And so it goes....

Yesterday, it turns out, was my last day at work. The big push for picking peas, beans and berries has past. Since Tristan and I were the last ones hired, we were the first ones fired.

It's okay.

But I have sorta mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, we are in the process of moving and every day off from work has been filled with the work of moving. I have not had a sit-on-my-butt day off in about a month and I am plain tuckered out. I have piles and piles of food to preserve. No kidding. I have a pile of onions, a pile of garlic, a 5 gallon bucket of beans, 2 oversized zukes. Local corn is starting to come in and tomatoes too. So, soon the canner is going to be very busy. I still have carrots in the ground here that I would like to harvest before we move. I have a garden abandoned to weeds at the old house and a garden at the new house still to be planted for the fall.

Piles.

I have piles of boxes and a stacks of paper with all the stuff I need to take care of in order to move.

And yet when the farmer said that her payroll was getting too big and she would only need a few of her more experienced farm helpers, I felt let down. I knew, by my own agenda, that the job could not last more than another month. I knew that I was getting tired of waking before my alarm clock at 5:30. I knew that I was lying awake at night wondering how I was going to juggle my work schedule with moving in August. I knew that I was missing my role as homemaker. I knew that my hands craved knitting. I have 2 new babies and a birthday in my family and I have not made anything yet. I knew that I missed posting on the blog on a regular basis as I had to prioritize what I could do with what I wanted to do. I knew that I was daydreaming about January. Remember January? January is when I write about snow, hand crafts and the soup de jour from food stores? Ahhh it is a glorious month...

But I loved that job. Hard work and all. I loved feeling like I was part of a greater process. I know more about how local food gets to the table. I have an enormous amount of respect for the farmers that grow our food. The folks I worked for were right there in the field with us weeding and harvesting and they have been doing it for 30+ years. I loved the fringe benefits of surplus produce and gleaning. My freezer is nearly full. I loved the quiet of the work and the intermittent chatter I could have with kids half my age. I loved the paycheck. It wasn't much in the grand scheme of our finances but it felt nice to contribute, in a different way, to our family's goals.

Today was my first full day off. We woke early and headed out the door to glean 10 gallons of beans from the farm, a parting gift from the farmer. We came home and put 5 gallons in the freezer. I filled one dehydrator with onions. I baked bread, made a quiche from our own eggs for dinner, I started to consolidate the piles into piles to be moved. I swept and vacuumed and added an inch to a sock that had been abandoned in my knitting basket. This is my work now, my noble pursuit....