I have embraced some of the sillier “holidays” in The Old Farmers’ Almanac‘s calendar. Today, they say, is National Blueberry Muffin Day. I have no idea where they get these things. Perhaps this is a nod to King Arthur Baking, which is almost as venerable a New England tradition as the Almanac.
National Blueberry Muffin Day is just my kind of thing, though I would be more catholic and include all the berries. The middle of July might see blueberries in some places, but it’s not likely. Where it is cold enough for proper chill times and properly acidic soil, conditions necessary for blueberry growth and fruiting, it is generally not deep enough into the blueberry growing season. Around my house, the blueberries are only now putting out the hard little buds that will become flowers in a week or so. Blue berries won’t show up until August this year.
However, I have a second flush of strawberries from the ever-bearing varieties and I’ve been able to pick some of those. I also have a glut of black raspberries. (It’s always a glut… except when it’s nothing at all… no happy medium with raspberries.) And I think there will be currants soon, but I’ve not been paying that part of the garden much attention since other parts need so much from me right now. So there are berries. Lots of berries! And that’s just here on my little plot of urban homestead.
So I ran out of happy vibes and just couldn’t finish up this post…
I am writing this at 8pm on 10 July. Guess what is happening… one year to the day… We’re having another 100-year flood. This time from Beryl. My son’s town is being evacuated, but they are closing roads so fast he doesn’t know how to get out. My garage has three inches of water purely because the drain pipe can’t keep up with the flow. There isn’t much coming into the basement yet, but this is supposed to keep going all night. There are tornados all around and sirens and Main Street is apparently closed because all the traffic is being diverted up to my street.
This morning’s paper was a retrospective, talking about the homes and businesses that still haven’t recovered from last year. Whole neighborhoods on the north end of my town are flood recovery buy-out ghost towns still. We’re still opening business flood loans at work because it has taken this long to creep through the insurance maze and tally up what was lost — and then figure out what to do next. There are roads that hadn’t yet made it onto the repair list. The one in front of my office ends about 100 meters away from our building — in a sink hole that took out the entire road.
That a flood-producing storm would hit exactly here in exactly a year’s time is unfathomable… yet here we are…
©Elizabeth Anker 2024
By My Solitary Hearth 