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