Beets today, apples tomorrow.

I spent part of this evening canning pickled beets in the summer kitchen that makes up the other part of the enclosed porch where I sleep. I had a great view outside, I was enjoying new music, my brother Isaiah was working on his 4H photography projects next to me, and I was experiencing the exciting rhythm of accomplishing a new skill confidently, for the first time. The moment is one I will miss and remember; the knowledge is hopefully something I will take with me.

Kim asked me yesterday, while we were breaking our backs weeding rows of corn: What do you think you will miss when you leave here? This has become a more pressing question for me in the last few days because I've suddenly found that my summer is a couple of weeks shorter than I thought it would be. I was recently hired by Topeka West High School to teach German! This could be a whole blog entry in and of itself, but I'll stick with Kim's question for now...

One of the things that I will miss most about my summer is my connection to the land, connection to what I do with my hands, living and working so intimately with the process of feeding myself and others. Today as I was enjoying the first sweet corn, I was thinking back over all of the seasons I have seen come and go just this summer.

I was remembering particularly the last day that I picked strawberries, carefully combing over the patch to find the last eight quarts needed for our CSA shares. It took me two hours and the entire strawberry patch to painstakingly pick the eight quarts, where only a week before I sat in one place and picked two quarts just from the strawberries within reach. I had to shake my head at how precious the few strawberries suddenly were. It wasn't that we were taking the strawberries for granted, per se. We always knew that the bumper crop was just a "flash in the pan," as my dad referred to it. But we had gotten so spoiled, so used to having infinite amounts of strawberries at our disposal. For example: at the height of strawberry season, slightly damaged strawberries were even considered appropriate weapons for throwing at the obnoxious rooster who lurks around barn corners waiting to attack, or even for throwing at each other. Kimberly discovered the fun of squishing strawberries on the back of my neck.

It made my head spin a little bit to think about how quickly we had come to expect strawberries at our fingertips; how adept we had become at incorporating strawberries into every dish we cooked. And then suddenly the strawberries were gone again. But something else was coming into season and we just as quickly adjusted to the strawberries' absence and welcomed the next harvest into our diets and work load.

That last day in the strawberry field, I was thinking about human nature, that humans are incredibly adaptable to changes in our environment and lives. Even as I mourned the end of strawberry season, I realized I would survive; the cycle scarcity and plenty would repeat itself again and again; and I will long for strawberries and the other multitudes of variety trickling through the garden's harvest calendar until each item appears again next year.

I realized I actually like experiencing this ebb and flow of seasons. It is like stretching; maintaining my flexibility to adjust, and to appreciate something to the fullest. When I enjoy something from the garden, the taste and the availability itself have borders, concrete beginnings and ends in sight. The foods appearing on my plate seem all the more marvelous and special knowing that the very consumption of the dish brings me closer to the end of its availability. I feel like I'm getting very wordy trying to capture this concept, but is it even possible to put it in words?

Imagine buttery zucchini in the peak of its season, exploding on the vines, plucked from the vines faster than we can eat it. I love zucchini, and I have the luxury of zucchini and carrot casserole; chocolate chip zucchini cake; zucchini chowder cooked in a cauldron over a fire to feed a crowd of 40. But even to enjoy the zucchini is to anticipate the next season's special foods. In a matter of days perhaps, those mid-July comfort foods will only be a memory, phantom recipes we skip over in our excitement on our way to recipes for sweet potatoes, or winter squash.

And so this, I suppose, is my personal testimony to the concept of eating seasonally. It's an exercise to flex our human nature, to practice our ability to adjust and keep our minds open; to understand and even begin to appreciate the parts of our lives that seem unfair, the boundaries on our lives that seem unnecessarily restrictive.

It is a tiny practice for the seasons of scarcity and richness that we experience throughout our lives:

The simultaneous disappointment of letting things go and excitement of new things to come.

The times of longing for something or someone, knowing that you will simply have to wait.

