February book report by Jason

February 2016-Why Did the Chicken Cross the World?, by Andrew Lawler

This book was a fascinating and absorbing romp through archaeological, anthropological, historical, cultural, biological, philosophical, ethical, behavioral, and political realms of study, all within the context of trying to understand what the chicken is in itself, where it comes from, how it came to be as it is, and what it has meant to us and what it means to us today.  The following quote from page 148 is the best general summary of our history with the bird:

“Amid familiar mammals like dogs and cats and cows, however, the chicken retains an almost alien quality.  The male can be fierce and even terrifying when defending its turf, all out of proportion with its small size, while the bird’s reptilian feet and downy feathers make for an unsettling combination.  Jerky movements give the bird a disturbingly robotic quality, while its voracious appetite for sex with multiple partners is impressive to some adn offensive to others.  We veer between admiration and disgust and between fascination and fear in our long relationship with the chicken.  This ambivalence mirrors our shifting attitudes toward God, sex, gender, and all that we consider both sensual and monstrous.” (Lawler, 148)

There were a few surprises with regard to its role in human society and history, particularly American history:

“ 'Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century descriptions of colonial foodways ignored the chicken for the most part,’ says the Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America.  For enslaved African Americans, this humble status proved a welcome boon.  In 1692, after several individuals bought their freedom with profits from animal sales, the Virginia General Assembly made it illegal for slaves to own horses, cattle, and pigs.  Masters often forbade their human chattel from hunting, fishing, or growing tobacco.  The chicken ‘is the only pleasure allowed to Negroes; they are not permitted to keep either ducks or geese or pigs,’ one visitor to George Washington’s Mount Vernon remarked.” (Lawler 193)

“If your goal is to build a more egalitarian society, then chickens are the perfect livestock.” (Lawler 186)

The sporadic surges in interest in backyard poultry, sometimes quite frivolous, show up in surprising places like Queen Victoria’s gardens and swanky 21^st century catalogs:

“Upscale Neiman Marcus recently offered a hundred-thousand-dollar chicken coop, complete with chandelier and heritage birds, as its ultimate extravagant gift.  ‘We’ll hold the future farmer’s hand as we teach how to raise a healthy flock, to compost from hen house to garden bed, grow veggies and herbs for their table and flock, sprout legumes, fodder and rotate pasture trays, and experience the reward of permaculture,’ says the designer.” (Lawler 260)

Those of us who pay attention to questions of animal cruelty and welfare will not be surprised to hear about the fates of industrial chickens, but it bears mentioning:

“In the United States alone, more than 200 million young roosters are killed each year.  In many documented cases, they were tossed live into Dumpsters or fed into wood chippers.” (Lawler 168)

“Leg and hip ailments brought on by inadequate bone structure hinder health in an animal designed to put on meat so fast the developing skeleton can’t keep up.  Some broilers can’t walk to their water and feed stations, and there are signs that large numbers are in chronic pain.  One study showed that broilers learned to self-administer a pain reliever by choosing feed containing the drug over food that lacked it.” (Lawler 217)

“Within a year or two, a typical laying hen is spent.  ‘We selected chickens to lay eggs at the expense of their own bodies,’ says Siegford.  ‘You won’t see a physically healthy hen at the end of her laying cycle no matter what nirvana you put her in.  Her body is driving her to lay eggs.’  No matter how many perches, dust-bathing mats, or open space are provided to hens, the genetics of the bird works against its welfare.  And once their laying days are over, there are no laws governing their destruction, and the hens have almost no economic value except as fertilizer or pet food.” (Lawler 248)

This is especially disturbing when we learn more about their cognitive abilities:

p. 240: “And chicks can do more then add and subtract.  They can understand geometry, recognize faces, retain memories, and make logical deductions that Vallortigara insists exceed the capabilities of some of his graduate students.  Other neuroscientists are finding that chickens practice self-control, alter their message to fit the receiver, and, in some instances, can feel empathy.  Some of these cognitive abilities equal or surpass those of assorted primates, and it is possible that the chicken possesses a primitive self-consciousness.”

