february favorites

A monthly round-up of links to facilitate your commitment to procrastination. 

Dudes, I have so many awesome links saved for you! First, I want to highlight my good friend Derek's post on being a stay-home dad. Derek is one of my closest friends, and I love his perspective on shouldering the load in a culture that doesn't respect fathers as whole people and equally capable parents.

In accordance with my own experience, most ex-vegetarians cite failing health as their primary reason for returning to meat. Chillax, vegans -- at least we're not cannibals.

This summer I'll be hosting a Food + Garden day camp at the Waldorf school, and I would love to teach the kids how to catch a sourdough starter and make bread. Alas, I can't eat gluten (even fermented) and I expect that many of the kids in the camp will be gluten-intolerant as well (even if their tests were negative). So I was thrilled to find this post!

We're also going to make butter from real cream. No Crisco for this girl!

In March I'll be attending my second workshop on home funerals and progressive hospice. I don't get much chance to talk about this here, but have you seen this essay entitled How Doctors Die? I'm happily watching it make the rounds, sparking important discussions.

Tangentially related, check out the graphic novel Fun Home. So much awesome.

Take heart that research finds no advantage in early reading programs. Why not do some yoga with your kids or just let them play instead?

Two more reasons to quit Facebook!

On the home front, did you know you can re-grow celery? Make your own apple cider vinegar? Or how about a cheap-ass worm composter? And let's talk about ethical herbalism.

For the first time I am seriously considering the GAPS protocol, especially because I have a history of long-term, broad-spectrum antibiotic use.

This month I'm re-reading the Margaret Atwood books that so influenced me as a teenager, paging through Ken Hom's Complete Chinese Cookbook, and loving Girl Hunter. What's on your bookshelf? 

living in blue

Guess what? It turns out that, in addition to eating and shitting, chickens also lay eggs!

I'd nearly forgotten.

How can I describe my joy at finding this egg? This perfect, tiny, blue egg. Blue! It's really blue! It doesn't look blue, but trust me, it is. The five eggs laid since then have also been in shades of blue and green.

In other news, we have walls now. Real walls! We had a crew in the house for three days, while Jeremy was at Rudolf Steiner College for a teaching conference, and the kids and I crashed at a friend's house. I love the walls. Our insulation is made from recycled blue jeans, which was covered with reed fencing, and then plastered over with a mixture of mud and straw. They'll be drying for a few weeks.

My original plan was to paint the walls with a blue pigment, but now I think it would be easier to lay down blue tile and keep the earthy color. And we asked the crew not to wipe away the trowel marks. I like the handmade look.

Living in an A-frame is tricky. I can't exactly hang frames on the wall, because of the angle. It also cuts way down on our usable floor space. I'm trying to think of creative ways to decorate our walls without having to put holes in the plaster. Any suggestions?

I also have a new oven and range. Well, new to me. It was pulled from an old camper, so it's short and tiny, but all four burners work, without pouring out soot and, most likely, carbon monoxide, from inefficient combustion. The oven has an actual temperature dial, too. I won't describe the tricks I had to employ to use the old oven. They'd make your head spin.

The oven is also blue, that weird turquoise-blue from the '50s. Blue seems to be my color right now.

This weekend our friends Tim & Jeanette rented a (blue) house on the (blue) coast, overlooking the ocean (under a blue sky), to celebrate Tim's 40th birthday. We played games, got rowdy, braved the windy beach, and consumed our body weight in fine cheese. (Some of them were blue.)

Dudes, I ate Humboldt Fog for breakfast. With a mimosa. Yowza!

This is our life. Do you ever have that thought, or even say it aloud? This is my life. This is what I do.

I had this thought when our friends Kathleen and Greg came to visit, to card wool, and stuff gnomes for a fundraiser, and by the way, learn to slaughter a chicken. Such is our life that this can happen spontaneously.

After, Kathleen said she felt like a goddess, an Amazon, a wild woman. "I can kill my own meal," she said, in awe.

The dark days are over. We've barely had a winter and people are worried. But I'm just soaking up that bright blue sunshine and dreaming, for the first time this season, of summer.

making a home

Growing up, the necessity of equal opportunities seemed obvious to me, and I believed I could do whatever inspired me regardless of my anatomical equipment. I was definitely not raised with the belief that my primary, or even secondary purpose in life was to raise children and mop the floor, and in fact I considered those endeavors essentially worthless in many ways. I didn't like children and I was very career-minded. I wanted to go to medical school and study pathology. I was so driven and so anxiously overachieving that I eventually became sick from it, and my life took a turn.

