Saturday

I had a terrible Saturday. A terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day as Alexander might say.

When my kids came downstairs at 6:15 on Saturday and wanted me to make breakfast RIGHT NOW (please, mom? I’m really hungry…insert puppy dog eyes and cute 4 year old smile) I grudgingly got out of bed and made my way to the kitchen.

I’m kind of abstract-random in my everyday life, so it isn’t really surprising that getting milk into the cereal bowls turned into noticing that someone spilled on the shelf in the fridge. Which turned into noticing that what they spilled was dripping down from the shelf above. Which turned into noticing that someone had shoved a bowl into the shelf so far that several open containers had overturned, creating a sticky puddle of congealed mystery liquids in the back. Which turned into deciding right then and there at 6:30am that I needed to clean out the fridge.

So while the kids argued over who got to use what cereal bowl, and who had more cereal, and who got to use the “zipper spoon,” (please don’t ask…that’s a whole other post) I was methodically removing items from the fridge and stacking them on the counter. Which turned into realizing I can’t take out shelves and drawers for cleaning without moving the whole fridge away from the wall. Which turned into getting my husband to move it for me.

Still with me? By now the fire was lit, and I was gonna clean that fridge, gol’ darn it. (That’s the clean version because you never know who’s reading this and I don’t want to call into question my upbringing.)

So. Fridge is moved. Stuff is out. Things are clean. Enter the husband, who has stopped back in the house to get the egg basket for the chicken coop. He says, “Are you going to vacuum under the fridge before I move it back?”

Um. Well, I guess I am now.

I took off the front grill and was shocked and appalled and horrified at how much yuck accumulates under your fridge. No, I have never in all the years I’ve been on my own pulled off the grill of a refrigerator and vacuumed under it. Don’t judge me.

I must have looked really disgusted, because he took pity on me and crouched down to vacuum it out for me. Which turned into a really big job, because Aaron never does anything half-way. He started mumbling about how all that dirt makes it hard for the motor to work, blah blah blah, and how we should really do this a few times a year, blah blah blah and how we don’t want to have to buy a new refrigerator just because I was too grossed out to do this blah blah blah. I swear he would have used a toothbrush to make it sparkle, except in all his cleaning fervor he bumped the water line that runs to the ice maker. And suddenly the compression fitting broke and water began spraying all over the kitchen.

Fabulous. To make this long story a whole lot shorter, I ended up spending the next hour and a half driving to hardware stores looking for parts. I preferred the hunt for parts to staying home alone with a potential flood problem in my kitchen. The local hardware store had no compression fittings. The hardware department at the Wal-Mart had no compression fittings. Neither did the other two stores I visited.

By now I was pretty worked up and sick of driving all over the county. Did I mention it was pouring rain? Well, it was. And all the in-and-out of the car was getting me soggier by the minute. That’s when it occurred to Aaron to have me call Culligan, who supplies our water filters. Quick promo for the Fairmont Culligan people: one phone call to the on-call guy resulted in me getting parts and pieces replaced almost instantly. They were super wonderful, and I sure wish I would have called them right away.

It is 11:30am when I finally get home, and I discover that all my fridge contents are warm and barely salvageable. (No, Aaron did not put anything back in the fridge while I was gone, thank you very much.)

And now I have three kids clamoring for lunch. And my kitchen is pretty much trashed. *sigh*

But it’s not over, folks!

After throwing together chicken noodle soup and sandwiches and letting the kids eat in the living room in front of the TV, (don’t judge me, I said) I got my kitchen put back together. I will say my refrigerator rocks. Sometimes I like to open it just to look at how clean and sparkly it is right now.

If you read my previous post about straining lard, you’ll better understand Round Two. If not, please go read it right now. Thank you.

So I have a bag of lard to render. It is a simple thing to do, but the one part that is a little time-consuming is the straining process itself. It’s sometimes hard to strain it quickly, and I was feeling like finding a new solution to that problem. I have a great stainless steel kettle with a spaghetti strainer in it. I put the lard in the strainer, and turned the burner on low.

Now, in my mind, this is a great idea. The lard will drip slowly through the strainer into the kettle below, making it a really simple way to separate the lard from the crackling. Right? That sounds reasonable, right? Right away I could hear the hiss of a drop of lard hitting the pan. Perfect. I’ll just come back and check on that in a few minutes.

