Kitchen confusion, with capers

Yesterday I found treasure in the freezer: two quarts of frozen blackberries from our summer bumper harvest. I'll bake a blackberry pie for my husband's birthday tomorrow, which will be suitably celebratory while also clearing some food out of the freezer in preparation for moving.

I've been taking stock of what's in the pantry and fridge in hopes of eating as much as we can so we'll have less to pack up and move next week, but it's not easy. We'll be eating a lot of canned soup and we may even break into the instant mac and cheese I keep on hand for the grandkids, but the pantry also offers all kinds of ingredients that won't mesh well into a meal: capers, alfredo sauce, almonds, butternut squash, and lime jello. What am I supposed to do with that?

I also need to strategize on packing up the kitchen things, but I've already made some serious errors. We have a bunch of local jellies in the fridge that would work well for thumbprint cookies, but I never brought the stand mixer back from our other house after Thanksgiving so I'll be working with a flimsy hand mixer, which makes cookie-baking much less fun. I can't pack up the pie pans and rolling pin until after the blackberry pies, and I can't pack certain pans and dishes until after Christmas dinner. 

At some point before next Thursday we'll need to switch over to paper plates and get everything in the kitchen packed up and ready to go, but choosing the correct moment will make a big difference in our quality of life over the next two weeks, which explains why my brain is working overtime to solve these logistical problems. I wake up in the wee hours nearly every morning with an urgent need to solve a piece of the puzzle, which makes me a little cranky the rest of the day.

I've lived in limbo so many times that I ought to find the place familiar and comfortable, but every time I stand on the bridge between dwellings, I feel a desperate desire to jump off. But instead I think I'll bake a blackberry pie, which will remind me of one of the things we'll miss most about living in Jackson: the big patch of blackberry bushes just behind the house, a reminder that even the most challenging situations offer opportunities to find treasure.