C is for...

cabin: This coming Sunday will be seven years since we first took ownership of our property and began visiting the cabin every weekend. Before long, the kids and I had taken up permanent residence there. It was a safe place for us, a retreat from the city, a promise. Before long, my dad retired and moved to the cabin as well. In October of 2001, we sold our house in the city and moved to the cabin full-time. That was four kids, three adults and two dogs living in a little cabin with gas lights, and outhouse and a tub on the porch. In 2003, we started building our house and finished it in 2004.



caffeine: If I have too much of this, or if I have it on an empty stomach, I get shaky and even ill. Still, there are times when I really need some, so I risk it. If I have a cup of coffee in the morning, I seem to run much better all day long.



calcium--because of some strange thing that happened with the weather, there wasn't enough calcium absorbed by my tomato plants, so they withered up and all but died. :-/



calico--we have two beautiful calico kitties.



camera--my darling husband and daughter bought me a Canon camera for my birthday this year. I use it often, but I don't really get to post the photos often because my computer crashed and it was the only one aside from Bo's laptop that I can use to post photos.



camouflage--Bard's favorite color.



camp--When I was in junior high, I absolutely loved summer camp and wanted to live there. I truly would have, but my parents got angry when I wasn't all that anxious to come home, so I never really got to go back.



canning--this one deserves its own post.



carbonated--Dr. Pepper is my favorite carbonated beverage.



career--I still don't know what I want to be when I grow up. I always thought I'd be a writer, but now I feel like the market's saturated and I don't have all that much to contribute. For now, being a mom is a decent living.



carpenter--my husband Bo was this when we first got married.



carrot--these were my favorite veggies growing up.



cartoonist--what Monet wants to be.



cast iron--lately, I have been cooking with my two cast iron skillets that I found at my favorite thrift store and I love them! I don't worry about nonstick coatings and they clean up in a jiffy. I'm on the lookout for more. Yesterday morning, I taught Houdin two things before we left for church:

--How to care for cast iron cookware
--How to make pate brise.

cats--we have too, too many. We currently have three cats who have learned how to use the dog door, so they're indoors and out. There are also several outdoor cats and today we found three kittens. No, we're not keeping them, no matter what Sweethearts says.



caterpillars--we found two Monarch caterpillars and have them in a jar with a whole wad of milkweed. Soon, they're become chyrysalis and then we'll watch them emerge as butterflies!

cattails--We have these growing in our front yard, believe it or not, along with a whole, whole, whole bunch of thistles for the the goldfinches (I hear the thistles make my neighbor angry. Whoops! Well, I do love those finches! Good thing the wind generally blows Northeast!) I've considered having that area landscaped, but I think God's doing an okay job of it all by Himself.


cell phone--I must be the only person in the world who doesn't have one. My kids don't have them, either. GASP!


chairs--I have a weakness for cool chairs. Yesterday, I bought a new one from My Favorite Thrift Store--it's a vintage upholstered rocker, cream-colored with wood trim. It was half-price, so how could I resist?

chameleon--We were given one of these and really enjoyed her for the time we had her. She sat on a ficus tree and lived on crickets and mealworms. She only had one eye, so I had to feed her by hand. I'd love to have another chameleon someday, but right now, we'll enjoy our iguana.

chaos--I was an only child, so the only chaos that ever ensued in our house was from my parents fighting (which they often did. sigh.). Now, there is always some sort of chaos going on in our house. It could be good chaos, like a house concert, or a group of friends playing together, or a meal being prepared, or a game being played. Or it could be bad chaos, like bickering siblings or a disgruntled live-in grandfather complaining about the toys in his area. I'm trying to learn to live with chaos, but it's not easy. Loud noises still make me jump, even after hearing them for 17 years.

charming--Our little village is quite charming. :-)

cheesecake --Six years ago, a friend got me hooked on making cheesecakes. About a year ago, I passed the torch to sixteen-year-old Houdin. Now he makes the cheesecakes for our houseconcerts and people rave about them. My favorite is the turtle cheesecake, but the milk chocolate cheesecake is a close second. Yum! He also makes plain as well as mint chocolate chip.

cherries--These have always been on of my favorite fruits. When I was young, I used to climb my aunt's cherry tree to get as many as I could, even though I was told over and over not to climb on it because the branches were weak. I'm still alive. Now we're growing two cherry trees on our own homestead, and though we haven't had a good crop yet, I'm looking forward to the day!

chickens--One of the first things we bought when we came to this home was chickens. At first, it was just Golden Comet layers, and now we have a whole crew of gals (along with a couple of roosters). Last year, we raised our first broilers and butchered them in the fall. It was fairly successful and we hope to do it again next year, if we can construct a better brooder than our basement!

children--"Let your children be your flowers." This was the advice of a friend of mine who listened to me lament about the fact that I didn't have the time or money to put in a flower bed. I clung to those words during that time, and now I have both children AND flowers, and children who love flowers. My daughters make the most beautiful bouquets from the flowers in our gardens. I'm surprised they can find the flowers for all the weeds!

China--Bard spent a week-and-a-half in China with her choral ensemble. She was able to sing at the Great Wall.

chlorine--I believe this is one of the world's biggest evils.

chocolate--I believe this is one of the answers to most of the world's problems. I especially love a very, very good dark chocolate, though I used to think that dark chocolate was a cruel joke.

choir--Four of my fave children are members of a very good choral group. Bard is on her 11th year in the ensemble.

Christ--my inspiration for just about everything I do.

Christian--I became a Christian when I was 16, thanks to the music of a young man who played guitar in cut-offs and a t-shirt at a festival where I, the previous year's Queen, was judge. His song changed my life.

Christianity--This is so greatly misunderstood. I wish people would really examine Christ's words instead of assuming they know what Christianity is. This includes Christians.

There are a ton of C words I want to cover, but I'm totally tired after a day of running around and canning, so I'll come back to this one...

Christmas: A time to focus on Advent, make hard candy and caramels, sugar cookies and white trash, hit the thrift stores a bit more often, and lug all the decorations from the basement. I try very, very hard not to make this a stressful time, but it always ends up with drama of some type. Still, it's always one of our favorite times of the year.

chrysalis: We collect Monarch caterpillars and watch them transform. We have about 11 of them right now, a few that have already made their chrysalis.

church: This one could get very, very verbose if I let it. Maybe I should do another post for this one, too?

cider: Every Fall, we buy gallons of fresh sweet cider from a local orchard and freeze it so that we can have when Autumn ends. When the winter winds begin to blow, we pull out a gallon and mull it on the stove.

city: A place I could never live.

classic: I'm drawn to classic things, whether it's literature, music, movies, styles of furniture, linens, whatever. Since I was in high school, I've loved to collect practical antiques and vintage clothing. It's a hobby I've confined to thrift-store shopping during this season of my life, but it's one of my hobbies that gives me the most joy.

Clover : Our pot-bellied pig.

clutter: A constant struggle.

coats: I have a fetish for these. Recently I found a black leather jacket and a black Hilary Radley swing cape at the thrift store. I can't help it. It's an addiction.

cobalt blue: My collection began with my grandmother's Vic's Vapo-Rub jar and grew from there. My husband, children, friends and family have added to it over the years. My favorite pieces are displayed in my bedroom.

colors : My favorites are dark green, burgundy, brown, black and shades of white/cream.

comparison: One of my biggest enemies.

computer: We're down to one functioning computer with internet access, and when I say "functioning," it's just barely doing that, shutting down every few minutes and unable to run the programs I use. I'm trying to scheme a way to get a new computer for schoolwork and writing.

concerts: One of our goals in building a house in the country was to have houseconcerts. Over the past two years, we've had seven concerts, have four more in the next two months and have a couple booked for 2008. Our goal is to consistently draw about 50 people per show.

constellations

content

conversations

cook

coop

cooperate

cornmeal

cosmetics

cottage cheese

cotton

couch

country

cows

crabby

crafts

Crash

cream

creative

Creator

criticism

curly

currants

curse

cute

It's an addiction!

Victoria Magazine is back! Oh, joy, joy, joy, joy! All through my latter high school years and my college days, I pored over this publication. I'm so thrilled to have another periodical to peruse! It's my one addiction--a good mag on a bad day.

Hat tip to Hind's Feet.

B is for...

Babies: five of them. The first two were born in hospitals and, when I realized I didn't want to do that again, the last three were born at home with a midwife.

Back: My mom always used to complain about her back hurting, and I thought she was such a wimp. Now my back hurts, and I think I'm such a wimp.

Bacon: Is it so difficult to make bacon without nitrates? I've looked everywhere and can only find one source for good nitrate-free bacon. It's expensive, but we only buy it once in a great while for BLTs or Bacon Onion Quiche. I should just raise my own hog.

Baggage: I have too much of it.

Baggy: Growing up, I always wore baggy clothes because I thought it was modest. Now I wear baggy clothes because they fit.

Baking: It's zucchini season, so I've been baking zucchini bread and zucchini cake, which I put in the freezer for a quick breakfast as the year gets crazy. I enjoy baking most times, but it would be easier if I had central air. :-)

Balance: For years, I tried to find the balances in life--the balance between quality time with my kids and cleaning my house, the balance between creative time and productive time, the balance between that would bring more good days and fewer bad days. I've come to realize that there is no balance. Life is an ever-pendulouse ebb and flow and I must simply hang on.

