The Mountain Eagle
WHITESBURG WEATHER

Warm spell not unusual

Points East



The old timers, when I was growing up, called the weather we’ve had here all over Kentucky for much of the past week, “Indian summer”.

Hard-core environmentalists call it global warming but the truth of the matter is that we have yet to break a daytime high temperature record for November according to records that go back more than a hundred years.

This is not the first little warm spell we’ve had in November, even in recent years. I don’t have time to fool around with statistics here, but this weather is only unusual due to the fact that our attention is being called to it by the naysayers.

Wait till the winter commences and spring sets in and then let’s swap notes. (This does not apply to Wind Gap, Penn., where my retired pal, Fred Beste, is paying close attention.)

But warm, it was, last weekend, here in the Garrard County valleys where the creeks ultimately drain into the Dix and Kentucky Rivers and the streams are clogged with leaves of sycamore, birch, elm, oak, walnut and a dozen other species of hardwood forest trees.

Short shirtsleeve weather. Sort of like, one hopes, heaven will look and feel like if we ever get there. Warm and windy and aromatic and soothing to the soul. The ultimate definition of autumn.

Loretta and I met up with newfound friends, Grant Robinson and Mac McIntosh there at the Garrard County Extension Service Office last Sunday and we hurried down Highway 39 to Crab Orchard, hung a right on 39 just after it joins 150 and heads southwest toward Somerset.

Umm. Autumn on both sides of the road and on the horizon. Garden patches of greens, turnips, cabbage and broccoli and name your favorite cole crop. Kale and mustard flourishing in gardens right beside the road.

Brummet’s Orchard was the destination. There, about six miles or so from downtown Crab Orchard out on 39 below the frost line, is where Francis and Rovena Brummet have long cultivated an orchard of some 1,700 trees.

Peaches in season come July, pears in mid September, and apples almost year round. Potatoes grown there on the farm, and are sold unwashed, untreated and just the way you like them if they have any left.

I’ve never asked the Brummets how old they are. But I do know that they celebrated their 64th wedding anniversary back in April and that’s close enough. So when I go see them, it’s sort of like visiting Mom and Dad because they treat me like a son and I feel warm all over. And I feel guilty that I’m not there far more often.

And so we filled baskets full of fruit at a pittance of the price you’d pay at any produce store and headed back home and Loretta said to me, “We have to get the Brummets something nice for Christmas,” and I asked, “What do you have in mind?” And she fell silent. Then she said, “something that spells love and lets them know we mean it as much as the love that they show to us.”

So we are working on that now. Probably impossible, but we are working on it.

In the meantime if you are looking for apples at bargain prices, stop by the Brummets’s on Highway 39 there outside Crab Orchard. But call before you make the trip because supplies are running low and you never know what might be in stock.


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