1.  It continues to be a gorgeous fall.  So many sunny days.  So many light jackets worn out of desire rather than necessity.  The heat from the furnace warms us on these chilly mornings, and in the afternoon, occasionally, we can even open a window.

2.  I spent this particular day with two healthy kids that are jolly as hell.  And came home from the orchard to a man home early from work wearing his black shirt and autumn beard.  I love his black shirt and autumn beard.

3.  The orchard.  And a big bagful of what I think are the best apples in the world.

4.  And the big sugar pumpkin bought with the apples.  It will be pie.

5.  And a fresh tin of coffee just in from the roasterie and the little white cup of espresso, on the house, when it has been so long since I have had espresso.

6.  There is even beer in the fridge.  Apple beer.

7.  And lots of eggs.

8.  It is a perfect day for an evening walk.

9.   The maples are yellow, yellow, yellow.

Some days the abundance is overwhelming.  And any discontent seems small.  Silly, even.

I like watching Reed pull an apple from the bag and taking big bites of that beautiful round apple with his beautiful round face.  I like seeing my girl’s shining face in the sun.

Have any of you read The Zero Waste Home blog?  It has been on my feed for a while now (kicking my butt) and is probably to thank for waste reduction being on my radar at all (I had previously thought that because we didn’t eat a lot of packaged food or use paper towels we were in the clear on the disposables front- as I said she really kicks my butt).  Anyway, we are far from being a Zero-Waste Home, though we are improving all the time, I hope, but today, I am not writing about that.  I am writing about clothes.

Yesterday, inspired by Bea’s wardrobe, I wrote a list of what I think I need to dress simply and well.  It was fun and fascinating.  I don’t think of myself as someone prone to fashion excess, but I was amazed at how hard it was for me to think about giving up the “luxuries” once I realized what I really needed- which is so little, really (though with our Wisconsin winters, my list is longer than Bea’s).

I am excited about this small project of mine, though it is slow and a little silly, maybe.  Still.  Did you know I think I only need eight pairs of socks?!  Maybe even seven.  Or six!  There is something so thrilling about that.

Anyway, here’s to letting go of things we thought we needed,

Lindsey

Excerpted from Wendell Berry’s “Discipline and Hope.”

The principle was stated by Thoreau in his journal: “Hard and steady and engrossing labor with the hands, especially out of doors, is invaluable to the literary man and serves him directly. Here I have been for six days surveying in the woods, and yet when I get home at evening, somewhat weary at last… I find myself more susceptible than usual to the finest influences, as music and poetry.” That is, certainly, the testimony of an exceptional man, a man of the rarest genius, and it will be asked if such work could produce such satisfaction in an ordinary man. My answer is that we do not have to look far or long for evidence that all the fundamental tasks for feeding and clothing and housing—farming, gardening, cooking, spinning, weaving, sewing, shoemaking, carpentry, cabinetwork, stonemasonry—were once done with consummate skill by ordinary people, and as that skill indisputably involved a high measure of pride, it can confidently be said to have produced a high measure of satisfaction.

We are being saved from work, then, for what? The answer can only be that we are being saved from work that is meaningful and ennobling and comely in order to be put to work that is unmeaning and degrading and ugly.

In 1930, the Twelve Southerners of I’ll Take My Stand issued an introduction to their book “A State of Principles,” in which they declared for the agrarian way of life as opposed to the industrial. The book, I believe, was never very popular. At the time, and during the three decades that followed, it might have been almost routinely dismissed by the dominant cultural factions as an act of sentimental allegiance to a lost cause. But now it has begun to be possible to say that the cause for which the Twelve Southerners spoke in their introduction was not a lost but a threatened cause: the cause of human culture. “The regular act of applied science,” they said, “is to introduce into labor a labor-saving device or a machine. Whether this is a benefit depends on how far it is advisable to save labor. The philosophy of applied science is generally quite sure that the saving of labor is a pure gain, and that the more of it the better. This is to assume that labor is an evil, that only the end of labor or the material product is good. On this assumption, labor becomes mercenary and servile… The act of labor as one of the happy functions of human life has been in effect abandoned… Turning to consumption as the grand end which justifies the evil of modern labor, we find that we have been deceived. We have more time in which to consume, and many more products to be consumed. But the tempo of our labors communicates itself to our satisfactions, and these also become brutal and hurried. The constitution of the natural man probably does not permit him to shorten his labor-time and enlarge his consuming-time indefinitely. He has to pay the penalty in satiety and aimlessness.”

The outcry in the face of such obvious truths is always that if they were implemented they would ruin the economy. The peculiarity of our condition would appear to be that the implementation of any truth would ruin the economy. If the Golden Rule were generally observed among us, the economy would not last a week. We have made our false economy a false god, and it has made blasphemy of the truth. So I have met the economy in the road, and am expected to yield it right of way. But I will not get over. My reason is that I am a man, and have a better right to the ground than the economy. The economy is no god for me, for I have had too close a look at its wheels. I have seen it at work in the strip mines and coal camps of Kentucky, and I know that it has no moral limits. It has emptied the country of the independent and the proud, and has crowded the cities with the dependent and the abject. It has always sacrificed the small to the large, the personal to the impersonal, the good to the cheap… I see it teaching my students to give themselves a price before they can give themselves a value.

