The Harvest Dinner

I am stuffed to the gills as I write this.  Tonight was the annual Harvest Dinner for the Clifton Volunteer Fire Department- Duluth Township.  It is held at the Duluth Town Hall out on the Homestead Road.  Not on Homestead Road, mind you, but The Homestead Road.  There is something very curious about the countryside around Duluth.  It is fiercely proud, and quirky.  There are people who have lived there for generations, and most of them know their good fortune.  Many more have moved in during the last few decades, and they are dedicated to the area.  Alex's aunties, Barb and Sherry, live in the country 'round there.  They have a gorgeous wooded place, with a house they built from scratch and a shop that is the envy of all.  Woods (40 acres), fields, a stream, fire pit, Quonset hut, a huge garden, and now the happiest chickens on the planet; their place has it all.  Oh yeah, and a killer dog yard for when they have to go to work, free range cat, and 10 acres of invisible fence for the pooches.  Their name for the spread is Camp Bark in the Dark.  But I digress.

This year was my first in three that I have made it to the feast.  Alex and Kevin make it every time and Alex even made the poster this year.  Twirling his pasta on a fork, with a big grin.  It is a fund raiser for the fire department, and Sherry is a fire fighter.  So is Jody, who also fixes violins and lives nearby.  She picked the numbers and our little family had a clean sweep in the door prizes.  We walked away with the coolest cutting board ever (wooden circle with an engraved spiral), sustainable farming calendar and gift certificate for the New Scenic Cafe, and alphabet letters that interlock.  The music in the background was great, fiddle and guitar duo.  It took about ten minutes for me to realize the musicians had also played at our wedding.  I thanked them and informed them that the music had done it's magic and we were still happily married eleven years later.  There were dozens of happy eaters, all cozy in the Duluth Town Hall.  An old country community building that we had wanted to get married at, but could never get ahold of anyone to work it out.  The unknown woman we sat next to had fought to create Alex's charter school, when it was slated to be closed 7 years ago.  She also knows my great friend Sam.  Maybe we have just been in town long enough to make all these amazing connections, but I also like to think we have been doing a few things right along the way.   Cultivating what is good and nourishing.

The food, of course, was excellent.  Spaghetti with fresh, organic, homemade sauce.  Veggies straight from local gardens.  Venison and locally harvested meat.  And dessert, dessert, dessert.  Kevin is going deer hunting at Sherry's tomorrow, and we are hoping for venison of our own.  The suckers are running rampant around here right now, and if we don't harvest them they will eventually come up with overcrowding illnesses.  Plus they are as free range and organic as it gets.  Tasty too.  I do still have some lingering, post-vegeterian regrets, but I live with them.  We are starting to break the news to Alex about where some of Mama and Daddy's food comes from, he still being a total vegeterian.  Not for lack of trying on our part, he just wont touch meat.  We started by explaining tonight that we were stopping by Barb and Sherry's after the dinner to close their chickens in for the night.  So no other animals would eat them.  This is a little part of the world we have not been terribly forthright about.  He never asked, we never explained.  He was rather interested in this new bit of information, and enquired about what types of animals might eat the chickens.  We came up with about a dozen local predators.  He didn't ask anything else, but we did forge on and mention Daddy was going to try to shoot a deer tomorrow.  I am not sure that he knows what that means, but if Kevin brings one out of the woods I guess he will further his education.

So, now the Harvest Dinner is past and the trees in the country are at their peak of color.  I currently have 44 pounds of green tomatoes ripening in the kitchen, and three coolers full of apples.  The last of the flowers fill two jars on the table.  Tomorrow we may have venison for the freezer and  Sherry stated she forsees eggs in our future.  Winter is surely coming (especially since it snowed today), but I think our cozy little free range life in Duluth should see us through.