Windfall

I am so blessed.

Twenty six quarts of apple sauce we preserved, pots spitting so high the sauce stuck to the ceiling. My hands blistered red from the fall of it while I shrieked and laughed, stirring two pots at once. Katherine, my doctor friend, sat with a look of terror at the multitasking, children running in and out to show their artwork and collections of baby teeth, jars boiling, apples cooking in the oven and on two burners, questions from Seda. Her husband, Ben, my music teacher, sat cutting more apples, reminded of Passover preparations years past, a marathon of slicing and chopping. We stood feeding the food mill at nearly 2 a.m., the apples not quite cooked and squeaking at the churn like Laborador puppies as I doubled over, laughing my belly inside out at the sound. And then the clean up in overwhelm... what to wash, what to bag for the night, how to stop in midsaucing when so much momentum drove those apples into softening...

The last of my friends left by 2:30, and I fell into sleep as if it were a warm, dark hole that Trinidad dragged me from snappy growling at 5:30 a.m. when a thunderstorm crashed overhead. He watched it alone and miraculously went back to bed without my help. I, lost in sleep again, recovered before eight, and found the strength in a few phone calls with our scattered tribe of mothers to plod the final lap of the canning process and set the last jars, gleaming, on the rack.

The harvest
a gleaning
a canning
a keeping
a warm fire glowing and
friends, oh
friends, how the bounty is ours.