Fall Equinox

 

 

 

 

 

 

It is 9 a.m. EDT and on FB there was a memory that came up from ten years ago today.  In my house on Benjamin Street in NE Minneapolis, Minnesota I was yep, canning tomatoes.  As I type 7 quarts of tomatoes have been canned and are cooling, and 6 pints of tomato juice are bubbling away in the water bath.  So much has changed in these ten years, and yet here I am still canning in my kitchen in Patten, Maine.  My house is full of jams and salsa's and summer squash and herbs from my container garden.  The past ten days have been gloriously sunny, warm and a reminder that summer had not yet finished its show.

Yesterday, the winds changed.  The breeze which has been mostly absent of late returned, and with it more than a hint of fall.   The colors are beginning, and the talk everywhere is if we will have a vibrant fall color season, or if the dry spells we have had will dull out the color.  Whatever it is, the nights are cool and getting cooler, the sun has shifted so very far to the south already and the days are shorter.  Today on the fall equinox we will achieve that two times a year balance.  Sunlight setting and rise balance.  Memories of summer and preparing for winter balance.  The first hints of going within, the out there so very loud summer energy of July and August in the our northern climes has gone away.  Even when hot sun on your cheeks, the intensity has diminished.  The harvesting has come.  The tomatoes have loved these hot days and  have finally made it to ripening.  The Amish have pumpkins piled high everywhere,  my neighbor Phil brought two pumpkins and put them beside my front door, lifting up my decorative welcome to all.  Fall has arrived.  

The light, the magical light of summer and fall angles is here.  I am soaking in the light.  Lifting my face to the sun.  Honoring this changing of the seasons.  The changing of the light.  The harvesting that has been done and will soon come.  

I have always lived in the Northern Climate.  A brief blip in time in the Bay Area of SanFrancisco,  time in Aurora, CO as a young young girl, Northern Illinois my growing up home, the changing of the seasons a constant.  The changes through my own life a constant.  Lightness and darkness, sun and moon, hot and cold, lots of in-betweens and yet here I am ten years apart, harvesting, preparing, honoring that fall has come, summer is ending and the tomatoes still sing out to be canned.