. Spinning .

In answer to the question "Will I really burn in Hell forever if I don’t pick the peaches?" Lisa of Eudaemonia, noticing that I’m still alive and well, comments: "Oh thank God you didn’t burn in hell!!! I’m guessing you’re still posting from New England :)"

Yes, Lisa, I’m still safe and secure on my little patch of earth here in Connecticut. Not having yet finished The Master and Margarita to discover the wages of sin and leery of riding naked on a broomstick in my present 10-pounds over the norm, I’ve not sold my soul to the Devil. Instead, I’ve taken advantage of a passive-aggressive nature honed to a skill as fine as diamond dust and of which I’ve been well aware since I was a nasty little girl, the youngest of three, finding it to be my only weapon.

Somehow I manage to miss the evening weather reports on the telly and Channel 3 Weather Alerts have mysteriously been deleted automatically from my Inbox.  Therefore, how will I have known prior to some silvery sunbright morning that Jack Frost might pay a visit in the night?

Meanwhile, I pick and pick and pick and do the job most Americans will not do because I cannot let it go, I cannot waste what God has given.  Odd, that this strong bond with nature exists in me with writing as well.  The guilt-drive–the strongest, especially when founded in a deep respect–comes from what little Bible-teaching I have had: God-given talents and how they are used by man.  If there are pearly gates and a face-off, I want to be able to say I used them well. 

And this is what tosses me around in bed at night.

Can’t help  it, this is the absolute best year we’ve ever had in all the fruit so I have to share the joy (harumph. I just mistyped that as “share the job” and boyohboy I sure wish it were the case) since it will be a long time until a year like this one comes again.  My only regret is that I didn’t check the raspberries in early summer; made wine only once many years ago and folks still speak of it today. Above is the crabapple wine in the carboy, still bubbling but most of the must and pulp has been strained (through a lady’s stocking!).  Below are the peach (looking yucky since the pulp’s in stockings–Him asked me why I was doing laundry in the wine) and on the right, the grape; the latter due to be transferred to carboys tonight if Him will help me.

Since I siphoned, strained and transferred the crabapple wine myself this afternoon, I believe it best to have some help.  The kitchen looked like an I Love Lucy set and I’m still sticky in places that weren’t exposed.

Honestly, the grape at this point tastes very dry.  The crabapple–omigod the crabapple is going to be the best.  The peach just tastes like fizzy peaches at this stage.

Now I’ve got to go outside and pick some more.

A moral dilemma, a question of misguided prayer.  Will I really burn in Hell forever if I leave the peaches on the tree to possibly be killed by frost tonight?  Can I suffer some children somewhere to come and pick them?  Deep down my soul’s fermenting at the thought of any waste.

But if I pray for frost am I conflicting in my purpose on this earth? And there’s pesto dependent on the picking of the basil, and the dill needs to be hung and dried.  Oh yes, the apples for a pie, I did forget the pretty apples on the neighbor’s goddamn tree. Oh my. I’m so one with nature with the harvest as if to serve the earth is pleasure and every fruit that rots is my own venial sin.

Will I really burn in Hell forever if today I don’t go out and pick the peaches?

Who else but I might have unopened packages of nylon stockings–not pantyhose–saved for decades just for this day to serve as straining bags to hold the pulp away from juices that become peach wine?  Even as the bubbling peach transforms itself the stockings meant to grace a lady’s youthful limb holds instead inside itself a rosy glow of fruit.

Pure sensuality.

Tough day. Good things bad things don’t-know-what-to-do things. Learning more and more about people about me about the interactive world of reality that lays down choices and somehow just like in an alien Photopia and left-right-up-down-try-fly-cry I just don’t know the language and just don’t have the word.

For once, after seventeen years, the peaches weren’t hampered by late frost, drought, birds, lack of bees, gummiosis, worms, squirrels, or any other malady that occurs where you don’t get the harvest you need to perform the miracle of turning peaches into wine.

