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late September harvest
Friday, September 20 2013
Yesterday, Wilma, the cantankerous grey cat we rehomed with Sarah the Vegan, had been acting ill and uncomfortable, so Sarah took her to the vet. After a few tests, it was determined that Wilma was in a state of advanced kidney failure. The plan then was to keep her overnight and then give her an enema and some intravenous fluids because sometimes this can "work miracles" in these cases. True to form, though, Wilma would have none of that and died overnight. She was approximately 16 years old. Sarah is understandably devastated and also feeling a guilty about leaving her to die at the vet's office, but of course she had only been trying to do what was best with the information she had at the time. We're coming up on the 7th anniversary of the day Gretchen and I picked up both Wilma and Marie (aka "the Baby") from a sketchy animal shelter out in Boiceville. The irony is that back then Wilma looked like a healthy middle-aged cat and Marie looked like reanimated taxidermy with maybe a few months left. Now Wilma has died essentially of old age and Marie looks a little better than she did back then.
It was a fairly warm day, at least by recent standards. Warm days in late September can still fool my subconscious into thinking we've still got a little summer left, and I usually indulge my subconscious in the fiction. Today I did so by celebrating 9-20 has a harvest day. My harvests included several small cabbages, kale, some not-very-good-looking tomatoes, and dozens of dried bean pods from the pole beans. Given how cheap cans of beans are, there must be some easy mechanized way to separate beans from their pods. Doing it by hand was a slow (and potentially papercut-inducing) process, and it took me about a half hour's worth of work to fill a quart-sized plastic container to the halfway mark.
I also ate a great many seeds from a prolific Velvetleaf that Gretchen had uprooted in disgust.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?130920 feedback
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