It used to be that to me the phrase "harvest time" simply mean the conservative Christian euphemism for Halloween, that time in October when church kids would dress up in costumes and get lots of candy and have a lot of fun, but it would *always* be called a Harvest Party, never a Halloween party. Now that I've gotten interested in gardening and preserving, though, the word takes on new meanings. Or, I guess, reverts back to what it's actually meant all along; gathering up the results of half-a-year's-worth of growing.



A few weeks ago we dug up all our potatoes--those potatoes that I thought were going to be toast, victims of some sort of horrible blight on their leaves. Apparently they were doing okay under the ground after all--we dug up about 25 pounds of delicious purpley-red potatoes of all shapes and size.

Three butternut squash took up residence on my counter for awhile; I've been gradually cooking them and reducing them to puree and making my favorite pasta sauce with them.

Tomatoes: they finally ripened, a lot of them anyway, and I've been salsa-ing away in the kitchen, making sure to use big latex gloves this time. No more delayed pepper-burning of the hands for me.

And then the last two days we've been picking apples: at the home of a generous friend and at a local orchard with adorable little trees that they've made sure don't grow much more than six feet high, with mounds of fruit on their low-hanging branches. Out in the sunny, crisp fall morning, my eager little daughters beside me, picking apples still wet with dew, I felt impossibly wholesome. We were like the living embodiment of a Norman Rockwell painting, I tell you. Did he ever paint this scene and call it "Harvest Time"? If he didn't, he should have. That's how sweet and all-American it felt.



Then we came home with buckets full of apples and the girls munched on them all afternoon while I made applesauce, and then in the evening I went outside and discovered a pile of those beautiful golden-red apples, each of them half-munched, sitting there browning in the sun, with no more than two or three bites out of it. I was ready to clobber my sweet, wholesome, apple-wasting daughters. Today, even as I was taking pictures of these apples to show you, I found another apple right there in the bucket with just two tiny teeth marks scraping tracks through the surface. So much for sweetness.



But now my daughters are sleeping, and I've got apple butter slowly cooking in the crockpot, and it makes my kitchen smell just like apple pie. There's a cat sleeping on my lap and the house is quiet. I've got jars of salsa and applesauce in the cupboard, and more tomatoes and apples and peaches waiting to be made into something delicious, and it seems to me like Harvest is a pretty wonderful time of year.