Industrialists have only taken interest in chickens in the last handful of decades, but their affects have been staggering and swift, locally and abroad:

p. 222: “Driving down Delmarva’s highways and back roads, I don’t see a single chicken…as chickens have become more numerous, they paradoxically have become less visible.”

p. 212: “A few livestock experts expressed alarm at the pace of change. ‘Modern science…threatens to become dogma,’ warned one in 1960. ‘The scientist might well be advised to go occasionally to the farmyard to learn rather than to teach, or what is far less excusable, to preach.’  The new approach to poultry, he added, was being applied ‘too uncritically and with too great haste.’

p. 250: “In the 1970s, Western aid agencies introduced the Rhode Island Red and other varieties of industrial chickens that quickly died off, but not before mixing with the local birds.  The resulting hybrids lacked tolerance for the tropical diseases and local flocks were decimated.  Ommeh is searching for those few Kenyan birds with enough indigenous genes to survive dry spells and avian illnesses endemic to the country.  ‘Making sure they are disease and drought tolerant is more important than talking about their meat productivity,’ she says.  ‘And we have to move fast or it will be too late.’

p. 252: “The Ho are among the last of the world’s ancient chicken varieties.  Western heritage breeds and the modern industrial chicken are descendants of the nineteenth-century British and American hen fevers.  Village fowl like the Ho, by contrast, date back many centuries and even millennia.  Vietnam alone has sixteen distinct chicken breeds that account for three out of every four chickens raised in the country.  As industrial broilers and layers proliferate around the world, these village birds are quietly disappearing…as they vanish, diverse and useful traits cultivated by local breeders over thousands of chicken generations will be lost.”

p. 255: “Growing birds in enclosed and isolated facilities that strictly limit their contact with anything on the outside, such as ducks, pigs, and humans, reduces the risk of deadly species-to-species transmission.  That fact encourages governments to back large and centralized poultry operations in the name of public health…some researchers suspect that the fast-growing industrial-poultry business has also played a role in the crisis, since the virus spread at the same time that the industry began to expand.”

There were many reasons for a would-be chicken breeder of functional and well-adjusted homestead fowl to be discouraged about the prospects for “success” at this endeavor.  The economic tide is not in our favor at the moment.  But tides shift, and it was evident that on the margins, particularly in the developing world, there are creative and intelligent professionals and individuals who see the value in keeping diversity alive and well for chickens and for the people they are partnered with around the world.  I felt meaningful connection with these tidbits from the edges of the main stories, especially the edges of the dominant modern story of maximum poultry product for minimum grain, which is at once the most alarming and the most tediously boring part of the whole history of the chicken.  I wish everyone who eats chicken products would take time to read this book.  Were that magically possible I am not naïve enough to think our problem would be solved, but the upshot of all those opened eyes would be a greatly broadened opportunity at the healthy end of the chicken farming spectrum and a change in the tone of the conversation (largely silent at the moment) regarding our dependence on this fascinating organism.

by Jason Myers-Benner February 2016

January book report by Jason

One of Jason's 2016 goals is to read a book a month. In a desire to support that effort, we have instituted family reading nights on Sunday.  Jason has also challenged himself to writing and presenting a book report on each book (with a possible hope that maybe his eldest daughter might wish to follow suit - she is currently reading a beekeeping book and says she is going to do one!).

He presented his first two book reports last night - for January and February.  We'll share them here for anyone who is interested:

January 2016-The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry

The reading of The Art of the Commonplace was a long time in coming for me, in that I have admired Berry’s thinking and writing on the economic, religious, cultural and agricultural issues surrounding the relationship of humans and their societies to the land and ecosystems for a long time, but have never pursued a more comprehensive exposure to his thoughts, logic and views before picking up this volume.  I was looking for a graduation present for Dylan Bontrager (my mentee from Shalom) who was interested in economics and politics, and asked Jonathan McRay, who has read far more of Berry’s work than I have, for a recommendation as to which Berry work would be most a propos.  While I was buying him one, I got one for me, too.