I’m picking daily as they ripen, peachpicker in one hand, shotgun in the other, fighting the birds to get to each individual peach as it matures.  I’m usually a second behind them.  But I’m bigger.

He laughs and runs just like the other boys even though he doesn’t have a father just his mom. Wild-eyed big-grinned wild-legged games of tag with hands held open at the ready. On a schoolyard in Missouri grassy brown and littered with the colors of September he’s happy, unaware of any threat except for maybe Brandon who’s a bully and likes to pick on little kids. He slows and for a moment stops and listens. Eyes dart at the subtle hum that only he can hear off in the distance. Shoulders pull together at an imagined rush of wind. Brown-black curly head dipped down, he cringes as a plane glides overhead. Sometimes his friends will tease him but most times they somehow know and don’t, remembering what Miss McCallum told them about that picture in their history book, about that day.  He’s just a little boy and he was only two some years before in New York City.

So in my research to find out how to get rid of the Yellowjackets–which as a reader properly pointed out are wasps, not bees–I’m supposed to sneak up on the hole at night to spray it.  I can take a flashlight, but not shine it in the hole.  I can mark the hole during the day to make it easier to find.  Do you honestly think that I’m not going to stumble right into it regardless of these precautions?  Or get stung marking it? Or piss them off moving the flashlight beam around the area?

Those peaches were probably sour anyway, grumbled Susan the Fox.

If you’ve been following my normally quiet little life since mid-August you know I’ve been dancing happily around the yard picking crabapples and grapes and pears and apples and peaches and tomatoes and the rest of that vegie garden stuff, and transforming their physical form into something more long-lasting.  For this, I’ve nearly been crucified, fallen off a ladder, gotten hit in the head by falling pears gathered together in defending their tree, been tatooed with an ankle bracelet by the killer raspberry vines, nearly blown up by an explosive fermention, and now, gotten stung by those yellowjackets that nest in the ground.  Too late I spotted their hole, as one of the little beestards stung me, instantly finding the vein on my hand that the nurse at the blood drawing station apparently couldn’t. 

Oh woeful Mother Nature am I! My sunny yellow chiffon gown in tatters, floral wreath askew, bruised and bleeding, licking my wounds, dragging bags of tomatoes, hot cherry peppers for salsa, and hard-fought-for peaches to the screeching of protesting birds, I bring home the bounty, filling my kitchen with pungent sweet scents and ripe bright primary colors. 

I take a deep breath, look around at the disarray, and to the gurgle of bubbling wine, sparkle of cut glassed sealed purple jelly, I sigh.  Inside my home, all outside is forgiven.

This has been an unbelievable year in terms of the crop.  Had I known, I would have planted the Roma (plum) tomatoes you need for bulk in a salsa, but for the past several years I’d be loaded down with cherry and plum types, with that occasional precious Big Boy used instead for BLT’s, and no salsa.  This year, I’ve gotten plenty of the big ones, but they’re too juicy by themselves to use alone.

I’ve got five gallons of crabapple wine in Stage II of the process, and ten gallons of grapes in the Stage I.  I have a gallon of juice clarified and ready to make a couple dozen more jars of grape jelly but I ran out of jelly jars and need to go out and buy more tomorrow.  Meanwhile, the kitchen smells yeasty and fruity and you can get high on the vapors alone.

But the dangers:  The grapes are in full galloping fermentation and while I’ve been elbow deep in it popping the grapes to get that done quickly, it keeps threatening to overflow its container and I’m afraid that it just might tonight.  At midnight.  Seep over and out and spill over the floor in a big sticky mess. Just managed by good luck to avoid an explosion this afternoon.  Skimmed the top pulp that separates itself from the crabapple wine, wrapped it in a plastic bag to discourage fruit flies until I get it outside in the garbage and lo and behold!  The stuff was still busy fermenting, putting out gas and the bag was blown up and ready to burst.  That would’ve been a mess I’d have had to walk away from.  Hop in the car and just drive.

Narrowly averted disaster, a stroke of luck, a happenstance to notice it in time.  So I’m still here. But the peaches are just beginning.