I’m Blessed

We are brimming with life over here.  I wrote in my journal of gratefulness: “spiders: hard eucharisteo.”  It’s from the book One Thousand Gifts that talks about giving thanks for the things God gives us, even the things that we don’t love.  It’s part of learning to give thanks in all things.

Yes, with the summer months comes quite a bit of life, bugs included.  I see it wherever I look.

My strawberries are getting big.  I see the raspberries starting to form too.  Plus, some herbs for tea I’ve been working on the last few years are really starting to take off!  I think this year I get to figure out how to dry chamomile, peppermint, and echinacea as well as a few herbs for cooking.

I’ve been trying to “get rid of” a bunch of things in our big freezers in preparation for the big season of putting away.  I realized that last year I had started making rhubarb juice for the purpose of making rhubarb jelly.  Then my body went on strike after the car accident, so I put all the juice in the freezer to make into jelly later.  So I took out the 2 huge gallon sized bags full of rhubarb juice and made jelly all one morning last week.

It felt so redemptive, as silly as that sounds.

So that night, I was trying to think of what else I could make and put away before the berries kept me busy for a few weeks, making strawberry and raspberry jams, pies, tarts, etc.  I went to my canning wish list, and saw that I needed to put away some “Minnesota Summer” jam as well, and had all the ingredients on hand for that, so I made 16 pints of that the next day. (I did modify the recipe this year and used unflavored gelatin instead of strawberry jello.  I found it worked better when added the gelatin at the beginning of the recipe than the end otherwise the gelatin wasn’t dissolving well.  I just decided that I didn’t want artificial red dye in my homemade jams.  I plan on playing with this recipe further next summer.)  PLUS I had some bread and caramel rolls going on in the kitchen that day too.  I figure if I’m stuck in the kitchen watching fruit boil, I might as well have something to do as I watch it.

The kids helped me move the play kitchen into our kitchen so that the little girls could stay close as I canned and set bread out to rise all day Saturday.  There’s nothing worse than having to stir something boiling for exactly 6 minutes, and your toddler runs off and you wonder what sorts of things she could get into for 6 minutes.  I like to keep them close.

It was the most perfect summer day to be in the kitchen.  It was rainy, but not blowing hard, so the kitchen windows were open.  The scent of lilacs right out the window and the fresh rain just wafted in and mixed with the scent of baking bread and sugary jam.  It was just heavenly.

I haven’t had a day like that in over a year.  Sure, I went to bed hurting that night.  Happy, though.  I felt so alive.  I know I can’t manage to work like that every day, but I was able to for one day, and that gave me such a high.  I felt like I had lived the day as an overcomer verses a victim and it was time to rest.  There’s nothing like taking your pain and telling it to shove it.

In the most, Christian, blessed way, of course.

I’m so blessed.