My husband has very basic tastes when it comes to food. His palate has expanded over the years, but generally he sees no need for anything fussy or foreign, a real meat-and-potatoes, bacon-and-eggs kind of guy. I am not. Give me all the sauces, and fancy ingredients, and ancient grains, and special veggies. We order very differently in nice restaurants.

When we first moved in together eleven years ago, our dining preferences took some getting used to. Not that we could afford anything super exciting, but after living alone for several years, I suddenly needed to accommodate vastly different tastes.

One dish we settled on was a sort of shepherd’s pie. I’d brown some ground beef, toss it together in a casserole dish with frozen mixed veggies (square carrots!) and a can of cream of celery soup, and top it with instant mashed potatoes, usually garlic or cheddar flavored. Half an hour in the oven, and dinner was served. Inexpensive and filling, though certainly not very clean.

We still eat a sort of shepherd’s pie around here – we had it tonight, in fact. I’ve graduated to using ground turkey and making a sauce from scratch: chopped onions sauteed in butter and a bit of salt, adding three tablespoons of flour to make a roux and then whisking in a cup of milk. I still use those store-bought frozen veggies, but they’re really not a terrible option when you think about how long the “fresh” produce has traveled in the back of a truck to get to the store. But the potato topping is real now: boiled red skins mashed dirty with butter and spread across the surface. Sprinkled with freshly grated cheese and baked. Salt and pepper. It takes a little longer to prep, but oh, it tastes so much better. And truly, it’s not any more expensive than the packaged stuff from years past.

Pie in the sky? Ground meat raised by here or by friends, or game hunted by J. Carrots and peas and corn and beans and potatoes from our own garden. Local milk and cheese.

So yeah. My shepherd’s pie has a little ways to go yet, but we’ve made some progress.

(Now…if we could just get Swee to eat it…)

We pulled the last of the veggies yesterday. Six short stalks of itty-bitty Brussels sprouts, and five teeny-tiny cabbages. I cut the sprout stalks with clippers, and then had to use the shovel to dig up the roots and stumps because the ground is already starting to freeze and we could see the ice crystals in the dirt. The original goal was to leave them in the garden and harvest on Thanksgiving morning for a true “farm to table” side dish, but we have had multiple hard frosts, and the daytime highs are in the 30s now – I decided not to risk it. Based on some reading, we left the sprouts on the stalks, wrapped them in plastic bags, and tucked them into the crisper drawer on high humidity to ride out their remaining week. The cabbages got the same treatment, and I hope to get them into a crock or jar this weekend to become sauerkraut for New Year’s Day.

There’s some cruel irony that the growing season ends right when I begin to feel energized to do things. We hustle all summer long, making and prepping and growing and chopping to the point of exhaustion, and when the cooler temps arrive to refresh us, it’s time to stop. And yet it’s a very clear reminder that we all need a season to rest, including Mother Nature. There’s no subtlety in her delivery, that’s for sure.

And so we put the gardens to bed – our current plot will soon be mulched and transitioned to a perennial bed (raspberries, strawberries, rhubarb for now), and our new plot has been started. We decided to move the main garden to the other side of the house where it will receive full sun for the majority of the day. It’s situated along the driveway in a flat space below the main orchard. We marked it out a full two-thirds longer than you see in the photo, and then realized we hadn’t stockpiled enough material to get it going and had to reduce our aspirations…at least for now. There’s plenty of room to expand, and goodness, it does look tiny from above, despite being a larger space than I tended this season. We began by putting down a whole mess of fallen, rotting apples, covered them with pine shavings and manure from the chicken coop, and blanketed the whole area with cardboard. We’re hoping to throw a layer of composted horse manure on top to finish, though it’s now a race against the snow, and I’m not sure we’re going to win.

