where the longing for love beat out the struggle for the legal tender

I think I probably spend a lot of time on this blog extolling the pleasures of this lifestyle. So forgive me if I indulge in one quick moment of whining: I don’t believe the temperature here has been above freezing in 20 days at least. It has been three weeks now that the highs haven’t been out of the low twenties -- I know because highs in the twenties require insulated coveralls to work in and this is the third week I’ll be wearing them. With the highs in the twenties, the lows have been single digits. Every night they predict lows in the teens but every morning we wake up to single digits.

That much cold starts making things hard. Wood is frozen and sawing frozen wood is, well, imagine using a bread knife saw through frozen steak. When bucking up a big log with only a buck saw while snow’s on the ground , a chainsaw begins to look tempting even to us. The van’s fan belt broke and we can’t fix it until it warms up. The truck’s choke sticks. I’ve gotten the truck stuck twice on the steep part of the hill which has meant backing it down the steep part of the hill (and then all the way back out to the road) twice now -- once I was successful and once I needed a come along to finish turning the truck around after it slid exactly crossways in the road. There’s a valve in the water pressure tank that is protected in the basement and even it has frozen three times. The house is considered warm if it gets up to 60 degrees.

ENOUGH!

Here’s what I have to say. We could easily fix all those things and never ever have to put up with them again. We could have a four wheel drive vehicle that isn’t officially an antique. We could have a working chainsaw. We could have a damn tractor. We could have all the trappings of civilization. We could have all the thing’s everyone else has.

And here’s what we’d have to give up to have it. Everything. Because to have the chainsaw on the one day it would come in handy, we’d have to live to afford it every other day of the year. Likewise, in order to have the nice, nearly new family vehicle and 4WD truck and a tractor, we’d have to live to afford it every other day of the year.

And that living to afford it means not living like we do live, the personally, family, socially, globally, environmentally, spiritually (and every other way) responsible life we’ve grown together here on this mountain.

It is a privilege to huddle together over the fires sharing a cup of tea and figuring out how to get the minimum done while we enjoy each other and wait for it to warm up just a bit.

And even people who give up everything to have all the thing’s everyone else does have times that challenge them too. They don’t get out of that -- they just give up the possibility of everything else.

The Road of Good Intentions

My Free Will Baptist preacher grandfather used to say, often, "The road to hell is paved with good intentions." Even though I'm pretty much a confirmed no-hell-er (or I guess I believe that people make their own little hells here that any larger hell would pale beside of), I agree.

I also believe that your intention in doing something or not doing something is hugely important. Doing the right thing for the wrong reason is . . . doing the right thing for the wrong reason: It is not doing the right thing. Oh, but I don't really mean to get into a discussion of what I believe and don't believe. "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

Still, I wanted to pile on and say, "What she said!" Geez, Louise. I've seen first hand too many examples myself. Got the big guns called in one time on another blog because I dared say that I didn't think letting your kid's teeth rot out was an example of exceptional parenting (I actually had the gall to call it neglectful).

The things we have valued in our journey have certainly included freedom, but with freedom comes responsibility -- freedom simply doesn't exist without responsibility. Choice doesn't exist without consequence. We've also valued politeness, kindness, thoughtfulness, and oh yes cleverness. Cleverness is highly valued here. Ok, and hard work too, and work on things that don't just benefit the doer -- one might consider it communality if it weren't that it is family. Expectations do exist but are always negotiable in their specifics.

Kids have parents because kids need parents. There are things that are simply inappropriate.

I suppose what we've tried to instill in the kids is an ability to internally validate themselves so that they aren't so easily swayed by fashion or external pressure. Discernment.

Banking

Not as in bailouts, but rather the little day to day things we do that end up being banking, as in banking a fire to save it for the morning.

I think first of all the manure I bring home. We were talking with some chemical farming types lately and they would talk about how much nitrogen this or that amendment had and how manure doesn’t have that. They are right in a way, manure has a certain amount of free nitrogen and that is usually less than your other nitrogen amendments. But manure has more in there that it releases over time. And not just nitrogen, of course. No matter how clever people think they are, they are not so clever as nature, and if a garden (or pasture) is full of organic matter, it has a tendency to balance itself out and become more and more fertile.