… A better economy, to my way of thinking, would be one that would place its emphasis not upon the quantity of notions and luxuries but upon the quality of necessities. Such an economy would, for example, produce an automobile that would last as least as long, and be at least as easy to maintain, as a horse. It would encourage workmanship to be as durable as its materials; thus a piece of furniture would have the durability not of glue but of wood. It would substitute for the pleasure of frivolity a pleasure in the high quality of essential work…

… The change I am talking about appeals to me precisely because it need not wait upon “other people.”Anybody who wants to do it can begin it in himself and in his household as soon as he is ready—by becoming answerable to at least some of his own needs, by acquiring skills and tools, by learning what his real needs are, by refusing the glamorous and the frivolous. When a person learns to act on his best hopes he enfranchises and validates them as no government or public policy ever will. And by his action the possibility that other people will do the same is made a likelihood.

But I must concede that there is also a sense in which I am tilting at windmills. While we have been preoccupied by various ideological menaces, we have been invaded and nearly overrun by windmills. They are drawing the nourishment from our soil and the lifeblood out of our veins. Let us tilt against the windmills. Though we have not conquered them, if we do not keep going at them they will surely conquer us.

“Do not hurry; do not rest,” said Goethe.  And if I have learned one thing about life with a child, it is this: do not hurry.

Do not hurry.

Do not hurry.

Do not hurry.

I don’t avoid air conditioning just because I am stingy (I am.)  But also because I don’t often hear people reminiscing about days spent inside comfortably cool, but I remember from my a/c-less childhood setting bowls of ice in front of window fans, sitting on the dark, cool basement steps, putting my pillowcases in the freezer, the shade and garden hoses and sleeping in the quiet of the front porch.  That is summer.

And, yes, I have totally caved and am delighted (delighted.) to have central air on this long string of sticky, sticky days.  But I am trying to keep them as sticky as I can while keeping us sane and reasonably happy (if pleasantly uncomfortable).  Because this is what I want to remember: sweaty farmer’s market runs followed by long cold baths with peppermint soap, Reed running around with just his diaper, the whir of fans, the darkness of the house, sleeping over the sheets, escapes to the icy library, and cherries fresh and cold in the fridge.

Happy heat wave,

Lindsey

We were promised a hot day, and the heat came quickly to us.  After breakfast, we set out into the garden  to water and play, and by 9:00, the edges of our hair were damp with good, summer sweat.  We spent the later part of the morning around a bathtub of cool water and bowls of yogurt with strawberry jam and on the couch watching the temperature climb on the thermostat.  So far we have evaded the dreaded (by me) air-conditioner, but the sink is also filled with dishes that don’t seem worth sticking my hands in hot water to wash.  So we’ll see what this evening brings.  But for now, I love my sticky hair wound unfashionably out of my face and my sticky arms and avoiding the sink and I love being pregnant in July.  May the heat plump me like a tomato.

This time I bought four quarts.  Because it would be nice to freeze some.  But we ate a quart on the way home, Reed and I.  And Adam and I might eat another quart tonight.  And shortcake sounds nice, doesn’t it?

Maybe we’ll save freezing for another day.

The best thing about gardening is meeting old friends, again.  Like the two little Red Russian kales that self-sowed from last year’s plant.  And the sunflowers from scattered birdseed.  And all my herbs that I worried about over the winter.  Everything looks so beautiful to me.   Especially my oregano plant, which began so small last spring and is now a wide carpet in its bed.  I took a cutting to try and clone it, something I have never done before and am not sure I will succeed at.  But it is such a beauty, this oregano.  I want everyone to have a piece of it.

I read this article in October, and didn’t do anything about it until now.  It turns out, everything I’ve heard is true.  Making your own mustard is pretty much the simplest, most satisfying thing around.  It doesn’t even dirty a bowl.  Mash up some mustard seeds.  Add mustard powder.  Add cold water, wine, juice, whatever.  Add vinegar.  Please, feel free to follow no recipe.  Add this!  Add that!  Go wild.

(I love recipes you don’t have to follow.)

Conclusion: I’m never buying jarred mustard again.

Right now, Reed is sleeping on his mattress on the floor with beeswax and oil in his hair.  He is probably on his stomach with his butt sticking up in the air (he often likes to sleep that way at the night’s start).  There was a rainbow, tonight, and rain, and we took all the jars off our shelves and rubbed spoon oil on the dry, neglected wood.  Our clothes are covered in wax and our arms up to our elbows.  I love the smell and I love it when we work side by side.  It might be one of my favorite parts of parenting: the joy of little tasks, the small moments of partnership.  The days when motherhood has been hard have been those that I have approached my role as being a mother/servant rather than a mother/teacher.  I am grateful to have learned this lesson so soon.  I am grateful to be a mother.

At certain things, I feel terribly inept (as a human, not just a mother).  But I am learning to be okay with my ineptitude, thoroughly okay, and to rejoice in my small successes and to always be learning.  And to be “glad and young” as e.e. cummings once said and I can never seem to forget.