There was a time when people went into a frenzy of fall preparations for winter, revolving around stocking the pantry with canned fruits and vegetables from their own gardens, of ensuring that the root cellar was well stocked, and from the same source.

That kind of self-preservation in food sufficiency in preparation for the onset of winter and our dependence on our own preservation in over-wintering the fruits from our own resources no longer presents as an imperative to most people.

We do, however, continue to preserve fruits and vegetables in season, sometimes to stock them in a home larder or pantry, and more often in our home freezers. Even a modest, small freezer like the one we own and have had for a quarter-century comes in handy year-around, in preserving food items when they are in abundance for times when they are not.

Take this Thanksgiving Day, for example; I extracted a bag of cranberries from our freezer, to make cranberry sauce with it. I also removed a container of mashed pumpkin left over from a too-large container from the last time I baked a pumpkin pie, and then proceeded to use the thawed pumpkin for a spiced pumpkin pie for our evening dessert. And out of that same freezer came a small half-turkey, left over from when we'd had its other half on another occasion in the past year. That half-turkey was seasoned and prepared for the oven. Our modern-day pantry.

While my husband continued his work at the back of the house, repairing and caulking the window frames, I was busy myself, tidying up the garden, cutting back perennials, in preparation for the long winter sleep in the garden, trying to decide whether to pull up the tomato vines or leave them yet awhile, since we've more tomatoes still ripening.

As we both worked at our separate tasks, our little dogs in rest mode after our usual daily hour-and-a-half-long ravine ramble with them, we could smell the fragrance of the cooling pie, then the alluring aroma of the turkey nicely browning in the oven.

Is that not perfection, added to a truly magnificent weather day of mild temperatures and clear, blue sky, sun beaming benignly onto the welcoming landscape?