A visual walk through the last two weeks and two "advertisements!"

Jason's home from the first day at a new tiling job in Keezletown and is out doing the "tuck and tie" on squash vines, collecting bean seed from the seed sanctuary and troubleshooting the next step on extracting a paper wasp nest from our lilac bush. Kali is working on her pokeberry dyeing project out on the porch (we'll be sporting some new colors soon - but some of the items she is dyeing are ones that will not be shown in public!). Alida and Terah are chattering and singing songs from The Sound of Music while they roll out tortillas for our taco dinner. I've just taken my second rinse down of the day after stirring the composting chicken coops' litter and giving each a fresh layer of leaves, as well as doing the same for the ducklings. So now to share some visual and word snippets from the last two weeks.

But first an "advertisement": Today I officially finished up the online course I bought for myself as my "leaving CJP present" and to support my continued healing! I give Christy Harrison's Intuitive Eating Fundamentals course 5 stars! The last year of reading, listening, unlearning, new learning and a good share of tears has brought more transformation and a peace in my relationship to my body and food that I honestly had given up on ever experiencing... If you struggle with your relationship with your body or with food or with "exercise," I'd be happy to share more with you about the class. She also offers a shorter (cheaper) class than the one that I took. 

As a teaser, here's the titles of the 13 modules we worked through. The lessons are applicable to nearly all areas of life!

1. Self compassion
2. Reject the diet mentality
3. Honor your hunger
4. Make peace with food
5. Challenge the food police
6. Feel your fullness
7. Pleasure and satisfaction
8. How to navigate emotional eating
9. Respect your body
10. Joyful movement
11. Gentle nutrition
12. Review and troubleshooting
13. Life as an intuition eater

And now to the happenings of the last few weeks, or at least a sampling of them!

Gardens, Harvests, Processing:

The dry beans are all harvested and threshed. The brown beans came first and more recently the black-eyed peas. Next up is white potato digging later this week. 

The delicata squash have now cured and been sorted into ones for the pigs, ones that we don't want for seed and are hoping to share around with anyone who wants them, and then a large bin tucked in the root cellar now to taste test for seed selection for next year's planting. It seems that the lush summer with adequate rains encouraged prolific growth of plants and some abundant harvests but also seems to possibly be one of the reasons we are having more early breakdown of some things and increased bug damage. I'm really glad we have pigs!!

Jason even found termites in a cantaloupe. Who ever heard of such a thing!

The garlic, shallots and onions all got sorted and processed this week. I just used our last onions for the refried beans tonight and am using large handfuls of first use garlic. Those are three of the crops that are not holding up well at all this year. This is a sad thing!

As many things wrap up for the season (the tomatoes are tanking and I'm ready!), the sweet peppers are coming ripe in greater quantities. This is a happy thing!

Here's one of the clear signs that I'm less overwhelmed this harvest season than the many previous ones when CJP was added to the mix: I made elderberry syrup! Even after sharing elderberries with multiple households, we still had such delightful bunches that I couldn't pass up the opportunity! 3 quarts of stripped off berries made 3 cups of syrup. We'll savor it!!

Another sign of less overwhelm was experimenting with our loaded apple tree out front. Jason nervously (as historically I got overwhelmed with any suggestion for something that takes more time or might not work out) suggested we try adding the apples to pasta sauce. From one previous experiment cooking them to see if they would make good sauce (answer: NO!), it seemed they were high in sugar and pectin. Maybe they could sweeten AND thicken our sauce. They did both marvelously! I'm hooked!! I didn't have to add any of my dried tomato powder for thickening and didn't have to cook it down nearly as long.

The magical food processing thing is happening over and over again this year. Anyone have an explanation? I throw all the things we have into a pot - here is all the tomatoes, peppers, squash, etc... I needed to catch up on - and cook it down into sauce and it comes out to EXACTLY 7 quarts (one canner load). What is this phenomenon? It happens ALL...THE...TIME! 

We had the opportunity to glean grapes for making juice this week up the hill. Due to Jason's back injury (see below), the girls went up with him to help (one helped the whole time, the other two in fits and starts - you can guess who was who!). It took several hours but they came home with nearly 2 bushels of yummy small grape clusters. They were not quite as ripe as sometimes so the juice is on the tart side but we will still savor it thoroughly this winter!

This might be the giveaway on who tuckered out partway through the process. :) 

The seed sanctuary is working as intended! Jason enjoys very much when he sees a squirrel on the wire OUTSIDE the cage (looking in longingly?!). He's bringing in lots of beautiful seed for future plantings. He just came in with what he deemed his contribution to supper (a large stalk of sorghum for chewing on). 

