2024 Life Logs, Day 295: Sunny and 70
Date: Tuesday, October 22, 2024
Weather: Sunny; High Temp 71, Low 55 degrees F
Location: At Home on Lakeview Avenue, Falmouth, MA
When I was a kid and there was a wonderful warm period in the fall, we called it Indian Summer. That term is no longer encouraged, seen as disrespectful of Native American people. The term Second Summer is preferable. Today the thermometer reached 70 degrees and it felt like those times in the fall when I was going up that we called Indian Summer. It made me wonder what the definition of Indian Summer was when I was growing up and why it was called that in the first place. What I found out is that a weather phase had to have 3 characteristics to be called Indian Summer. It had to sunny, it had to unseasonably dry and warm, and it had to follow the first killing frost of the season and usually a rainy period. It was also often hazy. Well, we haven’t had the first killing frost and it isn’t hazy, but it was sunny, dry, and warm yesterday and today. I’ll take that as a little Second Summer and hope that we have a third and a fourth and even a fifth! As to the origin of the Indian Summer label, there is no agreement. “The first recorded use of the term was in 1778 in a letter by French-American soldier and farmer J. H. St. John de Crèvecoeur, also known as Michel-Guillaume-Jean de Crèvecoeur. He wrote that sometimes the rain was followed by an interval of calm and warm which he said was called the Indian summer.”
I started this lovely day by taking a morning walk with Shadow. We had another coyote encounter just up the street. I didn’t see the critter, but Shadow did. He or she was crossing the street coming toward us when Shadow turned in that direction and went into his very loud ‘get outta here coyote’ barking fit. It worked and the coyote ran, but I am not liking these close encounters. When we got home, I had to deal with another issue in my sister’s life. After phone calls and emails, I put that aside for today and I prepared a fall salad for my Lunch-In at noon. It was a small group, but all of the food was delicious. After the luncheon, I stopped by Heather and Jed’s to check in on the boys. This was an Early Release Day from school. Sam and Jonah are fine on their own, but I like to make sure Ollie isn’t alone all afternoon. He had been biking with friends, but they went home to play on the Xbox. He eventually hooked up with them through Xbox and played with them that way. Then they went biking again. I just hung out and spent the time reading. I left for a bit to take Shadow out for a pee break and when I returned it was time to take Ollie to his private sax lesson. That was it for a day in this life.
