No Indian summer for us here in the Puget Sound Region! There were a couple of hopeful warm days that should have led to a string of hot days, resplendent with cries of "too hot." Alas, no luck. The skies filled with gray wet fog in the morning hours, followed by some soft, yet brilliant cool, sun in the late afternoon. And then the first major rainfall descended upon us last Sunday and my day was consumed with overreaching guilt. I did not go and support the farmers at our local markets. This is the week of the Harvest full moon, and I let the fresh cold dampness keep me from venturing forth. Shameful.
Yet, the tantalizing sense of the new is once again upon us - the start of the school year, new seasons with dance and music, new art exhibitions. New hopes grab at us. Expectant hopes fill our sensibilities. We start to accept the next season, autumn, with all its riotous color, chaos and swirling confusion, along with the last of the harvests. We will celebrate with glowing pumpkins! We will find the woolens and the raingear and get to the markets to support our farmers.
Thursday will be the last day this year for the Queen Anne Farmers Market. The organizers need to be publicly thanked again for their incredible and very successful efforts. All of the farmers I have spoken with have had a very positive experience with this newest market, and I sense from them a real eagerness to return next year and hopefully for a longer season.
In our own gardens, things are looking quite frayed around the edges with all the sunflowers toppled over, too many apples on the ground and lavender bushes pushing their abundant summer growth across pathways. With this recent wet cold snap, the zucchinis will finally slow way down and my favorite haricot vert beans will shut down completely. And I wonder if there will be enough warmth left in the soil to get my winter vegetable seeds to germinate?
Meanwhile there is the beginning sense of burrowing in. Time to snuggle into wraps and throws and read those stacks of things, i.e., books, magazines or articles printed from the Internet. Definitely the food choices have changed. The lightness of our summer meals no longer suffices. It is time to put the long, slow-cooking pots on the back burners. We still have some heavy-lifting time in the kitchen to finish our canning and freezing projects, but the light is waning. Summer has passed this year - and it never really got around to feeling like summer. I stored the fans last week, and I remembered that I used them only two or three times this year - and it was more for the symbolism than for any real need to dissipate uncomfortable heat.
[[In-content Ad]]
