Can Do

Hold onto yer britches, I'm a-comin'! I'm just wiping down the counter. I put by twenty pounds of broccoli, or maybe thirty, I'd have to put my cheaters on to tell for sure. It was nothing! Just a little can-do Sunday activity. Pick, cut, clean, blanch, cool, dry, freeze. The broccoli? Just the four plants, and no, I didn't start them from last year's seed this time. I've never done that, actually, because they come all ready to go in a plastic four-pack at the garden store down the way. Real good crop so far. Real good, and still coming on. Come on in, set a spell. I'll see can I fetch us some sarsaparillas.

It is a little close in here, isn't it? Picked the hottest day of the summer so far to be b'iling water but you can't argue with a harvest. Leave 'em another day and they'd be fixing to bloom. Just look at all that bounty! Why, pop me in calico and slap my fanny. It's that round squishy bit right there below the bow of my flour-sack apron, and I don't mind if you do.

It's no big deal. It's just a matter of self-reliance, and Lord knows we could use a lot more of that these days, if you don't mind me saying so. People these days aren't willing to put in the work. Expect other people to take care of them. They're going to be lost some day without the thrift and know-how that I personally demonstrated by putting by all that broccoli.

There's nothing to it. You just make do, you fend for yourself. How did I know what to do, you ask? I come from good Norwegian stock, farmers they were. It's in my blood.

Also, I looked it up on the youtubes to be sure.

I mean, no reason not to be modern. You don't want to rely on such a thing, but it's nice. Still have to use your common sense. Oh, and another little tip of the bonnet to our chest freezer and stovetop and all that hydropower. Well there's some hydropower for sure, the mighty Columbia River, and sorry to all the salmon, but if they were sturdy self-sufficient sorts they wouldn'ta been hatched when we was trying to make electricity out of the very substance they need to live. They'll adapt. Maybe 99% of them will die but one of them will love hot shallow water and slicey turbines and that baby's gonna thrive. Anyway. A little nod to the hydropower, plus the buttload of coal plants up north that also apparently figure into our power. Okay, mostly it's coal plants. But water too. And speaking of water, thanks also to all that water that come right out of the tap because of the good people that dammed up our natural reservoirs at Bull Run--it's a mighty slick system. It's so slick we flush poop with it.

Oh, I'd like to give a little shout-out to that Salad Spinner too. Of course, I could have put my broccoli in a bit of cheesecloth and whipped it around my head, but the Salad Spinner is so much easier, and maybe it'll take a few thousand years to degrade, but I only had to buy it once.

Sure, I could've gone to the grocery store, three of which are in walking distance, and bought plastic bags of frozen broccoli, but I take care of myself. I don't depend on other people. The store is for buying animals someone else has jammed into a pen and slaughtered and scraped the fur and feathers off of and wrapped in plastic. Not frozen broccoli, because I can do that myself. Because I am a can-do person.

I'm self-sufficient.