Vaccine Cold

It’s vaccine cold outdoors. Single digits. 

A local hospital's refrigerator was 9 degrees instead of the recommended 2-8*. Would they have to throw the 860 doses of vaccine away? 

Feel your heart cringe as you read that sentence. Oh no! They have to throw it away? That’s 860 people.

Feel your resistance to what is. Notice that suffering or discontent co-arises with resistance. Acceptance = Peace.

Feel the resistance to the intense cold outdoors.

Rest.

Moderna said the hospital could use the 860 doses after all.

* This turns out to be Celsius, not Fahrenheit as i originally thought.

Winter Harvest

 

My friend Paula harvested greens from her winter garden--collards and kale.

It's a good thing we have autumn harvest stored away for the winter. It's time to eat from the freezer and the root cellar.

What do we harvest from our lives for our own coming winter?

Now is the time to practice kindness and mindfulness. Now is the time to live your one wild and precious life. Your life. No one else's. Your unique life.

The big chill is coming.

Broccoli Christmas Tree

 It's finally time to start eating out of the freezer because any remaining vegetables in the garden are frozen. (I'm ignoring the turnips, the Jerusalem artichokes, and the small kale leaves.) I've been preparing my freezer for this day, and it is brimming with possibilities. 

Oops, my sweetie went to the food coop and saw the organic broccoli Christmas tree. He had to buy broccoli. We are having broccoli for dinner. The freezer will have to wait.

Desire strikes. Fresh organic broccoli looks so much better than a cold frozen vegetable.

Maybe tomorrow.

More Beans

My pole beans kept producing beans into October, right up to the first frost. I was astounded.

My sweetie groaned. "Not more beans!"

I felt delighted. "Yes! More beans."

Our freezer is already full of green beans.

"But look at those big beans," he said.

"Yes!" I said. "Just look."

I grew up on overcooked green beans. My sister calls them hundred-hour beans. With shreds of ham from a ham hock, and a lot of onions, the beans are more like a stew than a fresh vegetable. Tasty (according to me).

This little civil war in the kitchen continues. Yes. No. I want. I don't want.

Fortunately, we remain civil and kind to each other.

Homemade Suet for the Birds

I fry bacon once or twice a year--maybe in deep tomato season for a BLT sandwich. What to do with all that bacon grease?

My mother used to cook with bacon grease, but that's not politically correct any more. 50% of bacon grease is the good-for-you unsaturated fat, but another 40% is the bad-for-you saturated fat.

Last summer, i poured my extra bacon grease into a half-pint plastic container filled with shelled sunflower seeds. Then i put it in the freezer, where i just re-discovered it. Time to get out the suet feeder! The chickadees and nuthatches are loving this homemade suet.

Our meditation practice is a homemade project. What's the delicious recipe that works for you?

Right now, i Skype at 6 a.m. with a woman i met at a meditation retreat last year. Then i meditate with my neighbors at 8 a.m. for 20 minutes. Right now, i'm teaching 2 or 3 meditation classes a week, and i sit at our local meditation center about once a week.

Just like the chickadees, i keep coming back to meditation.

Cilantro Roots

Cilantro (a.k.a. coriander) reseeds itself in the garden and is blooming now, so it's mostly gone before the salsa ingredients--tomatoes and cucumbers--ripen.

My neighbor Connie digs up cilantro roots and puts them in her freezer. They are a great addition to winter soups. Cilantro root is also a key ingredient in Thai curries. In the Republic of Georgia, stems of cilantro are served on a plate, along with chives and stems of parsley as a salad, but eaten by hand, like an appetizer.

Cilantro is one of those herbs that people either love or hate. I have several friends who can't stand the taste of it, and other friends who adore it. It doesn't matter to cilantro if someone hates it. Cilantro just keeps growing, doing its own thing.

How do we respond when we feel someone doesn't like us? Most likely, we close down and send the dislike right back to them. I have a few friends who are able to shrug being disliked off with "That's their problem." But, i, for one, take it personally.

The Buddha challenges us to practice loving-kindness in these sorts of situations.

The kindest thing i can do with cilantro is eat it.

Squash to Pie

In the basement, while putting away extension cords from the holidays, i discovered 2 butternut squashes going south. I brought them up to the chopping block in the kitchen, cut off the brown parts, and soon had 3 bags of cubed squash for the freezer, as well as sauteed squash-apples-onions for dinner. My sweetie had been begging for a pumpkin pie, so i made a squash pie instead. (It looks the same.)