About 10 minutes later, I can smell a rather unpleasant smell. When I looked over at the stove, tiny tendrils of white smoke are emerging from the sides of the pot, and the smell of burning lard (it is horrible, just so you know) begins to fill the kitchen. When I get closer to the pot, I can see that there is a fire (a FIRE!) in the bottom of the pot. Fabulous.

I picked up the pot to carry it outside. When I jiggled the pot, the strainer wiggled loose and now smoke is POURING out of the pot. The fire alarms are going off, the kids come barreling down the stairs into the kitchen, I am trying to hold my breath as I stagger toward the front door with the pot. I didn’t even put on my shoes, I just managed somehow to get outside and set my very expensive stainless spaghetti cooker outside on the ground in the pouring rain, hoping to put out the fire.

When I return to the house, it is smoky and horrible, and the kids are coughing, and I made them go outside too. In the pouring rain. Barefoot.

I am a great mom, I will have you know.

My husband comes out of the shop and sees his wife and three kids huddled in the garage with a pot of smoking something planted in the yard and smoke alarms still going off in the house.

But it’s not over, folks!

Believe it or not, right at that exact moment, the tornado sirens in town go off. We live about 4 miles from Sherburn, but we can hear the sirens plain as day. I absolutely could not believe it. The rain stopped, it got very still, and off to the north you could see the black clouds rolling eastward. I herded the family out to the shop where we could listen to the radio. (I got their shoes and jackets for them, first, don’t worry.) I was honestly thinking, you have GOT to be kidding me. This day just keeps getting better. Fortunately, the storm continued eastward, and despite a quick smattering of hail, we remained unscathed in the storm.

Many hours later, I was able to take care of the mess in my house, get the kids fed and bathed and read and in bed, and I even managed to clean my scorched kettle thanks to my mom. (Vinegar and baking soda, in case you were wondering.) I thought I would try to get a last load of laundry done before I went to bed. I went upstairs to get a laundry basket, and I missed a step coming back down.

I’m sure it was a sight to see. I landed hard on my bottom and I think I actually felt my spine compress as I subsequently hit the next three as well. I slid the rest of the way and bounced off the wall on the landing at the bottom. Swell. I kind of laid there for a minute or two. Once I established that though I was certainly sore, I was more or less intact. I promptly went to bed before I had a chance to wreck anything else.

Yes, Alexander, it really was a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day. Here’s hoping tomorrow is a little less exciting.

Lucky

When we bought our farm, I knew that my husband planned to have a few animals. We came here 5 years ago with just a cat. Taking inventory of the situation last week, I realized we now have three dogs, three cats, 9 hens, 1 rooster, a lot of homing pigeons (they keep multiplying – I don’t know how many) and lately we’ve been trying our hand at raising a few pigs. Aaron is talking about adding a couple of cows this summer – we’re still working out the details on that one. And not long ago the kids were telling him how much they’d love to have some goats. (Goats? Seriously?) The worst part about suggesting new animals to my husband is that he is more than likely to follow through. He buys animals for the kids the way I might buy them a candy bar at the grocery store.

At some point or another, I’m sure I’ll write about each of the animals that have a home with us. Every animal is important to someone for some reason, and I like the level of responsibility that having them is teaching my kids.

Today I want to write about Lucky. Lucky is our outside Tomcat. He lives in the garage, and has the auspicious responsibility of keeping the mouse population at a minimum. He’s also taken it upon himself to keep feral cats off our property too, which is no small task. Before Lucky came to live with us, we would have a different random cat wandering our property at any given time.

Aaron found Lucky about 3 years ago, when he rescued him from the burn pit out back of our house. We don’t burn all that often, and it’s a fortunate thing, because this poor, tiny, mewling kitten was trying to live in it. There was no mama-cat anywhere around, and this little creature was barely recognizable as feline. It was jet-black and its fur was so matted and dirty, I couldn’t really tell it was even a cat.

We brought him in the house and bathed him. We already had some ear drops for the mites he was carrying, so I dropped a few drops in him and made a little nest in the front porch. When he was wet, his body was no larger than a gerbil. He was clearly in bad shape, and I didn’t have a lot of faith that he would make it. But never underestimate the love of a young child; it is powerful indeed. My oldest daughter spent hours in the porch with that cat, coaxing food and milk and water into it, and loving it just as hard as she could.

