away to maine

Last week, we left our farm in the care of a friend and drove to Maine.

We stayed by the sea.

We walked on the shore.

I marveled at my children, at how quickly they dig in to explore and learn a place that is so very different from home.

And I spent some time sitting, just staring out at the sea, and the gulls, and the clouds ever changing overhead.

We had a reason for driving the long hours to Maine that had nothing to do with the shore, but I could not possibly travel all that way and not see the sea. Once a year. Just once a year. I love my landlocked home with all of my heart and I am more than content to call our farm my forever place on this Earth, but once a year I need this. To stand on the shore and remember how vast the spaces of this world are. How Sea and Land and Sea and Land stretch out away from all points, and back again.

It's somehow enough, this just once a year.

filling the freezer

It all started here, at the Amenia Farmers' Market, this past Friday.

I walked down to Nancy's tent to give her the two slabs of bacon we bartered for the week before but which were left in my cooler at the end of the day. I didn't even make it to her table before I spotted these cases of tomatoes, forty pounds heavy, for - get this - $16 each. Knowing full well I had no business taking home a forty pound case of tomatoes, I oogled them and promptly shared a photo of them on facebook in the hopes that someone else would take them (all of them, please!) home for the weekend. But, the trouble with being a vendor at a farmers' market is that once you see something, once it's on your mind, you can't shake it because you're there and it's there. You see where I'm going with this? That top case of plum tomatoes? Yup. It came home with me.

Given that my experience with canning is limited at best, and that improperly canned tomatoes promise to poison every member of the family, I opted for freezing. And given that today, early in September, I really have no idea how I'd like to use these tomatoes in, say, the depths of December, I opted to keep things simple. Just a quick dunk in boiling water to slip off the skins, then I ran about half through the presser and left the other half whole. I filled quart containers with the whole tomatoes and then topped them off with puree. Finally, into the freezer they went.

Forty pounds of Summer's goodness, processed into 18 quarts and saved for the coming dark days of Winter.

Why, you might wonder, did I not put up my own tomatoes? Two words (and some heartbreak): late blight.