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Autumn moons, nippy weather and coon hunting Reprinted from our Sept. 27–Oct. 3, 2013 issue
by HELEN LEDFORD Alas, lawn chair days in the sun (a glass of iced, sweet tea in hand) are swiftly passing. Katydids’ hind legs are sawing out their autumn rhapsodies, and monarch butterflies hover about tall milkweed plants to deposit their eggs. It’s time to find a sweater for the cool mornings and the noticeably less warm evenings. September’s full or harvest moon moved its magnificent golden orb through the nighttime sky on Sept. 20. Early Native Americans celebrating the end of summer harvest fittingly called it the “full corn moon.” Memories of shucking those golden ears by the wagonload, in moonlight bright as noonday, and picking peanuts off dried vines, are stuck in my brain. A yearly ritual (and a fun one), it was a routine part of farm work. It seemed not so tedious a task, out in the field underneath a big yellow
moon. Telling ghost stories and other yarns added to our pleasure, though all the way home to bed we looked behind us with a creepy feeling clutching at our shirttails. Sure was fun to stick a bread pan full of those fat peanuts in the oven and parch them – a tasty, crunchy and healthy fall treat! The late “Red” Clodfelter, an Oak Ridge native, shared stories about some of the past corn shuckings in our own once-sleepy hamlet on the Ridge. Those were events where you took your sweetheart and, according to Clodfelter, the first guy to find an ear of corn with a red cob got to kiss the prettiest girl. With a big grin, he vaguely alluded to the fact that often there was a jar of “white lightning” hidden in the bounty to be shucked. That made the local boys work with more zeal, while the girls watched daintily, pretending mock horror at the very thought of a container of “spirits” somewhere in that pile of corn.
With October also comes the beautiful hunter’s moon, which will occur on Oct. 20 this year; it is sometimes dubbed the “blood moon” because of its reddish glow from seasonal atmospheric particles. Moonlit evenings were the favorite time for Native American braves to venture out with bow and arrow, for the nocturnal animals could be spotted more easily. On farms, with wheat and barley cut to the ground, hunted creatures had fewer places to hide. Hunting the raccoon, or “coon,” was and still is a very popular sport, and hound dogs are bred for that purpose. And whether it be Bluetick, Plott, or Redbone hounds, these canines, properly trained, are highly prized by their owners. Bill Gardner, born on the Ridge, long ago related how neighborhood men of former days liked to “run” their dogs at
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