Abundance

I just have to mention my garden. In this time of tight money, where it seems to me everything and everyone is curling into little balls of fear, like armadillo’s, where instead of opening our hands so abundance can be poured, we are, with knee-jerk reactions, closing our fists around what we have. It’s natural given the news we are bombarded with. Am I the only one who wonders if we’d be better off not listen to so much bad news? For every little tidbit of good news, it seems there is a but.

Well, there is no but in my garden. There is just abundance. We can’t eat the food fast enough and we’re giving it away as fast as we can. There’s been lettuce, best with homemade dressing. A great simple salad: lettuce onions, sliced hard-boiled eggs, dressed with mayonnaise thinned with a little cream and seasoned with salt, pepper and sugar.

Spinach or Chard, sautéed in a little olive oil and butter, add onions, garlic or lemon. Broccoli steamed, drained and served with brown butter; cabbage, sautéed in just a touch of water, served with butter, garnished with bacon or parsley. And then, the zucchini and summer squash—one of my favorites—is stir fried with corn and garlic. Green beans, I love these just steamed, but good with a cheese sauce too. I haven’t even mentioned the 46 bulbs of garlic, the carrots, green onions and all the herbs.

Oh, and the tomatoes. Buckets of tomatoes. The fruit is warm as we pick it and we feast on bacon and tomato sandwiches, tomatoes on burgers, fresh tomato sauce, (I hoped to do up some of Aunt Dot’s Chili Sauce, but time has been against me), tomato salad—One I love: tomatoes, usually our Juliet cut about an inch thick, string cheese, cut the same size, green onions, salt, pepper, basil, Italian dressing.

Such abundance in a little plot of ground and some hard work. Yet this feeling of abundance and wealth was so worth it, this year. We had a rough go in the spring. The weather was decidedly against us, we persevered and we are reaping the spoils. It makes me smile and send up all kinds of gratitude.

Tonight there will be grilled burgers with tomato and lettuce, beer-batter onion rings (onions courtesy of my son. This is what real sharing can be. Between the two families we have fed six families with extra for neighbors) Talk about abundance. Life is good.