Ah, but people are almost always sure that they are more clever than nature, and that something depends on them doing something that nature can’t do. Well, there is a place in the world for round-up, but there’s a place in the pasture for weeds too.

Back to banking. A couple of years ago I blogged about getting a pair of work boots. Well, they wore out, what are the odds, being worn every.single.workday and then standing in urine and manure and getting me around miles and miles of walking and getting torqued pretty good sometimes too. But cash money is scarce right now. Not as scarce as it has been, say, last winter, but still. When it became obvious that I was going to need new boots soon, I started a “jar”. That is just some sort of place to stash a little money as I come into it. We’ve had “jars” for all sorts of things . . . like for the Wii for the kids (that took a couple years to fully fund), like for the extra freezer, all sorts of things. So I started this jar, and when I got a little extra money for some extra horse job (like feeding at someone else’s farm), or when I had a few extra dollars that I could purloin from myself, it would go in there. And by the time I actually found boots that fit and felt good, I had almost as much money as they cost in that jar. It is a lot easier to come up with an extra $20 than an extra $120.

Today I’m selling a goat, and that money will go into a jar of its own. It is a long term thing for it. It might be needed for some farmstead milking expense (a new cow (which has its own jar actually) or a new billy goat, for example), or if we don’t end up needing it for that, it might be used to take the family out to eat or to the movies. But the goat has been a family endeavor and so the produce of it will go to the family, not to bills, and not to any one person, or not even divided up. It will be there to fund something that we don’t know quite what it is yet but it will be there.

We bank partly by not having many bills. This starts, I believe, with the security of owning our own land and house, and that is probably the one thing I would go into debt for. Instead of doing that, though, we spent a decade, and a lot of our time and energy, and most of our financial resources during those years, building it. It was hard but it was better than 30 years of debt or the possibility of being homeless in month's time.

But there was also the time when my mother thought we just needed TV. We got one channel at the time, and had videos, but she thought we just needed more than that. I cannot relate at all to *needing* TV. So anyway, my mother bought for us this expensive satellite system . . . and I took it back. Thanks but no thanks. It was the $40 per month bill for the minimum service. No thanks. Don’t need to worry about having to meet that, not for TV. I’d love to have Netflix even now but I’m not up for the monthly expense -- instead during the winter when it is dark in the evening and we have time to watch DVDs, we go rent the 5 for 5 for $5’s. Everything we see is a few years old. But we either have that extra $5 in our pocket or we don’t, and if we don’t, we don’t get them and that’s fine. A monthly bill is just totally something else again.

Another way we bank is that we don’t borrow. Not that we never have, or never would, just that it is something to avoid if at ALL possible. And if it wasn’t possible to avoid it, then it is something to pay off ASAP period. And doing that is just like having a jar for savings . . . when I was paying off my student loan, every time I had an extra $20 or $40, I put it toward that so that the load was paid off in about half the time allowed. And if we borrow, we have a plan as to how we’ll pay it off, and when, which is always early.

I knew a person once who borrowed money to take her family on a vacation to Scotland. She jokingly said that it would take 20 years or something to pay that off, which horrified me. So what she said to me was this (I’ll always remember): “I admire you not borrowing money, not being in debt, living the way you do. But you give up an awful lot to do that, like this trip to Scotland.” To which I say now, you do not give up anything except debt to be out of debt. If we wanted to go to Scotland, we’d have a jar for it, and when it was a fully funded trip, we’d go. Doing it that way tells you a lot more about what is really important to you. If you are borrowing from the future, a thousand here and a thousand there doesn’t seem so bad because it isn’t real. If the choice is, I could have this shot of single malt Scotch tonight or I could put that money in the jar, it becomes real clear what is important to you. I’ve found out that most people think that their debt will somehow magically disappear -- maybe they’ll die and not have to pay it, or win the lottery, or something. When they end up homeless and eating cat food, I find it very difficult to feel sorry for them. They made their choices.

We bank by filling up the freezers and canning shelves and having a few barrels of wheat and corn and caches of potatoes. What of that is boughten we buy when we are feeling a little flush. It gives us a thrill to put by: it gives us a thrill to eat from what we’ve put by.

