, a few weeks before I left for college. This is the "before" moment, when it is still summer.

I am on the right. My father is next to me. My brother, David, holds the watermelons. Two cousins visiting from Syracuse, New York, are on the left. 

The "after" moment takes place primarily indoors, in classrooms, libraries, and then, in my adulthood, in offices wearing suits and ties. This photo was taken six weeks after the one above. I was in between classes, standing on Massachusetts Avenue in front of a tobacco shop, and a newspaper reporter asked me about the Vietnam Moratorium.

In previous decades October represented something new, open-ended, and generally very good in my mind. Whether in school, in government, or as a financial advisor, somehow I was part of a generation that was going to change the world and fix everything.

This October is different. It contains an element of dread. My fellow countrymen may well pick Trump to be their leader. Even if they don't, Trump is already claiming the election would be rigged against him, that the media was unfair to him so that voids the election, and that voting fraud will have taken place in whatever places he lost. I see no chance that Trump will concede an election defeat. I expect that Fox News, Republican officeholders, and a great many of my neighbors to echo Trump. They will claim victory, and stick to the story. It almost worked in 2020. The wrath of GOP voters will descend on anyone who hesitates to agree. Fox lost audience when they reported in 2020 that Arizona voted for Biden. It won't make that mistake again. Republican officeholders saw what happened to Mike Pence, Liz Cheney, Mitt Romney, and the others. Politically, the nation is heading into a storm however it turns out.

But on the farm, things are quiet. That system is working as it should. The melons are dead. The leaves will start falling off the grapes and the plants will go dormant for a few months. 

It's all okay.