Ballad: When I was a child, the most tragic songs I ever heard were, "I'll Be True to You," "Seasons in the Sun," "One Tin Soldier" and "Wildfire." I was so very much a child drawn to stories of tragedy; these songs were among my very favorites.

Ballerinas: I could gaze for hours at my little girls dancing and twirling and bowing and spinning. They don't take dance classes, but they love to perform for me. It's one of my mind's most precious scenes.

Banjo: I totally want to learn to play!

Baptism: We've been recently discussing adult baptism. Monet isn't sure he wants to be baptized, ever. Since we've been attending an Anabaptist church, the subject has come up several times. If we decide to join the church, which is the direction we're heading, it's my understanding that we're supposed to be baptized again (Bo and I). The children will wait until they're adults to choose baptism.

Barber: When I was in high school, I kind of toyed with the idea of opening a barber shop with my dad, a real, old fashioned one with a barber pole and a quartet on Saturdays and straight-razor shaves.

Barefoot: I don't go barefoot as often now as I did as a child. It was surely summer when I was allowed to run outside with my shoes off. By the end of summer, I could scamper across our gravel drive with nary a wince.

Barn: When Bard was a child, we prayed for a red barn with lots and lots of animals. Every day when I look out my kitchen window, I see a red barn that houses goats, chickens, a pot-bellied pig, a pigeon and lots of cats. I need to thank God for that more often.

Bass Guitar: Recently Bard told Monet that he really should become good at his musical instruments because then he could choose any girl he wanted. There's something disturbingly true about this. Bo is a bass player and has a wonderful, sexy singing voice, somewhere between John Mayer, Steven Curtis Chapman and Daryll Hall. Between those talents and his adorable dimples, I was head-over-heels in no time.

Bathtub: I have a big 'ol tub in my bedroom that serves as my retreat. I turn the lights low and soak, enjoying a good book or a chat with my hubby. On the cold days when I was working at the greenhouse, it kept me going to know that I could go home and plunge myself into my tub's warmth. When we were building our house, we were worried that putting that huge whirlpool tub in our room would be a mistake that we'd regret. On the contrary! It's the best thing to use when you have to toss a bunch of dirty kids into water or soak a basket of smoldering clothes from a dryer fire or bathe a flea-bitten varmint. I don't know what I'd do without indoor plumbing!

Belief: I've always, always, always believed in a higher power. When I was young, I would pray to an unknown being, asking it to solve my problems, calm my angry mother or send me a pony. It wasn't until I was older that I saw this being as God, and it wasn't until I was sixteen that I became a Christian. Every day my belief in God moves and rearranges and changes and deepens and wavers. In my adult life, I've even tried to abandon Him, but His realness always returns to me.

Belligerent: I was as a child, and now I have two boys who are as well. Pray for me.

Bickering: If there's one thing that drives me insane, it's my children bickering with each other. They say I just don't understand. I was an only child. What do they know?

Billy goat: Johnny was a cute little billy, but now he's a brute. He sticks out his tongue before he rears up, does disgusting things with his pee, makes terrible noises that sound like a human man gurgling to death, and smells like something very wrong. But I love him anyway.

Books: My favorites are Peace Like a River, The Life of Pi, The Little House series, Gone-Away Lake, The Bible (especially my Amplified Bible), Tess of the D'Urbervilles (how very tragic!), Stephen King On Writing. I have a bunch of gardening books and cookbooks and children's books. The only thing that prevents me from surrounding my whole self with books is my lack of bookcases. I even hope to write one some day.

Bread: Quite possibly my favorite food. I love to bake it and I love, love, love to eat it warm with a slab of real butter. Oh, very yes.

Breakfast: Somehow, I often miss this. I get going and hit the ground running, sometimes forgetting to fuel my body. And then I get mean. I really should remember to eat breakfast.

Buggy: We have lots of these here in Amish Country, most of them black with a big orange "slow-moving-vehicle" sign on the back. But occasionally I'll see one with no lights, no reflectors and now sign. Those are the lower order Amish and you really don't want to come upon that kind of buggy in the dark of night. It's a great contrast to the buggy we saw in town one night that boasted ground effects. No joke.

Bumblebee: When I was a kid, I used to catch these and hold them in my hand.

Burden: A huge financial burden has been lifted. Thank you, God, for your provision and for your people!

A is for...

Abode: I've worked for and dreamed about this place where I live for many years. I don't know why it is (though I'm sure there's some deep-seated explanation rooted in my childhood), but having a home--not just a house--is very important to me. I'm strongly drawn to create environments for myself and those I love. I'm happy to say that the tenuous relationship I've had with my home these past few months has been resolved, thanks to the love and generosity of amazing people, so I'm thankful for my home and for God's people.


Absent-minded: Lately I've found myself to be more forgetful than usual, losing track of what I'm doing from moment to moment, step to step. If I don't make a grocery list, I may completely forget why I'm there, and even if I remember, I may forget between the time I remember and the time it takes me to get to the right aisle, even if it's only one aisle away.


Abundance: One day I'll think I have so much and another day I'll fret over having nothing. What's up with me? The truth is that I'm blessed with an abundance of love and I have everything I need. Mostly.


Ache: My body. My hips. My neck. My head.


Acquaintances: Thank you so much, God, for the people you've brought into my life. Some people aren't quite friends yet, but I'm so glad for these acquaintances.


Acorn: I hold tight to the promise of the oak within the tiny acorn. Something I heard recently that really struck a chord with me was that as soon as an acorn sprouts, it's an oak tree. I could be one day old or one year old or one hundred years old, and it's still an oak. My home is dotted with acorns, real and represented in different forms. There's one oak tree on our property which must be about 25 or 30 years old because it just started bearing acorns a couple of years ago; my understanding is that they get acorns after 25 years. See The Sprouted Acorn.


Adolescents: There are two of these in my household. Who they are is both a mystery and a comfort to me. I find that I have so much more in common with them now, that I return to the fondness I had for them when they were very young, a fondness that got a bit muddled during the pre-teen years. That's not to say there aren't difficult moments and days; it's just to say that there's more communion now than there has been in recent years.


Afford: If I had more money, I'd buy a compressor for our central air system, a new van, a front stairway, a side patio, a back deck, a clothesline, a banjo, a dulcimer and a set of drums. I'd get good furniture (an antique table and chairs big enough for the whole family and a comfortable couch where we could all read together), I'd finish my dad's kitchen and trimwork, and I'd give lots and lots of money away to people who need much more than I do.


Affluence: I struggle with how I feel about this. Sometimes I wish I had more. Sometimes I despise it. I'm trying to learn not to covet.


Aggravated: No matter how hard I try to please my father, he never sees anything but my faults. In turn, I become more faulty as my anger overtakes me and then he has so much more to talk to his sister about during his morning phone conversations. If he had any idea how wrong he is about me and the things I do, I wonder if he'd stop tearing me to pieces with his words.


Agriculture: Can this be in someone's bones? I think it's in mine. If it can be, does it come easily? Because it doesn't for me. I'm always trying to find that ecobalance on our mini-farm, but there's always some animal or plant trying to buck my system. Will it ever work?


Air Conditioner: Don't have one. Not in my car. Not in my house. It's not so bad today, but it was earlier this week. It's the next big thing on my list that I hope to save money for. Are the dog days over?


Alec D'Urberville: I'm reading Tess of the D'Urberville's for the first time and am at the part of Alec D'Urberville's conversion. Where has Thomas Hardy been all my life?!?


Amusement: Ever been to the State Fair? This year was my first experience there and we had a pretty good time. I never would have expected a cow and calf made entirely of butter. I tasted my first fried cheese curds; saw my first freak show; watched my son lose his head at the hands of a stage magician; met Gloria Rodin, the "world's smallest woman" (a Jamaican who is actually just one of the world's smallest women) and talked to her about her conversion to Christianity while she was touring state fairs in a little people's reggae band; bought a banjo-mandolin made from a board, a cigar box, staples, linoleum tacks and banjo strings; took my adolescents to see Weird Al Yankovic live (they loved it!); and, as I do at every fair, bought maple sugar candy.


Anabaptist: We've been attending a Mennonite church for about a year and a half now and I'm reading several books about Anabaptist roots and beliefs. It's where I fit.


Ancestors: Being adopted makes me feel like I'm missing out on a heritage. I wish I knew who my real ancestors were. Yet at the same time I wonder...why does it matter?


Anger: I struggle with this a LOT.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: New book by Barbara Kingsolver that really helped nudge me closer to eating locally. I buy all of my produce from local growers now, except for what I'm growing in my own yard.

Animals: They're taking over! Goats, pet rats, cats, dogs, lizard, birds, chickens, potbellied pig. Being in the midst of flea season, I'm working very hard to do non-toxic flea control right now. Lots of laundering, vacuuming, bathing animals, combings. It's endless!

Ankle: I've always wanted a tatoo there. What prevents it? Fear and indecision.

Annoying: Fleas. Gossiping father. Judgemental people. August heat.


Antibiotics: Have only used them probably five times in our family in 18 years. Twice for strep and three times (same time--three different people) for a Christmas of pneumonia/bronchitis/sinusitis.


