Everything else!

 Ok, 5 posts in just over 24 hours. Here I go! Here's the combo post of everything that didn't fit neatly into the Luca post, the PA trip, Kali's bday or Aunt Eleanor's visit! I might be feeling a little bit like Terah as I start this post - a little jumbled up and not sure how to get right side up and moving forward on sharing all the things that have fit into the cracks of the last two weeks (which is exactly how long Kali's been home for). 

And this week I've been feeling some indescribable feelings, most closely akin the the wandering feelings associated with grief or just a load of emotions that makes my body feel full to overflowing. It just so happens to be orientation week at CJP and the first fall orientation that I'm not a part of. I'm truly glad to be going through August on the farm without simultaneously going through August in academia. These things never paired well and I don't really know how I did it for so many years - I guess the last 6 months have been a testament to what it took out of me to accomplish it! So canning during the daylight hours is a relief for sure. But I also am still figuring out who I am without that aspect of my identity and where I will plug in with my gifts and skills going forward... For nearly the past two decades, August has been both exhausting and exhilarating in the culmination of many months of work and getting to meet a whole cohort of new students - I only really miss the latter!

On the home front, it's been pretty thrilling to have an additional daughter in the kitchen with me sometimes. The times when we've all been chopping, peeling, mixing, washing, canning together have been really lovely for me! That said, I also have company when I'm physically alone in the kitchen. I seldom work in silence and am immensely grateful for the learning and unlearning and healing I'm experiencing through the mentors and teachers I'm listening to. There's so many, but I'll share the most recent two as a sampling!

In the last few days I've listened to Melissa Toler a whole lot and I'm a big fan. So many of us need her voice to cut through the mess we are in as a culture laden with weight stigma and fat phobia. I took in both her 3 episodes on Christy Harrison's podcast Food Psych and then from there to all but one episode of her podcast Hearing Our Own Voice. That last episode is likely on the docket tomorrow! 

And then How to Keep House while Drowning by KC Davis. After listening to the whole audio book in one afternoon, I did my first little organizing project with the things I had learned in mind and it was a game changer...and, bonus, I had Terah's help!! Terah and I cleared some piles off my desk in the kitchen and cleaned out two drawers and a cupboard in the bathroom. And we did it just for us and to make our space more functional. It felt so different than doing it to meet some external standard or moral code. Here's a few teasers of some of my favorite takeaways from this book and then we'll get to ducklings and flowers and beautiful skies!

• You don't exist to serve your space, your space exists to serve you.
• Care tasks (e.g. cooking, cleaning, laundry, hygiene...) are morally neutral!
• Connect with the FUNCTION of a space and of care tasks and strip them of moral virtues and value messages.
• Thinking of cleaning/organizing as "resetting the space" for it to function for you.
• No one does all the good things all the time... Imperfection is required for a good life.
• I am allowed to be human.
• Rest is not a reward, it is a right.
• Those who work in shame, rest in shame.
• The goal is not to make the work equal but the rest fair!
• Closing duties (things you might choose to do at the end of the day) are a way of being kind to future you.

We plan to listen to this out loud as a family starting maybe as soon as tomorrow evening!

And now in other news:

Ducklings: they are growing up! Still so cute! Their mama hen is ready to let them be independent, so there may be some reconfiguring happening in the near future now that they are big enough to not physically need her for brooding.

Chickens: The very last clutch of eggs for this years breeding will hatch soon. And then the broody pens will sit empty until next spring. The new little fluff balls are a welcome site as we deal with the sadness and disappointment of some ongoing predator pressure, especially from foxes. A mishap the other night (one coop door left over) led to the loss of several hens and a chick, including Alida's pet hen Lilly. She is especially glad now Marigold, a younger hen she has been taming and who most recently hopped/flew up onto her shoulder surprising her. 

Garden harvests: the brown beans have been cut (thanks to Jason) and threshing is on the docket for him tomorrow afternoon. 

We are already starting to get into some of the fall crops. Cucumbers and watermelon are out and carrots have been seeded. We seeded them with crickets hopping all around us, so aren't feeling overly optimistic about those little seedlings getting past their hungry chompers! Delicata out, turnips in.

I'm not sure we have ever had such lovely elderberries! So glad for a friend who can use them, as I am running out of surplus food processing steam, especially for things that aren't yet familiar and routine for me.

Can you guess what this is?

Beautiful scenes: Wowzers!!

The way the light changes the mountain never ceases to amaze me!

The other morning I woke and our room was glowing pink. I got up and went outside to this:

I've gotten to enjoy just a couple walks up to Hensley's Pond recently. I love catching the ironweed blooming!

Fun times: I think the recent swim with the girls was fun. It was SOOOOOO cold! 

Kali has officially had her first meal since coming home a few days back, and another one since then. In the Philippines it's a meal if there is rice. Without rice, it's a snack. She's been doing a lot of snacking since arriving home, but we are sprinkling in some real meals now here and there!!

We had fun hosting Jonas and Ivy for a birthday brunch for Jonas (complete with introducing him to shoofly pie). And then surprised Ivy (and Jonas) with an impromptu sleepover invitation for Ivy with her cousins. Both gladly accepted and Ivy went strong until she finally gave in to sleep a few hours after her normal bedtime. 

For some closing kicks: noodle art

And be prepared for FANCY folded napkins the next time we can welcome you to our table! You can do this at home too! Check out lots of ideas!! 

Time for the bedtime routines to commence!!

Aunt Eleanor's visit - it had been too long...it went too fast!

It was September 2019 when we last enjoyed a long visit from my great Aunt Eleanor. We're all a few years older, but had just as marvelous time together this go round (my parents only got in on the first evening of her visit before they took off for WV for a few weeks). We definitely hope that it won't be 3 years until we do it again. 

This will be a good exercise for me to write this reflection on our week together, which is a joyous celebration of food, family, stories, laughter, food processing, hugs, and so many sweet times. I hope it will be good for my spirit, which feels a bit laden with sadness this evening. In short, I've found myself reflecting a lot today on the systems and structures that have such massive implications for individuals. Whether it is the impacts of colonization or the implications of our culture that doesn't set up systems that enable and support people to stay within their family as they age and be cared for surrounded by loved one, I have found myself feeling grief move through me as I go about the tasks of my day. And I wonder how I can continue to support and be part of a different way of being in the world. With those thoughts milling around in the background, I offer this smattering of photos from our precious days together!

I'm not sure I could ask for an easier house guest. And, in all honestly, Aunt Eleanor is not really a house guest at all. She's family and she just slid right into the flow of things (or stayed smartly on the edges of the hubbub sometimes!). She did have a knack for disappearing sometimes and then after poking around for awhile I'd often find her just absorbed in taking in everything around here (tucked in the rocking chair in the corner of the deck was her best hiding spot)! She also spent hours reading our printed blog books, so I now have another source of encouragement to keep it up. It was funny to be working at catching up on the blog as she sat across from me reading an earlier year. 

One of the things I love about her visits, is she is not just visiting me. She gets to have time with each of us and then time with all of us together. On one of the first days, I apologized for how I was scurrying around and not able to just sit and visit all the time (it is, afterall, August on a farm). She said something to the effect of me not needing to think another thing about that. She seemed quite happy to occupy herself with any number of things or join up with us in what we were up to. I was mentioning to her that my parents (especially my dad) had expressed concerns before moving in about what it would feel like to live in a place with a family at a very different life stage - we are in the chaotic, bustling, loud stage...they are retired with no kids at home. The wisdom from Eleanor was that they will need to learn to act their age. :) I love that she was able to embrace activity or just sit while we zoomed around!

And we certainly didn't zoom around the whole time. One of the gifts of her presence with us was that it actually encouraged us to slow down and soak up times together. We did music on TWO evenings in the middle of summer. This is unheard of! And very welcome!! 

We savored many delicious meals together - including Kali's first cooking since returning from the Philippines! I had missed those meals. She treated us to a scrumptious pork noodle casserole that was a huge hit - using our canned pork in place of tuna.

Aunt Eleanor would share snippets from the books she was reading and that inspired at least one fun food experiment. I made a Dutch baby for the first time. I googled it as I took it out of the oven as I had NO frame of reference for what it was supposed to look like - it was just about right! There were no leftovers. Terah thought it was too sweet, so I might try it with less sugar the next time. But the rest of us enjoyed it, especially with fresh blackberries. I so often get in food ruts when life is full and schedules are complicated. So it felt like a treat to try something new together.

 

Now, that was not the only food experiment of the week. I had an email come through my inbox about an event serving locally made okra ice cream. Since Kali has been enjoying trying all sorts of new foods and seems to find it interesting to do so, I offered to try it out around her birthday. With Eleanor being a good sport about trying new things too, I figured it would be fun to do it while she was there. The report: Kali was the only one, really, that liked it. I tolerated a little but found it rather unpleasant! I was proud of my planning ahead as I also made black walnut caramel corn in case the okra ice cream flopped. I wasn't sure the rest of us would get any as Aunt Eleanor declared this her bowl. But she did end up sharing!!

Now lest you think my dear great aunt sat around, lounging while eating caramel corn all week, let me offer a more balanced perspective. On many an occasion, she showed up and plopped down at a cutting board or with a paring knife to offer her additional set of hands to the mix. I think she mostly enjoyed it, even when "wildlife" (the increasing number of bean beetles) were sometimes crawling on her. One day Terah wanted to call my mom to say hi and I had her on speaker phone. I mentioned that Eleanor was helping to chop tomatoes and she piped up that she had a ball and chain around her ankle. She's so quick sometimes. :) I promise we did not tether her in any way to the kitchen table. But she often stayed until all the veggies were chopped!

