Fall fell on us

This week it started to get pretty chilly out there and the leaves suddenly turned. In two weeks or so, they’ll peak. I always remember this, because they peak around Sarah’s birthday.

Friday they called for a heavy frost overnight. My phone rang and it was my farmer neighbour on the other end. “Hard frost tonight, tomatoes still out in the field so come get all you want, no charge. Bring your tractor.”

Like crazy people we went, a half hour before sunset. We took six huge cloth grocery bags – a few of them those sturdy ones that stand up by themselves. Ron figures we got 90 pounds of tomatoes, most of them green. They overplanted and didn’t cage or support them (lesson learned, they said) so I had to go down some rows on the ridge tops between where the plats were growing flipping over the branches to find the goodies sheltered underneath. And then scrambling to pick the ones that fell off as soon as the branches moved, dodging bad tomatoes on the ground. It didn’t take us any more than twenty minutes to fill our bags. Ron loaded them up in the tractor bucket, and while he lumbered across their field, back over the road and into our yard, Meaghan and I came up the rows of peppers and onions.

We filled our jackets, and carried home as many onions as we could. I think Meaghan’s going to make them an apple pie, because earlier that day we went on a field trip.

Of course, we went apple picking and we came home with a pile of apples. Four 3 pound bags of Cortlands we picked ourselves, and a 20 pound bag of Macintosh for eight dollars. Somewhere between the coming home and the tomato harvest, I took a bag of apples over to our elderly neighbours and caught up on the local news.

See? A circle of kindness. Fall harvest time, neighbours helping each other, supporting one another.

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In other news: we turned on more breakers and things were fine. Nobody injured themselves with stupid accidents. Work did not get too crazy.

Overall, that makes me suspicious.