Antiques: I could spend all day in antique shops. See "afford" and "affluence."


April: My birth-month. One of my children share it.


Arguments: We have too many of them in this house. Are we too comfortable with each other, or are we too uncomfortable?


Armoire: Found a vintage one today at My Favorite Thrift Store. Was marked $65 but since it was Pink Tag Day and it had a pink tag, it was half-priced. Monet doesn't have a closet, so this will go to his room, as long as he takes care of it.


Armpit: What The Baby calls tattoos. I don't know why.


Artists: Love Monet, Mary Cassatt, Van Gogh and my son.


Asparagus: Fell in love with it this year and planted a whole bunch of it. Can't wait to harvest it next year!


Aspiration: I have to think about this one.


Authors: Barbara Kingsolver, Anne Tyler, Thomas Hardy, Shakespeare, Solomon, Walter Farley, James Thurber, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Charlotte Mason, William Wordsworth, C.S. Lewis, Laura Ingalls-Wilder, Anne LaMott, A. A. Milne, Elizabeth Enright, John Holt, Leif Enger, Madeleine L'Engle, the bloggers on the left.


Autumn: My favorite month. Nostalgia overcomes me when the leaves turn. A trip to the farmer's market for pumpkins and corn stalks lets me drink in the colors like a mug of mulled cider.

Encyclopedia of Me Meme

I'm going to jump-start my return to blogging (ie: cheat) by participating in Bella Dia's Encyclopedia of Me Meme. Wanna join? Just let her know!

Keep Cool

August. The heat is making me pay for the coolness of July. For the first time in my life, I'm seriously considering selling someone or something to purchase an air conditioner. We already have the whole system set up, the lines charged and everything, but we lack a compressor. We'd get it later, we said. When we had more money. Now we have less. No air in the house, no air in either car, so there's no escape from the heat short of laying in the tub all day or swaddling myself in wet washcloths. Unless you include shopping at the thrift store and the used book store. Which I do.

My niece and nephews are here for a few days. Today's the last of the few, and, while we've had a lot of fun milking goats, making bouquets, eating stuff from the garden, going thrift-store shopping and seeing a bargain showing of Evan Almighty, swinging on the swing and jumping on the trampoline, I think they're ready to go home. They hate the flies and the heat and my ten-year-old nephew Tenn's not too nuts about the lack of TV and various electronic games. I think he'll be glad, though, that he climbed to the top of the treehouse and just sat there for a long, long time, looking out over the hills (darn it! I just had a great idea. Why didn't I give him a disposable camera this week???), visited the cabin, chased chickens, played rodeo with the billy goat, tortured cats, explored the woods and creeks, listened to James Herriot stories about returning cows and flatulent dogs. I mean, what's not to love? Air conditioning? Pshaw.

But it was nice to get some relief from the heat and mugginess yesterday as we combed through the potential bargains at my favorite thrift store. Four-year-old nephew Hot Dog found some great "Engine Turtles" in a fifty-cent bag of treasures. Six-year-old niece Hobbit and eight-year-old daughter Sweetheart delighted in clip-on earrings, necklaces and Hobbit's shiny silvery shrug. The Baby scored a cute sundress and a baggie of Polly Pockets. Twelve-year-old son Monet bought a giant deck of cards and a bubble-blowing contraption. I scored two hunter-green throw-rugs for my kitchen and my second cast-iron skillet of the week (cooking with cast iron is my new thang; last week I found another just like this one, perfectly seasoned and ready-to-use. I added it to my cart with my other thangs--books and hand-embroidered pillowcases). Houdin found some borderline-tacky vintage clothes to add to his collection currently cluttering the floor. And we were so very cool.

Today, it's off to voice and piano lesssons, and then some of us will head for Columbus where we'll meet my sister-in-law and then there may be a little surprise in store for those two teens of mine who go along.

Until then, we'll keep cool in every way we know how.

Scenes from San Jose

Bard and Houdin spent six days in San Jose, California as part of their youth conference. Here are a couple of the photos they took along the way. It's good to have everyone back at home and I'm looking forward to a week-long stay-at-home vacation where the whole family can reconnect, relax, and pursue their creative endeavors.

I'm also looking forward to a return to blogging.

Thanks for sticking around. :-)

Pure, Lovely Milk

Cool summer days make me so nostalgic and sentimental. For some reason, when the weather warms up, I pop out of bed at 6:30 or 7:00, no alarm necessary, and set about keeping house. Most of what that entails is preparing food, beginning with the morning milking of our two well-trained Nubian milkers, Alice and Maggie.

For those who have never milked goats, let me tell you that it's a very connecting and organic experience, especially if you milk by hand on a homemade stanchion in the freshness of the outdoors on a summer morning. It's ritualistic and comforting to fill a bucket with warm, soapy water, pick up the stainless steel milk pail and amble to the milking station. I like routines, for the most part, so I enjoy hanging the bucket on the little red hook set into the side of the stanchion--just the way it looks to me, hanging there, is so reassuring and bucolic, like a still-life of good living.

And then it's time to open the tub of grain. To me, the smell of fresh goat grain is heavenly. It hearkens me back to something, though I don't know what, because we didn't keep goats as a child (I like to think I would have loved goats, but I also know I wasn't a very disciplined child, so I'm probably just waxing romantic). When I make a run for my grain supply, the combination of smells--warm molassass and fresh oats and cracked corn and sunflower seeds--I find myself breathing deeply for the whole ride, taking in the scent of something that I actually entertain scooping from the bag and savoring. After all, it's much healthier than most other things human beings put in their mouths every day.

But I save it for the goats, and they're so very thankful. Once I've filled an ice cream pail with grain, I turn to see three pairs of anxious goat eyes peering expectantly at me through the barnyard fence. They know what's coming. They know the routine, too.

Alice is first, because she's the oldest and most calm. I open the gate and she steps forth, making her way directly towards the stanchion, usually stopping to steel a mouthful of grain before I shoo her up onto the platform. I generally don't have to stockade them, unless there are some playful dogs or curious chickens galavanting near by. Alice is usually pretty happy to just stand there, munching quietly, as I go about my ritual.

I plunge my hands into the warm, soapy water and retrieve the washcloth, which I use to wash down Alice's udders and teats, reducing the chance of any foreign material falling into the milk pail and giving Alice a comforting start-up to the process which helps her milk release. Aiming away from the pail, I release eight streams of milk, four streams from each teat, into the grass nearby, clearing the opening of the teat of any bacteria that may be hiding there. I always think of this as some special gift to the grass and wonder if one day I'll see that the little patch of land where I send this milk will be greener or healthier in some way. But usually, it doesn't lie there long; a hungry cat or dog or chicken comes by and laps up every drop they can get, looking eagerly up at me with the hope of more. "Later, maybe," I say. It all depends on the bounty that day.

And then, the milking. This is the part of the day that forces me to be patient and still, to be right there in the moment and go no further. The hissing sound of the streams of milk sings in the bucket, and there is a country quiet. Not a silence, but a productive quiet. There's the ever-present crow from the barnyard's several roosters, the peep of the chicks obediently and instinctively following their mama hen, the quiet clucking of the mama as she points the way to forage through the garden, the rustling of the rabbits' water bottle as the coerce the drink from it, the rapping of a red-bellied woodpecker on the old wild cherry beyond the barn, and the gentle snorting of the neighbor's horses in the pasture next to my garden.

And the sights--well, there are so many, since I'm a deep aesthete. The filtered light of morning floats over the flower beds--through the delphinium and salvia and yellow-faced violas, fingers its way between the the blooms and stems of Bordeaux petunias in my porch's hanging baskets, scampering over the spent tips of the daylilies.

I see what needs doing, too, and my hands itch to pull the weed grasses that are sneaking about in my herb garden. They aren't overwhelming. On the contrary, I find it almost enjoyable to reach down and pull the sprawling grasses, roots and all, from the soft soil of the herb beds, tossing them into a bucket to give as an offering to my rabbits. The rabbits provide me with fresh, useable manure for my gardens, and I provide them with the growing things that I don't want, like these grasses, and some lamb's quarters, and the excess purslane, lettuces and nasturtiums that produce more abundantly than we can use.

But I force myself to be still and finish the milking, not to hurry through, empathizing with this mother goat, with her fullness and showing gratitude that she's allowing me to do this, to take this life-giving beverage from her every day.

When the feed pail is empty and the milk pail is half full, I lead Alice back to the barnyard and give Maggie her turn. Maggie runs to the stanchion, jumps onto the platform without hesitation, and dives into the newly-filled feed pail as if she were starving. Maggie is young and skittish, and I have to accomodate her by dumping the grain into a shallow bin so that she can see all that's going on around her. I learned quickly that hoping she would quietly munch from the ice cream pail was right out. Maggie, in her alertness (and also her pickiness) would quickly nose into the pail and nudge it right off the stanchion, leaving a feast for the chickens. She prefers to see her whole meal laid out for her, and she pauses jerkily and often to take account of her surroundings. She'll mellow in time, this young girl. For now, we just make our accomodations.