I married Jeremy and had children right away. This was less like a choice than submission, trying to pour myself into a mold, and yet it was so completely right and good. These relationships challenged absolutely everything I believed about myself and the world, in absolutely necessary ways. And within this family I have learned this unexpected truth: there can be peace in a marriage, and between children and parents, and in the presence of that peace we can become more fully who we really are, and who we should be. And from this peace we can influence the world for good.

Still, I held on to those career aspirations. I felt called to do so many things and I did try to do some of them. But mostly I felt that I needed a career because I could not abide the concept of housewifery. To me, “housewife” translated to “kept woman.” A woman can't be truly autonomous, I believed, unless she has her own independent life, which pivots on her independent acquisition of money. Without this money a woman is implicitly dependent on her husband and that means their relationship is not as authentically loving as it could be. I wasn't sure what other options there could be. I didn't understand the fundamental problem underlying the money itself.

The basic egalitarianism that preceded industrialization was based on the serious load of physical labor that was required to maintain a household. First men were drawn out of the home to serve the industrial machine, and then women were pressed into service when corporations capitalized on feminism to fill out a cheap workforce. And what is left for a man or a woman to do if s/he decides to make a home instead? If we don't have a conventional job, neither do we grow food or raise animals, or wash our clothes by hand, or sew or weave or knit things, or make pottery or work with leather or build forges for tools. We have to fill our days somehow, so we buy things, scrapbook, obsess over our children, and drive everywhere. 

(Lest you think I'm throwing stones, I confess to being guilty of all of the above, except the scrapbooking.)

What used to be known as home economics is now called “consumer science.” That's what it means to be a homemaker now. It's not “making” much at all. So I could never embrace it, that gilded cage of recent historical repression. I harshly judged self-described “stay-home moms,” even if I was, inadvertently, one of them. I stayed in school perpetually, mostly to set my mind to a future when I would be (to my way of thinking) contributing to society instead of folding laundry. (Although I always liked folding laundry, setting the world to rights in this small way.)

I realize now that I might not have felt so conflicted about staying home if I hadn't been doing so within a rigidly patriarchal religion that expected me to do this, and shamed me if I didn't. Now that I live in a progressive, non-religious area, I know lots of feminist women who stayed home with their babies, seemingly without ambivalence, because they wanted to do it, or because somebody needed to do it and they made less money than their partners. Within this context I can question the concept that I only have societal value if I'm paying payroll taxes. Bullshit! My kids are a goddamn gift to the world. And so is my sauerkraut. You're welcome!

I've been spinning my wheels for a long time, because I've been growing in the skills of true home economics, and finding that I loved it, while most of the things I felt called to do “just aren't done.” For the first time in over a decade, I haven't been taking classes, or working toward an ambitious career goal. I haven't planning for my life to change in significant ways. I've become a conscientious underachiever, which is ever so much healthier for me. I'm a homemaker. And if I can figure out how to render lard while sick with a stomach virus I'll give myself a gold star.

I was in this shrugging place of basic contentment that a job fell in my lap. Recently the school introduced a new position, Development Director, for fundraising. When the administration conceived of the position they suggested it to me right away, and I think I actually laughed. What do I know about fundraising? But then I stopped laughing and started thinking, Maybe I could do this.

Right now, my part-time work at the school pays for our Broke Ass Farm projects. Without that income we probably couldn't do much of anything out here. Jeremy is a teacher, after all, and even more poorly-paid than is typical (although the perks are significant). His income pays for our regular living expenses, like rent and gas and food -- but just barely. My income keeps us in the black, plus extra for chicken feed and seed starts and electric fencing. But I've been wishing I could do something else, because we rarely get home before dark.

And so, despite all the naysaying in my head, I applied for the Development Director position. My interview is on Wednesday.

If I get the job, I'm not sure what it would look like, but I'm hopeful. This could be Living the Dream, after all -- getting paid to do what you love, work that reflects your values. I want to help elevate the school because I truly believe in the philosophy, the curriculum, and the teachers of Waldorf education. This wasn't always the case. My children came to Waldorf education by default, because their dad is a Waldorf teacher. I've always been somewhat ambivalent, but now I have embraced it with my whole heart. Maybe I'll write about this someday.

Change is afoot. Jeremy and I might finally be able to reach that sweet spot, in which we are financially healthy, present for our children, and sharing all loads. But I'm grateful for the journey so far. Maybe if I'd done everything I felt that I must do, while my children were unborn or so small, I wouldn't have my priorities so firmly fixed. I might still be willing to sacrifice whatever necessary to earn that extrinsic validation; I might still have a narrow definition of success. I might not understand the revolutions that can sprout from a healthy home.

get ready

(Just to give you a warning, I'll be working on a different site format this week. So if you happen to visit the site and it just looks wrong, just... wrong, don't worry. It's all part of the PLAN.)

