This picture says a lot. It says a lot about the kind of man I married, the sort of husband who dismisses his wife from the kitchen on her birthday so she can go read while he makes supper for her family that HE invited over for her special day.
We are so good at overlooking the beautiful kindnesses our closest people gift to us. May it not be so.
Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays. The history behind it, the meaning of it, and the simple fact that we have set aside a day for everyone to render unto God what is His—our gratitude and acknowledgment that all we have is His and is from Him.
But so often Thanksgiving just gets lost in the blur and the day rolls around without much mental and emotional taking-in of what could be such a poignant time. We scramble through Thanksgiving and then it is a mad rush through the Christmas season. But I want to try to change that in my own heart and mind.
So from now through the end of this year (I will likely have a couple of catch-up days in there), I will be sharing a daily photo of something that moves my heart and reminds me of God’s goodness.
Hence this silly and sweet photo…Oh my goodness, such a pile of butter colored fuzz, pink noses, and baby blue eyes! They were born a month ago. I lost four cats this summer in a freak incident, one of which was Ember, my first ever cat who had been my constant pal as a single gal living in my Grandpa’s log cabin. Well, it was perfect timing that a tom paid a visit to our place.
God provides in the most mundane and ordinary ways, for our most mundane and ordinary desires, answering our most mundane and ordinary sadnesses.
I woke up last night to the lullaby of rain on the roof. Gentle rain. Peaceful rain. No hail, no devastating winds. Just music on the roof. We woke to 2 inches in the rain gauge and another inch has fallen since. It it one of those turning-inward kinds of days, where outside chores are accomplished as quickly as possible, and the oven and stove and dehydrator all warm the house and fill it with the tastes and smells of the season.
But fall really is less of a season and more of a sense, or an over-abundance of the senses. It is the time of gathering in, of putting up, of savoring and preserving.
The color palate shifts, in one last glorious display before the long winter sleep, as the last of the flowers send up their leaves and open their buds, and the trees, which in summer are a wonderful backdrop of green, burst into the most vivid of colors in a center-stage kind of a way. Living right inside the treeline of what becomes the Black Hills National Forest a little further west, a ponderosa pine forest, the hardwoods hide until the fall, at which point they come out of hiding in flamboyant style.
The last of the harvest is trickling in – the last of the fruit tasted sun-warm off the vine, the last of the shaking of the branches, the last eaten while perched in the branches to reach just one more. But even when the last of the harvest has trickled in, the work still isn’t done, and it continues in a pleasant flurry. The whirr of the dehydrator, the bubbling of the waterbath canner, the tastes and aromas of the summer, preserved for the winter. Every countertop surface is a chaos of things preserved and things to be preserved – The jams and jellies from the abundance of wild fruit, summertime salsas from the garden, enough to last us through next summer, bags and bags of dehydrated apples and zucchini, and jars of glassed eggs to get us through the winter slump. It is a delectable time of the year!
Flowers I thought wouldn’t bloom after the August hailstorm wiped out the gardens have flourished in the interim. One last bouquet was hastily cut last night, on the eve of what could still turn into our first winter storm if the temps drop tonight. Herbs were gathered in quickly – mint and thyme and lavender and dill – and are bundled neatly to dry.
But the savor of the season is mixed with the sweetness of routine – Baskets of eggs fresh from the coop, loaves of fresh bread, still warm.
Daily walks in the freshness of autumn, with a passel of dogs.
The company of a good pup.
Kittens in the barn, shades of cinnamon and the one little white one.
The view between a horse’s ears.
A certain pair of eyes in a sun-browned face.
Quiet evenings.
Beautiful sunrises.
Winter will be here before we know it. It is storing up the joy of times like this that keep the winter blues at bay. So I’m just listening to the whisper of the rain on the roof, and soaking it all in.
The first day of fall came and went a few days ago, with a flurry of exciting activity, selling yearlings and enjoying the sweet coolness of the beginning of a new season. A lot of people brace for the end of the summer. I suppose I kind of understand it. I guess I do too, a little. Not every summer, but summers like this one. The warmth, the rainstorms that have kept us green, the ease of accomplishing basic tasks, the colors and sights and sounds and tastes of summertime. The fruitfulness.
I have enjoyed (almost) the last of the flowers of my hail-wrecked garden – To my delight, a number of my plants bloomed again, and I was able to cut yet another bouquet for the kitchen. There is something about fresh-cut flowers that touches my little soul and delights the eyes, and when I’ve grown them myself, cared for them and cultivated them, it is an even keener enjoyment.
The garden is slowly slowing down, as the fruit harvest is in full swing. This is where the fun really is…Because now the summer can wind itself away, and winter can wind itself up, and we’ll still be tasting the fruit of summertime. The early summer fruits like chokecherries prep us for the pouring-in of everything in the fall.
Salsa, and basil, dried apples and the abundance of apples that will be frozen for pies are just some of the evidence of the wonderful bounty of this year! Days have been filled with picking and washing and processing gallons upon gallons of fruit, hawthorn berries and plums and apples, into things we will enjoy for months and potentially years – butters and jams and juices and fruit for pies. A gallon jar of apple scrap vinegar is brewing on the counter, and I have finally started waterglassing eggs from the summer abundance, which will hopefully allow me to continue to fill customer orders with fresh eggs over the slump of the winter, and Brad and I can eat and use the glassed eggs.
Winter doesn’t seem as long, when you can continue to enjoy the summer, even after it is gone.
What a summer it has been.
