A Feeble Cry From The Harvest Time Homestead

Help! I have reached a point in my life when I want to slow down, stop being so busy.

No, wait, that's not correct. It's not that I want to stop having full days but rather I want to change what it is I spend my time doing with my days. Or perhaps (pant-pant, puff-puff) I'm just ready for summer to be over.

When I have to divide my day's hours between outside time and inside time, I can't get the "necessaries" done and still have time for much of any relaxing. And typically, in the summer even in regard to the necessary things, inside time gets short changed. By a lot.

For instance, my house looks grittier and grimier than I like it to be, and although what we eat may be very healthy, I yearn for something other than a big salad, fresh berries or quick egg meals (I miss puttering in the kitchen concocting a great meal . . . while sipping a glass of wine), and I just can't find more than a few minutes now and then to read or do any handwork. Oh, and also I find it hard to spend time at the computer blogging.

Well, summer is on the way out. As soon as the sun goes down these late afternoons, you can actually feel the nip of fall in the air.



The above are our pair of Shetland geese. The pure white is the male while Mrs. is the gray and white. We've had Shetland and American Buff geese but recently made the decision to let go all of the American Buffs. We've found them to be really big geese that eat a lot of grain (tons!) in the winter time. They're also very clumsy and tend to barrel over and through anything in their path. Unfortunately, we lost two goslings this summer, both by being stepped on by these big honkers. We considered putting the three adult geese we had in the freezer . . . but simply don't have the room. So we offered them (alive, that is) to our daughter and she took them. She now has quite the poultry yard menagerie of geese, chickens, ducks and one very handsome tom turkey. (She really should be called Poultry Mama rather than Chicken Mama.)

I've already started garden clean-up which feels pretty darn good. Partly because some crops did so poorly this year that it's clear there's no hope in waiting for harvest, and partly because some crops have run their natural course. I'm more than ready to start putting the garden to bed for the winter.



Beans, raspberries and blueberries are being harvested and processed regularly right now. The yellow beans came in first and I have all of them I want in the freezer so our daughter is happy to get those still coming in. Even though I might wish for a heartier breakfast, I'm still enjoying the fresh berries in cream or milk each day. I've frozen or preserved just about all the berries we need for our year's supply so much of the harvest now is being given away.

Whine time. (Wine? Did somebody say wine?) Well, here I am again at the end of the day and I want desperately to go spend some time in my quilt studio, or maybe just sit and read for an hour or so (or here's an idea . . . why don't I vacuum? . . . or not), but the hour is too late for that and I still need to take a shower to get the raspberry juice off my arms and the dirt off my knees.

Yup, gotta do some reorganizing of priorities as far as what I do during the day. I have a great solution that would work for me. (Understand it is TOTALLY UNREALISTIC . . . and ain't never gonna happen, but I just know it would work.) If I could have one week of summer alternating with one week of winter year 'round, my life would be much better balanced. And I'd be happy, happy, happy. (Told ya it was totally unrealistic.)