Not wanting to spend too many waking hours on house chores, I've become more relaxed about farmhouse cleaning. Nevertheless, in addition to random spot tidying and bathroom polishing, every two weeks, I do a thorough top to bottom job. (With Ed as my vacuum cleaner.) Always on Sunday. It puts a good foot forward to the week ahead. It makes me feel orderly and in control.
And so it is that on a beautiful October morning, I do my duty to this old house and now I have the reward of enjoying its glitter and shine.
But that's not the end of it.
After breakfast -- where we did revel in the sunshine, albeit indoors...
...we head out and target the vegetable patch. Overgrown with weeds and spent tomatoes, peppers, peas, corn, brussel sprouts, cukes, and, to my shock -- eggplant (honestly? I planted eggplant? I completely forgot about it!) -- we have our fists full of stuff to dig out.
Dig, pull, shake off dirt, toss.
As I work up and down the strip of land, I'm thinking that winter is nature's gift to gardeners like us. I know how excited we get in February in picking seeds for the year. How easy it all seems then -- keeping tabs on the little seedlings, watering, watching, waiting. The plants grow, we put them into the ground, they bear fruits and veggies, some of them get to our table, many of them are eaten by the animals that pass this way (this year, we lost nearly all of our peas, brussel sprouts, strawberries, and grapes). We water, we harvest, and by the end of it all, we need a break!
It is wonderful to tidy things up in the garden, but it is even more wonderful to retreat home after and to put the plot out of our minds until... February.
And by the farmhouse, so long as the frost never quite takes hold, we sueely have the dash of color. Cosmos and beyond!
This evening, my girl and her husband are with us again for Sunday dinner.
...a good opportunity to make gnocchi, remembering the ones I ate in Italy, wishing I had their mushrooms here! Never mind, we have an abundance of market spinach. Yay spinach.
...and, too, I had picked the stragglers in the rhubarb patch -- enough for a rhubarb cake.
I think about how *homey* this day has been. My grandmother would be proud!
As for my writing (this in answer to a commenter) -- I did send out the requested text last week and now have several weeks of idle time, though I have the next half dozen agents to work with should this one, in the end, fizzle. It is daunting. One agent posts on her web page that she gets 250 queries per week. The one I'm currently working with posts that she responds to only 1% queries. The world is loaded with writers!
And you know what? I think that's a good thing!
And so it is that on a beautiful October morning, I do my duty to this old house and now I have the reward of enjoying its glitter and shine.
But that's not the end of it.
After breakfast -- where we did revel in the sunshine, albeit indoors...
...we head out and target the vegetable patch. Overgrown with weeds and spent tomatoes, peppers, peas, corn, brussel sprouts, cukes, and, to my shock -- eggplant (honestly? I planted eggplant? I completely forgot about it!) -- we have our fists full of stuff to dig out.
Dig, pull, shake off dirt, toss.
As I work up and down the strip of land, I'm thinking that winter is nature's gift to gardeners like us. I know how excited we get in February in picking seeds for the year. How easy it all seems then -- keeping tabs on the little seedlings, watering, watching, waiting. The plants grow, we put them into the ground, they bear fruits and veggies, some of them get to our table, many of them are eaten by the animals that pass this way (this year, we lost nearly all of our peas, brussel sprouts, strawberries, and grapes). We water, we harvest, and by the end of it all, we need a break!
It is wonderful to tidy things up in the garden, but it is even more wonderful to retreat home after and to put the plot out of our minds until... February.
And by the farmhouse, so long as the frost never quite takes hold, we sueely have the dash of color. Cosmos and beyond!
This evening, my girl and her husband are with us again for Sunday dinner.
...a good opportunity to make gnocchi, remembering the ones I ate in Italy, wishing I had their mushrooms here! Never mind, we have an abundance of market spinach. Yay spinach.
...and, too, I had picked the stragglers in the rhubarb patch -- enough for a rhubarb cake.
I think about how *homey* this day has been. My grandmother would be proud!
As for my writing (this in answer to a commenter) -- I did send out the requested text last week and now have several weeks of idle time, though I have the next half dozen agents to work with should this one, in the end, fizzle. It is daunting. One agent posts on her web page that she gets 250 queries per week. The one I'm currently working with posts that she responds to only 1% queries. The world is loaded with writers!
And you know what? I think that's a good thing!
