Oct 12th, 2025 Sunday Sunny
Fall is the season of harvest.
In traditional agricultural societies, this is that time of the year when every family is occupied with reaping the fruits of their labor – sickling grain stalks, drying corn cobs, pickling cabbage/sauerkraut/many other variations, processing apples into cider, storing up squashes and root veggies in cellars, etc. Since the vegetables and fruits taste best when they ripen, and they start to deteriorate quickly soon after, over the centuries wisdom has been developed to preserve such flavor and nutrition at their peak. It is a race against time, a practice to save the bountiful for the long months ahead. The more modern term might be “time shift”.
I have been fascinated by this idea, and often dream of making use of the crop from my own garden to make jam, kimchee, and wine to share with friends. Unfortunately, due to the invasion of nature, the results this year are fairly disappointing. Other than making a batch of pesto sauce from the surprisingly hardy basil leaves, I made no effort to save anything else – they just become an extra garnish to dinner dishes.
Yet nature compensates in its own way.
In our front yard stands a decent-sized crabapple tree, which blooms gloriously during spring. Now the branches are laden with crimson red beads, tempting the brave to take a bite (and regret it).
“Let’s make some crabapple jelly!” suggests my husband.
Though it sounds like quite some work, I agreed – the image of stirring a pot of berry-colored “nectar” makes me feel like a little fairy.
So we picked as many good-looking crabapples as we could reach. My husband took charge of cleaning and cutting off the stems, and I calculated the right amount of water, sugar, and lemon juice needed. Then came the time-consuming operation of boiling, smashing, extracting the juice, gelling, and canning. The whole procedure expanded over a week, and we were exhausted at the end, but rewarded with the ruby-like crystal jelly, and the magenta ceramic-like sauce (completely an afterthought, because the amount of pains we endured does not justify wasting seventy percent of the product).
I told my mom this story with excitement.
She shrugged, “why spend so much time on this when you are both so busy at work? It is not necessary, after all.”
Upon reflection, I admit that she is right. It is not NECESSARY to take on such a project. However, it is also not necessary to cook at home on a daily basis (why not order takeout or just eat out, or buy dinner from the deli section in the store?), but we do. It is not necessary to do house cleaning ourselves every month (why not hire some hourly sanitarians?), but we do. It is not necessary to knit/paint/craft many items and gift them (why not just buy some since they are quite cheap anyway?), but we do.
Strictly speaking, very few of the activities we do are real necessity. There are plenty of alternatives to achieve, arguably, the same outcome. Nevertheless, we have chosen to carry out the tasks in our own way.
Because it is what we do, how we employ our time, that defines our lifestyle. That makes it meaningful.