When we were pretty sure he was going to make it, we decided it would be okay to name him. 5-year old Emma had a lot of ideas. First she wanted to name him “Strawberry.” Given his jet-black color, that was a little difficult for me to go along with. After much deliberation, Dora, Nemo, and Princess were also eliminated as options. Finally Aaron said, “We’ll call him Lucky because he’s lucky to be alive.” That satisfied her, and Lucky he became.

Eventually, the cat looked strong enough to bring into the house. It was clear from the start that it would not be getting along at all with the cat in residence. Seven is my 12-year old tabby that I got when I first moved to Colorado. She’s been my baby for a long time, and considers the house to be her personal castle. I somehow thought that “Lucky” and “Seven” seemed to be names that went well together; therefore it was a good omen for their future relationship. In reality, they hate each other with a ferocity that is both impressive and alarming.

What reasonable pet owner could banish an established member of the family in favor of a younger version? Not me, I say. We made a comfortable home in the garage for the new kitten and Emma transferred her daily food/water/attention/love ritual to the garage.

In the last 3 years, Lucky has evolved from the “Little Kitten That Could” into something you would be afraid to meet in a dark alley. We must live on a feral cat highway or something, because we’ve had a lot of cats wandering around, at least we did in the early days. Come to think of it, I haven’t seen one in a long time. The boundary he’s created for the farm must reach beyond the line of my hearing. His arrogance grows with every cat he battles, and he swaggers around the farm like the seasoned Tom he is. I think his job description prohibits him from being a very cuddly cat.

Lucky is the one animal on the farm that no one messes with. And I mean no one. Every dog on our farm maintains a wide berth around that creature. The house cats will sometimes play at the deck screen and if Lucky happens to be on the deck he will pace the screen making god-awful sounds trying to get at the house cats. He’s friendly to me in an “I won’t claw you, but don’t touch me unless I want you to” kind of way.

But he does have a well of affection for Emma. She’s allowed to pick him up, and he purrs something fierce in her arms. He rubs his head hard all over her chin, which is actually a little endearing and also kind of disgusting. The top of his head bears the scars of his many battles, and it is rough, scratchy, and missing chunks of fur. But these two have a bond, of that there is no doubt.

One morning we came outside to find him loudly meowing in the yard. Emma could see he had some swelling over that eye. It took three of us to get him wrapped in a towel and put in a kennel to take him to the vet. We were able to get an antibiotic for him, (do not ask me what the vet was thinking…do you really expect me to forcibly get 10 tiny little pills down the throat of a cat who doesn’t like me all that much anyway?!) And I won’t go into the description of that event. But he healed up, and lives to battle another day.

Lucky’s birthday is this weekend. Well, his “Found You” day, anyway. We’re thankful for him, and consider him to be part of our animal family. I will find a way to celebrate him whether he wants to acknowledge me or not.  

Baby Girl

Last night, my 8 year old came over to the recliner where I was sitting and tried to climb up into my lap. She didn’t say anything, just gently adjusted her long limbs until she was curled somewhat awkwardly into my lap and rested her head against my chest. I had the good sense to recognize that this was no ordinary event, so I wisely kept silent and dropped my chin down to the top of her head. We existed like that, for long minutes, in a comfortable silence.

When was the last time I held her like this? Did I hold her at 7? At 6? It seems so long ago, I don’t know if I remember. Her younger brother and sister have largely occupied my lap for the last 5 years, and I honestly can’t remember the last time I cradled my oldest in my arms this way.

I have a vivid memory of holding her at a few months of age in a blue glider in the corner of her nursery. I loved that she fit so neatly on my chest and under my neck, like she had always been there. I remember rocking her for hours, sometimes drifting off to sleep myself. I had a bedtime CD of music that I played every night as I rocked her to sleep. It was filled with real music, not the generic lullaby music compiled by some random publishing house. I carefully selected musicians and songwriters and artists who sang ballads about love and heartache, who performed with pure and raw emotion. I wanted to infuse in her already things of weight and value. I remember that I chose songs just for their haunting melodies and their connection to a wisdom that I hoped for her to someday attain.