When the grain is gone and the pail is full, I lead Maggie back to the barnyard, on the way pausing just once to let her get a taste of the greener grass that's on the other side. And then, there is still one more pair of eager eyes watching me expectantly. That's Johnny, our Nubian buck. A handful of grain and a scratch on the head is all Johnny wants, and he gets it. Later, when I'm weeding the vegetable bed, Johnny will get the budding tops of my basil plants and the bolting lettuce plants along with a few snippets of purslane and radish seedlings. He has forage in the barnyard, but the things on my side are so much tastier that he never fails to stand right beside me as I weed, separated from me and this cornucopia only by the barnyard fence.

What happens from here depends on what I've planned for the milk. Most days, I carry it into the kitchen, strain it through special filters into quart jars and plunge the jars into a sink full of ice water to cool it to below 40 degrees Farenheit as quickly as I can. Most people who have tasted and dislike goat milk have not had it prepared this way, carefully screened of foreign objects and bacteria, milked into very clean containers, and cooled quickly in ice water--not straight into the fridge or freezer--so that when it's time to enjoy it, it's cold and sweet and creamy, without even a hint of goatiness. I don't pasteurize my goat's milk--pasteurization reduces the calcium, removes the good bacteria, and makes the milk harder for a human body to digest, resulting in so many of the health problems we face today, from brittle bones to obesity to peanut allergies.

Some days, I forgo the cooling process and pour the milk straight into a saucepan once it's been filtered, warming it, adding some cream, maple syrup and a bit of yogurt and then incubating it for several hours, creating more yogurt. Other days, I warm it to room temperature and add a bit of buttermilk, set it on the windowsill to create more fresh buttermilk for rhubarb bread or pancakes.

Sometimes I follow a recipe from Ricki Carroll's book Home Cheesemaking and I make mozzarella or fromage blanc or lactic cheese. Sweetheart praises me to the ends of the earth when she sees that bag of cheesecloth hanging over a bowl from the pendant light above the butcher block. She loves fromage blanch with a few chives, shallots and garlic from the garden. A sleeve of rosemary crackers and a bit of fruit, and that's a meal for my little girl.

Today, I have warmed the milk over a water bath and added some mesophilic starter and rennet, and in an hour, I will cut the curds of the feta cheese, reserving the whey for baking, or pizza dough, or I'll give it to the dogs who are very, very grateful. I've read that whey can be mixed with KoolAid or lemonade mix for a refreshing drink, but I haven't tried it yet.

This is the pace I love. These are the things that bring me joy. If I could only earn a living doing them and not spoil the beauty of it, I would do it in a heartbeat.

"Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things."

~Philippians 4:8 (New International Version)

Photos of Bard's Germany Tour

Thank you to everyone who helped Bard get to Central Europe, whether through financial contributions or prayers. She had a wonderful time and will soon post about her adventures on her own blog, but for now, I'll share with you the photos she took while she was there.

You can see them by clicking the photo album below. If you go to the public albums, you'll see that there's a Part B as well. :-)

Bard's Germany Tour: Part A

She's in Germany...

What would you do if it were 1:30 in the morning and you couldn't sleep?

Me? I called my daughter who's spending her days in Central Europe.

And why not? It's been a long day, after finding myself wide awake at 6:30 AM (this has been happening lately--my bodies awakens at 6:30 every morning, like it or not) and with a whole free day in front of me--so I thought.

I started it with a trip to a benefit book sale in my city where I picked up a bit of Bill Bryson, a couple of Madeleine L'Engles and an Elizabeth Berg for a song--a song that went to a good cause, nonetheless--and then I drifted towards my car UNTIL I smelled doughnuts frying at the local bakery. I tucked Mr. Bryson under my arm and strolled into the doughnut shop. A cream stick, a cup of coffee and a chair later, I was chatting with Mr. Bryson about his little adventure on the Appalachian Trail (Appalachia seems to be following me. Appalachian Music at Shakin' Down the Acorns, two books about Appalachia by Barbara Kingsolver, and now this. Huh. What's up with that?. The doughnuts at the local bakery aren't as good as they used to be. Sigh. So I didn't finish eating them and eased on down the road toward the bulk food store where I bulked up (ha) on organic quick oats and organic rolled oats and brown sugar and freshly ground peanut butter and a roll of 2-lb baggies. I intend to begin making granola to sell. Want some?

That was all, really, aside from a trip to the nursery to buy five blueberry bushes and three raspberry bushes.

When I arrived home, I got the mail (bad news, again), and the garage phone was ringing. Seems my son couldn't find the tickets to the music fest that he'd received for his birthday. Silly me. I'd hidden them from him on one of his more challenging days. And then today, the day he was set to go, packed and prepared, I'd slipped out to the benefit book sale without telling him the location of the tickets. Not on purpose. Honestly. So when I got home, everyone was quite glad to see me since they'd spent the morning trying to track me down (I'm a simple girl with no cell phone) by driving all over the village. Hop back into the car for a trip to the music fest and a detour to the ice cream shop with the little girls, Sweetheart and The Baby. Then home again, home again, jiggety jog, for a phone call to the attorney's office about the tax situation (more bad news) and a bit of time filling out a job application (library position) that had to be turned in by 5 pm today. Off to the library then (probably a good idea to pay my fine, too, she thought), with a detour to the greenhouse to pick up some bull compost for the berry bushes.

What had I wanted to accomplish? Weeding my garden, planting all of my berry bushes, making strawberry ice cream, spending time in the garden with my girls, making tons of granola, reading aloud to the girls, baking some bread and maybe a pizza...

What did I accomplish from that list?

None of it.

And when I sat down to check my e-mail, I discovered that my world traveler is having trouble accessing her money because the PIN is a word; there are no letters on Central European ATMs, apparently. Time on the phone with VISA (no help), time on the internet searching (no help), and finally, a snapshot of an ATM keypad and I realize that it's the same setup as a phone. So, of course, I had to call my daughter who is touring Central Europe with six euros left to her name.

It was so good to hear her voice. I miss her greatly. I'm glad she's having fun, and I'm thrilled that, through her hard work and the generosity of others, she's able to go on this trip (thank you all of you who know who you are), but I do miss her.

Look, the truth is that life is tough right now. But it's also good. Go figure.

How's life with you?

(Photo of Bard in Germany by her Nice Choir Manager)

A Series of Unfortunate Events

Huff. Puff. Huff. Puff. Huff. Puff.

That's the sound of me trying to catch my breath. It's the sound of me coming up for air. It's the sound I make when climbing the stairs, too, because I have woefully set aside my running in favor of other important things, like working my butt off so I can pay my bills and feed my family. Unfortunately, my butt doesn't disappear as quickly with this kind of work as it does with running. That, I fear, will have to wait. While my running partner chugs along (have you registered for the 5K yet, Kim?), I'm left in the dust. In lieu of running, I dream about it. Literally. I've composed an essay in my head about my running dreams, but I haven't stopped my life long enough to write it.

The past month has been eventful. Every moment has been occupied. I've been rising with the sun, but it's been beating me to bed each night. If you've ever seen a candle burned at both ends, you'll know what I look like.

Each morning brings the urgency of getting to the garden. With our wet, cold early spring, not much happened after the initial tilling. Now the herb garden is planted and mulched, the veggie garden is filled with onions, swiss chard seeds (yet to come up), peppers, tomatoes, eggplants, more onions, marigolds, basil and cilantro. The asparagus on which I had given up poked its many heads from the cool earth, only to be snipped off by a gang of marauding goats. Still, it persists and I hope for a bountiful harvest next year.

This seems to fit in with the theme of the month--hope deferred. Seeds that don't want to germinate. Newly placed seedlings that fall to the fate of a hungry goat kid. Threatening letters from government agencies holding my precious world in its fists lest I cough up several months' pay for taxes I owe. A new birthday camera just in time for my computer to crash. The cultivator quits when gardening season begins. Life=challenge. Most days, I'm tired and grumpy and my family takes the brunt. A few moments, like waking up from this afternoon's nap to the sound of birds and little girls singing, looking out my window over the finally green hillsides, turning silvery in the breezes of this spring day, almost make me want to grab my camera and my journal, but I barely have the desire. This home and hillside, this desire of my heart, this fruit of my labor, is only tenuously mine. Any act of God, unavoidable tragedy or certified letter might pull it out from under my bare gardening feet, leaving me on my rump, disillusioned and desolate.

These things have been occupying my mind, and more days than not, I find myself deep in depression. Work takes me from home, home greets me with more work, and never am I completely caught up. Even today, a day off from work outside the home, gives me an opportunity to pursue those things that have been niggling at me every day while I'm away, but my energy is zapped, and curled up in bed is where I'd like to be.

That's hardly anything inspiring to write about, though I do think about jotting down thoughts now and again. Life isn't all that poetic right now.

I need air. I need to resurface and take a deep breath. Something fresh and clean to purify my body and renew my energy.

A bit of hope would help, too.

::: a new friend :::

The Baby, Sweetheart and The Bookstore Lady.

::: mom and daughters :::

Sweetheart, me and The Baby at The Pink Cupcake, as taken by The Bookstore Lady.

::: "how can i pick just one? :::

The Baby ogles over the goods at The Pink Cupcake in Mt. Vernon, Ohio during Sweetheart's birthday weekend. Hooray for The Pink Cupcake!

Dear Friend

Here's a YouTube video of seventeen-year-old Bard sharing a song at Easter Sunrise Service. Enjoy!

