It's been a long time since our family has lived in a place with four seasons.
After eight years in the land of perpetual summer, we find ourselves in the northern country, and even as August draws to a close, I can feel a change in the air.
The days are still hot, and often steamy, but the mornings are cool and crisp. The apples on our backyard tree are beginning to turn red and fall to the ground.
For the first time in my life, I feel an urge to put away food, just like the squirrels I see running up and down the trees. My counter is lined with giant zucchini and garden-fresh tomatoes. I'm busy canning up tomato sauce, rhubarb compote and dill pickles. I'm freezing zucchini bread and chocolate zucchini muffins and basil-almond pesto.
It's not an easy task, especially with four little ones around my feet. I do a lot while the baby is asleep. I'm not really sure what compels me on. I know I could go to the store and buy a case of canned tomatoes. But I find myself loving the process, the satisfaction of slipping the skins off the tomatoes, slicing the cucumbers and watching the rhubarb soften as it bubbles on the stove. There is such satisfaction in going to the basement to line up the rows of brightly colored jars, like edible jewels.
It makes me think, quite often, of my pioneer ancestors, who had no fall-back. Food storage was not an option, but a necessity. They worked like mad during harvest time. There was meat to be salted down. The men and boys harvested the corn and wheat. Young children picked the last of their kitchen garden and buried it deep in the root cellar for the long winter ahead. Their whole existence was based on a desire to have shelter and enough food to survive.
I don't envy that time, but I like to take it in snatches, through cooking or sewing or garden harvesting. In all our busyness, it's feels good to reach up and pick an apple from the tree, and not just eat it, but peel it and boil it down into applesauce.
The whole process brings with it a deep sense of gratitude, for a Lord who saw fit to give his children good gifts, beautiful gifts. He gave us a vast garden to tend and to tame. He gave us winter so we would appreciate the coming of spring. He knew we would be easy slow to remember if He didn't make life a little cold around the edges.
So in the dead of a northern winter, when the world is frozen over, I will go down to my basement to retrieve a bit of summer, captured in a jar. I'll pour it on our dinner plates as a reminder of hope and a promise of things to come.
These are things our ancestors knew. I simply had a lot to learn from a jar of pickles.