If you don’t have debt or many bills, it doesn’t take much money to get by. If you have a place to live and food, then even if you don’t have money, your children aren’t cold and hungry.

How do I keep myself from wanting so much stuff? Well, not having the TV is a start. It is certainly possible to see through the manipulation of advertising, but it is still seductive to see so much. Another way is to simply not go shopping. When I stay home, I don’t spend much money, but what is more, I don’t see things that I then think I can’t live without. What ends up happening here is that we find that we actually need a new sifter, that the old one is kaput, and so we go and find out what is available in sifters. During that process I also see other things, things I might drool over but don’t truly need, like those nice bamboo spoons (I love kitchen stuff). Still, I find when I get home, my old wooden spoons work just fine, and the new sifter is all we bought. I know I need towels at some point, but if I don’t have the money for them, then no use deciding which of this year’s colors I would buy if I did have the money. In fact, it is worse than “no use” because it plants that seed of discontent with what you already have.

And perhaps most important, if you live this way, if you don’t borrow from the future, then hopefully you’re children will know not to borrow from the future too. Pouring money onto discontent does not really do anything about that discontent -- if you learn contentment, perhaps your children will have the chance to learn contentment also.

And then too, not to be forgotten, is the fact that every war that ever was, every exploitation of people and the environment was and is caused by money or the love and seeking thereof. So if you can control your own grasping, your own consumption, then and only then can you contribute to things like world peace and non-exploitation and environmental integrity. If it doesn’t actually inconvenience you in some way then it is all just gnashing teeth and sounding brass and tinkling cymbals -- and without love that is a verb.

Morality Lost

“I know both how to be abased, and I know how to abound: every where and in all things I am instructed both to be full and to be hungry, both to abound and to suffer need.” Philippians 4:12

I do not think that life is whole without a spiritual aspect to it. I think one of the most useful spiritual views is that of self-actualization, which is basically when what you want to do and what you ought to do are the same thing.

Abraham Maslow was the psychological theorist who came up with the idea of a hierarchy of needs as it related to human motivation. Most importantly, he was the first to look at exemplary humans rather than mentally ill or neurotic people; to look at what is going on inside of extraordinary people. (In fact he wrote: "the study of crippled, stunted, immature, and unhealthy specimens can yield only a cripple psychology and a cripple philosophy.” This is an idea I extrapolate to a whole lot of areas.)

It starts with the physiological. You need to breathe to be alive, eat, be warm (shelter, clothing), sleep, have water, pee, and have sex. Homeostasis. One might be concerned about what one eats after one has enough to eat. Then there are the safety needs -- a world that is predictable and orderly and where those basic physiological needs have the likelihood of being met continually. Owning a house and having some established food production are key here if you ask me.

The next level are the social needs, belonging and acceptance. Some people go so far as to form cults or gangs to satisfy these needs but most of us suffice with family and friends. Esteem is the next level, and if you don’t know how to esteem yourself, here you will seek the esteem of others by external means. Self-esteem is always an internal phenomenon, manifested most usually as confidence and self-respect. It isn’t something that can be taught, or given, or learned, or earned but is far more of a decision of independence.

And then, finally, there is self-actualization wherein lies morality, creativity, acceptance,
the ability to solve problems -- and while Maslow didn’t put it in here, to my mind, spirituality. Peak experiences is the catchphrase that comes to mind.

Maslow was not without his detractors, mostly people who dispute how strict the hierarchical nature of the needs is. It makes some sense that one cannot really think that deeply about morality when one is trying to figure out, from scratch, where one’s next meal is coming from. At the same time, creativity can be all the more important if what one has to eat is some form of beans and corn every day. And that is sort of where I am coming down in this exploration.

I think people are shortsighted and foolish to not consider their physiological and safety needs beyond “I can make the payment this month” and that any exploration of kinship or morality or creativity in the absence of taking care of the physiological and safety needs is a pretense. It is the sort of pretense that costuming serves when one lacks real self-esteem -- one pretends as a character instead of being a character.

But at the same time, and this is the key I think, one cannot surpass the physiological and safety and social needs to reach esteem and spirituality. It would be my posit that the only real way to explore, say, morality would be to grow one’s own food and build one’s own house because only in that way does one understand the labor and resource cost of such and take that into the moral consideration. I think that is why most monastics lead a simple life -- to stay in touch with the physical realities.

In a sort of “hither world, thither world, all worlds are one” way, there is no spiritual reality without the physical, nor any physical without the spiritual, and there is a great deal of suffering that results from the illusion of one separated from the other. It is why what you choose to eat matters to a small girl in Tahiti; it is why where you chose to drive today matters to a Inuit; it is why what you chose to speak to your friend matters even to someone you have yet to meet, and how you choose to conduct your business and the example you weave for your children matters. It all matters. To everyone and everything.

You only know the price and the gift of the chicken if you hatched it, raised it, looked it in the eye, fed it, worried over it, then chopped its head off and cleaned it and examined its bowels and aged it and cooked it and ate it. It isn’t awful or grand; it just is. But it is something that almost no one has experienced anymore. And it is in that that we have lost our morality.


thanks to Madcap and to Penelope

Life Ain't Always Beautiful

Warren Buffet tells a story of a woman who survived the Nazis. She was the only one in her family to survive. She told Mr. Buffet that every time she met someone she asked herself whether or not this was a person who would hide her from the Nazis.

Now, being the practical, funny, sideways sort of person that I am, I don’t think about who would hide me, I think about what sort of person I’d want to hide me. Because I don’t want a weak idiot who’s going to tell the first storm trooper to knock on the door exactly where I am hiding to hide me. Or someone without, say, food. Etc. I’m sure there were people like that who tried to hide people during the Holocaust but I’m sure we don’t have those stories because those people didn’t actually survive.

Only the smart, clever, tough as nails ones did. And many of those didn’t.

I happen to think that what is now happening in this country and in the world could be devastating, and people could be dying from what will happen, and likely not only in third world countries. Our family lives in a sustainable way, which means that we are not so affected by those vagaries of the wider world. We might be people that other people would wish to hide with. In fact, lots of people joke that way; “Oh, I know where to go” in case of this or that.

What I have thought about is what sort of people I would welcome in. Living sustainable is quite rewarding but it does require a few things -- hard work, hardiness, cheerfulness in the face of hardship, and pretty well all other things that have “hard” in them.

It is not an easy life. It is a worthy life.

So, will you be looking for someone to hide you? Or deciding who is worth hiding? Because doing for others is partly a matter of willingness, of kindness, of generosity, of morality. But it isn’t possible to do for others when you can’t even do for your own.

The woman who was hidden from the Nazis and survived, the woman who asked herself whether or not she thought a person would hide her should she need hiding, observed that she found it very difficult to make friends. You think? Real friends don’t come by the dozens. Real friends don’t just say the easy things. Real friends, well, . . . .

Uphill Both Ways

We’ve been reminiscing lately about how our gonads must have been as big as the Mississippi is long for us to have come out here and done this. We had just gotten married when we bought this piece of land. We moved out here some months later, after having started the house and the garden and the chickens and learning that we just couldn’t get it all done not being here. We were pregnant for the first time when we moved out here and lived in a tiny and ancient unheated trailer (we heated with kerosene heaters those winters).

There was no bridge across the creek then -- we simply forded it. If water was high we parked on the other side and hiked home, or if we were caught with the vehicle on this side of the creek, we stayed home until it subsided. When we parked on the other side, which we had to most of every winter back then, every item was carried home, uphill -- children, laundry, groceries, every single thing, more than a quarter mile, often in really bad weather and in the dark.

It never crossed either of our minds that we could fail. It simply wasn’t a possibility. Yet lots of things did fail. Those first chickens were killed by a pack of dogs that then got themselves trapped in the chicken coop so that we not only found every single chicken dead, we then had to kill three dogs. And I can’t tell you how many times we planted apple trees and grape vines. Everything took longer than it took. Except the children. We kept having children. Until my mother called the last one “problem number four” although that wasn’t why we stopped.

