Indian Summer
Luella Busch Archives, circa 1910
Last week's cold snap was only a tease for the fall to come. For at least the next few days it will be warm and dry, as if summer had never ended. My tomatoes are thriving although the Olsons down the block have already pulled up their plants—did they think they had gone past their freshness date, or were they just sick of eating tomatoes? I'll keep mine going, several dozen green ones are on the vines. I wait until there is a freeze predicted before I harvest. The red ones we eat or put into salsa, the green ones go in a box between newspapers stored in a cool place where they will slowly ripen. I check on them every few days and toss any bad ones. A surprising percentage will survive for several weeks, one year we had tomatoes until Thanksgiving!
4 Comments:-
Jono said...
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Professor Batty said...
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Anonymous said...
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Professor Batty said...
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Our tomatoes survived the first frost last week, but we are pressing our luck to let them go much longer. Being near the big lake buys us a little time.
The long term forecast for The Cities doesn't predict frost for another month - we might have tomatoes on the vine until Thanksgiving!
I read with interest your notes posted in connection with old surviving photographs you had discovered (eg the Luella Busch Archives). Here's a story to make anyone with even an iota of sentimentality and a sense of history feel their teeth going on edge. One of my uncles, born in 1909, was an accomplished amateur photographer and beginning in the late 1920s he took a great many photographs, printing them himself, and mounting them as 6x4s and occasionally 8x10s, all dated and with notations, in what became a life's work in a considerable pile of albums. He photographed beachfront scenes with their pedestrians, bathers, and the first cars parked on beach side roads now long gone, various parks about the city and the visitors of their time strolling, relaxing in the shade or playing games, the harbour with its trains and ships, city streets, buildings including early churches which have since disappeared under the hammer of so-called progress, family and Scandinavian community events such as weddings and parties, even funerals, recording the faces, places, joys and sometimes the sadness of what is now a bygone age. Before WW2 he photographed his experiences and his fellow soldiers in training, and during the war he captured scenes of both the tragedies and the high points of that terrible time. In later life he photographed the post war scene at home. When he died in 1965 I was away on a training course in another city and when I returned a few months later I discovered that his wife had burned all his albums and negatives, not out of any malice but because she thought they were just "remnants of his hobby". It was a jaw dropping and gopsmacking irreversible fact that instilled in me an almost mania for some time to collect and copy as many photos from my elderly relatives as possible and create a family tree which I have managed to get back to 1500. I feel sure that whoever the forgotten photographers may be who took the old pictures you sometimes post would be very pleased to know that their efforts have survived and can tell their stories, however mysterious, into another century.
-Gone South
Gone South ~ I empathize with you completely on this. Not that all old photos have value, but many do, especially those which have a cultural context or reflect on the human condition. Many of Luella Busch's pictures show the lighter side of people, which isn't always the case in old photos. I keep an eye out for old pictures, although usually I can't link them. The Frances Bruno postcards were an exception. I don't know how much other people get out of my little "stories", but I enjoy them. I may make a sidebar category for them…
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