Maybe it’s over, maybe the rest grow slow enough to look forward to, welcome, appreciate and enjoy. The big bold sandwich-size tomato you check every morning and just before dark, deciding on one more day on the vine. The peaches will gather in tens not in hundreds; just enough for a cobbler, a pie. The basil will be picked for use fresh–not frozen for pesto, the dill still is bound to be dried.
I took a walk around the yard, found a dozen still good crabapples. Maybe I should pick that tree down in Collinsville center I see with greedy eyed lust. It’s the perfect type, the perfect size, in perfect ripeness and who–not the landscaper who’ll end up raking them out of the grass–who would mind? No, no; the decision Chris and I made and stuck to is we plant what we want and we pick our own–that’s our own, only. And now, I have hers to do as well as my own. The season was good though I’ve often made more of any given item in any given year: 28 pints of peaches, 20 jars of grape jelly, 22 of crabapple and 11 of crabapple sauce, 27 jars of salsa, 15 of salsa juice–my own personal hot V-8, 10 gallons (that works out to about 50 bottles) of grape wine, 10 gallons of peach, and sadly only 5 of the now coveted crabapple wine. So that’s it, I think, that’s it for now. In three weeks the wine must be racked, again in three months and then one more time till it’s bottled.
I can relax and enjoy the more occasional gift from the garden and yard, savor it without deadlines and stress. Oh, and fruit flies and sticky floors, and washing each bottle and jar twice (by hand) and the same pots and equipment over and over again. Strainers mucky with pulp, and putting out garbage that ended up smelling like vinegar by trash-pickup Tuesdays, and lemon juice and cleanser to clean my hands.
To tell you this may make some of you cringe, but I do feel complete as a woman.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology