When Reed woke from napping and the sun cooled, my bare-legged baby and I took to the streets, pacifier, keys, and tree manual in hand.  I can’t think of a better way to spend an afternoon.  While we were out learning to spot hawthorns, black ash, and red river birch, we checked in on some Juneberry trees that live along the river (number 40).  The berries have formed, now.  They are plump and green and will soon be rosy.  My mouth was watering at the thought of that magical moment they turn sweet purple.  Oh, how I love Juneberries!

In fact, signs of summer’s fruits were all over our little river trail.  There were healthy canes of flowering blackberries and tiny green clusters of unripe wild grapes.   Maybe one of these days, I’ll go out and pick the grape leaves and preserve them to make dolma.  It sure seems like a lot of work, though.  Maybe I’ll make a project of it next year.

It has been a perfect spring.  There’s no doubt about it.  And all the plants and creatures seem to be bright, happy, and ready for the heat of summer.  Including me.  And that’s good, because the heat of summer is here.

Today, to avoid yesterday’s lethargy, I thought through the order of my day.  I opened the windows when I woke, and Reed and I went out before the sun got to high to water the garden.  The cold water felt good on my feet.  I closed all but the north-facing blinds when we got back inside, and put Reed down for a nap in front of the fan.  The high today is only 77 F, but that is hot for three north-blooded people in May.  And I’m loving it.  Summer, we are ready!

It’s a cold, rainy May day in Southern Wisconsin.  We spent most of the day inside, venturing only a few blocks to get ingredients for a spontaneous pot of soup.  I thought my days of hunkering down under wool blankets were done until autumn, but I am glad I didn’t pack away our scarves.

On the bright side:

Adam installed our rain barrel.  It is a little guy, our rain barrel, and it fills up very quickly on a rainy day.  But that’s just fine!  We don’t have a big garden to water.  It is perfect.  Few things are so satisfying to me as opening the lid of the barrel and filling my watering can with the precious, dark water.  I carry it over to my little garden sprouts and watch them drink up their leftover rain.  What a wonder!

Collecting rain makes me much more mindful of the preciousness of water.  I don’t think it is something we think about much in Wisconsin, where the earth is so lush and green.  Did you know that our lawns are the largest irrigated crop in America?  We use three times more water on grass than on corn.  It’s foolishness, really, and is hopefully something that will change in this country that puts such high value on resourcefulness and thrift.

I don’t water our lawn and rarely wash my car, but, I admit, I am a habitual water-waster.  I love water!  I adore lengthy showers.  I like steamy baths on cold days, and the feeling of frigid hose water on my bare toes in the summer.  I haven’t done much greywater recycling, aside from a little used water nipped here and there from the kitchen sink to water house plants.  But I’m just learning, just beginning.  And, man, when it comes to showers, I am WEAK.  But hopefully, I will be able to find a balance that includes the joy of abundant water as well as prudence in its use.

For now, our rain barrel is one of those joys.

Number 100- Dandelion Wine Part 1

Step 1:  Wake up before sunrise on a very warm morning and open all the windows.  At 7:00, when the baby wakes up and you are so happy to see him, note that this is the time the air smells best on hot days.  The sun is warming up the grass and all the flowers.

Step 2:  Take your bare-legged self and your bare-legged baby outside.  While he plays, walk around barefoot picking the heads off of dandelions and put them in a bag.  Start on your parkway and then move on to your neighbors.  Then go down to the park and pick there.

Step 3:  Note your sore bent back, your sticky hands and dirty legs and how good the young grass feels between your toes.  Identify with caper farmers, mussel hunters, tomato-pickers, and Johnny Appleseed.  Remember a history full of back-bending work.

Step 4:  Feel grateful for an easy life.  Feel grateful for back-bending work.

Step 5:  Fall in love with the work of foraging.

Step 6: Pick your dandelions over for bugs, then pour five quarts of boiling water over your gallon of blossoms.  Cover your pot with a cloth and let it stew for a few days.

Part one of making dandelion wine is completed!  It was so much fun, I think I might get batches started biweekly.

In September, I bought a plum tree.  It was 50% off, and not in the best shape.  An older man helped me bring it to my little car, and, me being eight months pregnant, neither of us had the mobility to get it situated well in the trunk.  We broke a bunch of branches in the process.  But I was so proud of that tree.  When I got home, I pulled out a shovel and shoveled and shoveled in my blue maternity dress and black boots.  I shoveled as best I could, though the hole probably should have been deeper and wider.  And planting plum trees in autumn can be a bit sketchy in Wisconsin regardless.  If their first winter is a harsh one, they can die.

But I planted it, and I was proud.  I wanted to plant a tree the autumn that my son was born.

I cheered this March when I saw the new growth.  It wasn’t dead!  It was alive!  And today, I woke to find new buds on its branches.

Isn’t spring lovely?  Things like this make me feel very glad.  A world where a plum tree can sleep through the winter and spring to life again one April is a life where good things are still possible and miracles still happen.

Shortly after Reed was born, we filled our freezer with half a hog.  It was a beautiful sight, all the crisp paper parcels stacked in the deep freeze  ready to feed us through the winter.  The shoulder roasts vanished first.  Then, during a split pea soup craze, the hocks.  We made the belly into home cured salt bacon and quickly gorged our way through 2/3 of that.  Even our seemingly endless reserves of pork chops dwindled.

By February, the majority of what was left were “project cuts.”  Pork livers for pate (do I even like pate?).  A giant bag of fat (that’s right, a giant bag of fat) to be rendered into lard.  And the ham.  The 25lb fresh ham ready to be thawed, cured and hung.  But 25 lb hams are kind of intimidating.

This afternoon, Adam and I got that ham (#38) all boxed up in salt and injected with brine.  It was pretty fun, sticking such a boulder of meat with a giant needle.  For the next 40 days, I’ll be tending the ham like a tender little plant.  And then we’ll hang it for months and months and months.  If all goes well, we’ll have a gorgeous ham to hack beautiful slivers from come Christmas.  Ham failure, I hear, smells quite putrid.  Either way, I’ve been having a blast.  The meat is beautiful, and I have really enjoyed working with it.

Working with meat used to intimidate me.  I hated the factory farm meat industry (still do), and didn’t really know how to go about buying it.  So, as a single lady, I probably ate meat once a month.  If that.  After I got married, Adam and I together began to figure out our ways, and I got more comfortable with meat, incorporating it into our dinners once or twice a week.  But I still didn’t know a chuck roast from a flank steak.  Then, last summer, I got this book.  I read it cover to cover and carried it with me for weeks.  I ordered half a hog from a responsible local farmer, butchered, but otherwise untouched.

We’ve been learning as we go.  And not all of our “project cuts” have turned out perfectly.  But it has been incredibly satisfying, and, truly, a good deal easier than I anticipated.

If you live in Wisconsin, you can find sources for local meat here.  Let me know if you have had any interesting experiences with meat or making things you never thought you could make.

My family and I are just getting back into the swing of things after a big wonderful wedding weekend (such big adventures can be tiring for tiny boys!).  Upon returning home we ate some lazy meals, watched a movie or two, went hunting for our camera (we left it at my parents house), and got the house somewhat in order again.

And now the week begins.  I love Monday mornings.  I love the return to the day-to-day routine, the fresh beginning of a week spread out ahead like newly tilled ground.

I love Monday mornings.  I love my work, and I believe in my work.  Caring for a child.  Buying food from people who care well for the land and its creatures.  Praying.  Praying to learn generosity.  Praying to learn thankfulness.  Practicing the craft of thrift.  Practicing the art of sales resistance.  Making mistakes.  Making yogurt.  Trying to keep the dishes done and the floor clean.  Trying to keep up with correspondences.  Failing often.  Nursing.  Knitting.  Tending my body and this tiny patch of earth I inhabit.  I believe our small, daily acts such as these are the truest form of activism.  I believe they are a vocation.  I believe they are my calling for this time and place.

I am reading Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community by Wendell Berry again, for the fifth(?) time since I bought it just over a year ago. I often think about that passage I quoted in that post about using the health of one’s community to chose.  People are usually surprised that I don’t use a breast pump (which in itself says a lot).  Aware that it is a very personal decision, they usually don’t ask why, and I am grateful for that.  My choice not to pump came after reading this article passed on to me by a coworker (I hadn’t thought much about it before).

I think having the option to breast pump is a wonderful, wonderful thing.  It gives so much freedom to women who love their work and can take care of their family (and themselves!) best by working away from home and providing good care for their babies during the day.

But what about the women working at Woodman’s who can hardly afford to take their much needed, but still unpaid, maternity leave?  What about women who can afford neither quality day care nor staying home to take care of their infant themselves (Imagine how different this country would be if all women got nine months paid maternity leave like women living in Norway recieve)?  Pumping is not a substitute for paid maternity leave or on-site day-care.  Giving mothers the ability to work is good, but that allowance often turns into requirement.  And those bearing the brunt of that are the low-wage workers.  I wish it weren’t that way.

So I breastfeed.  And on very rare occasions of great importance (for example, standing up in my best friend’s wedding), I use formula.  I know that this decision doesn’t make any difference to policy makers or CEO’s.  But that small act of saying no to something that makes me pay dearly (not just from my wallet) for what I already have (the ability to feed my child), seems very good.

If you have any thoughts about small acts, sales resistance, motherhood, pumping, breastfeeding, comment away.  I hope this fresh week ahead begins very blessed.

-Lindsey

Reed doesn’t take to napping easily.  He would rather look around and smile and play until he is severely overtired and grumpy.  Getting him to sleep can be amusing, stressful, funny, frustrating, meditative, sweet, restful, and any combination thereof.

So, I have taken to drinking a calming herbal tea I learned to make from this book while nursing the little one before trying to get him down.  I don’t know if it’s the smell that settles him in, if it effects the milk, or if it just relaxes him through me, but it does seem to have an effect.  Either way, the tea is very pleasant and very nice to take whenever you want to wind things down. Catnip is more known around here for the effects it has on cats, but it has a much longer history of human consumption.   Don’t buy it from your pet store, but look for it where loose herbs and teas are sold (try a local co-op or alternative health store or just grow your own).  In humans, rather than creating a wild euphoria, it is quite sedative.

1 part chamomile
1 part fennel seed
1 part catnip

Steep ten minutes.

Number 23

I’ve always loved seed catalogues.  When they arrived to my parents’ house in the wintertime, and I was a little girl, I would sit with them day after day, circling and starring and initialing the roses I thought we should plant (I always circled one called “Peace”) and the novel fruits and hollyhocks.  And now I got the first seed catalogue at my first house.  And my mind is swirling with tomatos and cucumbers and carrots and terraces and trellises and sketched and resketched garden plans.  And I love seed catalogues more than ever.

I love my days home with Reed, full of smiling at each other, learning things, doing my small things around the house- practicing thrift and home economics (in the true sense of the word) in little ways that I find so immensely satisfying.

Today, I listened to this talk by Wendell Berry for the 10th time (#6 “Our Land, Our Food, Our Responsibility”).  It always helps me to remember.

I like what he says, here, in one of his poems:

“Hope to become kinder than power instructs you to be
and hope to become poorer than wealth invites you to be”

Enjoy your Friday, everyone.

“Better than any argument is to rise at dawn and pick dew-wet red berries in a cup.” -Wendell Berry