AUTUMN'S HERE...GET USED TO IT!!

I guess I’m finally warming up to Autumn; what with Thanksgiving being upon us already and the Summer-like temperatures sticking around ‘til the end of September and everything it’s been a rather smooth transition from Summer to Fall.

I’m really looking forward to the upcoming Thanksgiving feast as it seems we haven’t had to use the oven for cooking our meals since we entered barbequing season so many weeks ago. That roast turkey and all of the fixings are going to be such a nice change from grilled everything, if you know what I mean. Don’t get me wrong, I love barbequing, but nothing beats a good old fashioned Thanksgiving turkey dinner. Come to think of it, I’m going to start fasting right now in preparation of the gorge-fest that I will be enjoying this upcoming weekend.

There are certain other advantages to Fall, I guess, like how easy it is to find your golf ball in the bushes now that the undergrowth and leaves and stuff are all thinning out and there’s a little less guilt if you sit in front of the TV watching football instead of doing yard work or the never-ending home improvements because the daylight hours are shorter and the thermometer starts dropping lower and lower. And then there are all of the great tastes and smells of the garden harvest processing as we prepare salsa, and spaghetti sauce and beet pickles and chocolate zucchini cakes et cetera et cetera.  I’ll tell ya, nothing tastes better than garden fresh produce.

In fact, this year I think we have had the best and most bountiful crop of tomatoes since the “Crippled Crop” of ’02. Let me explain. By “Crippled Crop” I mean Debbie and I were crippled and the tomato crop was most abundant. That was the year that Deb broke her ankle in a “golfing” ??  accident and had to get it screwed back together and everything and I had just had surgery on my left shoulder so she was limping around on crutches and I was working with one hand and we had to process all of these tomatoes that we had grown while we were both still healthy. Sheesh! Turns out we got it done somehow. I guess “where there’s a will, there’s a way.”

This year, we’ve been giving away tomatoes and we have made two batches of salsa, plus spaghetti sauce and we’re still eating fresh tomatoes with every meal. I’m not complaining I’m bragging. I guess you could also say that I’m very thankful for the bounty.

While I am still a little saddened by the fact that we will soon be mothballing, (it’s just an expression, folks, we’re not really going to be using mothballs), the summer clothing we can also look forward to getting that Autumn clothes collection out and wearing something different. That’s another thing we Canadians can be thankful for...cold weather clothing.

We can’t change the inevitable so we might as well get used to it, don’t you think? Take the good with the bad…accept that time will march forward and regardless of how we feel about it we should embrace the new season.

“The leaves fall, the wind blows, and the farm country slowly changes from the summer cottons into its winter wools.-Henry Beston (1888-1968), “Northern Farm”.