The book is divided into five parts: The first part orients us to Berry’s context with the lengthy essay “A Native Hill”, which the editor Norman Wirzba labels ‘A Geobiography.’  In it Mr. Berry takes us with him literarily while he takes a walk around his own land, and then the lands of neighbors also…places he has known and cherished since his earliest memories.  This depiction of an affectionate relationship of a person to a place lays the foundation for the rest of the collection; the most important element of all of the essays being that this is a matter of love.

In the second part, “Understanding our Cultural Crisis”, readers get a primer on Berry’s thinking on a variety of topics, including the history of European occupancy of this continent, racism, economics, relative status of the genders, and the effect of industrial machines on our concept of our bodies.  In this section, there is more of an emphasis on Berry’s notions of the entrenched ills of our society, and less of a focus on what might be done to correct them, though each of the essays is a complete set of thoughts on its own and as such they do include mention of circumstances that would be more favorable.

“The Agrarian Basis for an Authentic Culture”, the third part, is perhaps the most philosophical of the groupings.  The focus is mostly on concepts of human health in the broadest possible sense, with a sense of belonging to a meaningful and thriving community being the especial emphasis.  This necessarily means he must touch on a variety of other topics—nothing in this world exists without connection, ultimately, to everything else.  This is the section of the book where we learn why we might think there is a different way of living worth reaching for, and what it might feel like—what it might do for us individually and collectively—if we were to reorient our culture with gracious and harmonious relationships in view.

Economics, then (the focus of the fourth section), is more of the ‘how’ of Berry’s agrarian concept of society.  It is the living out of the cultural values elucidated in the previous part of the collection.  Holism, integration, appropriate scale, pleasure, and justice for all are emphasized.  Cultural philosophies may value members or elements intrinsically, but economics is how the members of the culture live out their values and show their esteem for those and that which they love.

Mr. Wirzba finishes out the collection with a few of Berry’s essays that touch on religion.  Not surprisingly, Berry’s take on religion is quite unconventional.  He insists that energy and land and their use are topics inseparable from religion, that the division between the spiritual life and the physical life is erroneous and damaging, and that furthermore Christian scripture (he embraces, in his own way, the tradition he was raised in) never intends anything other than these assumptions.

There are many of Wendell Berry’s writings that might be thought of as more practically applicable to a homesteading family like ours.  He has written eloquently about specifically why and how a person or family might choose a life that relates as directly to the land as possible, and his poetry celebrates that kind of life delightfully and intimately.  This collection has a broader focus, with the emphasis being more on what the harmonious way of life looks like when the whole neighborhood or even the whole society are involved.  Still, the reading of this collection of essays contributes several things to the Myers-Benner project here at Tangly Woods.  First, it provides a theoretical context for what we are trying to achieve, legitimizing our efforts in the face of criticism that this is all fine and good for one family, but it isn’t practical for everyone.  It helps prepare the rebuttal that everyone doesn’t need to do what we are…they need to do what they should be doing, and contribute what they have to contribute towards a community of peace and wellbeing that goes well beyond what any of us can do on our own in our one little home.  Second, it comforts us that what we feel compelling us forward is not compelling only us…Mr. Berry has clearly spent his whole life exploring similar yearnings.  When I read his writing on agrarianism, I feel a deep and clear resonance in my mind.  ‘That,’ I think to myself, ‘makes sense to me.  That is the way I want to relate to my neighbors.  That is the world I want to live in.’   Third, it is helpful to have someone explain why choosing to go a different way from the norm is so hard.  His explanations of how our whole economy has been arranged to favor dislocation, dependence, and extraction helped me to deepen my understanding of the forces we are contending with as we turn and make our way against the current.

On the whole, I would have to say that the effect of the book on me (besides delighting me with many beautifully crafted nuggets of wisdom) was to encourage me that there is critical value in what we are attempting to do; that the logical extensions of this way of life have implications for the healing of our community’s deepest sicknesses and discontents.  But it also sobers me deeply if I take his depictions of society’s ills to heart, not least because many of these essays were written thirty or forty years ago, and the trouble he describes has largely worsened, and the predictions he has made have largely been borne out.  The solutions he proposes, though, have the wonderful property of being decentralized.  That is to say that although he calls for the changing of some large-scale policy problems, he also calls for an economy based on many small towns surrounded by many small farms all thriving in the places they love.  And this can’t be built any other way than one community—or even one family—at a time.

