Kitchen Riches From My Gardens

...kitchen windowsill...and the cherry tomatoes are not even in yet. When they are, I will be overrun. Hundreds, it seems, hang ripening.

...one of my gardens - this one has green peppers, tall beautiful basil, and (believe it or not) daylilies and gladioli, all jumbled together. And it looks amazing. I am totally into pottagers, with their mixture of vegetable, herb, flower and fencing, with pathways. I'm working my way into that. I really like this photo, with its tiny perspective.

This garden has tomatoes, pole beans, squash, cucumbers, cantaloupe and sunflowers!

Another part of the same garden spot. Please ignore the orange hammock, still hanging. It was a souvenir my daughter Sarah brought back from Cambodia a few years ago. It lost its place when our tree was taken out by the storms awhile back. It still hangs from its other anchor, with nothing to hook up to. I've been meaning to cut it down - it would take all of five minutes. Honestly, I pay no attention to it, and only notice it now, "screaming" at me in this picture.

Some of you just won't understand, but I've felt poignant today. Always, long about mid-August, I begin to notice a difference in the light. I know that sounds crazy - it is still "high summer". But I see it...the light is ever-so-subtle in its shifting and changing. It heralds a coming fall season.

And again, I am sad. I think of a line from an old Gladys Taber book, "Stay a little, summer, do not go..."

This anomaly started about two years ago. I just began, inexplicably, to love summer. I guess summer is the true "Season of Harvest"...it is when the harvest becomes real and exciting. You have to understand, I've always been an autumn girl, and always loathed summer. No more. Tho' the heat has been awful, we here have gotten enough rain.

I am sure if I lived in some of the drought stricken areas of Texas, Oklahoma, and other places, I would not feel the same way.

But I live in east Tennessee, and so...

"No one can believe God is not good when the August gardens are in their heyday." ~Gladys Taber, from the wonderful book "The Book of Stillmeadow"