Doctor Grandma

I was trying to think of something to write about, & decided to add updates to the changing seasons in South Carolina. 🙂  Quite a difference from that in Indiana.

So now it is Fall. It feels different than when it did a month ago, but I wonder if most of that different feeling is tied up in our change in schedules. Children now walk to school each weekday morning and are not around during the day, in the neighborhood. They are busier. They don’t hang out as much in the picnic table area near our house.

There are not as many people in the neighborhood pool, though it is still open! We haven’t been swimming ourselves for probably 2 weeks. The evenings are cooler, getting down into the 60s. There isn’t that hot & humid feeling in the air, in the evenings, anymore.

I am busier as well. Later today I need to finish grading some assignments and tweek a power point for this week. This weekend I slept in luxuriously, but that is no longer an option during the week.

There is no sense of the trees changing yet. We do see that here, but it will occur much later. Daytime temps. still reach 90 but go no higher than that, if they do get there. More likely in the 80s. SC and IN temps. are actually very similar right now.

and that’s early, early Fall in SC, mid-September.

* Added note: We have learned that our pond was created by damming Bear Creek, hence the name of our neighborhood “. . .  at Bear Creek”. The reason we don’t have mosquitos is they load minnows which feed on mosquitos, into the pond, when needed. As the minnows grow too large and eat other things, they add more minnows. We also have dragonflies. All very natural to curb the mosquito population –nice! I guess the frog population then suffered and dwindled, since tadpoles also eat mosquitos & there weren’t enough for them. So the frog singing population has diminished drastically. There are many turtles, & they also added carp to eat the grass & clean the pond. The carp are huge. There are some large catfish, but all fish caught are supp. to be thrown back into the pond. They are talking about adding some sort of oxygen-spraying fountain, underneath, to clean the water more, in the future.

I will miss my 3-mi. walks in the late evening, at this house. The walk goes to the end of a dead-end street. The smell of pines is heavenly. There are other fragrant flowers that look like white lilacs, along the way. We sometimes see deer. I saw 2 very large, soaring hawks the other night. They circled and landed among the telephone pole wires, then let out a piercing hawk call. It is just very peaceful, especially as the sun goes down, cicadas loudly singing. It takes me about 40 mins.

Al and I have started taking a 3-mile walk every night, usually just before the sun goes down. We walk to the end of the road in front of our house, which ends in a dead end. Along the way this time of year, cicadas are making their loud calling, we see and hear different kinds of birds, and sometimes, something else happens.

Tonight I saw and heard movement in the thick woods on the side of the road. We walked on. On the way back, I saw an animal cross the road far ahead. It looked like either a large dog, or a small deer. Getting closer, we saw it again, peering out, about to cross the road. It was a small fawn. Just large enough not to be spotted. We were too far away to see it closely, but we saw it.

In today’s state newspaper, there was a story of a small black bear being spotted in someone’s back yard, in the county SOUTH of here. With all the forest and woods around us, I’m sure it could be in our back yard next time.

The beauty of South Carolina is breath taking. It always strikes me as odd that this was one of the 1st colonies of the country, and yet it is nearly all undeveloped. Forests abound everywhere. It is a state of small towns, most of them having an ice cream place, a pizza parlor, and maybe a few others stores, plus all claiming a “historic downtown area”. Across the street from our house I have seen a group of 5 deer running together. Seeing a deer cross the road is now almost commonplace. I never saw a deer until about 5 years ago, but down here they are common.

The pines are everywhere. Driving from one town to another is to pass acres and acres of untouched pines and forest. Flowering trees start in Feb./March. There are now apples turning red on the trees in our front yard, and it is mid-June. At a farmer’s market we were told they would have corn starting next week! In Indiana we always had a saying for growing corn: “Knee-high by the 4th of July”. Here, it is done and grown and being sold by the end of June.