Simple Living | A Harvest
A rogue burst of cold in early September. We say we don’t expect it, but we know that’s not true. Here in the north country, you expect anything, anytime, when it comes to the seasons and their weather. They choose their own rules, skipping ahead, dragging behind, minding only their willful, silly ways.
So the rogue cold came. It shook snow over the mountains, shaved frost over the valley, tightened the sky, sharpened the edge of the moon. It hung breath in the air. And it took the life of the gardens. Over two days it did all that. Two days of summer trying out fall.
You see it coming, that temperature dip, so the scramble begins. In open moments, you harvest, clip, bring inside. Cover the rest of the tender plants out there if you can (or just let them go). Stand at the kitchen sink in late evening washing baskets-full of herbs. Lay them to drip on tossed dishtowels. Bundle them up, then, tie them with twine, hang them to dry. It smells pungent and heady and wholesome. It smells like good things past and good things to come and good things right now. It’s seasons and seasoning and we need all of it.
And you feel, again, how nurturing it is to bring in a harvest, if even a basket-full of herbs. In the end, provision that took months of thoughtful care and tending, is now sitting on the pantry shelves. From seedlings with their delicate roots taking hold back when winter was fighting with spring, to the young and strong planted out when spring relaxed into summer, to the bushy plants that offered handfuls for tossing with dinner on hot summer nights. And now, the final abundant sweep of late summer bounty as a cold rain falls.
And you there, having experienced it all from beginning to end.