Celebrating the solstice moments -- finally!

The summer here was long and brutal, and a strange kind of aprés summer stuck around until well after Thanksgiving. When we did our family "frisbee at the beach" morning on Thanksgiving, we stopped running around in the sand after about half an hour or so because it was just too damn hot to play. It was even too hot and humid just sitting in the sand, doing nothing. Not typical beach weather for this area, to be sure. Thankfully, I suppose.

The chickens also had ill effects from the warmer weather, in that they had a longer and more severe molt than I've ever seen them have before. The worst part about that is not the coop, which looks like there's been a massive down pillow fight inside it, but the fact that while chickens are molting, they lay NO eggs. So from about the end of September until last week, we had to resort to buying eggs at the store.

And then it cooled off -- finally -- and winter's magic began to happen.

Chickens once again gave us eggs.

The garden started producing lettuce, enough for salads every single night!

And when it froze hard a couple of nights ago, I was able to begin digging my fall potatoes and they are AMAZING. If you've never had newly dug potatoes with some butter, sour cream and chives on them, you have not lived. Really. 

Our eggplants were harvested just before the frost too, which means eggplant parmesan soon!

In between all that we've been getting ready for holidays and doing a little clean up before we put the house on the market early next spring (probably February, which is spring for us). And dreaming of what next year will look like in our first Oregon holiday season. Not many houses on the market up there right now, but I still look, we talk about what we're looking for, and we dream.

That's where it all begins. But to forget the colorful bounty in the present seems ungrateful, so this year especially, we celebrate the now while looking forward to the "then." Hope you're doing the same!