Opinion: Weather has been great, but list of outdoor chores beckons

Talk about it

This has not been an October for complaints.

I’m like every other South Dakotan, I suppose. I really enjoy fall weather, but I usually find myself thinking things turned way too quickly from summer to winter. This year, while I still cringe at the cold weather that’s starting to show itself, I really can’t gripe much about the first 23 or 24 days of October, or the last few days of September, for that matter.

With the run of crazy weather events that have marked calendar year 2010 (starting late in 2009 with a blizzard that shut down the entire state for Christmas), I had some doubts when a meteorologist I know and respect told me the first part of October (“The first two weeks or so for sure”) would be dry and mild. What in the ice storms and Good Friday blizzards and tornadoes and flooding and torrential rains of the first nine months of the year would give me reason to doubt a forecast of nice weather, do you suppose?

Some years, many years in South Dakota, a long dry spell in the fall is the last thing the state needs. Many times in my memory, folks would be begging for even a half-inch of rain before winter. This year, a lot of people just wanted a stretch of good days to get their crops out of the fields. Judging from the heaping piles of grain at the roadside elevators along Highway 14 when Nancy and I drove back from Hobo Day last weekend, a whole lot of people got a significant chunk of their crop out of the field.

Nancy and I took advantage of the weather to get at a few overdue chores around the house. When you live in a building that is more than a century old, there’s always something that needs fixing, replacing, painting or caulking. Those jobs are called chores for a reason.

It doesn’t improve my general feeling about them when, just as I’m about to begin painting the porch pillars and railing, I open a piece of chocolate and find printed on the inside of the wrapper, “Life is not one big todo list.” Life isn’t that, of course, but when the bases on a couple of the 100-year-old pillars on your porch are rotting away, life isn’t simply an afternoon on the porch swing, either.

The thing is, wood pillars rot for a reason. When you look for the reason and find a leak in your porch roof, the to-do list that is not life grows a little longer: 1) Fix the leaky roof. 2) Replace the bases on the pillars. 3) Prime and paint the new wood.

That isn’t such a daunting list that a person won’t still have time to enjoy autumn, at least not until you prime and paint the new wood and see how drab the rest of the porch looks by comparison. So, the entire porch needed painting, which meant a good deal of it needed scraping and priming. Out of orneriness, I refused to put those tasks on a to-do list. I’ve always been such a rebel. Eat your heart out, James Dean.

Taking a day off and painting the porch turned out to be fun. Nancy and I scraped things down over a few evenings, and she did the priming. I lucked out and got a warm day with just enough breeze to move the wasps around but not enough to push leaves and lint into the fresh paint. It took an entire day, but it’s finished.

That was late in September. October followed, bringing just about the best weather you’ll ever find for wandering out onto a newly painted porch at sundown or just before sunrise to pause and ponder the change of seasons. I really should do that more often.

The last time I was out, though, I noticed that the eaves really need to be cleaned out. That’s on my to-do-list that isn’t life, and I’ll get to it, just as soon as I’m sure the good weather is gone for the season.

Terry Woster’s columns are published Wednesdays and Saturdays in The Daily Republic.

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