Willow just lost a tooth... her first. This little girl is growing the hell up. Sometimes it scares me. 

Yesterday I saw a newborn baby and I had the briefest, tiniest moment of baby lust. I remembered when my little ones were truly little and I experienced an instant of heart-opening OH...

Then the baby cried and my lust evaporated. Just like that!

There are no babies in my family's future. Just the simple, bittersweet observance of two children growing too fast, too soon to be gone, probably to distant shores. 

I do expect that my kids will crave escape from this small town. Maybe they'll go to San Francisco, or Bangkok. Maybe they'll tell friends or partners about their bizarre hometown and everyone will laugh in disbelief. Eventually they might get the craving for this green place, where they know every person and every last blade of grass, and they'll come home. But maybe not. Maybe this isn't really their home, their heart-home, in the way that Arizona and Utah were never my homes, just places where I lived for a while. They might not follow in my footsteps, but still, I'm always preparing myself for it: the day when they'll leave. 

I'm trying to love them so hard while they're here. 

My attention has been focused elsewhere and Broke Ass Farm projects have fallen by the wayside. True to the name, we haven't exactly been flooded with cash, so the long list of things that need to be done – principally, expanding the electric fence, neutering Tuna, establishing a bee colony, and building the garden – simply have not happened. 

For an entire week our chickens had no protection after the battery cage for the electric fence blew out. 

Luckily the company replaced it, but it was just another knock against us. Lately it feels like this place is falling down around our ears. 

We've been stuck in a pit of inertia with the chickens. The roosters are mature and crowing their friggin' heads off day and night (mostly night). In blunt economic terms, every dollar of food they consume at this point is a dollar wasted, because they're not getting any bigger.

And yet the work involved in processing them is so intense, so time-consuming, so soul-rending that I have been reluctant to accept it. We slaughtered, plucked, and dressed six of the boys a few weeks ago and that was so exhausting, I can hardly stand to think of doing it again.

Every time a friend asks how much we are charging for chicken meat, I just have to laugh. In order to compensate for the economic cost of losing so many birds to predation, plus the emotional, infrastructural, and labor costs we've invested, I'd probably have to charge something like $75 a bird.

At this point, if someone is willing to come to our house and help with processing, I'll consider that a fair trade for the meat. That's how eager I am to be done with this project.

I don't have regrets, per se. I wanted to see if we could make it work. We can't!! And hey, I get it now. I understand why there are no local sources of truly pastured, organic-fed, non-hybrid chicken at a reasonable price. I wanted to figure it out for myself. Now I know!

The ladies are doing very well. They should begin laying eggs within days. 

(Y'hear that, girls? WITHIN DAYS.)

This week we're planning to isolate them in the big coop, with the new nesting boxes, so they can get in the habit of laying in the coop (and NOT in the creek and the trees and under the house and any damn place we can't reach). We'll switch the fencing around to keep them under the madrone tree and out of the garden area.

Because it's planting time, baby!

Knowing that I was depressed about the chickens, Jeremy turned the soil on one garden bed several weeks ago. But then it started raining and I was too nervous to plant seeds. He kept encouraging me to plant anyway, and finally I did.

As I've mentioned before, we have very fertile soil here because of the cattle. We also have very compacted soil here because of the cattle. But as soon as Jeremy turned the soil, earthworms took up residence, which is a very good sign. Even weeks later the soil has stayed loamy. 

I have very high hopes for this garden space. The effort to break up the soil is going to be well worth it.

I'm not clear on the frost dates here because we live in a microclimate that doesn't appear on any known map. Playing it safe, I planted spinach, lettuces, French Breakfast radishes, a European Mesclun mix from Baker Creek (my favorite seed source), and blue-podded peas. 

I pulled over a defunct chicken tractor to protect the seeds from the chickens and that was that. It sure doesn't seem like much, this one bed on the edge of such a large intended garden area. But it's a start. 

I'm not sure if I've mentioned it, but Jeremy rabbits have finally successfully given birth. Unfortunately, not all of the babies have survived. Some of them were born right before a serious rainfall and despite the shelters and the tarps and Jeremy's worry, they didn't make it through the cold. 

The death aspect of growing food is simply inescapable. I know that I cover this topic an awful lot.

Sometimes it seems like most of what we do here is less about life than death. We do spend an awful lot of time discussing, evading, preparing for, and ultimately harvesting death. These little guys are pretty dang cute, but in a few weeks, theoretically, we'll be eating them. 