We built a house that is truly home. It looks like some mushroom sprung up in the woods. It is not large but you can’t see it entire from any angle because it has so many corners. I remember when we had the roof on but the ceiling wasn’t in. We’d been working very hard and yet hadn’t yet reached that last year’s push yet. My dad came up, probably his last time up it turned out. My dad, bless him, was always proud of me and baffled by me both. I absolutely honored everything I ever learned from him yet always took off at some ninety degree angle that he couldn’t quite understand. He looked up at the timbers in the house and asked how we got them up there. My husband answered, “One at a time.” My dad still gazed. Husband expounded. “A good day was when I got one rafter put up.” All that wood, everything up there, everything all around him, my dad understood all at once that we had done all that with only our hands. I think he also grasped that the only other person he’d ever known who had done that had been his own grandfather.

It took two more years to actually get us in the house. That last winter husband simply made a point to work at it every. single. day. And except for the days I took the kids to a homeschool meeting or to see my mom, I worked at it every single day too. In the mornings he went off to town to work and I cooked and cleaned and did all the work of running a household full of kids and in the afternoons and evenings, often until midnight, in the cold dark wet winter, we worked on the house. The kids ate a large number of frozen burritos that winter. That was a trade off. That and that after we were in the house, we didn’t want to speak to each other for several months. Ah, but they still got homemade bread and jam and eggs and potatoes every day too, and eventually husband and I found we again had things to say to one another.

And we didn’t buy much of anything except building materials and sinks and toilets and such. And legos. I really like my kitchen sinks and my roof by the way. And the kids still play with the lego sets.

And all of that and ten times more is still not the half of it. It sure wasn’t easy. But you know what? It wasn’t hard either. Or rather, it was very hard but worth every drop of blood, sweat and every single tear. It was fun. It was fulfilling. It was challenging and provoking in the best of ways.

on a different note: I had three posts written on a different computer that went phftz. One of them, I can't even remember what it was really so no hope of re-writing that! (and you are no doubt better off without it) One is the very nice award Alecto has given me, and I will have that up before long, I promise, because I have a whole new idea for it. And the last was the story of the cow's artificial insemination which did happen this week and I really don't want to re-write that so maybe if we can find the NT disk around here somewhere, we can get it off and I can post it. In the meantime, its the meantime and life really is good.

unto the least of these

All summer I'd been watching them grow. As soon as I knew what they were, I mentioned them to my boss, hoping she wouldn't bush hog them down. Other people at the barn said that field, the back field, the big hilly one with both a pond and a cave in it, almost never got hogged and I needn't worry.

But today when I walked out the back of the barn, I saw immediately. They were gone. I felt like throwing up, honestly, and I think I did cry just a tear or two. There was a hole in my soul for the loss. It played over and over in my head all day.

Elderberries. Just that. Elderberries.

And frankly, if I had them in my pasture, I wouldn't want them there either. A pasture is supposed to be pasture, to grow grass and clover and the like, but if it isn't mowed/grazed or if it is overgrazed (which this is), then other things start happening. Annual weeds, then tougher perennial weeds, then things like elderberries and blackberries, then trees. Elderberries and blackberries are reclaiming plants. If you want to find them, look for disturbed soil, or clearcuts, or abandoned pastures. But don't wait too long -- the best wild blackberries fields are only good for around 5 years and then the trees will shade them out.

I'm just saying I know why he cut them. But I'm also saying that I wouldn't have done it. Food is holy.

People are so disconnected from their food. From everything really. From each other, from birth, from death, from what sustains them, what sustains them really. So disconnected that they can cut down what in a month's time would be food, and they can do it without a thought, and even if you said to them, "this is food," it wouldn't have mattered, except if he'd known I wanted the berries, then I believe he would have spared them for me.

But he wouldn't have spared them for food. And I don't believe he was even slightly aware of their existence. And this is the way it is -- there are it may be so many voices in the world and none without signification is what the Bible says of it. There are so many entire worlds out there and, says I, the oil world has obliterated all knowledge of them. Not solely oil, there have always been the more aware and the less aware among us. But do you reckon Nero was as unaware of where his food came from?

