It was quiet and moist and foggy this morning. I walked out to dump the kitchen scraps on our neighbor's compost and a shimmer in the pine trees caught my eye.
Another morning of small moments: the most fragile of constructions, the sturdiest of homes.
Earlier this week, I cut off a soft portion of a late tomato. It has broken open—the tiniest of breaks—and was weeping gently, so I sliced it off and tossed it into the small compost bowl I keep on the counter. The bowl has a lid, and I snapped it into place.
In the morning, a surprise greeted me:
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As it turns out, September food dollars came in under the $180.00/month I set so optimistically back in the start of this year. How much under? A lot. Total dollars spent were $151.38, all on food. I think this is the first month ever we have not made any expenditures for common household items.
Year-to-date average? $219.32. I've done the math. There is no way we will average $180.00 a month for the year with only three months remaining. As I have observed before, the pandemic threw monkey wrenches in our grocery buying that I could not have predicted.
I will add that we had an eating out expenditure in September, the first in months! Two scoops of Graeter's ice cream (a regional ice cream chain). I had lemon sorbet; I don't remember what Warren ordered. Why ice cream out of the blue? Because I needed dry ice to ship blood (don't even ask and no, I did not ship blood after all was said and done) and every Graeter's sells dry ice for $1.75 a pound. Since we had to be there to buy the dry ice, why not treat ourselves as well?
That lemon sorbet was absolutely delicious.
The garden continues to putter along. I predicted last month that we would likely have zucchini until the first hard frost. Nope. Most of the plants started dying of old age in mid-September and I yanked all but one out. That one had a few potential zucchini at the time. I picked one (and gave it to an out of town friend) and left the other, which never developed into anything more than a twisted and skimpy squash, so I let it go. We have about 35 quarts of sliced zucchini in the freezer, and several packets of grated for baking, so with all we ate or baked fresh or gave away, I can't complain about the zucchini being done for the year. I am still picking tomatoes, albeit at a very slow rate. They are reluctant to ripen in the waning sun, preferring instead to go soft.
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| The last zucchini |
I am also restocked in both cinnamon and canned pumpkin, whatever that shortage was about.
Even though we are early in October, I see that the food dollars will likely be higher. We did a major restocking at Aldi a few days ago, and with the limited other purchases we have already made, we are closing in fast on the September figure, let alone the $180.00 goal.
Let's see what the month brings.
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| "Every replete tree was first a seed that waited." Hope Jahren, Lab Girl |
I love Lab Girl and have read it twice. But this post is not about that book or about Hope Jahren and why I find her an intriguing writer and scientist.
Rather, this post is about waiting.
I had long known that you could get an avocado seed to sprout if you removed the seed coat, poked toothpicks into it, and then suspended the seed over a glass of water, with the lower part of the seed submerged. Even in my college days, when this was popular, the only time I remember seeing that experiment up close was at the house of my first mother-in-law, who sporadically would try to coax an avocado seed into sprouting. Muriel was not the most patient person in the world and only wished he had a green thumb, so it was not unusual to walk into the kitchen, noticing the avocado seed/tumbler was missing from the sill of the kitchen window, inquire, and be told that she had "pitched the damn thing."
I have never once been tempted to try the toothpick/glass method.
But on the strength of absorbing some of Jahren's philosophy about being and waiting, I looked at an avocado seed differently this summer. Why wouldn't it sprout if it were put in soil and watered? Wasn't that what seeds are programmed to do? (I would help it along by removing the seed coat; unlike chicks, who have to peck their way out of the eggs, seeds are not weakened by being helped.)
What if I just waited?
My first attempt ended when I got impatient four or five weeks into the experiment and tried to rock the seed a bit in the soil. Crack. I realized I had most likely broken a tap root and on further inspection, it turns out I had.
Lesson #1: Don't be impatient.
My second attempt was cut short when an overreaching chipmunk or squirrel leapt onto the small table on the deck on which the seed in its pot had sat for two or three weeks. I came out one morning to find the pot overturned, the dirt scattered, and the seed on the deck floor, looking gnawed.
Lesson #2: Animals are part of that randomness of whether a seed becomes a tree.
A month ago, I tried one more time, again removing the seed coat, but this time finding a space inside on the overcrowded plant table. Other than watering the seed from time and time, I left it alone.
I waited.
And the seed, true to its internal program, responded.
Lesson #3: Wait. Wait. Wait.
I realized this weekend that the avocado seed had indeed sprouted. It has sent up a tall stalk with delicate small leaves (or presumably they will be when they unfurl).
"Each beginning is the end of a waiting," writes Hope Jahren.
And here we are: beginning.
We're not big maple syrup consumers. We only use it on pancakes, and maybe, maybe, I make pancakes once every five or six weeks.
Maybe.
The large jug of Ohio maple syrup that a good friend gave me for my birthday three or four years ago lasted a long time. But all good things come to an end, and that includes maple syrup. After years of pure maple syrup, I was not going back to "pancake syrup with real maple flavoring."
One jug of maple syrup: $17.00.
August in Ohio is when sweet corn hits the market or, in our case, the parking lot. A friend from my high school years (we were in 4-H together almost a half century ago) posted on Facebook two weeks ago that they had just picked 40 dozen ears of sweet corn and would be selling it out of the the truck at a small shopping plaza that morning.
Three dozen ears: $12.00.
Two weeks later, just Monday in fact, she posted that they had just picked the grandchildren's corn.
Another three dozen ears: another $12.00.
