life at breakneck speed

There was this missionary that used to come over to our house for dinner a lot when we were kids. We had a bicycle that had no chain, and after dinner was eaten, to oblige the children who were clamoring for a show, he would get on it and ride down the steep backyard. I remember him like that, his suit coat flying, legs akimbo, hollering like a madman and flying down the hill.

That’s exactly what life around here has been like lately. I’m on a bike without a chain and I’m on a steep steep hill, and it’s all I can do to hang on and steer. And I think, hey, what is JESS doing, couldn’t he help me get off this thing? And I look over and, behold! There he is on a chainless bike of his own, screaming his way down the same hill. What a fine pair.

But. Here's what's been going on:

Remember those shelves I showed you so long ago? Built. An entire wall of shelves in the schoolroom. The air conditioner repairman asked me in disbelief when I answered the door with a power drill in my hand, "You put them shelves up yourself? Really?" Yes. Really. In all fairness, I do have to credit Jess, my project finishing chairman, for helping me with the four hundred coats of paint.

Sorry about the bright window. Cute plaid Roman shades still to come. But now we have a great place to put the tons and tons of books we collect. The metal-and-chipboard shelves are headed to the garage, where they belong.

And I painted and put up molding around the upper part of the room, and found these cutest alphabet cards:

When we get the built-in desks in and the maps up and baseboards and bla bla bla, I'll get you some nicer pics of the schoolroom.

And here's the brand-new hardwood floor Jess worked me like a BORROWED MULE to get put in this last week:

We have still to put up the baseboards and all. What we had all over the main floor was pine plank flooring with 1/4" grooves between. After us living here for 2+years and having no way to really clean that out, you can imagine how horrible it was to remove the old flooring. Cathartic, true, to be able to finally able to sweep up the stuff we'd been sweeping between the planks for years, but we were covered in filth when we were finished. Now we sweep, and scoot our chairs back and forth, and run around in our socks and slide....yeah.

Here's a picture of the garden in late spring, a few weeks ago:

What you see there on the left is onions, lettuce next to it, and cabbages in the back of that box. In the box behind are potatoes, and tomatoes, and all the way to the right are sugar snap peas. All the way in the back are radishes, turnips, carrots and swiss chard.

I'll write up more about the garden when the season's over, but my initial reaction to this type of gardening is positive. This is like playing garden, and you get to eat more stuff than if you're really working hard. Hm. Note to self, though...the plants are going to get REALLY big, so plan accordingly. I had go out yesterday and rescue the pepper plants from under the gargantuan tomatoes.

Oh, and, this morning I got to go up and teach Forestry to the Cub Scouts at their day camp. What great fun. And although I refrained from jumping up on the table and pontificating about the souls and hearts of trees, I did get a kick out of talking about them with those great little boys. It ended up being a lot more fun than I thought.

So anyway, just thought I'd holler out to y'all on my way down the side of this hill. Hey! We're still here! And if we could just stop for long enough to get a chain on things, maybe we could slow down a bit. Not likely, though. See you at the bottom!

mother's hands

When I was a little girl, I used to sit in church with my mother and hold one of her hands. I’d trace the faint blue lines of the veins that stood up on their backs like long mole tunnels. I’d wonder at her rough skin, short-clipped nails, and plain gold wedding band. How did her hands get to be so old and ugly?

As with many parts of life, motherhood is a funny thing. Because my mother was always so close to me as I grew up, I never knew how to appreciate her presence. We don’t appreciate the ground. But just try to suddenly be without it. A mother is not a person with whom to have a relationship, she is a utility. I asked my son recently why we have mothers, and after some thought, he replied, “Because if we didn’t, how would we get our food?” Mother is such an important part of life that to appreciate her, we would have to consider the alternative, something from which our minds recoil. She is like underwear. Like air.

Then I moved away, married, and set up my own household. And began, I thought, to appreciate what my mother had been doing for me all those years. The laundry, the meals, the encouragement. All these things had to come from me. Man, I thought, she really WAS doing something!

And then one Mother’s Day I sat in church with her again. I was nine months pregnant with my first son, and they were giving out potted begonias to all the mothers. I wouldn’t take one, because I was NOT yet a mother. Momma poked me in the ribs and hissed, “Yes you are, take one of those plants.”

Just over 24 hours later, I had earned my begonia. After all the sweat and agony and panic of childbirth, they placed our child in my arms. Some moments, some emotions, defy words. There are no words to describe that moment, or they are so sacred that I don’t know them. But I knew then that as blindingly beautiful as that event was for me, I was not the only person who had experienced it. In that instant I joined hands with my mother, and countless millions of mothers before me who had seen that moment and treasured it up forever. In that instant, I at last placed my foot on the very beginning of the road to understanding what my mother had always been for me.

