(Beginners garden for late season radishes and lettuce)
Dinners with Timothy and Sissy two nights ago and the Lofting family last night have Michael and I feeling very welcomed to the area. When going to a movie or a dinner out or any assortment of things involves driving 15 minutes and much more around here, it is of essence to find “escapes” from the home nearby. I’d rather not be excreting oil.
The Loftings are the descendents of Hugh Lofting, scribe of Dr. Doolittle. Ida, his wife, is alive and thriving at 93 years of age. The secret, one of her granddaughters tells me, consists in her daily constitutional. Last night a variety of ages mixed under a completely dark sky (gotta work til the sun goes down round here), many friends of Claire. This young lady was invited to farm her family’s land after finishing college a bit over a decade ago. Since, she has created a CSA and participates in the Kennett Square Farmers Market. But as most describe her, I get the sense that Claire is much more than a part of these groups; she is largely known as the glue between many relationships, or perhaps the link – in any case, always good-natured, patient and ready with a suggestion or connection. More than one guest reveled in her ability to pull off such social evenings on a regular basis.
M and I were thrilled to ride home through the mist on our mountain bikes. With lights affixed to the handlebars and grassy and rocky terrain between there and here, it made for quite an adventure. After all my fears of mountain-biking the single-tracks of Idaho, maybe my incompetence was due solely to too small of a path. Fields of unmowed grass and roads of gravel and emerging rock somehow weren’t a problem. Then again, maybe that was the vino.
Thankfully within a roughly 3 field diameter, there are several of the type of persons one can walk over and hang out with absolutely whenever. Of course, if they are painting their barn it’d be best to help out.
(M scoops up the last of a fried puffball bite)
Labor Day Weekends of my single digit years meant corn on the cob and king of the raft contests at our family’s cottage on Clear Lake in Indiana. Always plenty of horseflies during the day and Hide and seek at night to round out the last summer day before heading into school responsibilities. All infused with a sense of the last hurrah being had.
During 2008’s holiday weekend, I feel as if racing against the clock of weather, rather than dissipating summer freedoms. Labor has come to be an enjoyable endeavor as well, a change of heart I realize some never come to comprehend. So yesterday I dug up a garden (and dug up another area to come up with more soil for the final garden) and planted some final fall seeds, hoping for a bit of lettuce and some small beets.
Today we scoped an available tool shed, in consultation about converting part of it into a chicken coop. Then came building a frame to partition off a wall: 
(Note: I never realized the importance of level ground until nailing and screwing this together)
But the best of all was making juice. A pear tree up nearby Timothy’s house has dropped the majority of its goodies and we set them up in a double-boiler of sorts to catch the sweet essence and bottle it. Pear juice during the winter, whether the foundation for a January 5 o’clock tipper or the base of a morning smoothie alongside other fruits frozen from summer glory, has to be one of my favorites. We also made a trip to Emery’s house and jostled the trees of her peach tree. Perhaps we’ll get around to juicing those this evening. A peach, at its best, ripest, sweetest and juiciest is perhaps the best fruit in the world. But its juice come February will do me just fine. Here is the apparatus for, essentially, steaming the heck out of the fruit, then collecting the flavor-laden water: 