How People Affect Me, Part Three

I had only been wandering around the bead shop for a half-hour or so when I heard a siren sounding, the kind of wail that emits from an ambulance and causes every mother to stop dead in her tracks. I tried to ignore it, but my mother-heart kept hurling itself into terrible fits of imagination. It had me convinced that my four-year-old was dead in the middle of town square, that she'd slipped from her older brother's clutches and had darted out into traffic.

Or that the eleven-year-old had been too exuberant with his new Heelies and ended up on the sidewalk in some unnatural position, his head cracked open, calling my name with his last few breaths.

I tried to fight these thoughts. I tried to tell myself that I was being ridiculous. I tried to concentrate on the beads before me, to focus on the beautiful hummingbird earrings I was attempting to create. But I couldn't do it. All of the "what-ifs" piled on top of my head and I just had to find out if my children were okay.

Setting my tin full of beads aside, I nonchalantly announced, "I have to go check on my children. I'll be right back." And then I stepped out the door onto the sidewalk and strolled ever-so-quickly towards the bookstore. Bard told me later how priceless was the expression of the bead shoppe woman.

I didn't see a crowd gathered along the sides of the road, so I felt a bit reassured, but then my mother-heart was nagging me with other, more probable scenarios. The bookstore was being torn apart, shelf-by-shelf, but my littlest darling while the boys fought over a comic book. Or the uptight bookstore clerk was timing my absense, prepared to call children's services any moment. Or the children hadn't gone into the bookstore at all. They were instead doing a standup routine on the corner with their hats out for tips. My busking boys.

I couldn't believe how long of a walk it was to the bookstore. It hadn't seemed that long before, and now I was questioning my sanity at letting my children walk so far away from me. Anything could happen in the time it takes a person to walk two blocks!

And then I was at the door of the bookstore, holding the handle in my hand, swinging it open, casting my eyes about the intimate bookshelf-lined room. I heard no shrieking. I saw no glaring employee. This was almost more eerie than my nightmarish thoughts.

When I rounded the corner, I found fifteen-year-old Houdin curled up on a chair with a big, thick book. A few feet away, The Baby was cuddled up on a couch next to a neatly-dressed woman who couldn't have looked more like the kind of lady who would work in a bookstore. Beside them stood a stack of books, and it was clear that had read or were intending to read every one of them. Dramatically.

The Baby barely noticed my entrance, and I'm not sure the bookstore lady gave much pause, either. They just read merrily along so that I almost wondered if I were having an Ebeneezer Scrooge moment.

But when the book was finished and the covers snapped shut, I was acknowledged ever-so-slightly. And then another book was begun.

A second bookstore lady stood in a little island in the middle of the store, near the register, and called to me that they'd been happily enjoying the children's company, and I knew then that I was in love. At that moment, I would have handed them my entire life's savings, I was so grateful. I took my time browsing the books until a nagging feeling overcame me. My beads were waiting. I had to return to finish my bead transactions.

So I let The Baby choose her favorite book from the pile they'd read, laughed as she and the bookstore ladies fought noisily over The Baby's purple shearling coat, and made a mental promise that I'd be back soon.

Those ladies were a balm to my soul. I want to be like them. I want to take life like they do, happily drinking it up and being right where they are, loving what they do. What could be more important than being kind to little girls and teenaged boys and tired mamas?

We finished our bead transaction and returned to the bookstore, where the second bookstore lady plopped herself right back down on the couch and read more books to The Baby and Sweetheart. Not lightweight books, either. These were long, wordy, time-consuming books. And the girls listened to every drop.

And I shopped.

As a thank-you for being such wonderful people, I made a large purchase at the bookstore. Large for me, that is.

Considering the service, I think it was the best deal I ever got.

Houdin

How People Affect Me, Part Two

I wasn't all that interested in letting a grumpy hotel clerk deter me from having a splendid birthday mini-vacation with my five loverly children, so on Thursday morning, we gussied up and headed into town.

I knew a bit about downtown because we were once accidental tourists to Mt. Vernon, stranded there several years ago when our radiator blew enroute to Cincinnati. Since all of the repair shops were closed for the evening, we'd bummed a ride with a couple of women in a huge passenger van who took us into town to find a place to stay. Only after they drove us around for about forty five minutes to find a hotel that wasn't full of college-aged soccer-tournament guys did we find that they were headed to the hospital because the quiet boy in the back seat was bleeding from his ear.

The whole thing had been an adventure, and we'd made the best of it, with a visit to the cafe and a funky museum and an architectural salvage warehouse and a little independent bookstore and a bead shoppe. The bead shoppe alone could have distracted me for days.

So it was that very bead shoppe that I was seeking on our sojourn to downtown. On our first drive through, I saw that the cafe had moved, that there were a few more antique stores, that the funky museum was gone, and that the bead shoppe did, indeed, remain. I parked the car, extracted the five children from it, and down the block we walked, three months worth of stashed-away mad money jingling in a little black drawstring bag in my pocket.

When we stepped inside the bead shoppe, it was just as I remembered it. Table after table after table of colorful, sparkling beads carefully separated into their own compartments. The shopkeeper slid her eyes our way, and I saw a look of nervousness that immediately soaked into my skin and saturated me from head to tow. Thousands and thousands and thousands of tiny beads. Hundreds of organized compartments. And me, with two teenagers. And two young children. And one toddler. A whole slew of accidents waiting to happen.

I felt it upon impact. The nervousness became me, and I couldn't shake it. I suddenly felt like I was the most irresponsible mother in the world, though I'd not been in the shoppe for more than three minutes. That nervousness must have oozed out of me and found its way directly into four-year-old The Baby. But with toddlers, a mother's oozed nervousness soaks in and morphs into something else, something insidious. When a mother becomes a frazzled mess, a toddler becomes...Demon Child.

I don't know why this happens, and I don't know how God thought it was at all funny to make things this way, but the more nervous I became, the more fingers The Baby grew; the faster she became; the more curious and hands-on. And when she found something sweet and quiet to do, the shopkeeper found a reason why she shouldn't be doing it. And she told me about it.

"She shouldn't be sitting near that window display..."

"Come on, Baby. Let's look at something else...

"But I like the butterflies! I want to look at those pretty butterflies!"

Hands and fingers and knees and elbows were everywhere. The shopkeeper's eyes were in one place. On me and my children. She hovered near me, and I began to feel as if she had mistaken me for the local bead shoplifter.

My long-awaited foray into beading was being thwarted.

Finally, I looked pleadingly at sixteen-year-old Houdin, a teenaged boy who really has no great interest in beads, and begged him, "Could you please take her down to that cute little bookstore and see if you can read her a book?" I scooped up The Baby, shifted her into Houdin's strong arms, and watched nervously as he bounded out the door with her on his hip. Eleven-year-old Monet followed, gliding on his Heelies out the door.

Now I had two things to worry about; recovering my reputation from this reluctant shopkeeper and the safety of my precious, precocious daughter in a strange town with my two young equally precocious boys.

I turned my gaze back to the hundreds of tiny compartments and tried to find beading inspiration.

But it's hard to make a delicate pair of dazzling earrings when your hands are shaking like you've just downed a double espresso, a Live Wire and a Red Bull.

Congratulations, Bard!

Second place speaker! Bard is the second from the left.



Congratulations Monica and Bard! Fourth place team! And they're NOVICES this year! You both RAWK! (Monica, left. Bard, right. If you look closely at the picture on the left, you see that they're holding hands. So adorable!)

How People Affect Me, Part One

It amazes me how deeply I'm affected by other people's attitudes.

I mean, when someone doesn't treat me warmly, my first and very immediate thought is to wonder why they don't like me. Generally, if I've not even opened my mouth, I tend to believe that a grumpy person dislikes the way I look. I'm no Andi McDowell, after all, so I suppose a real aesthete would be put off by my face. This makes me feel very self-conscious.

If I have my children with me, I immediately assume that my progeny are piglets and the person has determined that I'm a terrible mother/they're terrible children/both. This also makes me feel very self-conscious. And much like a failure.

If I've asked a question and the person is short-tempered or unkind, I just know it's because I've asked the stupidest question on the face of all existing planets and the person is merely tolerating my existence. This makes me feel like an idiot.

It takes several encounters with a grumpy person before I begin to realize that I'm not the problem. This makes me feel dense. But better.

One of the adventures of our recent mini-vacation began with the phone call I made to our hotel the day before our departure.

"Would it be possible for us to store an ice cream cake somewhere at the hotel?"

A high-pitched elderly voice that sounded very much like Minnie Mouse responded, "No. That won't be possible. Our freezer is full."

H-okay. "Um...I have another question. We will be having pizzas delivered to the hotel on Friday night. Our forensics group will be arriving back at the hotel at around 9:00. Would it be possible to use a breakfast area or common room to eat?"

"No, I don't think so. You can call back tomorrow and ask to reserve a meeting room, but it will cost extra."

This one suprised me. We've always been welcomed to every hotel we've gone to for speech tournaments. Sometimes our name is on the marquee. Sometimes the hotel actually foots the bill for the pizza. I shrugged, thanked the Minnie Mouse voice and figured I'd ask someone else when I arrived the next day.

But when I arrived the next day, I had the opportunity to put a face to the voice. A woman with very stiff, teased hair and a stiff-looking face to match stood behind the counter.

