The Jig Is Up

O Gladiolas!

OK, the jig is pretty much up.

We had several consecutive killing frosts last week when it was cold, before it got warm and humid again; everything in my garden bit the dust except for the leeks, turnips, and a few little carrots and beet tops. I yanked most the leeks yesterday and made potato-leek-sorrel soup; and today used the very last sad-looking summer squash and some other sad, snagged-before-the-night veggies to make a vegetable soup today. Add enough garlic and some cheese and curry and it’ll be delicious.

I managed to get into the garden just before dark and strip it of anything I thought would get frosted, so I have baskets of green tomatoes slowly ripening on the dining room table, and grabbed as many of the scarlet runner beans that I thought might actually have a bean in them. I picked the peppers in the big garden and covered the ones in the beds next to the house, and picked any gladiolas that had blossom stalks, and handsful of other flowers.

 

Next day, the frost had killed the volunteer squash vines and pretty much everything else. Rather than take a chance with what was left, I brought in the volunteer squashes – three nice-sized buttercups and a small butternut – and picked the remaining peppers. This dry nasty year was wicked fine for peppers: I had 40, most large or very very large, and an amazing 8 had turned red. I now have bags and bags of chopped peppers in the freezer (thank you, Mom!), and one lone fresh one – as big as 2 normal ones - even after giving away a dozen or so. 

Some of the ripening tomatoes have been made into small-batch pasta sauce; the basil, also flourishing this year and now sadly kaput, has been made into frozen pesto and what I could salvage after frost went into some of the sauce; other tomatoes have been frozen, a few at a time. 

 For the next few weeks, at least, one of my daily chores will be looking at each tomato in the baskets, moving the ripe and almost-ripe ones into the kitchen for processing into sauce or bags of frozen chunks, and tossing any that decide to rot or mold rather than ripen.  Every day I also need to go through the two big baskets of pears that are daily coming off the tree and into the house, looking for ripe ones and rotten ones. Pears ripen off the tree – you pick them when they release from the tree when you lift the fruit horizontal to the limb; and you collect any that released themselves and have fallen into the flower bed that surrounds the pear tree. A ripe pear will often have a slight yellow blush, sometimes a rose blush, but you make the ripeness decision with your nose – if you wait for softness, you’ll be eating nasty mushy grainy blah. A ripe pear smells like – oh, sort of what heaven must smell like, and it explodes into a spicey glorious juiciness in your mouth. I don’t know how I lived most my adult life without a pear tree in it, and now I have one, I’m in love.

 The trees are glorious in spectacle this year, in spite of the drought. My ponds have dried up; I’ve never seen this before. I don’t dare water the perennials, nor plant any new ones. Fingers crossed that we get sufficient water soon and often before our world freezes, or next year may be a very sad year.

Speaking of which – and who’s speaking of anything else? – let’s  just take a snapshot of the antichrist who’s masquerading as president. These are things we know about him – not opinion, not unproven, just the bare truth:

·         He’s a liar. He lies all the time, about everything. I’m not talking about the state secrets and other sensitive matters all presidents have to sometimes lie about to the greater public – this one lies about everything, including insignificant, unimportant daily stuff. He’s pathological.

·         He’s a racist, and has been always.

·         He’s a bad businessman, and has always been.

·         He’s destroying the environment as fast as he can and encouraging other conscienceless actors to do the same.

·         He flubbed the pandemic response, and he’s actively trying to get us to kill each other.

·         He’s actively encouraging others to kill us.

·         He’s planning to kill us himself by eliminating our access to healthcare.

·         He doesn’t listen to anyone, thinks he knows more than everyone about everything, and can’t admit when he’s wrong. Which is often.

·         He’s a bully, a misogynist, and acts only in his own interests.

·         He’s alienated our international allies and made us an unwelcome, untrusted laughingstock to most of the rest of the world.

·         He tears families apart, and puts children in cages.

·         He wastes the nation’s money, often on his own entertainment.

·         He’s lazy, rarely works, and brags about it.

·         He has shared state secrets with our enemies, and given them encouragement and succor.

·         He makes fun of cripples, abuses women, encourages violence among his followers, says despicable things about American heroes.

·         He has turned our norms of decency and fair play, the statesman’s greater vision of acting for the greater good, and most of our safety-checks upside down, inside out, into the garbage.

·         He acts like, and talks like, an autocrat, despot, king.

Let’s leave it at that list, which doesn’t include a host of the despicable things he’s done and said. In public. In front of cameras, so there’s plenty of proof.

Ask your foolish friends and family to listen to this list of shame and ask them if that’s really what they want to be voting for in November.

And let’s all stop calling his, and the bullshit of the Republicans who follow his lead, “disinformation.” Let’s call it lies, which is the unpleasant but true word, and let’s call him and all of them out on it. Over and over and over again.

October is a blue moon month: two full moons, on the first and on Hallowe’en: harvest moon and hunter’s moon.

 All photos Deb Marshall