August 30, 2022

 

With monsoon season this year it continued to be very hot in the daylight hours and we are always grateful that it cools down at night. We have had several crashing storms with thunder and lightning putting on a show and sudden great cloudbursts yielding large amounts of water. Rain gauges throughout our village indicate a huge variety in the amount that has been received.

The grasshoppers come with the hot days and our gardens are feeling the effects of their ravenous appetites. A hopper full of harvested grain is bound to collect a goodly share of grasshoppers caught up as the headers sweep up the kernels of grain.

Kurt and Margret Iverson and their sons, Andrew and Conner, have recently returned from a trip to some of their ancestral lands in Norway. The summer months are the perfect time for this visit, both in scenery and temperature. They did get rained out of a couple of intended hikes, but were able to find other venues. On one of their hikes they met someone who knew Margret’s niece when she had visited Norway in 2013. How likely is that? The scenery was report as “fantastic” and the family reported saying, “Hey, look, there is another postcard” repeatedly, to collect for memories now back in Mink Creek. The Iverson tried some new sausages, these made from reindeer, whale and moose. It is nice to have them back home.

Max Haws and his family have been at the Haws residence in Mink Creek. This Haws family live in southern California and quite often will bring with them a large box of avocados harvested from their home to share with the Mink Creek community. They did so this year and it was much appreciated.

The young men of the village gave some assistance to the family of Robbie and Taniesha Greene in the building of a shed on their property. Extra hands make the task more possible and those young helpers learn as they are doing. The basic frame went up in just one evening’s efforts. Leader Bret Rasmussen has considerable building experience to direct this project.

Just as we were thinking that the Fall season was close we are enduring another week of blistering days.  It makes our gardens grateful for any drink we can provide, providing the plants have survived the onslaught of grasshoppers that have descended upon us this year.  There are still some chokecherries reported as being available for those wanting that jelly or syrup.  Chokecherries were high on the list of fall preservation in the early days of Mink Creek.  The settlers even dried them for winter use--true fact.