We have scoped out several other elderberry places so all elderberries are not lost for the year. Used to my paternal family reunion was held the third Sunday of August and on the way home from that the elderberries were always ripe and we'd stop in the wide spots in the road and pick them. Maybe a bird will plant some on some ground here for me.

If you've never read the introduction to Tom Brown's Guide to Wild Edible and Medicinal Plants, do. When you can feel this way for the blade of grass . . . .

Our Way

We always try to grow enough potatoes to feed our family for the whole year if that was all we had to eat. We always try to grow enough hard corn to feed our family for a whole year even if that was all we had to eat. Then, no matter what happens, what fails, how little money there is, whatever, we have food to eat. Our children have food to eat. (just think about that for a moment, what it would be like if your children did not have enough to eat) That is the basis.

Now, that’s a lot of corn, and a lot of potatoes. The image I always have in my mind is of the seven fat years and the seven lean years from the Old Testament. Seven fat years is enough to convince people that it will always be that way which is a reason it is significant. What do you think cannot be pulled out from under you, and imagine that it is pulled out from under you. One year we did have a near total failure of the hard corn crop. Everything that could go wrong did go wrong. Weather. Crows. Weather. Caterpillars. Weather. ‘Coons. But we still had, from the previous years, enough corn. For the humans.

Eventually the corn gets cycled into animal feed, but not right away. The potatoes won’t keep like that but do make good animal feed. Potatoes are probably the crop that can best meet caloric needs in the smallest space. (that’s a hint)

Everything else is, as they say, gravy.

Sometimes I think the secret is how small everything else is. This spring, as we’ve had extra eggs, I’ve taken to freezing them. We generally keep the chickens laying some all winter, but we never have enough eggs in that we always end up buying some in winter. Even having just a few in the freezer will alleviate that. We have day neutral strawberries and as they come in, I freeze the extra. It isn’t much at a time, but will add up over a season. We’re about to pick gooseberries. I’ll freeze most of them to have for winter fruit. What a treat is a gooseberry pie. I may experiment with drying them and reconstituting them this year. When our blueberries come in we will no doubt eat them all. But I will also visit a nearby u-pick blueberry place and try to get several gallons which we will mostly freeze and dry. With greens, the first thing is to try to keep them growing for most of the year, but the second is to freeze extra as it comes in. Just blanch and freeze. For the short time of the year when the greens aren’t growing, and for those times running to the freezer is more convenient than running to the garden, it doesn’t take that many put up. We’ll pickle various vegetables along. We scythe for hay along and put it into haystacks.

Ok, everything else isn’t gravy. When the blackberries come in, it is a major project since we try to make 75 to 100 pints of jam each year. But I always make a few cobblers and freeze enough extra to make a cobbler per month for the rest of the year. Green beans and tomatoes are also things that are put up in some quantity. If we’ve got good apples or pears, they can hold in storage, but apples or pears that are compromised have to be processed in some way right now and I’ve blistered a few fingers peeling and coring. But I’ve never regretted doing it.

We have many bases. We own our house and land. We built that house with our own hands, and we’ve increased the fertility of the land. Never say never, but we aren’t likely to end up homeless. That is a the basis. We cut our own heating fuel with hand tools. Our children are warm. That is the basis. Our relationships with each other is the basis. Maintaining our health (which maintaining all these other bases does) is the basis. I would even say that being willing to die, being willing to suffer a few aches and pains and blisters and bruises, is the basis.

We do stuff with the animals nearly every day, and make meals every day, and garden nearly every day and cut wood every day we don’t garden. I’d say we read every day and write every day and talk every day and listen every day and create every day. And I’d say that all this stuff, these bases, these routines, they are what life is really all about. People do tend to ask me, how do I find time to do all this. What I always wonder is, what the heck they are doing with all their days.

And why they choose that way.

Ever Where ya Go, There ya Are

Well, I didn’t get to ride this weekend at the barn. We meant to but it just didn’t happen.

My first day home after a couple days there is always a catch up day. My family does a remarkable job making everything run smoothly while missing a member of their team, but I have a role I play here and without me here there are some things that just don’t get done. The day I’m back home is the day to catch up on those things.

