DAY 43 THIS ALKALINE YEAR Twenty Ounce Windfalls!

High winds last night produced  a culinary bonanza today, in the form of Twenty Ounce windfalls.  Next to my cousin’s house is an apple tree that my grandfather and his brothers planted nearly 100 years ago.   He was president of our Apple Growers Association,  until these farms declined here as a result of intensive farming with access to railroads in eastern part Washington.  Nobody has pruned or fertilized the tree since the 1920s.

When I drove up to her house, two deer were  feasting on the windfalls, their pelts grey and white tails dripping from all the rain, their bellies fat from all the apples.  She and I rescued enough to fill three large grocery shopping bags.  Twenty Ounces are well named; they are 4-5” in diameter,  and I’ll use them to make applesauce. Naturally sweet, they’ll need no sugar, only a little cinnamon and nutmeg.

My cousin and I had lunch at the same restaurant where I ate more acidic than alkaline last week and today it was no problem.  They had a good minestrone soup, and I didn’t eat the baguette & butter that I couldn’t resist last week.   Why, I wonder?  Maybe it has something to do with making these choices public.  In writing about them, I’m becoming more conscious of them, and of my own strong desire to make good choices.

After lunch, we drove  to North Beach to let Binka the dog have a good run; she scampered and leapt in the high winds, which drive straight down from the Strait of Georgia, sculpturing the gravel into high mounds on the upper beach, tossing logs onto the grass beyond.  A few years ago, neighbors and I rescued a whole beach just west of where we walked today; storms had resisted all our attempts to make stone barriers against the waves.  Our rescue, which resulted in a beach that has expanded ever since, consisted of taking out the stone barriers and installing 10,000 cubic yards of small round stones and two small curved stone structures, only one or two feet high,  extending into the water at each end of the renovation project so that the stones could pass back and forth over them with the longshore currents.  The beach has grown mightily since then.

Perhaps there’s an analogy with this alkaline year; I’ve given up all the barriers  in the forms of “I must” eat everything,  planting instead the small stones of intention and choice.