We'll have frost tonight, twenty-nine degrees. That will be the end of the tender crops: peppers, beans, eggplant, basil. So it was a day of harvest, of processing food for the winter. Resting now in my freezer are four pounds of pesto. There are herbs hanging all over the house, a fridge full of fruit, bowls of peppers that might get a little more ripe, a little more sweet, even though they will no longer enjoy benefit of sun and fresh air, even though they've been plucked from the mother vein.
There's something deeply engaging about experiencing abundance. Some atavistic pleasure center fires when I confront a stock of fruit or seed or root. And it's even more pleasurable when the abundance has sprung from my own labor, my own hand and soil.
We're wired to love harvest, it's in our blood. It's how we have always survived.