But this week that didn’t quite happen. We meant for it to but it just didn’t happen.

When the girls went to find the equines to take them to graze, our queen goat came to get them and asked them to come with her so that she could show them her new baby! And I swear that is the way it happened. She doesn’t usually come and “baa” at you, and when she does you pay attention. She knew she was due some corn for having that magnificent baby. Sorry I don’t have a photo yet, maybe later. We were trying to figure out how old she is -- I remember seeing her born and I think this year she will be nine. She used to always have triplets, as did her mom most usually. The goats we are due to eat this year are hers and were triplets (we ate one last year so there are only two big boys left). Then one year she had quads, they were small, and it was raining, and they all were dead the next morning. Since then she’s had singles, which is fine with me. She looks good, is in good shape, and the baby had probably been on the ground at least 24 hours when we found him. He has his father’s speckled ears.

So we just got kind of settled down from getting a new goat, which it doesn’t matter how many times it happens, the thrill of holding such a small perfect thing is overwhelming. The equines went to the front to graze and I tried to catch up in the kitchen. But I got a call on the radio -- “there is something wrong with the horse, you better come here now” -- that had that strain of emergency in the voice.

I went to find a hole in my horse’s side. Well, flank, just on the underside of the flank. A literal hole. It was quite alarming at first. But then I got it cleaned up I determined it probably wasn’t so bad. So long as he didn’t get an infection. I don’t like to give prophylactic antibiotics because I want to know if there is an infection, I don’t want to cover it up. It was very scary because it is the sort of injury that could be more serious. He’d evidently found something sharp to scratch on and had scratched this hole in himself. His other flank was scratched too. So we found what we think was the object and removed it. And I cleaned him up and covered his wound with black salve (I went to the black salve school of medicine as I am of the opinion that it is often the treatment of choice, human or equine, although the jar clearly says not for use on humans) and took his temperature and his pulse (both normal) and turned him loose. He was waiting for supper as usual. He ate with his usual gusto. He was waiting for breakfast, impatiently I might add, this morning. His temp and pulse was still normal, as was his gusto.

So there I was, dealing with all that instead of doing much in the kitchen. When it comes down, my family got some supper and I consider that a victory. Life just isn’t always what you plan. Today, I got mostly caught up, and even got to write this, so I’m not doing badly.

And I’ll get to ride eventually. But I’ve thought about what if I don’t. If I don’t, I don’t. When I’m cleaning out a stall, it may be a bit of drudgery by the 10th one or so, but I get to take a break and kiss a horse’s nose instead of a person’s butt and I like that difference. It is also a great chance to think through some things.

Like how no matter how much is going on, it is always possible to add another thing. Eventually I guess something “suffers” but I think more accurately, things get re-prioritized. I remember a woman I knew who started milking goats and the first thing she said to me about how it was going was, “Gee, that’s an hour out of my day, and it isn’t like I don’t still have everything else I had to do before I was milking.” I knew what she meant because milking and handling the milk does take some time. That I’m not by myself in doing this helps a whole lot. But when the horse started losing weight and I needed to add feeding him to my list of things, that was more time out of my day that just didn’t exist. And yet, I’ve been feeding him, morning and night, for some time now and that’s become one of my favorite times of the day. He makes noises like a dinosaur, he minds so well, he is so personable. The goat tries to come and steal his grain and he doesn’t mind at all. He bonded with her when he first came and she was the only other hoofed animal we had and she was scared to death of him and he would follow her around. But he will chase the cow out. The cow will chase the donkey. And I sit there and watch and keep the goat from eating too much and thoroughly enjoy myself. I don’t have the time to do that, but I do it anyway. I still make all the bread, all the cheese, we still cook from scratch, we still do dishes by hand, we still don’t have any water. When I am away, we plan ahead, I make ahead, my family takes magnificent care of me making sure I get fed. I milk but they take care of the milk. That sort of thing. I sit and watch the horse eat, at least sometimes. I know how precious a baby goat is so I sit and hold him while his mamma eats some corn.

