October 6, 2021
I enjoy the fall. I used to
love the crisp days, when being outside, either doing yard work or just sitting
would give me chilled cheeks, and an infusion of energy.
Fall was the time of our
harvest, of course, when we had veggie gardens, and it is again even if our gardens
are now at waist height. My mother’s garden was immense, and I can recall more
than one fall weekend spent with my sister and I and our mother, harvesting
that behemoth. My mom had a portable washtub with two “sinks”. It was made of
metal, and she would haul that tub out and fill it with (icy) cold water from
the hose. I recall red hands as I scrubbed potatoes and cucumbers. Produce was
then laid out to dry, before being stored in our cellarway (potatoes) or sliced
and deseeded and ground up for relish, or simply sliced or poked for pickles
(cukes).
Harvesting in the Ashbury
household these days is a much smaller-scale event. We have a few tomatoes
still growing which we’ll leave until frost is forecast. And I do believe it’s
time to pick the last of the green beans.
Yesterday I ambitiously set
out to make two soups—butternut squash with red bell pepper and cream of
potato. It was “nanny Tuesday”, the day when our daughter has her two grandchildren
for a few hours after school. They’re here for supper, and I thought that if I
was making home made soup, we’d have home made sandwiches to go with them.
The soups are easy enough to
make. As for the sandwiches—I had bought a nice-looking corned beef brisket on Sunday
and put that baby in my crock pot first thing in the morning. We get one of
those maybe three times a year. We used to make what my cookbook called “New
England Boiled Dinner”, but which we always called corned beef and cabbage. It’s
exactly that, but we always added carrots and potatoes to the slow simmering
pot, and it was always a good feed.
Mostly, anymore, I just put
the corned beef into our crock pot. There are two decisions I have to make
after that: rye bread or buns, and more importantly, do I fry up some sauerkraut
to go with, or not? Yesterday the decisions were buns, and not for the pickled
cabbage.
Our daughter doesn’t eat meat,
but she does eat eggs, so making egg salad for her to enjoy with her soup was
simple enough. As for the little ones, we decided to offer them both of the above
sandwich options but had a sure-fire alternative available in case that wasn’t
what they wanted: grilled cheese.
And it turned out that those
grilled cheese sandwiches proved to be what they chose. We have a lot of fresh
fruit in the house, most of the time. But we also have “canned” fruit, which we
mostly use in the winter. Our supply chains, when it comes to food, still seem
just a tad shaky here, still. I had wanted to buy some berries when we got our
groceries on Sunday but there wasn’t much that looked really good. Fortunately,
David volunteered yesterday to go on his scooter to the other grocery store in
town, which is a ten-minute ride for him. There he found some berries, and that
was what we gave the children for their dessert.
One thing we’ve noticed about
having greatgrandchildren in the house is this. Neither of us has as much
tolerance for noise and busyness as we had when it was our grandchildren
who came around. And yes, little ones still get their energy the old-fashioned
way—they suck it out of any adults who happen to be in the room.
Our youngest greatgrandchild—the
granddaughter of our late son—was here over the past weekend. Our daughter has
been known for years by various members of the family as the baby/toddler whisperer.
When our granddaughter needed help over the weekend so she could pick up a
couple of extra shifts at work, our daughter stepped up. That baby loves her
great-aunt. And she’s precocious at two-and-a-half. One of her tricks is to
pick up any cellphone at home when she isn’t getting her way with either her
mom or her Nana, and cry out, “Call Jen!”
We are blessed as we do get to
spend some time with three of our four great-grandchildren. And while we don’t
have as much tolerance for the noise and busyness, as I said, we do have
patience for those times when the oldest of our four “greats” want to talk. They’re
eight and seven and beginning to show small signs here and there of being
capable of reasoning. Around the supper table is one of the best places I’ve
ever found for interesting conversation.
Love,
Morgan
http://www.bookstrand.com/morgan-ashbury
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