Abundance

A. recently vacated his home office, leaving us with a mostly empty room upstairs. Good thing, because we need the space for squash storage.

Guess I know what we're bringing to Thanksgiving dinner this year.

Squash, unlike most other vegetables, likes to be stored in a warm, dry place. I was unwilling to have any significant square footage of our downstairs living space taken up with a ridiculous amount of squash. But most of the rest of the house is unheated.

A.'s former office, however, has a pass-through vent in the floor through which heat rises from the woodstove directly underneath. So while it's not exactly tropical in there, at least it doesn't actually freeze. Good enough.

The only problem with this storage area is that it's upstairs. And not that close to the stairs, either. Which is why I spent at least twenty minutes today ferrying hundreds of pounds of squash from the garden wall, into the dining room, through the library and living room, up the stairs, through the back hall, and finally into the office. It took me eleven trips. Eleven long, arduous trips. And there are still a couple of squash I haven't removed from the vine in the garden yet.

But! The majority of the squash have been safely stored away from the frost we're supposed to get tomorrow.

At least we know we won't starve this winter. Or lack potassium.