It snuck up on me this weekend, that certain smug satisfaction that comes from producing useful things. No big projects completed, no big harvests, just a steady trickle of things that came from here…
- I’ve eaten an arugula salad each of the last five days now. We’re not exactly early to the greens around here, but they are just as delicious. There’s also a bag of young kale in the fridge and some baby spinach made its way into my morning smoothie yesterday.
- I decanted the first batch of tinctures and mixed up a bottle of bitters: dandelion, yellow dock, fennel, orange peel, and ginger.
- Rhubarb baking. First another batch of my still-favorite leftover oatmeal muffins with rhubarb and walnuts. Then I branched out and made some bars. It was my first go at my mom’s recipe after eating more than my share for year – they were a care package staple of hers. (I really like rhubarb. She even started sending me raw rhubarb care packages for a few years; it wouldn’t even notice a few days in transit.) Anyway, I finally have a rhubarb supply of my own and her bar recipe is a keeper.
- I finally processed the beeswax from last year’s honey harvest. Yielded just a couple blocks, but I’m already looking forward to a salve experiment or two.
- I harvested a bucket of mint from our runaway patch. Didn’t put a dent in the crop but it filled the drier twice and now I have a generous supply of mint tea again as well as a couple pints tincturing for another alchemical project.
All bits and bobs but taken together it feels like a bounty.
The long weekend felt about the same. Knocked some weeds back in the garden, watched the chickens grow, knit a few more rows on the baby blanket. All together, it felt like progress and competence. Both of which I needed sorely to feel. I started a new job about a month and a half ago, and I’ve hit a rough patch. I’m not completely green but I’m not yet fully competent and I’ve been stuck in a vortex of anxiety and self-doubt. I’m confident it will pass but in the meantime it is exhausting to repeatedly calm my frayed nerves, redirect my energy, and refill my reserves so that I can bring my best self to another day. One of these days it will turn for me.
In the meantime, I’ll be sitting quietly and enjoying a bit of smug satisfaction.