She Brings Me Water
An aeclectic look at the nearby worldArchive for September, 2007
Harvest Home
I ended my last post with a reference to the autumnal equinox and the shortening of the days. This equinox, also known as Harvest Home or Mabon, on September 23 (beginning the evening before), marks the second time of the year (the first is the spring equinox) when day and night are of equal length. After the autumnal equinox, the days will continue to grow shorter and the night longer. Mabon, or Harvest Home, celebrates the “bringing home” of the summer’s crop, the time when harvest festivals (also known as state fairs) are held, and we can begin to relax a bit after the summer’s hard work. We can catch up on our reading, try out some new recipes, do a little painting…
The watercolors above are a set of four ATC’s, or Artist Trading Cards, that I painted for an ATC “swap”. The theme of this swap was pagan celebrations, and so I painted two cards with Ostara (Easter) symbols, one for Beltane, and one for Mabon, in the lower right-hand corner. It’s a representation of the Mayan maize god, depicted as an ear of corn.
Here’s a recipe I made up recently using some sweet potatoes our next-door farmer/neighbor gave us and some of our corn (steamed and scraped off the cobs):
Sweet potatoes, black beans and corn
Peel and cube sweet potatoes, cook in microwave with a little water and butter until tender. Add 1 can of black beans (drained), some fake crab (chopped), cooked corn kernels, shredded cheese (cheddar, colby, or jalapeno jack). Season with cumin, seasoned pepper, lemon pepper, garlic powder to taste. Microwave until hot.
As you can see, this recipe was made entirely in the microwave. We’ve decided not to fix our stove, for various reasons: it uses lots of electricity, not good for our aging fuse box or the environment. We really don’t need it, because of having the microwave, toaster oven, camp stove (on the porch). Most of my cooking involves steaming or sauteeing vegetables, and maybe cooking some rice or couscous, for which I only need a burner or two. To supply this need without having to go out on the porch to use the camp stove in the dark and cold of approaching winter, we are going to purchase a small propane camp stove to set on top of the not-functioning oven. We’re also going to start using our crock pot again, which we’ve discovered uses surprisingly little electricity. In the winter we eat lots of soups and stews, and the crock pot is perfect for that. I also discovered that you can make bread in one; I’ll let you know how that turns out.
Abundance, Fear and Moonflowers
If you’ve been following along with this blog from the first post (The Nearby World), you’ve read about our neighbor, the one who’s been planting a very large garden for the past seven years. He’s an older man and every year he says that next year, he’s not going to plant such a large garden, but every year, the garden is just as large, if not larger. And every year, he invites us and his other neighbors and friends to help ourselves to the excess produce. So Rod and I go over there every few days or when we need something and fill them up with tomatoes, okra, eggplant, green beans…we take as much as we can eat or process or give away, but by August/September, there still seems to be a lot that just goes to waste, rotting on the vine or just getting too big to be edible. Part of the problem is that we seem to be the only ones (besides this neighbor and his wife and sometimes one or two of their daughters) out there picking.
Why is that, we wonder? The food is free, fresh and local–practically in our and the neighbor’s backyards. We decided that it is fear that keeps others from coming. Fear of eating something that hasn’t been cleaned and packaged and “approved” before we can buy it in the grocery store. Fear of nature in the raw, too unfamiliar and too alien (is that a BUG??). Too much reality, in this Disney-fied world.
So, along with our own garden produce, we have his and therefore, our reality is that we have a lot of produce to process. We eat as much as we can fresh, steaming ears of corn and layering eggplant and tomatoes and okra in casseroles. I used to can but gave it up when I got a full time job, which I no longer have but can’t can now as we have no stove (long story, but I do have a microwave, a toaster oven and our camp stove is set up on the screened porch, so I haven’t missed it). I use the food processor to process tomatoes for cooking the sliced okra in, it keeps them from getting slimy. The corn is in the freezer; when we want corn, I steam it on the camp stove. We also have bags of steamed green beans in the freezer, and containers of processed tomatoes for soups, spaghetti sauce, salsa…
But now, as we head into September, things are slowly ending. The corn stalks are dried up and yellow and they talk to each other in the wind like old people recalling their youth. The outward-expansion of spring and summer is reversing itself into the inward-spiraling of fall and winter. The days are growing shorter. After the autumnal equinox the night will take over from the day, and darkness will prevail. In anticipation, the moonflower we planted next to the pergola blooms in the early evening and on into the night.
