Lilacs don’t know it’s autumn

It’s a constant, low hum in the night, one that arrives about this time every year, one that I find annoying. It’s harvest season and somewhere out here in the near distance, a corn dryer operates, overpowering the silence I crave. As I understand it, when corn is picked, the kernels contain somewhere between 20-30% moisture and this needs to be reduced to something closer to 15%. If kept at the higher moisture content the corn will mold and rot when stored, whereas at the lower percentage, the grain can be piled and kept for long periods of time without spoiling. And that is your agriculture lesson for the day, my friends. I hope it’s accurate.

It has been an odd autumn. We’re well into October and my lilac bushes are blooming. Evidently a lilac response to monthslong stress is to bloom. It puts me in mind of a wonderful, sad poem by Walt Whitman, written after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln called, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” The speaker in the poem watches Lincoln’s funeral train pass and says, “Here, coffin that slowly passes, I give you my sprig of lilac.” There may be a lesson here: when under stress, learn to bloom, and announce to the world that you are alive and well, that you have once again, as poet Billy Collins wrote, “sidestepped the flame of death.”

The walnuts have finally finished falling. I have raked many buckets of the things off my drive, and sometimes I just drive over them with my car, the crushing sounding like small arms gunfire in the distance. For a few weeks I’d open a side door in the morning, heading to town or somewhere and a dozen or so crows would take off from the drive where they were picking through the crushed walnuts. Who knew that crows enjoyed walnuts?

This is a tough time of year for the wild creatures out here, and pretty much every time I travel the two-lane to the northeast of my place I encounter new deaths on the road, raccoons, opossums, feral cats, skunks, deer and, a few months back, an American bald eagle. I see them up ahead and I pray it’s something that has been discarded or carelessly fallen from some conveyance or other, but no. I wish that I could gather them all up in the spring, when life is new, and warn them of the dangers of crossing roads. But, alas.

More plant talk. A couple of decades ago a court attendant in a courthouse where my wife was the presiding judge gave her a small clump of plume grass, which she dutifully planted about 25 feet from the house, not expecting much of anything to happen. Some of you may know the rest of the story. The grass spreads quickly and has since taken over the side yard, which I don’t mind, especially this time of year. Just as the sun begins its descent beyond the western horizon its light settles on the plume grass, illuminating it like hundreds of sparklers just before dusk arrives. It’s a beautiful thing.

Speaking of heading to town. I was doing so a couple of days ago and Frank Sinatra came on the radio, singing a slow and languorous song, originally a French tune with lyrics later added by Johnny Mercer. You all know it, “Autumn Leaves.” Pianist Roger Williams, who grew up in Des Moines, recorded the piece in 1955 and it went on to become #1 on Billboard’s popular music chart. To my knowledge Sinatra’s version didn’t hit the charts, but, because he’s Sinatra it’s quite moving and it reflects my own autumnal feelings, especially when he sings, “But I miss you most of all, my darling, when autumn leaves start to fall.”

Kurt Ullrich lives in rural Jackson County. The Dubuque Telegraph Herald has published a 60-page magazine of Kurt’s columns. The magazine can be purchased here