The patience required to live through an empty time, knowing that sometime, somehow, your life will be filled, and filled full.

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Today we picked apples from a friend's farm, and Kim is baking an apple pie with the first of the apples.

Hurrah!! Apple pie!!


July 2 CSA Shares

Filley, NE 68357

This is my first post since returning home in May. Home, for the time being, is my parents' sustainable farm in Filley Nebraska, where I am an "intern." It's been a great opportunity to reconnect with some of the most important people in my life. Including the other two interns, my sister Rachel and my college roommate Kimberly. During the day I pull weeds and work on my tan, and plant or harvest vegetables for the CSA boxes or farmers market. I live on the screened in porch with my sister Rachel, and my college roommate Kim Schmidt. I cook with fresh herbs, play with kittens, water blueberry bushes, and generally enjoy a fairly picturesque albeit hardworking existence here.

I do spend a lot of time thinking about things while out in the field (and just as much time staring blankly ahead thinking "I hate peas... I hate peas... I don't ever want to pick another pea in my life...") and I definitely intended to write blog posts while I'm here. The problem so far has been that I write letters and posts and memoirs in my head while I am outside, and by the time I come inside they have vanished, or I've used up all my energy and have no interest in spending what's left of my evening staring at a computer screen transcribing.

Here is my first attempt.

The sky was still black when I woke up to lightning, and I sat straight up, wide awake. I was facing the view out the windows that make up one wall of my summer home. I can see the sky and two windmills, nothing else, but, following that sinister or promising flash of lightning, I didn't need to see anything else. The sky was darker than it should have been at that time of morning--the western windows behind me were turning sunrise pink but the windmills were outlined against dark sky that was a different texture of darkness from usual. I was excited and couldn't get back to sleep. Some days a storm wouldn't be my favorite thing, I tend to love sunshine and blue sky, but all I could think of was the possibility of power and water that this storm might bring.

I wouldn't normally be woken up by a solitary lightning bolt at 5:30am, but it was just the three of us (Rachel, Kim, and myself) running the farm while my parents were on vacation. I was feeling very responsible for the things of the farm, and we had watched the plants dry out over the previous several days--hot, dry days, without any rain. This is not always a big terrible problem, but it was compounded by the fact that there had also been no wind. For water we rely on an old fashioned Dempster classic windmill, so no wind is no water pumped, and we were worried, watching the water level in the storage tank drop as we leaked water slowly and carefully out onto the dry field.

And so my first thought when I sat up in my couch bed that morning was that maybe there would be wind, and that was the thought that kept me awake--watching the windmill sit silently. Then, finally, over a time that could have been five minutes or could have been two hours, I watched it slowly creak and start to turn, nearly imperceptibly at first and then eventually faster, reaching a speed attested to by a comforting creak and click sound each time it turned around. It was only then that I could get back to sleep, knowing that we would wake up on our way to a full tank of water. Even better, the storm brought with it a slow steady rain that would mean we wouldn't need to water the garden for several days, saving us gallons of worry and water.
There are all kinds of things to be worried about with weather changes--everything from the water pump by the pond flooding and being ruined, to strong winds blowing the greenhouse away... So many things that can go wrong, that it is an unbelievable relief when the weather works in your favor.

I like being in such close contact and dependence on the weather, the ground, the sky. I'm painfully aware of the possibility for good and the possibility for bad that each change in weather brings. I'm not sure why this seems like a good thing but it seems healthy, just like putting my hands in a batch of bread dough, cooking food I just picked from the garden, and feeling my body flex and ache with hard work. I can't think of a neat summary or lesson or moral of my post so I think I'll end with a few of my favorite farm pictures so far this summer.


Rita and Kim woman the farmers market booth.




Pest control involves collecting and squishing lots of gross bugs. And yes, having perpetually gross hands.





Ginette, Chad, and Reid pick strawberries during their visit from Vancouver.





Rita and Merlin assemble Tuesday CSA boxes.