Weekend Things--Fall Harvest

I keep waking up in the middle of the night and then lying there, all of the things I need to do, want to do, should do, running a marathon around my brain. Friday my massage therapist noted an imbalance in my gall bladder meridians, which are associated with lists and making decisions, and also with the hours between one and four a.m. I'm not sure how much I buy into all that, but when I woke up early (but not nearly as early as usual, thanks, perhaps, to the massage) on Saturday morning, I decided to just get up and get some things crossed off my list.

There is a tension in our weekends, between accomplishing all the things we need to do, and making time for the things we want to do. This time of year heightens that tension, with all of the perishable foods coming out of the garden––ours and others'––and the impending possibility of frost.

Last weekend we accidentally picked 59 pounds of apples, and, when visiting family friends, came home with a great big box of produce. During the week, I managed to turn the basil into pesto, and most of the tomatoes into ketchup and jam, but still our refrigerator resisted closing for all the goodness inside it, and something had to be done.

So early Saturday morning, I started with a quadruple batch of apple chia jam and oatmeal for breakfast, then moved on to a bowl of gazpacho soup for later weekend eating that took care of more tomatoes, a cucumber and a green pepper. The rest of the green peppers I roasted and froze (wish I'd thought of doing this with them). The rest of the tomatoes went into the solar oven for more pasta sauce. I finished off the morning with a plum cake. I left the huge harvest of beans for C to blanch and freeze later in the weekend (the winners in this summer's Garden Roulette were the legumes––peas and beans we had aplenty).



While I was cooking like a madwoman, E asked if we could get out the autumn stuff. I had just been thinking that the boys aren't all that into our little seasonal traditions anymore, so this pleased me greatly. I hung up our fall banner and E decorated our TV table with autumnal things. I still need to get out the autumn books, although we hardly read any of the spring and summer ones, now that the boys like to listen to chapter books (still on Harry Potter Round 3) and are even reading chapter books to themselves.

I was able to get most of one story revised while E and Z were at soccer an M at a friend's house, and then when I picked up M, I came home with another box of fresh produce and two jugs of apple cider right out of the press. After that we all went to another of M's friend's house for a laser tag birthday party, which I have to say while kind of fun, for a bit, definitely not something I'd want to do all the time (and yes, I had reservations about my kids running around the woods with fake guns killing each other...and me).

All of that out of the way, we cleared the decks for doing something off my "want to do" list on Sunday.