"I'm here to check in," I said. "I have a reservation for today through Friday night."

A few keystrokes, and a response, "I don't have a reservation for you for tonight. I have one for tomorrow and one for Friday, but not for tonight."

I was struck dumb. How could this be? I'd driven over and hour and had five tired kids in the car. I had definitely made this reservation, and I had definitely been told that my room would be ready when I arrived. I had also definitely failed to bring my confirmation number.

"There's nothing I can do." This, even though the parking lot was practically empty.

I didn't want to have to strangle this woman, so I took a deep, deep breath, wondering what I'd done to deserve this treatment. I'd been nice. I had showered. I hadn't even brought my kids into the foyer with me. What had I done that would cause her to be so mean and unaccomodating?

"Can you cancel my other reservation and just make a new one including tonight?"

"I could, but I'd have to charge you $14 per night more," she squeaked, glaring at me over her bifocals.

I stood for a moment looking at her, then I put my head in my hands. "I'm kind of at your mercy here. I have five kids in the car, and I'm tired. Is there anything you can do?" Having already gathered that this woman was the type to flaunt her lack of authority, I totally expected her to say, "My hands are tied," but she surprised me.

"Well, I can put you in a vacant room for the night..." (Thank goodness. A vacant room, I thought. I certainly wouldn't want an occupied one. What a favor she's doing me!) "But you'll have to check out of it and check into a different one in the morning."

I sighed.

"Isn't there any way you can put me in a room that will be vacant tonight and Thursday and Friday? Is there a way you can check to see what rooms won't be filled this weekend?"

She shook her head.

But then, with the push of a few buttons, she did just that.

"You'll have to stop down here at the desk at 7:00 tomorrow morning or your card will expire."

Let it expire, I thought. I'm not coming down her in my jammies at 7:00 during my vacation.

And I hauled my children to the third floor.

For the remainder of our stay, this woman was a thorn in my side. When taking our microwave popcorn to the front desk for my son, my friend Marcella was told that there was no microwave in the hotel (came to find out later that it wasn't true). It was then that I started to realize that it wasn't I who was the problem. If this woman could be difficult with Marcella, it had to be that she was quite simply a difficult woman.

We were able to get a room for our pizza party by asking a reasonable human being for help. We were able to get permission to store our cake by talking to a sane human being. And when Minnie Mouse approached a couple of the quietest kids in the club and I in the lobby telling us that we were being too loud, that guests were complaining and that one guest had already left because of us, I was able to look her straight in the eye, ask her to repeat what she'd just said, and then boldly respond to her by saying,

"Oh. Okay. I'm sorry."

Okay, so I wasn't so bold.

But at least I had realized that it wasn't just me. In my heart, I knew that this woman would be short-tempered and unaccomodating with anyone with whom she interacted.

But it still bothers me how deeply her attitude affected me.

::: happy birthday, sweetheart! :::

Sweetheart's Eighth Birthday

Sweetheart turned 8 this week. Visit my picasa web album to see my little sweetie growing up.

A New Look for Time to Cook

My cooking blog, Time to Cook, has a bit of a facelift. Head on over and see how you like it!

Time to Vacate

We're not the kind of family who takes vacations.

I've never been to Disney World. I've never taken my children to see the Grand Canyon or Niagara Falls. We've never flown to Europe. Heck, we barely ever leave our state!

Even when my husband I and married, young and poor, our honeymoon was spent twenty minutes away from home in a hotel that was once an oats silo. For one night. And then we hit the ground running.

I don't believe we've stopped since.

Our vacations have always been more familycentric, consisting of visits to parents' and grandparents' houses, graduation parties, weddings, funerals. Our immediate family spends Bo's vacation days on service projects or home improvement projects. If we travel overnight, it's generally for our children's activities--particularly speech and debate tournaments.

If the tournament is less than 3 hours away, Bo does his best to convince us to just commute. If we can camp during one of these outings, we'll borrow a friend's pop-up and rough-it. If it's far, far away, we'll get one hotel room for the seven of us and pray there's a cot available when we get there.

This weekend, we had a tournament in Mt. Vernon, Ohio, which doesn't qualify as far, far away from us. We're not in camping weather, so roughing-it was out of the question.

But we didn't commute.

We stayed in a hotel. For THREE WHOLE NIGHTS. And celebrated!

Because this week, Sweetheart and I both turned a bit older. I am now a woman of thirty-eight and Sweetheart is an adorable eight-years-old. To make our birthdays more special, I decided that I would save up my pennies and spend an extra day in Mt. Vernon, explore that cute little college town, laze around in a hotel room watching Fresh Prince of Bel Aire and eating pizza.

After working and cleaning house on Wednesday, the five kiddoes and I drove to Mt. Vernon to check into our hotel room and settle in. There, we met our grumpy hotel host (more about her later) and vegged out, stayed up late, and laughed a lot.

Thursday morning, the day before the tournament was to start, I took the boys to get haircuts and then we briefly explored the downtown Mt. Vernon area. Just as I remembered from a pass-through several years ago, there was a cute little store (more about that later, too), a hip cafe and a bead shoppe with all of the makings for a few saweet pairs of earrings. There was also an adorable little bakery called The Pink Cupcake. I promptly strolled in and ordered a birthday cake for Sweetheart and her girlfriend Lydia, who would be turning 7 the next day.

We hoofed it back to the hotel to pick up the girls and then we went exploring.

Bard and I made earrings at the bead shop. Sweetheart made an adorable necklace with her name on it. The boys took The Baby to the bookstore and cafe (more about that later, too) where we met up with them after our earring adventure was complete. I checked my e-mail at the cafe and bought two fabulous cookbooks at the fabulous bookstore that employed two fabulous women (more about them later, too) and then we popped in to The Pink Cupcake so the girls could all ooh and ahh over the displays. Of course we just had to take something along with us (I may have gained seven pounds this week, but it was worth it) so we all chose something--both of us birthday girls chose two things--and then we meandered back to the hotel room where Bo joined us after his drive from home.

Friday morning, early, brought the tournament (more about that later, too. Boy. I hope I remember all this), a late-night pizza party, and more from our grumpy hotel clerk. Saturday brought more tournament, cake for the girls from The Pink Cupcake, and a wonderful evening meal at the Southside Diner where all of our forensics team enjoyed food, fellowship and general silliness.

It was a full and wonderful weekend--and there's so much more to tell.

While we may not take vacations, I try to take advantage of every moment, turning as many into mini-vacations as I possibly can. Those are the moments that make life fun.

::: happy birthday to me! :::

I've been having a wonderful birthday, extended and quite doting. And, get this, it has JUST NOW STARTED! As of right this hour, I'm thirty-old and have been spoiled relentlessly.

Maybe when I'm done, I'll tell you all about it. :-)

::: guess what I got for my birthday??? :::

A NEW CAMERA!!! YIPEEE!

Well, it sounded like fun at the time...

More than you wanted to know about me. Hat tip to Sara.

