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.