Happy Fall Equinox!
Happy Fall Equinox! The halfway point between the summer and winter solstice. It was 84F here yesterday, the wind shifted strong and coming from the north, with a high temp today around 60, with highs in the 60’s for the next week. I will be heading to the trailer and the 80 later today, but I have been meaning to can salsa and pasta sauce with my mom for years so that’s what we did this morning. She is a German emigre and a master food preserver. I haven’t bought salsa or pasta sauce in many years.
I sold my house in the city to move back to my childhood home in part to help my parents as they are closing in on 80. My mom has some challenges now with memory, remembering the names of things, though she remains quite active, she spends most of every day working in her garden and flower beds, and she has sounded more lucid and present than she has in a long time, while working on this. She adds kale she grew and dried, and summer zucchini she grated and froze, to the pasta sauce.
I’m planning on visiting the local farmers market this Saturday, to see if I can find some late season watermelon to ferment, which I have never tried before. Wild high bush cranberries are ready to pick, which I have also not fermented before, so that is exciting.
It wasn’t easy finding canning tomatoes. Most of the people who my parents have purchased their canning vegetables from are no longer growing vegetables, either getting out of the business or simply aging out of it. Hopefully next year I will grow all we need.
It hasn’t been easy finding canning material either. Since the beginning of the “pandemic” canning lids have been hard to come by. People the last two summers have often had to purchase whole new glass containers, which come with the lids. The few times I have seen lids for sale I buy a few boxes, so I will have them when we need them. One would think with increased demand, production would have been increased. Surely people are hoarding, but there seems more of a story here. Something to think about, and plan for, for those who are thinking about resilience.
Happy Equinox!
Very nice post and reflection on the changing of the seasons. It’s so important to keep doing as much as you can with your aging parents. and to just be with them in the last years of their lives. My mom had dementia and lived in assisted living. I wasn’t able to be physically in her presence for all of this Covid crap...as I did not get the you know what and they wouldn’t let me in her building. The last day of her life (on Mother’s Day 2021) I had to talk to her on the phone outside through a sliding glass door. She was in a ‘skilled nursing’ facility and I couldn’t go in the building. I knew she was dying and I told her everyone (all the family members) loved her, I sang her some songs and told her to go find my Dad (who had passed away 34 years prior). That it was ok to go. She passed away within the hour after I left. I know she’s in a better place. She lived a long and full life, found true, unrequited love in the last four years of her life with a beautiful man with a beautiful soul. So what more could a daughter ask than to see her mother happy.
How lovely. In this post, you paint a charming narrative of this turning of the wheel from summer into fall. Don't you love the cooler days? Feeling the outwardly expressed energies of summer retreating into the depths and darkness to rest and revitalize? I love these thresholds into the following season. Today, I re-graveled my driveway and made oven roasted tomatoes. I am now going to soak in an Epsom salts bath and do some yin yoga afterward and sleep soundly. Simple, happy life. Your mama sounds like a beautiful being 🙏