Jellied

Today I picked up DS so we could take his broken TV and the 2 computer monitors that some jerk left on my curb on Wednesday. See, the garbageman won't take them, they have to be recycled at the Hazardous Waste place and you have to pay twenty cents a pound for the privilege. Naturally I have no way of knowing who left them and I'm not pulling the same stunt so I stifled my irritation and got rid of them. After dropping that stuff off we picked up Mom so that the three of us could come here and make a batch of pepper jelly. Mom washed the jars, DS chopped and ground the peppers, I dissolved a huge amount of sugar in a little vinegar. It boiled together, we added Certo and a few drops of green food color so it didn't look like jellied vomit (hey, think about it. You grind green and red peppers together with yellow ones; what do you expect it to look like?) and got it jarred up. While we waited for a Papa Murphy's pizza to bake DS learned to knit with one of those spool things so he can make flashes for his kilt hose. Durwood picked a boatload of raspberries and kibbitzed. It was fun. After driving DS and Mom home I came back, loaded up my bike (I need to name her), and took a 4 mile ride on the Fox River Trail. I had a great day.

September 17--Rebun Island, Japan. She waited all year for that one week when the Queen Anne's Lace and the Purple Lupines were in bloom. That week on the low hills that formed the arms of Cape Gorota the cinquefoil that grew low to the ground hiding its distinctive shaped leaves in the confusion that was late summer was ready to be picked. Old Lee An made her way slowly up from her house at the edge of the village with her sectioned collecting basket over one arm, her carved lion-headed stick in the other. For most of her seventy-seven years Lee An had made potions and teas, had read the leaves and the clouds for serious believers and silly girls. She was getting to be too old to climb the hills and stoop and bend to pick her herbs. She needed a student, an apprentice.

This is not great writing, but it's writing and that's all that counts.
--Barbara