Strangely wonderful, strangely defeating by turns.
Exciting new opportunities have presented themselves, writing for a local newspaper and magazine, shooting more portrait sessions, a wedding. Canning like crazy with the wealth of chokecherries, zucchini, and tomatoes. Baking bread, brewing kombucha, fermenting milk kefir. Productivity and fruitfulness.
A freak hailstorm wiped out my garden a few weeks ago (thankfully my greenhouse survived). I lost four of my precious cats to poison before we figured out where it was coming from. I grafted four TSC chicks onto a broody hen and she took to them readily, only to have my nasty rooster (who is no more) kill three of them a week or two later. Those frustrating defeats.
And then days like today, when this is the bountiful harvest reaped, reset things a little. Eggs from my chickens, tomatoes and jalapeños from my greenhouse, and succulent wild plums from the road ditch.
Isn’t this a beautiful sight?
Originally printed in the Custer County Chronicle, August 16, 2023
Chokecherry season crops up at the most inconvenient time. It’s hot outside, hot inside, and even hotter standing over a boiling pot of almost-jelly, stirring and pouring and fishing hot jars out of hotter water, burning fingers and creating chaos in the kitchen. It isn’t as if there’s not enough to do or the summer hasn’t flown by fast enough. The branding irons are hardly cooled and we begin the late summer work of preconditioning calves. The bulls hardly start their summertime gig before we gather them up for their 10-month vacation. Teeny little seedlings hardly pop up in the garden before the tomatoes are towering over my head, zucchinis the size of small dogs hide under every leaf, and I’m trying to find my strawberries in the dill forest. Just when I think we might catch a break, the chokecherries (which I’m pretty sure just bloomed yesterday) are suddenly ripe in Gobbler Knob and we’re picking them by the bucketful. And the more we pick, the more work there is to do. Funny how that goes. And this year is a bumper crop year.
So, I find myself wondering…why? Why in the world do I go to the trouble of picking chokecherries and processing them, or canning anything for that matter?
To be quite honest, no matter how madcap the summer, I love the chokecherry harvest, inconvenient as it may be. The task itself is pleasant, the rhythmic stripping stem after stem of berries, the sweet-astringent tang on the tongue, the sunlight and fresh air, a forced slow-down. Sometimes that inconvenience is a disguised blessing. Then there’s the aroma in the kitchen as the berries cook for extracting the juice, the jewel-like color of the juice itself, and finally the jelly in gleaming jars set out in proud rows on the countertop, or, better yet, spread generously on a slice of fresh bread. Oh, boy. A person can founder on that.
Several years back, before she passed away, my grandma gifted me her recipes, and those two worn boxes of handwritten cards have become cherished possessions, especially the one for chokecherry jelly, dirty and smudged as it is with age and use and love, scratched out in her spidery handwriting.
Chokecherries were plentiful on my grandparents’ little ranch near Hermosa, and they were diligent in utilizing them. As far back as I can remember, chokecherry jelly has been a family tradition, and I don’t know that there was ever a meal my grandma served that didn’t feature a little dish of the ruby-red jelly in a crystal bowl, with the obligatory tiny jelly spoon.
I picture that little bowl of jelly and vividly remember family gatherings packed around the long wooden table Grandpa built. I can remember how good their house smelled, built of rough-cut lumber. I remember cousins and Christmases and sweet summertimes, our twice-yearly pilgrimages to the Black Hills. I can remember Grandpa’s simple blessing over the meal: “We thank you again, Lord, for the many good things You give us…” And I can see the blue enamel plates Grandma served lunch on, and the brown stoneware for suppertime. And Grandma, always the picturesque wife and homemaker and hostess, with permed silver hair and a cardigan, seated next to my jovial, plaid-shirted Grandpa, who was the life of that house.
All from a little bowl of homemade jelly, and a smudged recipe card. Reminders of the best parts of the past, the happiest memories of my childhood, and my lifelong love of the Hills.
But beyond that, that simple, smudged recipe card and my jars of jelly foster a broader connection to a whole era and a way of life that is in danger of passing away.
It is an era of family gatherings around a dinner table. Before cellphones and social media intruded into every aspect of our lives. Before Walmart and online shopping reduced the need for self-sufficiency. An era of recipes passed hand to hand, not looked up on Pinterest. An era before “Ask Siri,” but rather “Ask Dad. He knows.” An era of mothers teaching tasks to daughters and granddaughters, and fathers to sons and grandsons. An era of taking pride and pleasure in doing by hand – whether that was a garden, or a meal, or a home, or a family. An era of multi-generational learning and sharing of skills and knowledge. An era of legacy-building through seemingly unimportant tasks. Like chokecherry jelly.
As a culture, we have segregated our societies by age, families have spread out geographically, and we’ve chosen again and again to prioritize convenience over relationships (especially generational ones), over community, and over self-sufficiency. As a culture, we are losing skills and knowledge that used to be passed down, generation to generation.
Chokecherry jelly isn’t just about chokecherry jelly, or how much better homemade is than storebought.
It is so much more than that. It is about those little things that remind of us who we are, and where we came from. It is about connecting to the past in tangible, meaningful ways. It is about preserving a way of life, a dying art, a heritage skill, and cultivating a mindset of capability and productivity. A mindset of choosing to not dollar out every action, every decision, but rather intentionally choosing to sacrifice convenience for things that are of greater importance.
Besides, you just can’t beat chokecherry jelly on homemade sourdough toast.
Song Dog Journal 