Share your thankfulness and sustain others with inspiration from poet Anna Letitia Barbauld

#UpliftingMessage

As summer turns to fall, I have been blessed to stay in a home with a garden and fruit trees. Purple and green lettuce, dark green kale, vibrant red and green Swiss chard, cucumbers, carrots, tomatoes, sweet peas, green beans, artichokes, and white onions. Mottled pattypan, zucchini, yellow squash, and pumpkins. Blueberry and strawberry bushes with fruits tart and sweet.

Many vegetables are best eaten fresh and fruits either frozen or become jam. We recently harvested over forty-five pounds of apples from two trees and processed them into twenty-eight gallons of applesauce, pie filling, vacuum-sealed and/or frozen slices, and dried apple chips.

In the pantry above the shelves are rows of glass quart and pint jars filled with sunny yellow peaches, dark reddish tomatoes flecked with white seeds, beige apple pie filling slices, pink-tinted apple sauce, light purple beets, white pear slices, yellow-green pickles, and light brown relish speckled with red peppers.

There’s a bin where white onions with paper-thin brown translucent skins await. In the freezer, nearly black blueberries slumber next to vacuum-packed bright green beans and lime-green shredded zucchini. A rainbow of colors to sustain us as autumn’s fogs descend and blanket everything in banks of rolling grey mist.

I am reminded of poet and lyricist Anna Barbauld who wrote:

All the blessings of the field,

all the stores the gardens yield,

all the fruits in full supply,

ripened ‘neath the summer sky.

All that spring with bounteous hand

scatters o’er the smiling land,

all that liberal autumn pours

from its rich o’erflowing stores.

Her words unsurprisingly found their way into Thanksgiving songs when bounteous harvests are gathered with enough to feed us through winter’s chill and next spring’s planting.

Where have we known o’erflowing blessings this year? How might sharing our thankfulness sustain us and others?

Rev Sybrant has a Masters in Divinity, Social Work, and a Doctor of Ministry. For more information, visit us at 15050 SW Weir Road www.murrayhills.org | 503-524-5230