Some especially worthwhile quotes from the text:

From Racism and the Economy (1988)

p. 56: “But surely we must go further and say that a market will be degenerative if it is not under the rule of the virtues.  The most obvious lesson of slavery, one that we have never learned, is about the limits of a mere market.  A mere market cannot adequately recognize or protect the full value of a creature, as seller or as buyer or as merchandise.  We now call a market “free” to the extent that buyers and sellers are able to ignore this limitation.  But it was a limit not ignorable by slaves or by the enemies of slavery.  To them it was plain that the market was inevitably reductive: it treated people as bodies, not as souls.”

p. 60: “People who wish to be free to pay no attention to anybody who knows them are not going to accept the constraints or pursue the freedoms of community life.”

p. 63: “Neither teachers nor students feel themselves answerable to the community, for the school does not exist to serve the community.  It exists to aid and abet the student’s escape from the community into “tomorrow’s world,” in which community standards, it goes without saying, will not apply.”

p. 63: “A true and appropriate answer to our race problem, as to many others, would be a restoration of our communities—it being understood that a community, properly speaking, cannot exclude or mistreat any of its members.  This is what we forgot during slavery and the industrialization that followed, and have never remembered.”

p. 64: “We must be aware too of the certainty that the present way of things will eventually fail.  If it fails quickly, by any of several predicted causes, then we will have no need, being absent, to worry about what to do next.  If it fails slowly, and if we have been careful to preserve the most necessary and valuable things, then it may fail into a restoration of community life—that is, into understanding of our need to help and comfort one another.”

From Feminism, the Body, and the Machine (1989):

p. 72: “But in general, apart from its own highly specialized standards of quantity and efficiency, “technological progress” has produced a social and ecological decline.  Industrial war, except by the most fanatically narrow standards, is worse than war used to be.  Industrial agriculture, except by the standards of quantity and mechanical efficiency, diminishes everything it affects.  Industrial workmanship is certainly worse than traditional workmanship, and is getting shoddier every day.  After forty-odd years, the evidence is everywhere that television, far from proving a great tool of education, is a tool of stupefaction and disintegration.  Industrial education has abandoned the duty of passing on the cultural and intellectual inheritance in favor of baby-sitting and career preparation.”

From Think Little (1970):

p. 87: “A man who is trying to live as a neighbor to his neighbors will have a lively and practical understanding of the work of peace and brotherhood, and let there be no mistake about it—he is doing that work.  A couple who make a good marriage, and raise healthy, morally competent children, are serving the world’s future more directly and surely than any political leader, though they never utter a public word.  A good farmer who is dealing with the problem of soil erosion on an acre of ground has a sounder grasp of that problem and cares more about it and is probably doing more to solve it than any bureaucrat who is talking about it in general.  A man who is willing to undertake the discipline and difficulty of mending his own ways is worth more to the conservation movement than a hundred who are insisting merely that the government and the industries mend their ways.”

p. 87: “In other words, if you are fearful of the destruction of the environment, then learn to quit being an environmental parasite.  We all are, in one way or another, and the remedies are not always obvious, though they certainly will always be difficult.  They require a new kind of life—harder, more laborious, poorer in luxuries and gadgets, but also, I am certain, richer in meaning and more abundant in real pleasure.”

From Health is Membership (1994):

p. 154: “A body, love insists, is neither a spirit nor a machine; it is not a picture, a diagram, a chart, a graph, an anatomy; it is not an explanation; it is not a law.  It is precisely and uniquely what it is.  It belongs to the world of love, which is a world of living creatures, natural orders and cycles, many small, fragile lights in the dark.”

From Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community (1992):

p. 166: “…if you are dependent on people who do not know you, who control the value of your necessities, you are not free, and you are not safe.”

p. 167: “To this economy, democracy and the values of the religious traditions mean absolutely nothing.  And those who wish to help communities to survive had better understand that a merely political freedom means little within a totalitarian economy.”

