The Better Half

Change is hard. Anytime something changes, even for the good, it causes stress in our lives and stress leads to any number of health problems. There have been several changes lately, albeit small ones, but changes none-the-less and my health is taking a hit.

School started for all the kids, including our youngest, which means that the house is now unusually empty whereas it used to hum with the activities of a small girl. My business is growing - slowly - but the changes that have come about from that will take a while to settle out into a more normal routine. My husband has started taking on more "side jobs" as though the full time maintenance of the farm wasn't quite enough to do....there have been a lot of small and, technically, good changes. But I am still tapped out. Kids brought home "the crud" from school - that first wave of viruses that they all seem to pass around and introduce to one another almost as fast as they introduce themselves to their peers. And, to top it all off, at some point in the last four days I have internalized all my stress and placed it in a nice sore knot in my neck which no longer allows me to turn to look at anything on my left. I try to keep telling myself that, maybe with a twenty minute nap, all things will be improved and I will have the energy to go out and actually accomplish something....anything.

So far, it hasn't worked.

But, thankfully, there is another person that lives with me and seems to have a supply never ending energy - my better half.  We balance each other out most of the time - I'm full of energy when he is at a low point and vice verse, but lately he has definitely been carrying the "home front" load that seems to totally put me over the edge.  With all that still needs to be done on the farm before the snow flies, we have had to select which projects to tackle and then try to take them on together.  "Many hands make light work"....unfortunately due to school projects and activities, the "many hands" are simply his and mine.  The focus of this last weekend was the grapes. 

Five years ago I ordered and planted what were supposed to be "seedless" grapes - not sure where it got screwed up, but every grape that grows on the arbor has seeds in it. What we didn't expect, however, is that they are some of the most flavorful grapes I have ever tasted.  After spending the early summer picking Japanese beetles off them and attempting to cover them when they spray the fields with Round Up, we finally get to harvest.  I trudged along with Keith, carrying the bushel basket and we set to work picking.  Before we were 1/4 the way through the row we realized that we were in for a lot of grape.

One bushel basket, two five gallon buckets and four large bowls later we had finally picked all the grapes.  Roughly 50 pounds came off our four smallish grape vines.  Then the real work began.  I try not to, but I end up counting how many times I have to touch each fruit of vegetable on the way to processing it - once to pick it, once to pull it off the stem, another time to clean it, and then crushing.  For each of those 50 pounds of grapes, each grape was touched approximately 4 times, and that doesn't even take into consideration that then you cook them, strain them, strain them again, mix it with sugar and boil it, put it in sterilized glass jars and then boil it again.  Then we take the second straining left overs, which is the pulp of the grape minus the skin and seed, and mix that with sugar and cook it on a cookie sheet to make fruit leathers.  This is a project that takes all weekend with two people working full time.  17 pints of jelly, 11 cups of jelly, 4 quarts of juice, 7 pints of jam, and 5 cookie-sheet sized fruit leathers later we were finally finished.

Don't get me wrong, I love it that in the middle of winter I will be able to take a quart of concentrated Concord grape juice off the shelf and mix up home grown grape juice for the kids, or eat a fruit leather while out for a hike in the woods, or spread a thick layer of jelly on a piece of bread, but right at this time of year, with a cold and a wicked pain in the neck, it is hard to be enthusiastic about the whole process.  We finished the dark purple, sticky sweet mess on Monday night at approximately 10:30 pm and then I headed off to work on Tuesday. 

On Wednesday....we went and picked apples....approximately #140 pounds of them, that, thanks only to the un-ending energy of my spouse, will be processed into quart after quart of beautiful, tasty applesauce.  Meanwhile, I take on the challenge of the tomatoes and processing as many of them as possible into marinara, pizza sauce and frozen tomatoes which will provide a winter's worth of spaghetti sauce, pizza sauce and chili, if we are lucky...and if my energy holds out.