◆ PARALLAX

I canned 18 quarts of peaches this past August, and we just finished the last one last night. My spreadsheet says that's right on target for a family of four, with two quarts a month from September through December. The secret isn't just the canning, it's building meals around them -- cottage cheese and peaches for lunch, peach cobbler once a week. If you store it, you'd better eat it, or it's just a museum exhibit.

That said, I underplanted the freezer. We ran out of frozen sliced peaches for smoothies by October, and my teenager still brings it up every weekend. Next year I'm adding two more trees to the orchard and doing 12 quarts just for the freezer. Morale matters as much as calories. A quart of August in a January snowstorm keeps everybody's spirits up better than any generator.

Also, somebody remind me to rotate the dried peach chips. They're buried behind the lentil buckets and I'm pretty sure they date to '94.