The 9-year-old was blowing his trombone.
He’d only had one lesson, and his best tone sounded a lot like his father blowing his nose. To practice proper embouchure, he made farty noises with his lips in between each trombone blat.
The little dog yelped. The big dog whined.
“What on earth is that noise?” the teenager asked, wandering into the room.
The oxen began bellowing, and a rooster crowed from halfway up a pine tree, even though it was dark.
My husband and I smiled at each other. We were popping dried black beans out of their pods and into metal bowls, sifting out the chaff and pouring the beans into big jars. There was a pumpkin baking in the oven of the wood stove, and a pot of soup on the top.
We were all home together, done with our daily rounds that are complicated by commuting, jobs, school and delivering the teen to and from ballet school a million times a week.
It was Columbus Day weekend. The perfect time for Thanksgiving.
And so we had our yearly family harvest festival, sharing our garden bounty with local and distant friends. Corn, pumpkins, peas, beans, cabbages, potatoes, pickled beets and cukes all made it to the table in one form or another.
Just in time, too. An after-dinner walk was brisk enough that the whole party pulled up hoods and stuffed hands deep into pockets. And that night was the first killer frost.
The next morning, the garden was done. Dead leaves drooped off the pumpkin vines, pepper plants were blackened, flower stalks brown. The trees, which had been in their yellow and orange glory when our friends arrived, began shedding leaves as soon as they left. Suddenly, it was winter.
The humidity dropped, the Milky Way came out. The next morning the oil man came, and the hens took a day off from laying.
Seasons are like that around here — there’s no easing from one to the next. The page turns and the world changes. Last week, we thought the growing season might never end; this week, we wouldn’t be surprised by snow.
And in the complicated world outside the garden, it’s the same. One week it’s the long, hot days of summer, with walks to the beach, wild fruit to pick, tomatoes and cucumber slices. The next, it’s “Nutcracker” rehearsals and trombone lessons, and it’s dark before we’re done with all the driving back and forth.
Somehow, the garden connects it all. In the cold, dark evenings, we’re all back around the wood stove, cooking up what we’ve grown. We’re drying bean vines on the hooks behind the stove, and hot peppers in the warming oven. There are a few baskets of the last of the garden pickings by the door — squashes and pumpkins and onions and garlic. We’re bringing in boxes of apples from the orchard halfway between home and work. We’re still digging potatoes.
And in another month, we’ll celebrate Thanksgiving again, this one oddly distant from the harvest.
But no matter, any excuse to celebrate the harvest, the bounty that comes from working with the earth, is fine with us.
And, if our guests are lucky, maybe there’ll be a trombone concert too.
Margaret Hartley is the Gazette’s Sunday and features editor. Greenpoint appears in the Gazette’s print edition Sundays on the Environment page.
Have a question or a topic you’d like addressed on Greenpoint? Email greenpoint@dailygazette.net.