This Mother’s Day will mark seven years since I wouldn’t take the begonia in church. Every day I learn just a little more what my mother was doing, quietly, all the time I was growing up. I wash, and bake, and scrub the house repeatedly, knowing that this is the menial labor she did for years for me. I marvel at my children, who take me so for granted that they hardly seem to see me sometimes, and wince to think that I felt the same way about my own mother. I stifle silent tears as I watch them grow and know that she did this also. I turn my face toward heaven, and resolutely gather my family around me, and realize that she is doing this even now.

And I begin to understand how her hands got to be the way they are, hands that held me, cared for me, shaped me, then opened and let me go.

Recently I was sitting in church again. It’s the only time I get to sit down anymore. I looked down at my hands, and it seemed odd to me to see the veins starting to become prominent, my nails cut short, my skin rough. My engagement ring is in the jewelry box, leaving only my plain gold wedding band. The diamond ring scratches babies and gets bread dough stuck in it. How did my hands come to look like this, I thought.

The same way my mother’s did. And I smiled, because I was glad to see that my hands are slowly becoming like hers. Old, and ugly. And beautiful.

sufficiency

This is one of my most favorite books ever.

I’ve checked it out from the library so much that they ought to realize what’s going on and just give it to me. I suppose I could just buy it, but it’s a terrible enough temptation to me when I do have it around that it’s good that it’s out of my house some of the time.

I love to open this book up to the pages with the illustrations called “The One-Acre Farm” and “The Five-Acre Farm”. I pore over the labeled layouts of the tidy little farms, noting how they’ve stuck the beehives in right over here, put the hay storage right over there. I drool over the carefully drawn garden beds, with cryptic names like “root break” and “bean break”. The author gives advice on how to rotate your crops, how to maximize planting space on your property, how to slaughter and dress your animals, where to fit in your milk cow, how to make soap, how to grow wheat…

You begin to plumb the depth of the madness here.

The problem is, I believe all of it. I believe in the wisdom of raising your own food, knowing what went into it. I believe in the metaphysics of understanding the life journey of what goes on your plate. I believe in teaching my children the gritty details of what it means to be a consumer, that the toil and the joy of our hands’ work is more important than the ease of bought goods. I believe in the health benefits of it. I believe in the spiritual and mental benefits. I believe….well, see, I believe it all.

I can see my own smallholding laid out in just such a way, with my milk cow out there in the pasture, my garden laid out just so, my beehives, my wheat….

But honestly. I admit that I am a chronic dreamer. I admit to being a habitual more-than-I-could-ever-chew biter. But after reading the whole book through again this time even I began to hyperventilate. Who can do all this? Who on earth really has enough time, energy, and sheer maniacal drive to run “The One-Acre Farm”? Milk the cow, make all your dairy products. Grow the wheat, make all your bread. Grow all the vegetables, make all the clothes, feed all the animals, build all the buildings, BREW ALL THE BEER…

Okay, so that last one isn’t really a problem for us so much. It sounds like a lovely, idyllic sort of life, really, working hard and cutting loose from dependency on “the system”. It just bumps up hard against the brick wall of reality. There are, well, children. They need new clothes now, because the ones you made or bought ten minutes ago are suddenly above their ankles and wrists. They need to go to the library. They need a new box of crayons and more construction paper. They need a hamburger and French fries and the toy that comes with them. They need…they need…

And there is my husband. A good, hardworking man who comes home to a stack of wild, off-the-wall self-sufficiency projects so tall it could make Atlas feel like a lazy bum.

And there is the need for us to sit, at the end of the day, on the front porch steps and watch the lightning bugs come out, and talk about nothing and laugh with our children. At such times, I think wistfully of the cow I’m not running off to milk right now, and wonder what “self-sufficiency” is really worth.

In “The Wealth of Nations” Adam Smith argued that division of labor allows for more efficient use of time and resources by the people engaged in the divided labor. If you do one thing, he said, you can learn to do it smoking well, and spend less time doing it. The whole self-sufficiency bit is at the exact opposite end of that spectrum.

So what’s the answer? Maybe it’s the same answer as with almost every other choice between two extremes. Balance. To make your goal avoidance of ever going to the grocery or department store again would take every ounce of your time and energy for the rest of your life. To specialize so much that you turn one widget all day every day would make you go insane. But somewhere out there in the middle, I think, is where we want to be. We do want our children to learn these things, but we want to be able to spend some quiet time with them, too. We want to have the leisure to answer their questions, to do some dreaming ourselves, to enjoy the things we do choose to take on without rushing to the next thing. To read a book. To write.

So it seems that although we so often curse the pace of “modern life” and wish that we could bring back “the good old days” when everybody lived and worked on a farm, this may be a case of the green on the other side of the fence. I think the modern life gives us a lot that we don’t give it credit for.

In short, I heartily recommend this book to you, with a grain of salt. There are a lot of lovely fascinating things to be found in its pages. Just don’t feel like you have to take it all on. The author’s approach is so very...encouraging…that you feel like you need to do it all. Rotating my garden plantings I can do. Planting wheat is a no-go.

But I do think I have space for those beehives…