An Honest Day's Work

I know all my posts lately have been about food. Obviously, there is a lot more to wellness and feeling good than what you eat, but it is a pretty big part of optimal health. It might sound corny, but the old adage "you get what you give" rings no more true than in regards to what we nourish our bodies with.

As I write this, I am waiting for my 3rd turn of hot-water-bath canning to finish on the stove. I am exhausted after 8 hours on my feet, sweating in a 100 degree kitchen, and peeling a half bushel of peaches. I am counting in my head how many quarts of fruit, vegetables, and meals my husband and I currently have, counting how many more we will need to get through the winter without buying much other than toothpaste and toilet paper, and counting how many weekends are left in the growing season for me to finish the year's canning.

When it all is laid out, weekend by weekend, the weeks in the year, the days in a month, and how many times a week I think Jake and I can eat potatoes until next May, it all becomes very simple: the schedule of our lives measured in quarts and pints. The decisions about our meals and what we put into our bodies to nourish them through the cold, dark winter have been made for us, based upon the successful crops of this past summer and the soon-to-be Fall. 

As I finished the last pint of valuable peach butter, I could not help consider the urgency that families felt 100 years ago, when there was no back-up of a 24-hr McDonald's or a Meijer store to fill the hungry and dangerous gap that might occur, had a country wife miscalculated her family's needs.