I don't do windows, and I don't can tomatoes!

It's that time of year again.  I have lived in NC close to 20 years now.  I came from a totally different climate much more north of here.  Brrrrrr!  Well, the growing season in the south is much longer, starts earlier and, depending on how the weather goes, can last way into late fall, even up until November.  That's a lot of gardening!  Hubby starts preparing the soil and plants lettuce and such as early as March.  We have had some kind of fresh veggie ever since April when that lettuce started coming in.  But, right about now we have the majority of our crop hitting us in the face.  We have tomatoes, green beans, yellow beans, cucumbers, peppers, squash, summer and winter, and god knows what else.  Yes, it is nice to have garden grown fresh veggies.  I luv my veggies!  But!  When we moved to NC, I sold ALL my canning stuff and proclaimed "I no longer can ANYTHING!"  Ack!  That doesn't stop him.  Over the years we have accumulated all of that canning stuff back again, including a zillion jars.  I still refuse to can things, so, when the time comes, I get the heck out of Dodge cuz hubby is doing "woman's work".  Ha!  I told him I would never do it again.  I have history.  I don't want to be a slave to the kitchen any more!  Woman's Work, indeed!

I grew up in a little town in southern Michigan.  My daddy was a hard worker.  He owned his own construction business, and all of us, including me, worked for him at some time or another.  That's where I got the nickname "Muscles".  Ah, that's a whole different story.  Feeding the family, the BIG family, was part of his job, so he didn't just grow a garden.  He had fields of everything imaginable.  Every veggie known to man, fruit trees, apple, peach, cherry, etc., and strawberry and raspberry patches.  We did not go hungry, ever.  Oh, yeh, there were the chickens.  Eggs galore, and Sunday dinner......Plucking chicken feathers is a real treat that everyone should try at least once.  To this day I am afraid of chickens cuz of that HUGE rooster that held me down and tried to peck me to death when I was 3 years old.  True Story!!

Yes, we ate well.  We also worked our a$$es off from the time we were old enough to carry a bushel basket out to the field.  And the canning!  It went on forever!  We even made our own ketchup.  Some things we froze.  We had a huge freezer that seemed to always be full.  One of my favorite treats was frozen cherries, right out of the freezer.  It was like bite sized, real fruit popsicles, oh so good on a hot summer day.  We even had a mulberry tree!  Ahhh, I had almost forgotten that.....

Even tho some of these memories are sweet, I just cannot process and can all this stuff any more!  So, I routinely escape during canning season.  Anywhere!  I refuse!  So, I am thinking about a road trip.  There are so many places to go, people to see, things to do.......