She also got in on the delicata harvest, which was a good one (5 bushels for us and a bushel for the pigs). I thought she was just going to "supervise," but it wasn't long before she was right in the patch with us. 

There was still a good amount of time in the evening for some collective lounging. We even introduced her to a Netflix show that Ivy had just told us about (very enthusiastically): Is It Cake? I don't think it's one I'm gonna get hooked on, but it does include some very impressive cake creating/decorating skills!!

I don't know if my kids always grasp what a gift it is to be able to have such close relationships with grandparents and, in this case, spending many days back to back with their great, great aunt. Eleanor was the only great aunt I had any close connections with growing up and it was limited to very rare visits to WV where we might take a walk through the pine trees just the two of us and her unforgettable letters. But this is so different. A week sprinkled with moments of marveling at the stars together, hearing stories about her childhood and mothering 8 children and fun snippets from her relationship with Joe before his death, and getting exposure to her sharp and witty humor. It's just delightful. 

As we ate ice cream cones last evening, I learned that she and Uncle Joe would stop for a cone with butter pecan ice cream in Elkins after shopping. They would share it but he would lick more of the ice cream and leave most of the cone for her! Would that little story ever have been imparted to us if we weren't there all licking ice cream cones together?

Yesterday I came upstairs where they were puzzling to read some of our chapter book out loud to Terah and Alida. As is typical of me, I was quickly yawning about every other sentence and struggling to stay awake. I saw Eleanor get her phone out and then happened to notice that she was puzzling but holding her phone up and a click would happen about every time I yawned. She was trying to catch me yawning. :) I haven't seen her photos to know how close she got, but it made me start laughing every time I started to yawn after that. It made me very pleased to see that I caught this picture of her with a pretzel in her mouth AND on her phone! 

We didn't get to do everything or eat everything together we might have wanted to. And she didn't get to sew our recliner since we couldn't find my mom's sturdy needle and thread. So we'll have to get another visit on the schedule soon. For now, I a little heart pang as I removed the walking sticks from each exterior door and put them back in their bin in the garage until they are needed again. 

Home in time for her birthday!

The answer to whether Kali is solidly an adult now or in her last year of adolescence depends on who you ask. But the hard fact is that she is now 19! And that she arrived home in time to celebrate her birthday with us, which was probably as much a gift for us as it was for her. It is also worth noting that there was so much emphasis on August 9th in our household (welcome home signs, a chain with loops noting how many days until her arrival, etc...) that I didn't do nearly as much advance birthday planning as I normally do. And Kali wasn't around to talk about what she wanted, and the birthday person choosing what they want for their bday is a pretty big thing in this household. Kali did confirm with me just now that she had a nice birthday but also agreed that even for her the emphasis up to that point had really been on the bigger transition of returning home after 2+ months! So here's how things shook out:

Her ducks chores were done for her, so this was her first activity of the day (well, after brushing her teeth and changing). This is not an unusual scene ever since the acquisition of her phone! In addition to her many word games and any number of other things, she now has friends all the way across the world to connect with.

I pulled her away to take a meander down to the ducklings for a visit and to husk corn for her birthday brunch. 

Emily, Jonas and Ivy joined us for brunch centering around Kali's request of sausage quiche. While I was making pie crusts I added funny cake pies to the menu, and then just loaded the table up with veggies. I cannot get over all the colors and textures of this time of year.

She was literally loved upon throughout the day!

She got some new co-op snacks and some coupons to spread out the birthday fun (there'll be a sister movie night and sister game night and a day hike with her parents and watching a show with her dad coming in the future). There was some game playing sprinkled into the day somewhere.

She also found herself a 4-leaf clover!

The big adventure of the day was getting her behind the wheel of our car again. She had wanted to do some driving where she gets to try to find her way around or just enjoy exploring wherever she feels like going. This was very fun for her and Jason and I think Alida enjoyed it well enough and Terah was moderately stressed - at least that is what I gathered from the report. But all arrived home, after 4+ hours, in good spirits. They had three stops to accomplish - a visit to the library, a visit to Sharp Shopper, and a visit to Smiley's Ice Cream. The rest of the time was spent galavanting around the countryside. I happily stayed at home and chopped many veggies, while listening to an entire audio book (maybe more on How to Keep House while Drowning another time!).

The celebrating continued into the next day when we had her birthday dinner with my parents, and also her great, great aunt Eleanor (who had joined us that afternoon for the week - more on that also in a later post!). Another colorful, delicious meal and a new food experience, blackberry cake, that Terah now wants for her birthday even though blackberries are no longer in season then. It was my mother who made the fried eggplant and okra, which is always a labor of love! 

As I type this she is wearing her birthday t-shirt and giving ME a foot massage. I'm writing about her birthday while cashing in my last birthday coupon from September 2021. So if any of this doesn't make sense, it's because I'm half focused on what I'm typing and half focused on the wonderful sensations in my feet!