Do you have any pets?	Oh, my. Yes, yes, yes.
What color shirt are you wearing?	Dark grey wool.
Name three things that are physically close to you:	A Polly Pocket, a fake canned ham and a red high top. Just one, though.
What is the last book you read?	I'm reading Gilead.
Are you or were you a good student?	From time to time.
What's your favorite sport?	Sleeping.
Do you enjoy sleeping late?	See above.
What's the weather like right now?	Too cold for my liking. Where's that other thing? What's it called? Ah, yes. Spring.
Who tells the best jokes?	My daughter Bard is hilarious. She doesn't tell jokes--she's just funny.
What was the last thing you dreamed about?	My daughter's choir manager hating me. Who knows?
Do you drive? If so, have you ever crashed?	Yes. Yes. Let's move on, shall we?
Do you believe in karma?	If I don't believe in it, will it go away? No, actually, I don't.
Do you believe in luck?	Nope.
Do you like your eggs scrambled or sunny side up?	Scrambled, with sour cream and chives.
Do you collect anything? If so, what?	Dust. Stories. White dishes and servingware. Pottery. Embroidered things. Animals. Kids.
Are you proud of yourself?	Not at the moment, no.
Are you reliable?	Not really.
Have you ever given money to a bum?	Absolutely. I give him a dollar for a cup of coffee every morning. Oh, wait. Did you mean one I'm not married to? Then, yes.
What's your favorite food?	Very, very good food. I don't have a particular favorite.
Have you ever had a secret admirer?	Doubtful
Do you like the smell of gasoline?	Ack.
Do like to draw?	Yes. But you might not like to look at what I draw. It may hurt your eyes.
What's your favorite invention?	Running water and indoor plumbing.
Is your room messy?	Medium.
What do you like better: oranges or apples?	Apples. Especially nice crisp ones, like Fuji or Pink Lady. But not cooked ones. Ick.
Do you give in easily?	Depends on who's asking.
Are you a good guesser?	Not really.
Can you read other people's expressions?	Depends on who's expressing. Some people, yes. Others, I don't think anyone can.
Are you a bully?	Can be.
Do you have a job?	Several.
What time did you wake up this morning?	Which time? Ultimately, I woke up at 8.
What did you eat for breakfast this morning?	Almonds, an Asian pear and a Clif bar.
When was the last time you showered?	This morning.
What do you plan on doing tomorrow?	Working and preparing for the weekend. I get to have a birthday this week!
What's your favorite day of the week and why?	Saturday, usually. It's the day I get to spend with my husband and do fun stuff. It's also the day we usually have our houseconcerts.
Do you have any nicknames?	Several. What? Do you think I'd write them here?
Have you ever been scuba diving?	No, but I'd love to.
What's your least favorite color?	Probably hot pink.
Is there someone you have been constantly thinking about? If yes, who?	Today? Yes. But that's just because I'm feeling a bit angry.
Would you ever go skydiving?	If someone pushed me out of a plane, I guess I'd have to.
What toothpaste do you use?	Tom's of Maine.
Do you enjoy challenges?	Sometimes.
What's the worst injury you have had?	Childbirth.
What's the last movie you saw?	Babette's Feast at home, Reign Over Me in theaters.
What do you want to know about the future?	What my children will do for their professions.
What does your last text message say?	I don't have text messaging. Unless you count mail.
Who was the last person you spoke over the phone to?	Kim, I think.
What's your favorite school subject?	Literature
What's your least favorite school subject?	Math
Would you rather have money or love?	Love. Definitely love.
What is your dream vacation?	Duh. Traveling around the entire world at my leisure with endless amounts of money. And love, of course.
What is your favorite animal?	A dog. Especially my little Jack Russells.
Do you miss anyone right now?	Yes, I do. But what good does that do?
What's the last sporting event you watched?	The Ohio State championship game.
Do you need to do laundry?	I'm doing laundry. So there.
Do you listen to the radio?	NPR occasionally. Mostly iPod, though. And Rhapsody.
Where were you when 9/11 happened?	In bed.
What do you do when vending machines steal your money?	Go tattle.
Have you ever caught a butterfly?	Yep. And I raised some, too.
What color are your bed sheets?	White.
What's your ringtone?	I don't have a cell phone. ::GASP:: Can you believe it???
Who was the last person to make you laugh?	My kids.
Do you have any obsessions right now?	Worrying about my life.
Do you like things that glow in the dark?	This is an exceedingly odd question.
What's your favorite fruity scent?	Fruit, I guess.
Do you watch cartoons?	If you count Homestar Runner, I guess I do.
Have you ever sat on a roof?	Oh, yes.
Have you ever been to a different country?	Does Canada count?
Name three things in the world you dislike:	cowards, backstabbers and money
Name three people in the world you dislike:	I can't do that.
Has a rumor even been spread about you?	I'm sure.
Do you like sushi?	Never had it. Should I?
Do you believe in magic?	In a young girl's heart?
Do you hold grudges?	Yes, I do, unfortunately. I'm holding a couple right now. Would you like to hold them for me?
Take this survey or other MySpace Surveys at PimpSurveys.com

Seize Life!

"Throughout the world sounds one long cry from the heart of the artist: Give me the chance to do my very best."
~Babette from Babette's Feast

" Seize life! Eat bread with gusto,
Drink wine with a robust heart.
Oh yes—God takes pleasure in your pleasure!
Dress festively every morning.
Don't skimp on colors and scarves.
Relish life with the spouse you love
Each and every day of your precarious life.
Each day is God's gift. It's all you get in exchange
For the hard work of staying alive.
Make the most of each one!
Whatever turns up, grab it and do it. And heartily! "
~Ecclesiastes 9:10, The Message

There are parts of me that cannot be supressed, no matter what company surrounds me--the love of language and the love of good food; to me, the whole of my service to others is wrapped up in these two loves. Often I find myself within a circle of people who don't understand my passions, and somehow that makes me feel small and insignificant. Sometimes I find my desire to produce substantial foods for mind and body belittled, almost ridiculed, by those who don't understand how intrisic these things are to me.

I can't help it. I want to feed you.

And it's not good enough for me to slap some macaroni and cheese or a bologna sandwich on a paper plate and hand it over.

It's not good enough to slip through the drive-through for lunch and be satisfied with a watery iceberg lettuce salad.

It doesn't do to throw together a casserole with canned beans and cream of mushroom soup and french-fried onions.

I know even in writing this that I'll be misunderstood.

I want to feed you real food. Real, substantial, simple, delicious food.

You must know how it pains me that I don't find myself with the amount of time I need to give you want I want to give you. The recipes I want to try, the dishes I want to prepare, the delicacies I want to bestow upon you are too many for the days I have left upon this earth.

I think of Babette, of the sacrifices she made to prepare a meal for those she loved, those who had saved her life, and how she must have had some sense that they were afraid of what she would serve them, that their fears grew larger than this realm. They literally believed that she was preparing the food of the devil. They had no idea that she was a well-known French chef. Her quail, you might say, were cast before swine.

If I were in Babette's place, I'd be fretting. I'd be fuming. I'd not have one good thing to say about those ungrateful gourmands.

But not Babette.

In someone else's kitchen, a long way from her home, she patiently and lovingly prepares a feast; course after course comes forth, and somehow, the food changes people. It awakens them. They find beauty and love and miracles.

When it is discovered that she has used all the money she had to prepare the feast--10,000 francs in the late 1800's--her spinster employers are aghast. Why would she spend all of her money on them?

"It was not just for you," she replies.

"Tout ce que ta main trouve à faire avec ta force, fais-le." Ecclesiastes 9:10, en francais.

I want to find that kind of purpose, like Babette's, where I do what I do--yes, for you--but not just for you. For my own good. For the Lord. Seizing each day with both hands and drinking it down.

Come eat. The feast is ready.

For Firefly

Most of us will never know how dark this world can seem.
When life becomes more nightmare than a dream.
So to all of you who have survived a visit to the edge,
I trust that you will understand this pledge.

I promise I will always leave the darkness for the light.
I swear by all that's holy, I will not give up the fight.
I'll drink down death like water before I ever come again
To that dark place where I might make
The choice for life to end.

I've found that as I've traveled through the inscape of my life
That mountain tops make valleys in between.
And when that nameless sadness like a cloud comes over me,
I look back on all the brightness I have seen.

And realize that though my world might seem so torn apart
Most often it is joy that breaks the heart.
And that I am the richest woman though I must beg for bread
For the very One who might condemn has called me friend instead.

I promise I will always leave the darkness for the light.
I swear by all that's holy, I will not give up the fight.
I'll drink down death like water before I ever come again
To that dark place where I might make
The choice for life to end.

I will always leave the darkness for the light.
I will not give up the fight.

Michael Card

I've been nominated...

Well, I'm honored. I've been nominated for the Homeschool Blog Awards under the category of The Best Nitty-Gritty Homeschool Blog. The Best Nitty-Gritty Homeschool Blog is "for the homeschooler who is brutally honest and open about her mistakes and failures. These are the moms that make you feel better and let you know that it is OK that we aren’t perfect."

Honestly? That's been my goal with this blog. To tell it like it is in our family, to give hope to others who think they can't do it or aren't doing it right. I think we do a great diservice to each other in the homeschool community when we put on a facade, when we only list the five million books we're reading aloud or the twelve gazillion activities our children are involved in. Yes indeedy, we need to laugh with those who laugh, but we also need to weep with those who weep and mourn with those who mourn.

That's why I wrote Broken Branches, about the importance of fathers treating their daughters with tenderness; Battling the Demons is about my struggle against looking for the worst in my children; Changeback Messages is about the difficulty of letting go and trusting my children to be safe in their travels; and, for a lighthearted look at the nitty gritty, Boy of Summer is a piece about something my son is simply not good at--and a bunch of things he is.

So, yes, I'm honored that someone has nominated me for the best nitty gritty homeschool blog. Even if I don't win, at least I know I'm headed in the right direction.

After tragedy, laundry...

"We should all do what, in the long run, gives us joy, even if it is only picking grapes or sorting the laundry.”

~E.B. White

I do enjoy clean laundry. I enjoy smelling it, whether on myself or on other people, wearing it, seeing it whipping in the wind or even soaking in the rain. I even enjoy folding it and putting it away if it's fresh from the dryer, toasty and effluvious. There are few things that make me as feel prepared and organized as having freshly laundered clothes, sheets, rugs and curtains gracing my abode.

This may hearken back to the days of my youth. Then, I didn't care much for laundry one way or the other. I was like most children--yes, even like my own--who considered the term "put your clothes away" to mean "shove them under the bed or throw them on the closet floor." I also equated the term "clean your room" with "pull out all of those clean clothes from under your bed and on your closet floor and throw them in the laundry hamper."

We had a hamper back then. It was a kind of plasticky wicker, golden in color, with a solid hinged top. It sat at the end of the hallway and the dirty (or, in my case, clean) clothes disappeared from it and reappeared in my closet or drawers. Now that I think about it, I don't believe I ever really had to put my own clothes away. I just took off the clean outfit I didn't want to wear and put it in the hamper. Does anyone have hampers anymore?

What I did have to do, however, was take the clothes out of the dryer. The best way to get out of this, of course, was to pop open the dryer door, feel the clothes, and make an assessment. Not dry yet. Whether they were dry or not, I could garner a few more moments of freedom if I snapped the door shut and restarted the dryer.

This worked okay for the clothesline, too. It was my job to haul the big plastic laundry basket out to the back yard and retrieve the clothes from the line. After more than a time or two of claiming they weren't dry yet, I eventually had to pay the piper. If it was an especially warm and breezy day, I couldn't even get away with one round of procrastination.