So right there is $41.00 of food purchases which are either extremely seasonal (the corn) or extremely rare (maple syrup). The corn amortized over a year comes to $2.00 a month. The maple syrup, amortized over two years, comes to 71¢ a month. (It's even cheaper over three years!) I can live with that kind of extravagance.
By the time I add up all the food purchases ($235.60) and add in the household items ($18.06), we spent a whopping $253.66 in August. Some of those food dollars included some larger ticket items (olive oil, coconut oil), which, like the maple syrup, will not need replaced for several months, but it is what it is.
For the year, we are averaging $227.81 a month.
Not what I had hoped for after a low-spend July, but pretty much what I have predicted for Covid-19 shopping. One high month (only one, I hope), one low month, repeat. It is interesting to see what gaps appear at the market. Canned pumpkin is almost nonexistent. So, apparently, are canned beets according to my good friend Margo, but given that I have made zero purchases of canned beets in my life, that one doesn't impact me. Ground cinnamon is hard to find at times. Fruit has stayed high, even summer melons. (I'm hoping the fall apple harvest will help bring down those prices.) On the other hand, there will be LOTS of zucchini and corn to eat all winter long in this household. Looking at my garden, I predict the zucchini will go on merrily until we get a hard frost.
A few years back, a reader commented, somewhat kindly, somewhat tongue in cheek, that maybe I was a tad obsessed about tracking my food purchases and maybe I just needed to lighten up. Clearly I ignored that advice as I have gone on tracking our purchases ever since. Loooking ahead to 2021, when I will be retiring, not drawing social security right away, and living on a greatly reduced monthly income, watching these food dollars will become critical. So I do not regret the tracking.
I'm not even making predictions for September...
Yesterday's post was not a teaser. Truly. It was the best I could do after almost an hour of staring at a blank screen.
Last night Warren and I talked about many things, as we so often do: how his day went, how my day went, Court issues, Symphony issues, what the weekend holds. You get the idea. (Yes, our offices are only about five yards apart, but there are days where we can spin off into our programs and meetings, not reemerging until supper.)
For the curious, the weekend looks a lot like the week, except that I do not turn to Court work at all, and Warren tries to minimize Symphony work. Warren works in his shop; I do laundry and read. Our at-home weekends never fail to disappoint my close friend Cindy, who often starts her Monday email to me with asking me about my weekend, this past week asked "Did you do anything FUN over the weekend?" Keeping within our Covid-19 restrictions in this state, she buys feed, buys groceries, shops at Goodwill, and sometimes eats out during her weekends. When I pointed out that I am still pretty much on medical lockdown, she emailed back that I "must be" getting restless by now and ready to GO DO SOMETHING.
Not really. The one thing I really wanted to do—travel west to my family and then northeast to friends in Maine—got scrubbed months ago. Those trips aren't coming back this year and I have made peace with that. But otherwise, while I would like matters to be different, I am more than satisfied with my stay-at-home life. I have not been in my office at Court for over five months; all of us have had to learn new ways to do our old jobs. Life rolls on.
As I mentioned yesterday, August has held some hard times. A close friend/colleague had a serious medical crisis erupt in her family and that hurt both professionally, because we had to work around her absence and the uncertainty of her return, and personally, because we are such good friends. The major medical crisis started to resolve positively when she found herself in ER. None of this was Covid-19, for which all of us are grateful. Other close friends are dealing with the death of a beloved dog. Someone else near and dear to my heart is struggling with major depression. There are some family stressors (larger family, not me and Warren) going on. In none of these situations can I show up and hug the person, which is what I want to do. I can only talk on the phone or text or send wishes into the air for them.
August has been heavy at times.
But the rest has been good. Today was the livestream funeral mass of a longtime friend and colleague who died back in the winter; watching that brought back wonderful memories even while I cried. I had a wonderful, uplifting long phone call with a young friend who is headed back to college for a career change and our talk reminded me of the joy and power of direction. Our Legal Clinic continues to operate virtually; I am the volunteer who assigns the attorneys so I have firsthand knowledge of who we are serving and how our attorneys are providing these people hope and advice and direction. The Symphony participated in its 6th Benefit in the Barn, tackling hunger and food insecurity in our county and one adjoining county. Go here to watch it; that's Warren speaking in the beginning. Between the Clinic and the Symphony, I am reminded how I am always humbled with the strength of our community.
And our Poetry Group started meeting again, by Zoom. That was a good thing, because Emily had been sulking. We meet again this Sunday and I can't wait.
And then there was a surprise this month: a stunning, amazing, never-saw-it-coming-ever surprise. About a week ago I received an email from a name I did not recognize, titled "Uncle Ski."
Uncle Ski was my uncle, an engaging, wonderful man who died seven years ago. I blogged about him after his death; you can read my words here. So the title on the email was so specific that I thought it was not spam or a phishing attempt, and opened it.
It was a lovely email from someone, a man named Sam, who read my blog post all these years later and reached out to me directly. After thanking me for my words, Sam wrote "I really appreciated reading it because it gave me some perspective on myself." Then he dropped the bombshell: "Your Uncle Ski was my grandfather."
I had to catch my breath. I'm still catching it.
Sam and I have exchanged several emails. My stepcousin once removed (his mother was my Uncle Ski's daughter) is a writer and blogger. Imagine that. You can find his blog at All the Biscuits in Georgia. He just saw his oldest son ship off to his first Navy deployment, a fact that would have made Uncle Ski, who served his whole life in the Navy, immensely proud. I have given Sam my dad's phone number and encouraged him to call him; my dad, when I told him what had happened, marveled at the connection, then said, "Oh, I have a lot of stories to tell him about his grandfather."
You could hear the anticipation in his voice.
