Well, all of my calendars tell me that Sept. 22 was the beginning of fall. The high temperature here on the farm was 97 degrees and hot enough to melt the ice cream truck.
By this time of year, sometimes at this time of the year, we wake up to cool temperatures and as I step out onto our back porch about 6 a.m., I feel a flush of cooler fresh air. But here lately, all I feel is the oppressing heat left over from yesterday. I have to step back inside to the coolness of forced cool blowing from air conditioner vents just to drink my dark roast elixir.
When we bought some of the acreage of our farm, the family who sold it to us said, “This strip right through here is in a dry belt, very dry.” As he was no meteorologist, we took his skepticism as it was “all talk.” Now we take it all back. For the past several years, we have been like the dust bowl of the 1930s. The grasses of the pasturelands crunch as the cows meander over the brown grazing fields.
As I thought about this predicament, I pondered which of our pastures had the greenest grasses and I found my thoughts not going to the south pasture, nor to the north, east or west, but to the named pieces of land we have bought and pieced together for this farm acreage.
When we began to buy the land around our little log house, there were five parcels of land and they each came up for sale at different periods of time. As we bought, they were added into the whole. Just for the sake of names, let’s just say that the added acres belonged to the Whites, Reds, Greens, Blacks and Browns.
When we need some type of work done on one of these places, we never say, “We need to fix the fence on the South parcel.” We say, “The fence is down on the White Place.” Or “The cows need moving on the Green Place.” Never the east acreage. At the time we acquired the added land, it was forever named the same as the previous owner from whom we bought the land. It will never through the years be changed to another name.
This brings me to another comical thought. Should I call my first-born Number One or First, and the second one Middle or Number Two, or my last, Three? I actually did know a family when I was growing up who had 18 children and by the time the last one came along, they had run out of names, so they called him “Eighteen.”
PUMPKIN SPICE LOAF
1 package of yellow cake mix
1 T. pumpkin pie spice
1 regular can of pumpkin puree
1 cup of semi-sweet chocolate morsels.
Mix cake mix with the spice and add in the pumpkin puree. It will be really thick. Add in chocolate morsels and mix again, careful to mix in until there is no dry cake mix and divide into two loaf pans and bake at 350 degrees for 30-35 minutes. I added just a dripping of cream cheese frosting. I, of course, froze one of the loaves for later.
