Raspberries in November...

Today is/was paint a bench day and garden clean-up day...
It's going to freeze hard this week and the garden is just kaput except for some kale...
So I filled the yard waste bin with all sorts of slimy broccoli stalks...
Black tomato vines...
Pepper plants covered in half-opened blooms...
Which makes me think very highly of peppers...they were willing to go the extra mile...
Give it all they've got...
They had hope...
Albiet false hope...
I gathered up the zucchini vines,
Squash vines...
I found a forgotten slimy onion.  Yuk.
And as I was pulling a pumpkin vine, I noticed that a branch of the vine had taken off on its own and created a very green pumpkin hanging from the fence...well, hello there!
Too bad it won't reach its full potential.
With half of the garden yanked from the ground, the bin was full...
I dragged it to the street, thankful that a machine will dump it into the truck...no person should have to lift that heavy thing...
And as I went to put my gloves back in the shed something red caught my eye.
RASPBERRIES!
In November!?!?
My raspberry vines had saved the best trick for last...
They were tasty, however, the sun hasn't been shining, so they weren't as flavorful as those that ripen in summer...
But I was happy to have a little taste of summer on a day when the last traces of warm days were going into the waste bin...

Fall Cleaning...

I'm partial to fall cleaning over spring cleaning.
I suppose I could do both.
But I don't.
I hate to clean.
Fall is the time I like to clean under sinks...
behind dressers...
under beds...
Mostly because I'm in the house all winter and I don't want to be in a dirty house all winter.
Makes sense, no?
This year I cleaned my blinds...
I won't tell you the last time that happened.
Because I can't.
It never has.
Don't tell anyone.
It never occurred to me honestly...
Yes, I saw the dust on occasion but I looked away and it disappeared out of sight.
Easy peasy.
Until my white blinds took on a mushroom color...
It was time.
FINE!
So I cleaned them...inch by inch...
Blind by blind...
I hear you can take them down and dunk them in a bathtub but I didn't.
I painstakingly cleaned each one.
First with a dust rag,
Then with a Lysol wet wipe,
Then with a damp cloth.
They're clean.
I wish I could say I was done, but today I cleaned under my kitchen sink...
Woah.
The nasty that was living under there!
I do occasionally clean under the sink but I hadn't in several months and it was, well...
dirty.
It's fall, though, so I didn't just clean, I fall cleaned.
I not only scrubbed, I replaced the shelf paper.
It's sparkling new!
I won't be embarrassed when someone wants to throw something in the garbage under my sink now!
"Go ahead, it's under the sink" I'll say with a wave of my hand,
Instead of "Here, let me throw that away for you" as I barely open the cupboard to hide it's filth and toss it blindly into the trash.
Which could be why it got even dirtier under there...
The miss factor.
When you don't want to see, you miss your target and dirt gets flung all over!

Which made me think...
Of times I've tried to hide things from God...
Secret sin that I try to cover up, usually making a bigger mess of things...
Which is silly...
God sees everything.
It's a lot of work to clean...first to admit it's time to tackle it,
And then to do the painstaking work of making things shine again...
To clean a house is one thing but to clean up my life, my attitudes, my thoughts, my actions...
Especially the corners of my heart.
That's hard work.
But so worthwhile...
It feels good to set things straight and shiny.
And the rewards are everlasting.
I pray that I will not let my life get as dirty as my blinds...!

1 John 1:6-7
If we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth. But if we walk in the light as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin.