A Slice of My Life (in real time)

Everywhere I look these days, I see color. The mountains around our cottage are filled with larch trees that display bright flames of yellow among the dark green pines.

Our tiny (and messy) berry patch is all gold and red and rich browns. The mountain ash, birch and cottonwood are hanging onto the last of their colorful leaves.

Mornings are frosty and crisp. And the wood stove is faithfully crackling inside, adding it's flames to the fan of color surrounding our home.

The garden is in. Carrots, potatoes and beets are safely tucked away, while green tomatoes continue to ripen on the shelves in our mud room. In the pantry, baskets are filled with homegrown onions and garlic.

It feels good to have the harvest in. Unlike last year, we even have a fall planting of garlic in the ground, snugly covered with a layer of straw mulch.

I love growing our own garlic, and always feel so happy to see those green shoots poke out of the straw in early spring.

We had strange summer with our garlic (tiny heads and even some onion-like heads too), so I brought in new seed and a new variety for fall planting, called "Big Boy."

I have to confess that our garden was a bit shambled this summer. Instead of growing all the things, we had 5 primary crops: potatoes, tomatoes, carrots, onions and garlic.

If you follow along, you know my man mulched the garden with rotten hay, and some of the bales hadn't decayed at the center. As a result, he seeded several beds with grass and more weed varieties than I could count!

We lost all of our parsnips in the weeding process and battled the grass all year long.

Sigh.

The wonderful thing about gardening is there's always next year. I had hoped we'd get to fall cleanup, but thus far, it hasn't happened.

You see, we're finally building our root cellar.

Yes, the long-promised, long-awaited root cellar that medical bills kept pushing further and further into the distance!

We intentionally saved last year, set the money aside and my man has been using every spare moment to finish it before the heavy cold comes.

So I've been very quiet with my internet tasks, only adding jewelry to my Canadian shop on the weekends, eeking out scatter-brained articles on the blog here and there.

But mostly, I've been mamma-ing (is that a word?) my baby girl, keeping our home, doing last minute garden work, a bit of preserving and tackling heavy detox treatments again.

Ugh.

Yes, I'm back at it. The first time I ran one of my heavy detoxes, I cried.

Not again. I hate these processes so much...I never wanted to find myself in this place again!

But life doesn't respect my wishes and I'm back at it, 3-4x a week.

Did I already say "ugh"?

My man and I had some hard decision to make this past year. He had to change employers, on account of my needs. In spite of the fact that we were hiring help with our "baby" (now toddler), we needed more daily stability in our lives.

Thanks the blog and you folks who faithfully follow along, he's been able to cut back to 3/4x at work, coming home soon enough that I can get a good nap and rest every day (not just on crashing on weekends).

We've also been re-evaluating our lifestyle.

Do we need to take a break from gardening, so I can get on top of health? Do we need to quit beekeeping, so we have less on our plates? Do we need to sell and move somewhere else where housing is cheaper, so we don't have a mortgage?

Because while I love this old fashioned life, I love my home and family more. I love taking care of the most important things, more.

Good health, a good marriage, a stable home life and being present for baby girl is far more important to us than living a traditional lifestyle.

We've been going 'round and 'round while trying to figure out what we need and what is the best course of action for us.

And you know what we've realized?

We're fine.

But we need to pull together if we're going to do life well. Being married for 8 years before having children (however necessary it was) gave us room to become very sloppy in our living. Kind of like we never left our carefree early 20's.

Oh, we work hard. But we're not good at thinking and planning ahead.

One of us (I won't say who) likes to fly by the seat of their pants all the time. This person always believes everything will work out, that we don't need to bother with life now, that planning ahead and having to stick to a thing is "confining."

We've been realizing most of the pain, chaos and even my health relapse was because we couldn't be bothered to think and plan ahead. This results in us having to push ourselves too hard, too often.

We can do a lot. But we can't just plow into things and work like maniacs to get the job done.

Can we manage a garden?

Of course!

Are we able to keep going with the honeybees?

Absolutely!

Can we continue to turn this wild piece of land into a tiny farmstead?

Yes, if we plan ahead and take it one step at a time.

Since baby girl came, planning is essential. We have to work at projects in smaller increments, so it takes longer.

Alas for the free spirited one in our home. 😉

We don't want to be slaves to our home, gardens, cooking, preserving, animals, hunting, land developments or anything else. Every one of these things should serve us. We have to channel the things in our lives so they nourish, instead of drain us.

Something about having a child in the house has made us stop and truly consider the trajectory of our lives. How are we living before God? Each other? Our fellow human beings?

What is this little person going to say about what her parents believed and valued? There's the old quote "more is caught than taught."

What is she "catching" from us?

Is she seeing parents regularly engage with God in a surrendered, thankful and trusting way? Will she have better understanding of His thoughts toward her, based on the way we engage with her?

Are we using our land and home to teach her skills that will set her up for life? Or are we running in a hamster wheel, pushing her aside for the sake of our goals?

Are we teaching her how to plan and execute, or to react to whatever is in front of her face? Is she learning to care for something beyond herself?

We wanted this land for our children, so we could teach them skills, discipline and an understanding of how life works.

We've had to ask the hard question "is this actually happening? Are we truly keeping things in their proper place?"

I've been reminded that our traditional lifestyle is here to serve us and our growing family. We don't serve it.

I know this is personal. Forgive my ranting and rambling. But these things have been deep on my heart, and putting them out there somehow makes me feel more accountable to live by them.

In the chaos, I know much of what we have is good. So very good!

Just the other day, I saw baby girl contentedly toddling around the new root cellar work site, stopping to look up at her daddy while collecting screws he'd dropped.

I watched her little face light up when the little bantam "chickie" she was holding pecked feed from her hand, after she had patiently waited for it to happen.

I was grateful for her obedience to my order for silence when we (almost) had a head-on with an unafraid black bear in the dense woods across the road.

I happily observed her stacking very small pieces of firewood in the wheelbarrow I had half filled, and I saw her pride in the fact that she could contribute and help.

We have a special little person in our lives, and we are shaping her. As we shape her, she somehow gives joy back to us.

So my friend, it's not all bad or hard. We have many gifts given to us every day. Amidst the sober contemplating, brewing over where we're headed and where we want to go, life is still handing us beautiful moments.

And we're grateful.

We want to make the most of what we've been given. And sometimes, we need to stop and contemplate whether or not we're doing that.

Amen?