Harvest your memories

It would be great to get that dependability bug. You know the one where you do what you're expected to do, or expect yourself to do, when you're expected to do it. In retirement that seems to have escaped me, even tho' I do get a bunch done. The last post to this page was in the spring, just before planting season. And now, here we are, and it's harvest season...not that I have to worry about that much...rotten garden results this year. One more year and if it doesn't get better, I'm done...back to the grocery freezer section or hopefully supporting local farmers' markets. Harvest season brings about many traditions and perhaps starts new ones for some. Is this the time you are harvesting or remembering harvests in the past? What do you remember, or how do you observe a harvest season? Is it something your family has always done or something you plan to share with your children or grandchildren? This year, I hope to revive our "boiled dinner day." If not in the same way or the same famiy members, at least to not let the fall pass without hosting a boiled dinner in the crisp fall air. In the past, our extended family would gather at the family camp (where we now live) to help us close up for the season. Many of them got to use the camp during the summer months, and this gathering was a way to gather more help for the many tasks, as well as celebrate the end of another season, sharing the new memories of the season, and perhaps seasons past. Harvest time can be a rich time of memory making whether it's an actual harvest, a regular fall gathering or multiple trips to fall sports events. What is it you want to capture from those memories and how will you do it? Do you need to do it? This is yet another fall if you haven't captured the memories of past fall events or an aging member of your family. This is a reminder, to me and hopefully to anyone else reading this to capture it....write it down, save or copy old photos, maybe tackle or update a scrapbooking project. If you haven't done any of this, maybe this is the year to start. It's never too late, if you can just get started. One memory preserved is simply that one memory, but it can snowball (sorry for the wintery reminder) and help you continue the journey. You can preserve your memories or those of family members or start a collection of family history for the next generation to share, simply....Write it Down. Like me don't worry so much about what you'll do for your next task, begin with this memory, this season.

Time to Grow again

Spring has sprung or so the date on the calendar says. Yet in central Maine there is still an abundant snow cover and the lakes are deeply frozen. It will be interesting to see if it’s weeks or a month or more before we actually see buds or blossoms poking through the soil. For the rest of the country apparently, it is spring. My friends are posting pictures of spring buds, talking about signs of green grass and thinking about preparing for planting. How soon do people actual start planning? I know die-hard gardeners plan ALL winter with diagrams, seed catalogs and research. I’m just not one of them. I think I feel obligated to grow, simply because I can. I was brought up that way. There was always a garden in the backyard. My family couldn’t get through a year without planning for fresh veggies, and spending the rest of the summer and fall preserving them. Did it really help the budget that much? Or was it just the pure love of fresh veggies? In part I think it was the ultimate bargain for my mother. A few cents spent for seeds translated to saved dollars on the weekly grocery bill. It filled the expensive freezer….which is still freezing MORE than 50 years after it was first plugged in! What did your family do for gardening or preserving vegetables, fruits or meat? Are there memories associated with that? I can remember hot summer afternoons and a few mornings spent on the sun porch “snipping” beans…pounds of them! Only to be followed by a long evening blanching them in boiling water and quickly cooling them in ice water to be bagged for the freezer. I think that memory contributes to my love of green beans more than any other vegetable, but cooked properly and thoroughly, as part of a veggie-laden winter meal. I don’t recall that we were often allowed into the garden to actually pick, but perhaps as we became more trustworthy and older. I remember a few times helping place the seeds into the row, but I wasn’t always careful enough to get that right and so I gather I wasn’t often asked. I remember digging potatoes in the fall, even getting my school clothes too dirty on one occasion because I failed to change when I got home…heading to the garden too soon. Extra veggies were always delegated to the "veggie stand" on the front lawn, that actually was an old table from the "play house" behind the barn and a folding lawn chair. I think we sold cucumbers at five cents a piece or six for a quarter. Could that be possible? Were they really that cheap or is my memory forgetting the real price? Either way the sale of veggies, tomatoes, cucumbers maybe beans or potatoes, and of course, corn, supplemented the back-to-school budget so we had funds for a new fall wardrobe. There was a science to it and I gather I absorbed it rather than “learned” it, because a lot of it stays with me today. I plant the way I “know” how just because it feels right. More recently I’ve studied gardening mostly to reassure myself I’m doing it right, I think. Then I don’ t remember what I know and what I’ve learned. Guess it doesn’t make any difference if the plants grow and produce. Then again I keep questioning, why I do this? Because I can or because I know what I’m doing or because of the memories it brings to mind. You must have memories of summer gardening and growing. Have you written them down? There's that reminder again....Write it Down!

February rant....cabin fever delusions

It’s Refund Season according to a television ad! Get your billions back, I’m told. If only…. It’s never that simple and there is not always a refund. By the time you get all the right information together, you’ve earned whatever Might be coming back, if anything. Still we all scramble to get the numbers together, added up, all the paper that substantiates the numbers and all the inane questions answered to document Any change from the previous year. I’m sure younger people, more mobile people, have “stuff” to claim for change or refunds or whatever they may need. Maybe they can keep better track of it than I do. Maybe they are more like I used to be…organized. When did I become disorganized? Am I more disorganized than I used to be? Or do I simply not remember what I’ve organized? That’s always a worthy new year’s resolution: get organized! Well I’ll never call it a resolution, but it is a goal, if not for my financial well-being then for my mental well-being! It would help immensely if I could simply find what I forgot to organize and remember what I did organize. Is that aging? Slowly I’m clearing files, physical and digital. I’m finding things I didn’t know I had, and certainly not why I saved them in the first place. There are keepsakes, thousands of pictures, and just plain stuff you keep because someone said you should keep everything seven years or is it 10 or just three? Well we are double up on most of those years, so out it goes this year…this spring, if not this winter. And there’s not a lot of time left, if I’m to clear out the clutter or saved “stuff” from winter. And that’s the rule IF we haven't used it, needed it or remembered it in a year or more likely two years-plus, it can go! Sale-able “stuff” will be sold or donated. Other stuff that should be stuff for someone else to take care of will be going their way. The rest is likely just junk, and trashy junk at that. Does that constitute a resolution, a plan or just another annual rant? Time will tell. Wish me luck!