Simple and complex

I’ve been hours processing tomatoes. Some have gotten dried, and diced, and frozen with minced garlic, basil and parsley. With three cups packed and flattened in a two quart freezer bag, it will be broken off in segments and used when the winter cold blows. Using a straw and closing the zip-lock bag to the very end, I suck the air out and the bag flattens up against the leathery fruit. With the red tomatoes, the white of the garlic and the green of the herbs, it looks like Christmas already.

I pick basil and parsley by flashlight. The basil always gets spotted at the end of the season and as I search for unblemished leaves, I am happy that I have made the year’s pesto when the basil was in its prime. I didn’t used to do it that way. In fact up until this year, I have waited until the end and harvested the whole of it.

I don’t know why it gets blotchy, but I know now that it does. And with that knowledge, I change my behavior. In the moment, I contemplate how the ancients undoubtedly made adjustments, and how experience is tantamount to knowledge.

I ponder whether it is all that advantageous to know why something happens, rather than that it does. Somehow if we know why, it seems there is a tendency to think that we could somehow alter its natural cycle. That idea, that we can control our environment to suit our desire, seems to be at the root of the dire predicament that humankind finds itself today.

The freezer is filling, and the bounty of the harvest will safely store through the winter – thanks to the technology of refrigeration.

Go figure.