From People, Land, and Community (1983):

p. 192: “Perhaps it is only when we focus our minds on our machines that time seems short.  Time is always running out for machines.  They shorten our work, in a sense popularly approved, by simplifying it and speeding it up, but our work perishes quickly in them too as they wear out and are discarded.  For the living Creation, on the other hand, time is always coming.  It is running out for the farm built on the industrial pattern; the industrial farm burns fertility as it burns fuel.  For the farm built into the pattern of living things, as an analogue of forest or prairie, time is a bringer of gifts.  These gifts may be welcomed and cared for.   To some extent they may be expected.  Only within strict limits are they the result of human intention and knowledge.  They cannot in the usual sense be made.  Only in the short term of industrial accounting can they be thought simply earnable.  Over the real length of human time, to be earned they must be deserved.”

From Conservation and Local Economy (1991):

p. 201: “If we want to succeed in our dearest aims and hopes as a people, we must understand that we cannot proceed any further without standards, and we must see that ultimately the standards are not set by us but by nature.  We must see that it is foolish, sinful, and suicidal to destroy the health of nature for the sake of an economy that is really not an economy at all but merely a financial system, one that is unnatural, undemocratic, sacrilegious, and ephemeral.  We must see the error of our effort to live by fire, by burning the world in order to live in it.

From Economy and Pleasure (1988):

p. 218: “Ultimately, in the argument about work and how it should be done, one has only one’s pleasure to offer.  It is possible, as I have learned again and again, to be in one’s place, in such company, wild or domestic, and with such pleasure, that one cannot think of another place that one would prefer to be—or of another place at all.  One does not miss or regret the past, or fear or long for the future.  Being there is simply all, and is enough.  Such times give one the chief standard and the chief reason for one’s work.”

From The Gift of Good Land (1979):

p. 304: “That is not to suggest that we can live harmlessly, or strictly at our own expense; we depend upon other creatures and survive by their deaths.  To live, we must daily break the body and shed the blood of Creation.  When we do this knowingly, lovingly, skillfully, reverently, it is a sacrament.  When we do it ignorantly, greedily, clumsily, destructively, it is a desecration.  In such desecration we condemn ourselves to spiritual and moral loneliness, and others to want.”

From Christianity and the Survival of Creation (1992):

p. 315: “How we take our lives from this world, how we work, what work we do, how well we use the materials we use, and what we do with them after we have used them—all these are questions of the highest and gravest religious significance.  In answering them, we practice, or do not practice, our religion.”

From The Pleasures of Eating (1989):

p. 326: “Eating with the fullest pleasure—pleasure, that is, that does not depend on ignorance—is perhaps the profoundest enactment of our connection with the world.  In this pleasure we experience and celebrate our dependence and our gratitude, for we are living from mystery, from creatures we did not make and from powers we cannot comprehend.”

by Jason Myers-Benner January 2016

A doozy of a week!

I figure I better balance out the blog postings!  There is probably no way to have a completely accurate reflection of our lives portrayed in this space since the only times I write are when there is enough space in my day for such a luxury (which automatically means it is probably one of the better, less frazzling days). So just in case anyone is wondering: there were many, many times this week where my nerves were shot, my patience was all used up and I wondered how I was going to keep from falling apart!  And, as usually happens, now that I'm sitting nursing a peaceful, sleeping baby in the comfort of the recliner in our bedroom, it's hard to conjure up the intensity of feelings I've experienced since I last wrote. That is probably a good thing!

As noted in my last posting, we need unscheduled days.  We haven't had one since then and I'm feeling it!  So much for our attempt to not schedule more than two evening things a week - we pretty much had something every day/evening this week.  All good stuff, but stuff nonetheless.  I'll admit to feeling more than a tad challenged by this particular kind of pruning job - how to choose which activities with which people to say no to.  And, honestly, while the activities this week complexified an already challenging time, some of those activities were also life-giving and "normalizing" in a time where I feel rather out of sorts, off-balance and just plain tuckered out.

