Some Days Are...

Wonderful. The rain is peppering down, but since Ian installed a gutter when he was here this past week none of it is flowing off the roof onto the stairs or deck. It's cool, but an old sweatshirt I'd be embarrassed to wear in public is keeping me cozy. My "good" sweatshirt is in the laundry basket, but alas I cannot do laundry until my drier full of plums has finished.

The first 10 lbs worth of plums are dried and squirreled away in a quart Mason jar. I cleaned and cut up the second 10 lb batch of plums about 5:00 pm yesterday and got them in the drier. At some point during the night Sal must have bumped the drier because the top was ajar by about an inch this morning, and the plums were a long way from dry. So now the drier hums away on the kitchen counter and it smells like exotic flowers in here.

The campground, so crowded even last weekend, has one lone tent this weekend. I thought this would be a busy weekend but I guess the forecasted rain and the fact that school has started or will start on Tuesday has kept our tenters at home. From now on the visitors will be in motor homes, trailers and 5th wheels, and will mostly be retirees heading south for the winter.

I was up for an hour between 3:00 and 4:00 am, and heard the resident owls hunting in the field next to the park. But I also heard something I've never heard here before and I had to do some research. The question; Do we have wild turkeys in the South Okanagan? And the answer is yes. The wild turkey was introduced as a game bird in the 1970s near Penticton and by the 1980s there were over 130 birds in the area. The introduction has not been entirely successful, and the birds are uncommon, but apparently that unmistakable call I heard quite clearly just before dawn was indeed a wild turkey.

And so, on this rainy September afternoon there's a pervading sense of calm, deceptive probably, but I am feeling particularly contented. We spent the week going through the kitchen, organizing, weeding out, relocating. The third storage cupboard has made it possible to move baking dishes, pans, and other kitchen equipment I don't use on a daily basis out of the stuffed cupboards and into a much more accessible area.

And of course the work of putting food away and stockpiling while seasonal foods are plentiful has continued. As soon as the plums are done I'll start on the squashes. Once they are done I'll do more bell peppers and then a bunch of potatoes. This kind of work always makes me feel the way a broody chicken must feel, happy to sit in her little spot and cackle happily under her breath. So with a cackle I am away.