Illness surprises us. We go to the doctor for a check-up and find something not quite right. My 47-year-old step-daughter just emerged from a week in the hospital and a bout with inflamed colitis. My 96-year-old hospice client has leukemia, but she subsists on a diet of Pepperidge Farm cookies and Boost, a nutritional drink.

My middle-aged winter squashes had begun to bruise and brown. Most of my friends in their 60s have had skin cancers removed. The women almost all have osteopenia, the predecessor of osteoporosis. Bones begin to weaken inside, unnoticed.

The body only lasts so long. And what it does is beyond our control, no matter how well we take care of it.

Knowing this, knowing that Life consumes Life, what's the harvest of our life? What do we make of our "one wild and precious life"?

Pie photo from farmersdaughterct.wordpress.com

Storing Life Away

We had our first fire in the woodstove a couple of mornings ago, just to take the chill off.  Even though it's not really cold yet, it's time for long sleeves and long pants. I'm storing summer clothes away bit by bit--shorts, short-sleeved shirts, tank tops, capri pants.

Out in the vegetable garden, i'm trying to store summer away. Last night, i made lemon basil pesto and stored it in the freezer.

We try to store our lives away--in photo albums, on Facebook, in memory, on flash drives. These give us the illusion of a continuum. We think we can just reach back and touch our past. Yet our lives actually unfold moment-by-moment.

That person in the picture that you take to be you is actually non-existent. We could say she's "dead." The photo reminds us of how we used to look--when we were 5 or 18 or 30 or even yesterday. But there is no way we can reach out and touch that person. She is gone, gone, gone.

Now there is only this person, with a memory that is happening in the present moment.

Localvore Stress

I store garlic, onions, tomatillos, and gladiola bulbs in my unfinished basement. My sweetie built a rack of open shelving that i can simply slide trays into. The open-air concept allows me to see when the onions start to sprout in April.

We have an apartment-sized refrigerator in the basement and that's where i keep my potato harvest and ziplock bags full of sun-dried tomatoes. An apartment-sized freezer is stuffed full of green beans, broccoli, and pesto from the garden. Last winter i held more tightly to the localvore concept and actually managed to clean everything out by June. Well, almost everything--i just peeled 50 heads of garlic and stored them in olive oil.

This localvore idea is rooted in the slogan: Act Locally; Think Globally. By eating locally, we can cut down on all the oil needed to transport vegetables from the West Coast to the East.

The fly in the ointment is this: The vegetables at the store are so much more beautiful than the ones in my freezer. And the grocery store has more variety too. Even the local food co-op that sells ONLY organic fruits and vegetables (and mostly local) has a more interesting selection than i do in my basement.

I may ascribe to the idea of Voluntary Simplicity, but how does it taste?

A little local chicken broth adds a lot of flavor to green beans. Grated zucchini turns into blond brownies, heavy on the chocolate chips and walnuts. Put sun-dried tomatoes in the pesto and deplete 2 storage items at the same time.

Next week: green beans, grated zucchini, some broccoli, and oh yes, winter squash--AGAIN. Repeat for 20 weeks.

By April, my sweetie is threatening to throw out the remaining 2 trays of tomatillos. Quick! Think Mexican. Green chili. Well, there's getting used to the color, but it actually tastes great. Simmer a pork tenderloin in tomatillos, onions, and garlic for chili verde.

Finally the cellar is bare. I can buy any vegetable i want at the Farmers' Market. But wait! Late April and it's time to pick fiddlehead ferns and wild leeks. Asparagus begins to poke up. I refuse to eat the dandelion green salads i grew up on. Last year's kale re-sprouts in the garden, and has enough tender leaves for 2 meals a week.

Just when i think i can cut loose from localvoring, the season begins again. Rhubarb, cherry tomatoes, cucumbers. The cornucopia overflows into ziplock bags, and, now that we're localvoring the sun and producing our own electricity with photovoltaics, it's time to buy a bigger freezer.

Harvest: Bounty or Compost?

In this harvest season, i try to cook 2 or 3 vegetables from the garden for dinner every evening--broccoli or zucchini, chard or kale, and a salad entirely of tomatoes. I leave the leftovers in the fridge for my sweetie. When i return from a long weekend away, they're still there.

"You're supposed to have eaten these," i say, with one eye on the overflowing harvest basket i just brought in from the vegetable garden.

"Oh, i did," he says. "Except for that yellow squash. You deal with that."

This is when the bounty takes a dives into exasperation. Too much of a good thing leads to some form of suffering or other. I spend an hour after dinner slicing tomatoes for the food drier or blanching broccoli for the freezer.

Speaking of which, we're just about to buy a new 7-cubic-foot Energy Star freezer because we have too much food for the freezer.