St. Luke's Summer Sadness

Today is the Full Hunters Moon & the Feast of St. Luke.

David E. Ross Memorial Garden,
just west of Slayter Hill ~ Purdue
"This is St. Luke's summer, or the 'Indian summer' as it is called in America. The air is soft and warm and still. The yellow leaves fall from the Beeches in countless numbers, but slowly and noiselessly, and as if reluctant to let go their hold. The rooks come back to us again across the fields, and clamour among the empty nests, which were their homes in spring. The 'remontant' Roses are putting out their latest blooms, and the Antirrhinums, Mulleins, and some few other flowers, show themselves 'remontant' also. There is an aromatic fragrance everywhere from the withering leaves and from the lingering flowers.

But there is sadness with it all. We cannot deceive ourselves, but we know that all is now over, and that at any moment the frost may come, and leave us nothing but decay and death."

~ 15 October 1874, emphasis added ~
from A Year in a Lancashire Garden
by Henry A. Bright

"The sadness of autumn is in the air, the smell of woodsmoke and earth and things long-forgotten. Over our heads the first skein of geese (the souls of the dead) scissor through the air, heading for their winter home, north of Boscrambe Woods, the creaking noise they make engenders a fit of melancholy in both of us. The Dog lifts its head, watching them make their black wingprints across the sky and gives a sad little whine. 'Here comes winter,' Audrey says."

~ p 131, emphasis added ~
from the novel Human Croquet
by Kate Atkinson
(see more on my book blog)
The Hunters Moon

The Cosmic Task of Cats

Little Beaumont, working very, very hard!
"Why do cats sleep so much?
Perhaps they've been trusted with some major cosmic task, an essential law of physics -- such as: if there are less than five million cats sleeping at any one time the world will stop spinning. So that when you look at them and think,
what a lazy, good - for - nothing animal,

they are, in fact, working very, very hard."
~ from the novel Human Croquet (135)
by Kate Atkinson, b. 1951
English novelist
I am also reminded of Eleanor Farjeon's clever little poem, which has been illustrated as a children's book many times:

Cats Sleep Anywhere
Cats sleep anywhere, any table, any chair.
Top of piano, window-ledge, in the middle, on the edge.
Open drawer, empty shoe, anybody's lap will do.
Fitted in a cardboard box, in the cupboard with your frocks.
Anywhere! They don't care! Cats sleep anywhere.

Eleanor Farjeon, 1881 - 1965
English children's author

Farjeon also wrote the lyrics to "Morning Has Broken," way back before Cat Stevens made them famous (click here to hear).

For my favorite Farjeon passage,
check out: "The Precious Firstlings"

Basket Cats

Beaumont

Fuqua

Pine

We'll Eat You Up -- We Love You So!

A Touching Obituary,
especially the little boy who eats up what he loves!
My favorite line in Where the Wild Things Are has always been when the Wild Things cry out upon Max's departure, "Oh please don't go -- we'll eat you up -- we love you so!"

I grew to understand my love for it even more when reading Joseph Campbell's Myths to Live By, I came across an archetypal explanation for the human impulse to love and devour:

" . . . an ancient Zoroastrian legend of the first parents of the human race, where they are pictured as having sprung from the earth in the from of a single reed, so closely joined that they could not have been told apart. However, in time they separated; and again in them they united and there were born to them two children, whom they loved so tenderly and irresistible that they ate them up. The mother ate one; the father ate the other; and god, to protect the human race, then reduced the force of man's capacity for love by some ninety-nine per cent" (153 - 54).

So if it seems that we human beings are stinted in our capacity for love, now we know that, ironically, it's because our tendency to love each other is so overwhelming that it must be reigned in by the gods.

Maybe this also explains why we can't resist calling our children things like, "Honey Bun" and "Sweetie Pie" -- or to name a couple of favorites in our family: "Pie - Cake" and "Kielbasa." These endearments persisted until our younger son Sam finally objected: "Don't Call Me the Food Names!" A line that we quote to this day with great enjoyment -- not that we have ever stopped calling the children by the food names! Old habits die hard, particularly those with a sound theoretical basis!

Maurice Sendak,
thanks for sending the Wild Things to eat us up!
We love them so!
We'll miss you so!

Cartoon by Dan Wasserman
P.S. Another example:

"Eliza picked Isobel up from the counter and started nibbling her ear. Why, Vinny wondered, was Eliza always trying to eat bits of her children? What a tasty little morsel, Eliza murmured in Isobel's ear while Vinny patted butter aggressively, imagining it was Eliza's head. If Eliza wasn't careful, Vinny thought, she'd look around one day and discover that she'd eaten them all up."

from the novel Human Croquet (109)

"How's my treasure? . . . He's edible, don't you think?" (p 78)

from the novel When Will There Be Good News?

both by Kate Atkinson, b. 1951
English novelist