There was an art to removing the clothes from the line. Foremost was the placement of the clothesline pole, a long aluminum rod with a kind of v-shaped attachment on one end which doubled quite well as a lion-taming rod, sword, lightsaber or javelin. If the clothesline rod weren't strategically positioned, clothes would--GASP!--touch the ground, and then the whole thing was a mess. The best thing to do was begin with the sheets, then other long stuff like crispy, crackly, stiff towels and cardboard jeans. After those were snapped and wrangled into submission, it was time for shirts, which hung upside down so as to avoid pointy shoulders, and then washcloths and underwear. While I never claimed to enjoy this activity, I still have fond memories of it and recall being very precise about how I organized the clothes int he baskets.

Clotheslines took a hiatus from my life until about six years ago when we were living in a small cabin with very minimal electricity. For many months, "doing laundry" meant packing fifteen million baskets of dirty things and toting them up a gravel footpath to the car which would take us to the local dirty laundromat. This was a total and complete conflict. The joy of clean clothes meets the dread of the filthy place. What on earth was in those washing machines before my load? And who had folded their clothes on this table before I? Still, baskets of fluffy, fresh wash was the payoff, and even when I was largely pregnant, I enjoyed getting the clothes clean. Joy of joys, I can still remember the day my dear husband lugged our old washing machine from our city house to our country cabin, rigged it up on the front porch, and made me one happy woman. A top-notch clothesline was constructed which stretched from my porch to a distant tree, between two pulleys. Some strong connection to my ancestors surfaced when I laundered my clothes then; with my hillbilly washin' setup, I'd step from my cabin onto the porch and pull those wet clothes from the washer. With each snap of a clothespin, I felt a sense of purpose and accomplishment much different than my writing, childrearing, research and volunteer work gave me. It forced me, too, to slow way, way down, to bring my daily routine to a crawl. And because it was my only means of doing laundry aside from the last-resort laundromat, that slow-down period was completely necessary.

Now, some people claim to love the smell of line-dried laundry. I'll confess. I don't like it. While I'm truly a nature-girl through-and-through, give me a Downy-fluffed, machine-dried towel over a stiff-as-a-board, wet-dog smelling line-dried one any day. I guess I'll never make it as a homesteading purist.

Who knew that something so inocuous as laundry would come so close to being tragic?

When we built our house several years ago, one of the features I lobbied very hard to acquire was a second-floor laundry room, and a nice one at that. I had to do a lot of fast-talking to convince my husband that it would be safe and very, very handy. For nights, he researched dryer ducts and washer pans before he was assured. I've rarely been unhappy with the choice. It's very definitely convenient to pull the clothes from the dryer and whisk them right to their destinations. If I have a terribly large pile, baskets full of clean laundry travel from the laundry to my bedroom where my queen-sized bed is transformed into a folding center. I turn up the tunes while my tee-shirts tumble-dry, putzing around the bedroom doing odd jobs. By the end of the day, the laundry is done and the bedroom's in order. Quite productive, indeed.

So, I had a new second-floor laundry with an efficient flourescent light and some handy shelves, but because we'd decided on hickory doors and custom kitchen cabinets, there really was no appliance budget. We took some of the little cash we had and bought a very old, very used washer and dryer pair from a very old, very used furniture store. The clothes have never felt clean to me, and I don't think it's just because it was someone else's washing machine. For one thing, the hot water feature stopped working about six months ago, and the fabric softener dispenser had a very crafty way of tossing all of the liquid around the top of the machine, completely avoiding the clothes. On top of all of that, the clothes never smelled clean, no matter what kind of detergent or fabric softener I would use.

But it wasn't the washing machine that caused the real problem. It was actually the dryer that conspired against us.

My husband and I were minding our own business, sitting in our bedroom having a heated discussion about global warming, when the fire alarms started to sound. I didn't jump up, I'm ashamed to say. But, in my defense, we have the kind of fire alarms that go off when the toast is too brown, or when the shower's too hot, or when the summer humidity is too high, or when a housefly has a fever. I figured that one of the kids was burning popcorn, so I ignored it, continuing my side of the argument. After several minutes, the alarms were still sounding, so I decided to see what those crazy kids were doing.

Once in the hallway, it became clear that this wasn't your average popcorn smoke. The hall was filled with a thick, plastic-smelling grayness that sent me toward the kitchen, assuming that it was something left in the microwave too long. Fortunately for us, we had left the laundry room door open. Had it been closed, I'd likely have continued past it and headed down to the first floor. If I had, we might have lost our home. What I saw, out of the corner of my eye, was a pile of flaming clothes flickering on the floor in front of the dryer. I strolled as calmly as I could back into the bedroom and stated, "Um. We actually have, um, a fire..."

Bo leapt from his spot and raced to the laundry room where he quickly called everyone to action. Ironically, a decorated ash bucket that my mother-in-law had filled with pretty girly things and had given the girls for Christmas, was put to use as an anti-fire weapon. I dashed back and forth between the laundry room and the bathtub, filling pails and soaking towels to put out the ever-increasing fire. One of us insisted that Bard gather the kids and get them outside. Every minute that passed had us wondering how long it would be before we'd have to join our kids outside, too and watch helplessly as our house burned to the ground.

Thank God, Bo was able to extinguish the fire and disconnect the gas dryer, which we had determined was actually burning inside, at the motor. With the help of Houdin, he hauled the dryer out to the front yard and we proceeded to fill baskets with smoldering laundry, dumping it into the bathtub and the front yard.

Obviously, at the moment when I was able to breathe a sigh of relief and praise God for our safety, I wasn't thinking about the fact that I no longer had a dryer. I was just trying to absorb the shock of having a fire in my house. But, before long, five kids, five dogs, two adults, a cat and a live-in father made me quite aware of the fact that we'd need to replace that dryer.

Money's tight. At this point, a trip to the laundromat was more affordable than a brand new dryer, even at sixty bucks a pop. Not enjoyable, just more affordable. It was clear, though, after one massive laundry trip, that this couldn't last.

Yesterday, I arrived home from work to a wonderful early birthday gift. My dear husband had shopped for and purchased not only a brand new dryer, but a fabulous, awesome, amazing new washing machine! I am now the proud owner of a Whirlpool Cabrio washer and a Duet dryer, two of the top-consumer-rated machines. Two of the BIGGEST machines on the market!

So when I got home from the greenhouse today, I started washing everything I could get my hands on--blankets, pillowcases, socks, slippers, stuffed animals, small children, large dogs, annoying relatives--and entertaining myself by watching the load swish and swash (the machine has a clear top), admiring the bright lights and colorful knobs (Sweetheart and I even turned off the lights so we could pretend we were in a spaceship), and reading the owner's manual to learn about all the mad skills my new machines have.

I'll bet my mother would laugh if she could see my washing machine, if she knew that I actually have to read a manual to know how to use it. She'd probably be a bit baffled that I throw all of the clothes in the dryer and the dryer actually knows when the clothes are dry. I'll bet she could never imagine hanging her clothes on the line and having a little timer tell her how long it will be until they were ready to be put away, or having a moisture sensor check them for doneness.

And even though I will continue to love my fluffy, fresh-from-the-dryer towels, I'm still lobbying for a clothesline.

Stream of Consciousness Whilst I Avoid Getting Ready for Church

I really should be taking a shower now, but I'm here instead stealing what few moments I can get to press my fingers against these keys and make some clickity-clacking noise.
Life has been moving at breakneck speed.
The greenhouse, where I've been spending most of my time, has been burgeoning with life.
The greenhouse, where I've been spending most of my time, opens tomorrow.
The Pierce Pettis show was tops. We had over 70 people here and Pierce was a real trooper, singing his lungs out even though he was recovering from bronchitis.
We had a great jam session after the show where about a half-dozen musicians, including Pierce, had fun with songs like Man of Constant Sorrow, Aimee, Harvest Moon and lots of old-time tunes, reels and jigs. A few of us practiced our Irish step dancing. Some of us weren't as good as others. Still, it was quite fun.
I got to cuddle on my nieces and nephews, which was quite loverly.
Bo and I have still been delivering pizzas.
I've still been working, ever so slowly, on the Couch Potato to 5K. Kim and I ran a mile straight on Friday. And I'm still alive.
School has been a very, very hit and miss with my work at the greenhouse. Reading aloud has suffered. The boys did come to the greenhouse with me on Friday and did some schoolwork there, but it was quite distracting for them, so they didn't get a whole lot done. I hope to set up a table somewhere where they can work and not be distracted. It's such a beautiful work environment.
Bard has also been working at the greenhouse, when she isn't doing speech and debate or classes or drama.
Spring is here! My perennials are coming up, and I'm quite jazzed about that.
My asparagus didn't come up, and I'm quite bummed about that.
I think I lost my red raspberries too. The goats got out and made short work of them.
I haven't lost my weeds.
Bo tilled the gardens yesterday. He made a couple of patches for pumpkins and melons as well.
The boys have been working on their treehouses. REMIND ME TO WRITE ABOUT THIS!
I have to get ready for church. I know there's more, like the baby goats and houseconcert stuff and dinners out (I have to write about my early birthday dinner!) but I really need to get in the shower now.
Be blessed!