When I rocked my daughter, and sang along to Eva Cassidy and Norah Jones, I relished those moments of togetherness. I felt her heart beating against mine; I drew breaths in rhythm with hers. I felt so intensely connected to her – I could not imagine the day would ever come when I missed a thing about her. I could catalog her facial expressions, the nuances of her mood, and I felt in tune with my child in a way that I had never felt in tune before.

It seems like a million years have passed since then. The last time she climbed up on my lap, I had no idea it would be the last time. I’m sure I was cuddling and comforting my other babies at the time. They were born ridiculously close together and demanded more and more of me every passing day. In fact, it was a comfort and a help when my oldest became old enough to manage her daily care on her own. She potty trained quickly, took to eating solid food like a champ. As soon as she could buckle her own car seat, I barely rejoiced before I was already asking her to help buckle the other kids in.

I didn’t notice that she stopped crawling up on my lap. Probably it was already full. She never asked. She never tried. I didn’t notice.

Why did she need that today? What happened at school/on the bus/on the playground/at daycare that made her need me this way? I am filled with anxiety. I want to ask her a million questions. I want to root out the cause of her need; fix it, make it better. Sometimes my intuition is smarter than my brain, and sometimes I actually manage to listen to it, so I wisely said nothing.

After a few minutes she sat up, and took a deep breath and smiled. I tried to very casually ask “how was your day?” all the while trying really hard not to sound like I was feeling inside. She said, “Good. Can I have a snack?” When I nodded, she hopped down and wandered into the kitchen. I followed her apprehensively. Why was I suddenly so uncertain? Why did I feel like I was navigating unknown territory in perilous waters? I gave her an apple and she took it upstairs to her room and shut the door.

I spent the next hour chopping vegetables for dinner with careful precision. Analyzing that moment, trying to extract some meaning. Should I go upstairs and press for more information? Surely something happened today for her to need some extra comforting. On the other hand, she’s usually very forthcoming. If she has something to say, she will say it, so maybe I should just let her be and decide on her own when she wants to tell me. I am intensely sensitive about my privacy and I hate when others intrude on that with probing questions when I just want to be left alone to think things through. Is that how she feels? Should I leave her alone? If I leave her alone, will she feel neglected? I don’t want her to think I don’t care. Is there girl drama? Believe it or not, at second grade there is already girl drama. Was someone mean to her? Is there a birthday party she didn’t get invited to? Did she fail her spelling test? Did she get in trouble with her teacher? Was there a problem on the bus?  

Have I mentioned that I am tiny bit obsessive about some things? This might be a good time to mention that fact. I have a terrible habit of over-analyzing situations. As a creative thinker, this is very dangerous indeed, because I can create entire fictional universes over one random comment or action. I have more than once orchestrated a problem where none existed. I’m trying to learn from that, so part of me wants to wait her out. The other part of me really, really, really wants to go upstairs and drag it out of her.

You’re dying to know, though, right? Well. The story goes down like so: I didn’t go upstairs. I didn’t press. I did spend most of the evening fabricating multiple tragic circumstances and formulating my responses to them. Later that evening she was brushing her hair before bed and I finally said, “Everything okay with you today?” She smiled and leaned on my hip with her arm around my back and said, “Yeah. I just missed you.”

Wow. I miss you too, baby girl.

Self-Reliance

This weekend I had a Moment in the middle of my Saturday afternoon. I don’t have Moments all that often, but I notice that I seem to have them more and more as I get older. It wasn’t an earth-shattering, call the newspaper, broadcast it on Facebook kind of revelation. It was the kind of Moment that sneaks up on you, real slow, and takes a little time to fully appreciate.

It came to me as I was standing in my kitchen on Saturday afternoon, straining lard through cheesecloth into a mason jar. (I realize that sentence alone is likely to raise some questions…I’ll get back to that in a minute.) But there was a moment during that process when the late afternoon sun through the kitchen window was falling just so on the counter, and I could hear my kids playing with the puppy outside on the lawn, that a kind of quiet stillness crept over me. I felt very much like I was supposed to be doing that exact thing at that exact moment in time. It was a strange moment, not unlike déjà vu, when I felt inexplicably that I was just another woman, in a long line of women before me, to stand in that exact spot, and strain lard into a mason jar.