In theory, this lasagna method will kill off the existing grass while nourishing the dirt below, and all the cardboard should be broken down in time to till it under in the spring. Yes, I think we’re going to rent a rototiller this time, and have at it. Turning the soil with the spade took me far too long, and I am just not physically strong enough to manage a large enough space in time to plant. As a friend pointed out, I will lose all that time I spent digging out rocks in the other plot, and have to do it all over again in the spring in this new spot, but our raspberries will reap the benefit of my efforts for years to come, and I’ll have all winter to forget just how hard I worked and get excited to be out in the dirt again.

Though we have over a month to go until the Solstice, it’s truly beginning to feel wintry here. Mittens are always tucked into mama’s bag, and no one leaves the house without a hat. They will still be blaze orange for a few  more weeks as hunting season winds down. Beanie and I took a little walk during Swee’s piano lesson yesterday, partially to get a little bit of fresh air but really to keep her from pestering the teacher’s cat for half an hour. We checked out the dam at Mill Pond, the water rushing through the opening and down over the rocks. There’s a thin layer of translucent ice on the pond’s still surface, and jagged clumps on the stones below. Beanie is already talking about skating, and there are snowflakes on my ten-day forecast. Definitely time to come indoors and give it a rest.

“Self-care is not about self-indulgence; it is about self-preservation.”
                                                                                             -Audre Lorde

Two weekends ago, I spent some time at Kripalu Center in the Berkshire mountains of western Massachusetts. It was a rare chance for me to move at my own pace, and with the freedom of total independence; I was bound only by the retreat schedule and my own hunger pangs. You, my fellow parents, know all too well how infrequently you feel like an independent human being, wholly your own. I practiced yoga at sunrise, enjoyed fresh, clean meals in a silent dining room, hiked in the woods and bathed in the quiet smell of fallen leaves, and passed multiple hours without speaking to a soul. Silence. There was zero expectation that I attempt to be social, or make small talk. This beautiful, golden silence was encouraged and celebrated. Just heavenly.

I try very hard to slip self-care into our normal days, but there are times when an hour here and there just is not enough. A total immersion was precisely what I needed. The retreat focused on self-renewal, and it included some difficult, emotional work – I wasn’t quite prepared for that kind of depth – and while I anticipated it being wonderful, I was certainly surprised at just how renewed I felt when I arrived home.

The power went out a few hours later. And it stayed out for a couple of days, long enough to make me fear for the contents of our freezer. Breathe, and relax around the tension. We were lucky. Our lines were reconnected quite quickly in comparison to others we know, and I felt some guilt at even admitting we were back on.

It was inconvenient, yes. Because the storm and subsequent outage was so unexpected, we hadn’t prepared. We had very little drinking water on hand, and certainly hadn’t filled the bathtub. In great good fortune, I’d been too lazy to tip the wheelbarrow up against the shed when I was finished with it the week before, and the storm had left us with plenty of rainwater to flush the toilets. No power means no wifi, and we are in a hollow with no cell service, so we were effectively disconnected from everything. Really though, it was encouraging to see how well we managed. We re-heated leftovers on our gas range (lit with a match) to keep them from going bad, and colored with the girls by candlelight after dinner. We played outside with friends, and soaked in the quiet of our home – so very quiet without the background hum of appliances. We pulled out extra blankets and fired up the woodstove in the evenings.  Can you receive? We checked on friends and neighbors, and felt cared for by the same as they looked in on us. And we were warmed through and through as the entire community came together to celebrate Halloween for the kids, moving the party to the fire station where their generator gave light and heat in the middle of a chilly, dark village.

I made a commitment to myself during that weekend in the mountains. Clearly I can’t pick up and run off to the Berkshires any time I feel overwhelmed by life, and so I have to develop a practice to reconnect with my wise self, my true self. I have to get up and move. I have to drink in the silence and maintain that space for myself. I’ve chosen to gift myself time alone in meditation each morning. A blanket and a candle, a short reading and introspection. Inspiration without practice is not sustainable. It’s not been easy to maintain, particularly with the time change, and I’ve slipped already. But then my accountability partner texted me yesterday to keep me on track, and so I’ll be ducking out to the car to retrieve my mat before bed, for 6 o’clock comes early.