" I QUIT!" says one of our cucumber plants.
"Me too!" say the others. The leaves turn brown, the stalks dry out and half-formed cucumbers turn yellow on the vine.
"I’m thinking of quitting too," says a tomato plant, and all the others murmur assent, with a chorus of peppers joining in.
"I can fly!" exclaims a maple leaf, and it leaps from the top of a 50-foot tree, joining a few dozen redbud leaves already claiming space on the grass. Tragic.
"Food!" shouts a bee and zooms in to check out the dinner my beloved wife, Marsha, and I are enjoying on the porch. Soon, 27 of the bee’s cousins are attending the party. We hastily gather our dishes and run inside to the dining room table to finish our meal.
"I think I’ll go south for the winter," says our thermometer as it plunges 10 degrees.
"Me too," says a hummingbird lapping sugar water from the feeder. It flies off at 50 beats per second.
"Time to flex my muscles," says our hibernating furnace, and soon the house is filled with the smell of a summer’s worth of burning dust from the beast.
Experiencing one season merge into another is one of the many joys of living in a temperate climate.
Some people complain about things like snow, ice and cold. About heat, humidity and sunburn. About leaf raking and garden spading and grass mowing.
I love the seasons. In my world, the only valid complaints are about heat, sunshine and blue jeans. I ignore the rest.
"Blue jeans," you ask? "What about blue jeans?"
Ask my wife, Marsha, who does 87.3% of the laundry in our household.
All summer long, the hamper fills with sweaty T-shirts and shorts.
No socks — we wear sandals.
No long pants.
No long-sleeved shirts.
No blue jeans.
Then, autumn sneaks in, and it gets colder.
Now the poor hamper is groaning as it is stuffed with sweatshirts and socks .
The worst, however, is blue jeans.
The washing machine and dryer groan along with the hamper.
Marsha, being the sweet person she is, never complains. The chair in my bedroom receives stacks of neatly folded clothes every few days, and I dutifully put them away.
The "neatly folded" part is what restricts my laundry chores to 12.7%. I am incapable of neatly folding anything except a road map, and who uses road maps anymore?
Marsha is one of those rare people who can neatly fold a fitted sheet, so a few T-shirts and shorts are, for her, a simple task.
As autumn moves to winter and I finish my yard work — mowing, raking, pruning, cleaning out the vegetable garden, putting away hoses and planters and porch furniture, with help from my friend Justin — my time demands ease until snow starts to fall.
I read more books. I do more writing and woodworking. Marsha does more laundry.
Of all the laundry, what takes the most space? Blue jeans.
She never wears them. The blue jeans are mine.
They are the only flaw in the entire process of changing seasons. That and the return to rock-hard, store-bought tomatoes.
Jim Whitehouse lives in Albion.
The Link LonkSeptember 28, 2020 at 01:59AM
https://www.hillsdale.net/opinion/20200927/looking-out-signs-of-autumn-cooler-temps-falling-leaves-heavier-laundry
Looking Out: Signs of autumn: cooler temps, falling leaves, heavier laundry - The Hillsdale Daily News
https://news.google.com/search?q=Laundry&hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US:en