I guess what I’m saying is, it is ok if everything doesn’t happen NOW. Because everything is happening now anyway.
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In a complete change of tone, did you notice the Saudi’s didn’t increase production again? It is because they can’t. The age of oil is over. What are you going to do without your own personal oil? Three dollar gas hasn’t changed people’s behavior. I suggest that that is a measure of addiction. What will the DTs be like? I can solve the mortgage crisis too. Folks, you bought insane McMansions you can’t afford. Get together in your neighborhood and two of you who can’t afford your houses, move in together and make that one mortgage payment instead of the two. I'm so tired of the whining. And for gawd’s sake, grow a garden.

TGD Meme

Where is the stock market today? Why? What does the interest rate cut mean? What does it affect? Why is the dollar falling? What is oil trading at today? How much have housing prices really fallen (perhaps “really” in relation to the price of gold)? What would you do in a hyper-inflation economy? I do not understand why people don’t know the answers to those questions. And so many more.

I fully believe that we’re going to have to be a world of gardners and husbanders. That no matter who you are or where you are, you yourself are going to have to grow some of your own food -- have a garden, have a hutch of rabbits, hunt, wildcraft, etc. I believe that food will be how the global warming and peak oil and general economic collapse will be felt because people will not quit driving until the gas stations are empty and food is scarce.

I am not an advocate of “going back” but I certainly think there are things to be learned from the past. I think the most recent period of the most learning for us right now would be the Great Depression. I’m old enough that my parents lived through the Depression and I got to talk with them and their parents about what it was like. My husband even had a great-grandmother to give her perspective on it. What was it that happened? How did people get through it?

First I think it is important to understand that all of my family, and all of my husband’s family, were in the mountains of Southern Appalachia, in fact, within about a four county area of extreme southwestern Virginia, the coalfields, not more than forty miles from where we live now. None were professionals, none had “investments”, but all owned land. In fact, in talking with them, the thing that stands out to me was what little difference "the Depression” made to their every day lives. They didn’t have money before the Depression and they didn’t have it during the Depression. It didn’t matter. They had all grown food before and grew it during. When asked they say something like, “Well, nobody had anything, no money, no nothing.” But when asked, “Well, did you have food?” they say, “Sure, we had food. We weren’t ever hungry.”

Of course, the food they had you might not recognize as food -- beans and cornbread formed the backbone of it, and it was grown and cooked at home. Beans and any grain would do as well. They kept cows and milked them but as far as I can tell no one made cheese. They raised pigs.

These next observations are not specifically Depression related but are specifically how my great-grandparents lived. They had children from the late 1890s to the early 1920s, sixteen of them and they all lived to adulthood. They started out on some land on top of the mountain but eventually moved into “town” but this would have been a “town” like on little house on the prairie or something, maybe a few hundred people, and they still had acreage. Grandpa never had a wage paying job, ever. Grandma sold butter. Once a year they took the butter money and outlines of the children’s feet to town and bought them shoes. Grandma did some midwifing and was generally a healer. She would have rarely been paid for this but it is part of what hold communities together, how people look out for each other when they aren’t blood relations.

Another grandfather had extensive gardens. By the time I knew him, that’s what I knew about him -- that he loved to garden.

All these people had land. I don’t know how they got it but obviously owning land was more important to them than having the latest gadget (they didn’t, for example, have cars for a long, long time). Land was the first thing, instead of the last thing (and no 30 year mortgage either), that they took care of. I am sure that having some land, and some experience growing food, is vital to surviving.

Some years ago a cousin of mine said something about us living like our grandparents. Until then I really hadn’t thought about it that way. I think it is more that we value the same sorts of things our grandparents did. And while I don’t aspire to “live like them”, not exactly and not for exactly the same reasons either, I do think we can learn a lot especially from the Depression experience. That’s why this is a meme. How did your family that lived through that time, say 1930 to 1940 -- where were they, what was life like before the Depression, what happened and how did life change, how did they manage, who lived and who died and who moved and where, and what lessons can you bring to tomorrow from their experience yesterday? How will you change your life? I really hope that people will participate in this meme, that it may grow well beyond here. If you don’t know already, ask someone in your family the questions, and if they are dead already, what can you find out anyway? Please leave a comment so we too can learn from your family’s experience.