How cruel and ugly and heartless do you have to be to eat a bunny rabbit?

That's how I used to think about it. How can you love an animal and then kill it? But the theory doesn't quite match up to the reality.

This knowledge is the blessing and curse of every grower.

We share the land with a rancher who grazes cattle, perhaps a hundred at a time. Friends ask us all the time whether they can buy meat from this guy. Sadly, these entirely grass-fed, free-ranging cattle are bound for a finishing feedlot in the Midwest, where their relative health, not to mention the superior nutrient content and safety of their meat, will sharply drop off while they gorge themselves to death on corn and soy.

While we were planting seeds yesterday we heard barking up the hill. At first I assumed that the rancher was rounding up cattle, along with his border collies, for another shipment. But he didn't follow along behind on horseback and on closer inspection the dogs were not collies, but strays. They circled the cattle, barking and nipping, while the cattle bellowed and eventually turned to fight the dogs. Apparently the dogs weren't amenable to moving on until one of them was shot and killed.

I didn't hear the shots. I don't know what to think about it. This is an agricultural area and ranchers have a right to protect their livestock. The cattle were seriously disturbed and the dogs were on the attack. But I'm a city person, inherently. Dogs are lovable members of the family, and the idea of one being shot is shocking to me.

I don't have any conclusions from this event. I just wanted to mention it as yet another aspect of "country living" that isn't exactly glorified in Mother Earth News. 

We have lived in our little cabin on all these acres for eight months now. The fantasy is slowly giving way to reality. Reality is gritty, sometimes downright ugly. It is not clean, organized, or compassionate. It is careless. Sometimes it is unbearable. Reality doesn't give a shit about all the farming memoirs I've hopefully consumed over the past ten years. Reality is prepared to dump buckets of rain on a freshly-planted seed bed, to blow out our electric fencing, to kill half a dozen chickens by way of a bobcat.  

My test is whether I can stand up to all this reality. Whether I can stay standing.  

My little girl was visited by the Toothe Faerie last night. (That's how she signed her card.) She left Willow a jump-rope in exchange for her tooth. Willow can jump-rope like you would not believe. She's not a baby anymore. She's growing up, up, up, and away. 

it's alive! (recipe: healing fruit smoothie)

This has been a wild week. A wild week of unspeakable intestinal nastiness thanks to whatever stomach virus is traveling our school's hallowed halls.

I have lost countless hours of my life to Breaking Bad and Battlestar Galactica, whole seasons of which I watched from the sick haze of my bed with only Tuna's warm puppy bulk for company. I read three entire books from cover to cover. And I literally camped out in the bathroom at one point, with magazines and bottles of kombucha and the laptop, just in case I got bored.

And yet I'm still alive. I think. I can't miss any more hours of work so I have to be alive.

When I could not eat but needed the energy (because I still had to stack wood and feed the chickens and fold laundry, gah!), I made smoothies. Mostly I just blended almond butter, almond milk, whole-milk yogurt, and bananas. Perfection in a glass. But occasionally I made a fruit smoothie like this. 

This virus is extremely contagious. Once it gets into your household you are virtually guaranteed that everyone in your family will catch it. It can linger for several weeks on clothing, sheets, toilet lids...

Jeremy is sick now, but he won't admit it lest someone suggest he have a substitute for his class. He's a little bit of a control freak. I hope he doesn't mind my saying that. I love that he's a control freak. Sometimes it seems like I'm the only one in this relationship with flaws.

Hm, maybe I'm a little bit delirious?

A few Christmases ago I asked my whole family to chip in together to buy me a Blendtec blender, which is very similar to a Vitamix, but better (in my opinion). I loved that blender. I worshiped it (just a little bit). I used it daily. I made almond butter and coconut milk and hollandaise and countless green smoothies.

But I haven't used it even once since we moved to this cabin. I never liked to run the generator just for this one appliance, and it's too powerful for our solar system.

So I traded with a friend, sacrificing my baby in exchange for her Oster. I'm not sad about it, though. Using a regular blender is better than not blending at all. Someday, maybe I'll have the power to use my Blendtec again, but for now, at least it's not gathering dust.

Healing Fruit Smoothie
1 c. whole-milk yogurt
1 c. frozen fruit (I used peaches)
1 tangerine, peeled
1/2 banana
1/2 bunch of spinach
1/4 avocado
thumb-sized piece of ginger, peeled 
2 t. cod liver oil (optional)

Combine all ingredients in a blender and process until smooth. This recipe will make enough for two 16-oz. smoothies. Enjoy!