Racing to Keep Up With Garden!

                The season is quickly becoming a frantic race against time for the home canner and freezer, and that’s the category I joined since we moved to the country.

                If I let the garden go to clean house, the weeds have a field day, and the food rots on the plants.  So I tend to let the house go; now I can’t yell, “Close the door, were you born in a barn?” to the kids because the house looks it.

                I can’t remember the last time I took down cobwebs, and my kitchen cupboards are in a dizzy state.  I barely manage to keep up with dusting and vacuuming and the laundry piles up faster than I the spin dry on the washer.  I must keep pace with some things, like dishes, animals, and bathroom cleaning (also newspaper writing), but the garden comes second.

                It’s wonderful that we got a new freezer this year, but it’s rather unfortunate that Jim hasn’t installed a plug for it in the basement yet.  I’ve frozen 17 quarts of vegetables and fruit now.  With a turkey and a large container of ice cream, not to mention several cans of orange juice and the week’s bread ration, the freezer above the refrigerator is bursting at the seam.  Electrical work is way out of my line, so itr must wait until my live-in handyman can get around to it.

                I can’t complain that Jim was remiss in his household duties as the last few weeks have been hectic.  Besides the ever-ripening variety of produce, we’ve survived a wedding, vacation, moving Grandma from her house to Mom and Dad’s, and a seven day workweek for Jim.

                The other day two of my sisters (I have four) came to help in the garden.  We managed to fill our old trailer full of weeds and cleaned up a great bit of garden.  I pressed all the day’s pickings on them as I couldn’t put them anywhere anyway.  I tried to talk them into tackling the house next, but they declined.

                You’d think that if the freezer were operating, my troubles would be over.  No,’ I’ll always have something to complain about.  The beans.  I hate cleaning beans (but love eating them) more than anything.

                Since food preserving is not in Jim’s line, it’s me that has to cut off the tips and snap millions of the nasty things.  I you rub them the wrong way, it makes your teeth itch.  If you try to start blanching them too soon, you get behind on cleaning them.  It is a necessary evil though, if we want to eat this winter.

                I think I’ll just start some trouble tonight.  When Jim is ready for dinner, I’ll just refuse to serve it until my freezer is plugged in.  Maybe I’d better think of something different though:  he’s bigger than I am and even more stubborn too.  I might never have my freezer.

                Maybe I’ll try one of my infrequent (and not always successful) pleas in exchange for a working freezer?

Getting Into the Spirit of Christmas

[This is another of my columns from "On the Farm," which I wrote many years ago for the Fostoria Review-Times.]

GETTING IN THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTMAS
Merry Christmas, Ho, Ho, Holy Toledo!
Only two more weeks till the big day and I haven’t yet found my Christmas spirit. I know I left it somewhere around here. It was flying high, wide and nauseous at Halloween when I started playing the Christmas music. But I lost it somewhere between Tom Turkey and the solid chunks of ice in the horse and chicken troughs.
What happened to the old days when you walked along slippery sidewalks with the snow falling lightly and the carols ringing from a faulty PA system? Or the days when a flannel nightgown cost $4.00 and a kid could buy three hankies for Daddy and still have change enough from his dollar for a half pound of French creams to enjoy on Christmas Eve? Where is that innocence which forty years ago prompted me to say, “Mama, guess what I got you for Christmas, but it isn’t an egg poacher!”
The past is gone forever, and now you push your way through crowded store aisles, waiting forty minutes to pay an astronomical amount for a shirt for Dad, but what the heck – it’s Christmas. And the grocery total is twice the usual as you stock up on dates, nuts, coconut and nonpareils, not to mention sugar, flour, butter and eggs.
In the progressive age, you have to traverse the entire area of the store to procure a box to put Dad’s shirt and Mom’s nightgown in, and you have to prove you bought it before the stingy merchants give it to you. And how about the price tag on the pack that the jolly red-suited man carries on his back?
Why won’t my spirit show its face when I listen to my primary school kids practice their carols for the PTO program? Instead, I lament that their voice quality is unfortunately the same as their parents’.
Or couldn’t it flag when I taste that most delicious flavor of Christmas, anticipation? No, the thoughts at the back of my mind push out the anticipation in favor of despairing at the chaos my living room will be all of Christmas Day and how can I plan the dinner so that everything is ready at the same time (I only have one oven).
Even the memories of that most magical time, Christmas Eve, when you walk out to go to church and there’s a special something in the air are dismissed from my mind when I ponder how to keep the kids’ church clothes out of their hands so they are fresh for church on Christmas.
In the meantime, there’s dollars of shopping, there’s dozens of cookies to bak and hours to spend closeted with the wrapping paper and scotch tape. It sounds like these tasks will only serve to depress my spirit even further.
Watch next week for Part II of the Christmas spirit: “How to Keep the Christmas Spirit” or “Even the Cookies in the Freezer Have Been Raided!”