Equinox Rains

 

 

               The Equinox Rains came through on Friday night, shifting the seasons once again. Inside, the changes had already begun; outside, we spent the afternoon preparing.

                When I came home on Friday afternoon, after working with students in the school garden to lay down some cover crop, I found Mark up in the fig tree, picking ripe fruit. “I thought we could get one more round in the dryer,” he called down. “You know, before the rain creates Fig Bombs.” I agreed and wandered into the back yard to finish picking the tomatoes, tuck away the electric lamp, and pull the potted plants out to where they would catch the rain when it fell. Mark finished his compost sifting project and moved his favorite chair inside. We tucked the rabbit in early with a bag of baby carrots I pulled out of the school trash can and went inside. Let it rain.

                That evening, I shifted the mantle and table decorations from Lammastime—or the early harvest—to the Fall Equinox. Every six weeks, the decorations evolve. I will change the plates, the candles and holders, the fabrics that sit under the lamp on the kitchen table to reflect the seasons. Right now, the mantle is green and gold and orange with my mother’s old glass pumpkin and the orange candle holders. Dried foliage from the coast and two brown and green plates from the 1940s, plus the turkey butterdish. Late Harvest.

                The clouds were moving in fast over the moon when we went to bed, chased by the wind. Just before I fell asleep I thought “wind in the corn.” An hour or so later, the rains came in a rush like the high tide, smelling of salt water and wet forest and far clear spaces. Rain. Rain like the sea. Rain like a blessing. Rain to shift the seasons, once again, from summer to fall, right on schedule.

               

Canning Season

 

                When I was 14, we lived in an old house with a crab-apple tree in the back yard. I gathered the apples in the fall and attempted to make applesauce. It was awful. The apples were tart and wormy; I was dismayed. “Wrong apples,” my father muttered when he saw the results. “Crab apples are for cider.” Who knew?

The next weekend, we made our first trip to the apple orchards, where I picked half a bushel of beautiful MacIntosh apples under a bright blue New England sky. I even climbed up in the tree to reach the highest, ripest fruit. My father pretended not to notice. When I came home, I had apples. After consulting Betty Crocker c. 1958, I made real applesauce for the first time, peeling the apples and tossing the unbroken skins over my shoulder. I had read that the skins would fall into the initials of the person you would marry; it was worth a shot.  The puree bubbled in the new harvest gold crockpot, sending the sweet scent of cinnamon throughout the house. Once the sauce was frozen, I moved onto pie, making a crust for the first time. Then I tried turnovers. And we ate apples for days. Next year, I vowed, a full bushel.

Picking apples and making sauce became an autumn ritual. When I was in college, my room mate woke up at six on Saturday morning and peeled all of the fruit before I even rolled out of bed. We ate applesauce for a late breakfast that morning and on pancakes for weeks.

These days, I make far more than applesauce in late August and early September, as school starts up again. Every day, something is processed. Salsa. Tomato sauce. Dried pears. Pickles of all sorts. Whatever overflows from local gardens and old trees finds its way into our house, waits its turn in the dining room, and becomes something we will eat this winter. Tonight, it was dried pears and salsa verde. Tomorrow will be another batch of tomato sauce, cooking down in the crockpot that looks exactly like my first one, that I made my first batch of sauce in, back in high school.