The week kind of followed a bell curve. It started out horribly with an incredibly taxing work day, improved in the middle of the week and then the last few days were more challenging again. I think Jason got at least 3 desperate phone calls from me on Monday. It was a day in the office with Terah where I had meetings almost back to back all day long.  It started out with a too late and too short nap, which never bodes well for the remainder of the day.  It just felt like very little went as I had hoped it might and I was coming apart at the seams by the time Terah and I pulled up our driveway.  It felt very clear then that the stage of taking Terah with me for long days in the office was coming to rapid close.  It took a horrible, no good, very bad day to bring us to the point of actually working at making a change. I guess I'm glad for that clarity, as much as it was hard to shake feelings of failure that it wasn't working any more. I had another really packed day of meetings on Wednesday but we didn't have time between Monday and Wednesday to get Terah acclimated to mama's milk from a rubber nipple.  So I headed back in with her Wednesday, with significantly lowered expectations and a dose of trepidation. It went so much better, in part I think because my day was book ended with walks with good friends.  I was grateful to end my time bringing her in for full days with a good day. I still hope she might join me occasionally when I have a day with few meetings and don't have to be in as long.  Everyone has been so welcoming of our little duo and a number seemed genuinely sad to here me say that it was probably our last full day there together.

I am still pondering a short conversation with one of the students I work with.  She noted how she had just been thinking how wonderful it was that I was coming to work with Terah.  I had such a mixture of emotions in response to her comments.  On the one hand I'm so glad that she thinks it is great that I'm there with a baby.  I'm grateful that no one has made me feel like Terah "doesn't belong" at the office.  It seems to me that I'm the main one that has made that determination.  Most people have only expressed encouragement or awe or a sense of being inspired by the feat we are pulling off, working together.  But I'm not sure I want to be a shining example for anyone.  Maybe if I wasn't such a perfectionist, if I didn't have a job that required that I be productive and focused, and if our fourth daughter was a little more "chill," it might work.  I guess I just don't want anyone to look in on what we were attempting and be so inspired as to think it's a great set up and that they might like to also give it a try.  Again, not that it couldn't work well for some for a longer period of time, but I have found it be super hard!

Initially the balance tipped in favor of continuing, despite the challenges.  It felt worth it to have Terah close to me, and to have her be able to eat straight from the source as she needed/wanted to.  Monday was when I realized that the balance had tipped. I was feeling so frustrated (sadly, a lot of that emotion directed at Terah, who was just doing what babies do), and realized that the pressure I was under was eroding my relationship with her. I did not want that!  And it wasn't good for her either. We needed to find a way to relieve some of the pressure.  So that's where the bottle comes in.  The tries to date have included some playing, a tiny bit of sucking, and a little bit of frustration.  I'm glad we have a little time yet before I'll be 20 minutes away.  Most of the time I'm just upstairs.  Today's bottle try happened while I enjoyed my first massage in 6 months.  It was glorious and I had plenty of knots to be worked on!  Alida enjoyed a fun playdate with my massage therapist's daughter and then we all enjoyed a delicious lunch of baked sweet potatoes with sausage gravy and kale before they headed home.  This was clearly a bright spot in the week!

The other main component contributing to my "feeling fried" is that Terah has found her voice and is using it with gusto!  While I don't think of myself as someone who needs a ton of peace and quiet, a little bit of it each day does help me to think clearly.  Terah has had some really, really loud days!  Days where she just doesn't settle easily for naps, where I try nursing, then going for a walk if that fails and then sometimes going for a walk in our woods and nursing at the same time.  Eventually sleep overtakes her, but sometimes not before I'm feeling a little crazy inside.  And, when awake, she makes happy noises but also a lot of what sounds like complaining of various kinds.  She grunts, squawks, shrieks and babbles.  In some of her intense fussing, she is using new consonants and last night it sounded and awful lot like "ma ma ma ma."

