Accepting Gifts

Sunflowers are late due to cool summer

 Is it an wonder that so many places have Fall Festivals and celebrate the Harvest Moon?  Summer is beautiful, and yet requires a certain amount of endurance to survive the battles with children and weeds and, (unless you live here) HEAT.  Fall is the time when surviving brings easily gathered rewards.  You straighten your aching back and feel the cool breeze dry your sweaty brow.

My baskets are usually full, but barely bloomed in the fog

 You walk through the skin temperature air and breathe in the delightfully cedar and blackberry scented breeze.  The Thorny bramble draws blood but the berries are so sweet and abundant.  Apples fall into your lap as you read in the grass below the tree.  No, sorry, you don't get to discover gravity but you do get to discover peace, the time to pause, while the kids are in school and remember your successes and treasure the gifts you are usually too busy to see.

The dredge barge fills the boat basin and crowds the boats to side tie

Our harbor was devastated in spring storms but fall sees an ongoing rebuilding project as barges full of stinking silt are dredges up and carted away.  The fall renews the harbor and the school year and the pantry shelves.  Soon crab boats will have docks again, jam will fill the cupboards and schools will be filled.  Life in the come-back town will be renewed once again.  September is my New Years birth.

dredging away the 3-11-11 tsunami's deposit

three sisters in the harbor

Battery Point lighthouse

sea lion napping away from the crowd

summer weather??

 This summer was cool and foggy and the plants grew slowly but the end product is sweet and only a month late.

walnut tree producing blackberries

future pie or jam

apples on atee that fell 5 years ago, and redwood stump

Me loving rare sunshiny day

red bean mooncakes

When I was a student at Beijing Teachers College, I adored the sweet red bean filled MoonCakes of the Harvest Moon Festival and barely could have imagined that I would not taste them again for a couple decades.  Finally I have found them on-line!  Amazingly familiar calebratory taste.

Loved these and went 22 years without!

 I loved the moon cakes when I was a student at Beijing Teacher's College in 1987, but I have never had any more since returning to the states. Until i found them on-line this year. I adore them but the taste is really different from most american pastries. Sweet Red Bean fills most of them, or lotus seed paste and the most desirable ones have a whole yolk inside to look like the moon.

Celebrated on the 15th of the 8th lunar month, you might see Chang Er dancing on the moon where she has lived ever since she flew there. The moon Festival is a romantic time to remember that you can be together emotionally with those you love if you can both see the moon from where ever you are.

Jam TODAY! 

9-11 in the CC Harbor

Fallen apple tree by redwoods in my yard

So today, I settled in with a hot bath ad a good book, then a walk around the yard with bucket in hand and a fresh slice of blackberry pie for lunch.



I will teach, I will be exhausted and overwhelmed by bills and debt and work and the demands of life, but I will look at the jars of jam, and remember that some gifts come to balance the work, some things are free and all you have to do is open your hands to receive them.