Depending on your point of view there’s no better time of the year than right now, but of course, that’s arguable…like just about anything else you can name.
This is a good time. In my view for most of my adult life…the best time of the year.
Sports-wise, you have the culmination of the pennant races in baseball, plus the newness of another football season. In the span of a week I got to see the Cubs’ Alec Mills pitch a no-hitter; and last Thursday night I got to see Fort Loramie’s Logan Eilerman have the game of his young football life by racking up 197 receiving yards in an impressive win over Covington. 197 yards is a BIG night…in any league!
In the old days I would have offered that the presidential races were an exciting time for people’s consideration, but not anymore. Now they’re a literal beatdown of your patience and respect for the process – even appreciation for the office itself. We don’t get the best people running for president anymore, or for the right reasons. And that’s painfully obvious.
But in a sensory regard I can make a large personal case for the fall season being the best time of the year. The air turned crisp over the weekend as the temperatures dropped. Tuesday is the first official day of fall. Except for the masks football both looked and felt like football on Friday night. I never like to see officials wearing shorts…or referee John Derryberry’s tattoo!
Food tastes better with the fall solstice. Made the first chili of the season on Saturday, and enough to last most of the week. Chili being chili, it’s gets better every time you heat it up. Mine is an interesting recipe that I got a few years ago from a friend who literally lives on the Gettysburg battlefield. Judy Schultz calls it “battlefield chili”, with a lot of the traditional ingredients – ground beef, onions, peppers, and beans. But Judy finishes hers by adding a couple pounds of polska kielbasa, for a bit of a smokey, sweet taste, and I highly recommend it.
I cranked up the wood stove in my den over the weekend, fueled by a fresh pile of seasoned red oak, courtesy of friend and supplier Charlie Dye. I don’t cut my own firewood anymore, and Charlie gladly fills that bill. Saturday morning I toasted the sunrise with that intoxicating smell of wood smoke as a swirling breeze fumed the entire neighborhood. There is no aroma like it, or comfort like that which comes from burning wood.
Of course it’s not that cold right now and a light fire is all you need. But regardless of how cold it is, it always smells the same, and when it’s comfortable enough to stand outside and breathe it in…that’s an added bonus. I wouldn’t do it when it’s zero.
Who can argue, right? (Laughing) Wrong!
Four weeks into the high school football season we still got an email this week from a reader saying that the health risks to innocent people negate the need, or benefits, of teenage boys playing football.
And you know that any talk of the presidential race is a fight waiting to happen – fueled even higher this weekend by the prospect of adding a replacement Supreme Court judge before the election to replace the seat vacated by the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
And even the sensory aspect of seasonal change is subject to argument.
Last February I wrote a weekend column on the process of burning wood to heat the house…and within days I had a response from a reader in Dayton arguing that wood is not a renewable resource, like I claimed, citing some statistic from the internet about the diminishing number of trees over the past half century, the increasing amount of carbon dioxide in the environment as the rain forests continue to decline. She added…that if I were more conscienable I would heat with green energy.
But I’m not that conscientious, and there’s no statistic anywhere that can justify not cutting and splitting trees that are already dead and down.
The point is, I guess, that there’s really nothing that people aren’t willing to bitch about anymore – nothing sacred for the sake of a cause. You gotta’ have a cause!
Politics? I get that. It’s always been a fist fight.
I like to hunt, and I plan on going West to pheasant hunt at least twice this year, knowing that someone will write to tell me that I don’t need to kill to eat…when I can go to Kroger and get something that someone else has already killed.
And I’m sure I haven’t heard the last of…”They have the rest of their lives to play football.”
I’m just saying…there’s nothing you can name that doesn’t offend at least someone anymore. But personally I’m comforted in knowing that that’s just the way we like it. It seems to work.
Have a happy season of ‘unhappiness’.