Corn...corn...corn! We are going to have SO MUCH popcorn and flour corn, and probably more than enough bronze flint corn for ponhoss. We successfully outsmarted the chipmunks this year and the patches are looking great! Jason and I just bought our birthday presents for ourselves yesterday - two things to help ease the processing grains, particularly corn! We bought some stainless steel sifters for corn and other flours and then a hand crank corn sheller. We'll wear all the skin off our fingers if we try to hand shell all of this year's corn!

We are big fans of the slicer tomato we have affectionally named "Shenandoah Valentine!" Jason found the perfectly heart shaped one Sunday in honor of my parent's 57th wedding anniversary!

Fun times:

Most Tangly Woods' evening meals are able to happen on Mom and Dad's deck (we are treated to Mom's delicious cooking on Monday evenings when they are around). And it is lovely when there is nothing on the schedule for either household right after dinner and we can linger visiting or enjoying the girls hula-hoop shows or watching for what birds are coming through in the evening. My dad is birding here, not snoozing!

We are so grateful for the playdates our girls get to enjoy with Ivy twice weekly. On one this week they were pretending to go to the Queen Zouse's ball (this included my wedding dress and lots of fanciness).

They are not always fancy or fully clothed! This cloud burst the other day was rather enticing!

Having Kali back with us continues to be a delight! And we are getting back into the groove of getting some time for Jason and I to be with just Kali weekly. The last few times it's been her driving us to one of Jason's jobs where he has had tiny things he needed to wrap up while Kali and I took a walk down to sit and chat along the river. I love those times!!

Our conversations meander but some of what we've talked about is what ways Kali wants to take part in the functioning of our household. Here she is working on reducing the poke berry population at Tangly Woods. In addition, she is now officially our laundry person! And we are also back to regularly enjoying thoroughly her cooking!

A Sunday lunch and afternoon at Jonathan, Christen and Luca's house was the perfect sabbath activity. Luca was a delight even if it seems likely that he's working on getting some teeth through his gums.

One not so fun time:

Last Monday Jason tweaked his back at a job. Ugh! He was pretty uncomfortable for a few days and needed to be a lot stiller than he would normally be in late summer. And I got to test my muscles and stamina for a few days. I definitely went into autopilot for a stint just trying to get the next thing done. The girls all helped in additional ways, including bringing some company for Jason while he sat with the heating pad my parents kindly loaned him!

Luca:

Ok, let's get back to the FUN TIMES! This...Baby...Is...Too...Much! He's so so so so much fun and we savor our times with him immensely. This past Thursday when I got back from my walk with Christen around 8:30 a.m., Alida was already up AND had done her chores. This is pretty much unheard of, but knowing I was returning with Luca was a huge motivator. He seemed happy she was waiting for him.

He gets passed from one loving set of arms to another! 

He's good at taking me back to former times where life centered around NAPS (or lack there of). This kiddo works hard for his naps right now, as does the person helping him. We snuggled, he drank a bottle, I sang, we laid together and he pawed at my nose (my nose should be healed up by our next Luca-day!), and finally he sacked out while I held him and fed him his bottle and bounced and patted him while singing a little jingle we made up with Terah's name. :)

We love making him smile and laugh - which is not normally too hard. If we land on something that works (here's it's Alida who had the touch), we have no interest in stopping until he tires of it!

Ducklings:

In the vein of cute things that are growing and changing, here are our "independent" ducklings. They aren't as interested in their independence as their mama hen was in granting it to them. She easily moved herself back to the compost coop when let out to range. The ducklings peeped for her A LOT the first day or two (pulled at my heart strings hard), but they seem to be adjusting now. She normally visits them some when she is let out each day to range. 

Well the tortillas are nearly done and before long it will be time to shut birds in and have dinner. 

I'll close with one more "advertisement!" If you missed my recent post where I mentioned How to Keep House while Drowning I'll put in a second plug here now that our whole family has listened to it together! It was just as good the second time around and inspired great family conversations! 

I'll sample me practicing a new approach to thinking about our space. Here pictured is Terah's "already started" clothes. These are clothes that are not yet dirty enough for the wash but too dirty to return to the drawers of clean clothes. She has three shelves to work with in the bathroom. And this scene is a common one that unfolds partway through each day. Here's a moral judgmental take on the picture: what a messy kid we have who should know better than to leave her clothes all over the floor. With that approach, I could choose to reprimand her for not keeping things tidy. Instead, as I sat pondering the scene from the toilet, this came to me: What I'm looking at is proof that I live in a house with children. And this particular child is involved in various kinds of activities each day that necessitate multiple changes of clothing. And that same child is often moving so fast to get to the next thing that she can't bear to take the time to fold or put the clothes back on the shelf. What a full and fun life she lives!! Kali, who was with me in the bathroom at the time, made some kind of comment suggesting that maybe I was working to convince myself of my new outlook. :) Yep, it may take some time to fully take root, but I'm enjoying many opportunities to practice it and how I feel when I do! 

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.