And just like that, the Moment passed. And as I came back to myself, I pondered for a while on my lot in life. (Doesn’t that sound wonderfully dramatic? To stand around and ponder your lot in life?) Anyway, that’s what I was doing. On any other day, I’m sure that I would rather be pondering my lot in life while sipping an umbrella drink on someone’s yacht in the Mediterranean. But on Saturday afternoon, I had this overwhelming sense that I was channeling the thousands of farm women before me whose sole task in life was to sustain their families.

My husband dreams of a fully sustainable life on our farm. To be able to disconnect from the modern conveniences that are actually hobbling our ability to be independent. For example, you have to eat to live. Therefore you have to buy the food you eat. Therefore you have to make enough money to buy food. Therefore you have to rely on someone else to pay you for your work so you can eat. This is the model our generation has grown up with. Even modern farmers do not have sustainable farms…they farm for money, and money pays for their lifestyle. But my husband has been questioning this model and wondering why our society has required us to move away from independence toward a much more dependent life. (This is where I could go off on a tangent about economics and capitalism, and welfare, and government subsidies, but none of those get me back to straining lard, so I will save that for another post.)

In our family’s shift toward sustainability, we have begun to gradually recover the skills left behind by our grandmothers. We raised some chickens, both for broilers and as egg-layers. The garden project that began as an experiment has evolved into a full-fledged canning and preserving extravaganza. I still have a freezer and pantry full of fruit and vegetables from last summer’s harvest. This winter I learned how to make my own laundry soap. (Shameless plug for homemade laundry detergent: why pay $13.00 for a box of laundry soap, when you can make almost 10 times that amount for about $5.00? AND it’s better quality. Fragrance-free, chemical-free, additive-free…and as an added bonus, it also cleans your clothes!) I began to churn my own butter from buttermilk and can now create specialty combinations like garlic and herb butter for Italian night, and strawberry butter for French toast.

Before you get all amazed at my prowess in forgotten skills, I have a disclaimer. I don’t really attempt anything that looks very difficult. I’m still a full-time teacher, and a mom, and a wife, and that still comes with a boatload of other responsibilities. I have been holding on to the modern conveniences of life because I was programmed this way, and it seems easier, to be honest. My husband, God bless him, has been nudging me along, hoping somewhere along the line this philosophy will take hold.

Finally…back to the lard story. We butchered two hogs a few weeks ago. We had to sit down with the butcher and choose our cuts, (also a fun adventure, if you’ve never done it.) One question he asked us was whether we wanted the lard. I instinctively responded “NO!” with a shudder. At the same moment, my wonderful husband said, “Of course!” Because apparently if you render your own lard from a farm-raised animal, it is vastly superior in quality and nutrition to the standard vegetable shortening you find in the store. You should really take a minute to read about it; it only took a couple of internet articles to convince me this was a good idea, and easy enough for me to tackle on my own.

And that is how I came to be standing in my kitchen, in the fading light of a Saturday afternoon, straining lard through cheesecloth into a mason jar. I’m grasping, now, for the proper words to frame the Moment. I can say it felt like I was on the verge of a big discovery; it felt like God Himself was whispering “pay attention, now, I’m trying to tell you something.” I felt indefinably connected to all the women who stood here before me.

I’ve been reading the Little House series with my 8-year-old daughter. I’ve been marveling at the careful description those books provide in the way of life of the pioneers. I am astounded by the depth and the quality of their lives considering the remarkable amount of work they put into everyday endeavors. As I stood there, I really felt the full weight of the mission my husband is on. I understood the beauty of self-reliance. I had a fleeting glimpse into a larger truth. But it was gone before I could really wrap myself around it.

In college, I had an entire course devoted to Thoreau and Emerson and their philosophy of transcendentalism. They believed in the inherent goodness of man; they believed that society corrupted the purity of each individual’s connection to the earth. I remember how powerful their words were to me then; how moved and inspired I was by their theory of life. When did I lose sight of that? I suspect that I am only beginning to watch these pieces of my experiences fall together in a pre-determined pattern. I think maybe I am supposed to be here. I’m supposed to do this. As silly as it sounds, on Saturday afternoon I was supposed to be straining lard through cheesecloth into a mason jar.