There are things that almost always work to calm her.  She loves music.  If any of us break out in a song, it almost always stops her fussing.  She also loves when Jason plays piano with her.  Another calming thing for her is going outside.  Bring on the warmer weather!  Though we were grateful it stayed cold enough for the girls to enjoy one more stint at the Bridgewater ice skating rink before it closes today for the season.  It was Alida's month to pick our family night activity, and not surprisingly she picked a repeat of January.  Everyone seemed to like it about as much as the last time - including Terah who seemed mesmerized by the skaters going round and round.  We were joined by a few friends, which was a bonus (esp. since C is a figure skater and instructor so the girls and Jason got some good tips).

On the home front it is really starting to feel like spring.  Windowsills and shelves are starting to be taken over by trays of various seedlings and plant starts - parsley, basil, peppers, onions, leeks, sweet potatoes.  And the incubator is loaded with the first two broods of chicks due to hatch days before and the day of Alida's 5th birthday.

Our Lent commitment to not purchase any food is going great.  Though it is not feeling like we are "giving up much" with our freezers and pantry and root cellar still loaded with good food.  But it is doing exactly what I hoped it would do - it is making me focus on using up what we have and being creative with new uses for those things that we have in abundance.  It's been fun!

I think we are all benefiting as well from our individual commitments - Kali even moved up her reading time from 10:30 p.m. latest to 10 p.m.  Alida also noted that she added not getting out more than 10 things at a time, but I can report that she has decidedly failed at that one!

We got started with an evening family ritual recently which has stuck and has quickly become a favorite.  We all eagerly anticipate gathering in our bedroom at night for Jason to read (when he isn't cracking up) out loud James Herriott.  What great stories - at least what I hear of them.  Alida never makes it through a chapter and I doze in and out, enjoying thoroughly whatever parts I get to hear!

Quick update: the dehydrated squash leather is good!  Amazing how much it shrank - I'll spread it even thicker next time and we want to experiment with some spices or toppings like nuts, coconut, cinnamon or cocoa powder.  A great new snack food discovered! Also, Jason got our first round of fermented winter squash going and I was able to stomach some - so definitely not pregnant and am not having lingering aversions (though I will admit I'm still not itching to consume the stuff!  So we continue to enjoy our winter foods, while at the same time starting to get eager for the first spinach salad of spring.  Jason uncovered the parsley/cilantro bed today, took away the leaf mulch from the figs and is working to load leaves on the garden paths.  Spring is a comin'!

In this crazy busy week, I almost missed the first walking iris bloom of the year!

My idea of a good day!

Wow, did I need a day like today!  It confirms what I already knew - this family needs days at home where we don't have to go anywhere.  If for no one else, it helps gets Terah's little digestive system get back on track.  This little gal likes to poop at home and sometimes will go all day without going when I'm at work with her or we are all away from home.  She's gotten three good poopies out in the sink today (still no poops in her diaper - I think we are going on 2 plus months...).  Big girl!

While we are on the subject of things that will likely make her roll her eyes at me and ask me why in the world I posted that on a public forum, here's a video of her on her changing table today. And, yes, I did try to get just a few seconds of her rather impressive thighs. They are super squeezable!



So, today: the word I told Jason best describes the day for me is "expansive."  I didn't feel super rushed, and felt like I had time to spend with each of my family members and still got a good number of things done.  I mean, I even scrubbed our toilet and bathroom sink!  And clipped all the girls' finger and toe nails!

The day started with no alarm - well, I guess I always have my "terah-alarm."  We were up pretty early but Jason had beat us to it (and he had been up early enough that he was into my idea of starting the day with a cup of coffee).  But first Jason helped Terah and I get a much needed shower - a very nice way to start our day!  By the time our coffee was steeping, Alida had joined us in the front room and a fire was making the room nice and cozy.  I got our soaked and slightly fermented amaranth porridge going and before long roused Kali so she wouldn't miss out.  We all enjoyed bowls of porridge with some combination of toppings (homegrown dried strawberries, soaked dehydrated pecans, coconut, raisins).

I had my little kitchen morning burst, getting cream skimmed for butter, getting yogurt started, doing all our dishes from our day away the day before and straightening up. By that time Terah was ready for her first nap and she sacked out nursing and transferred to the front pack for my marathon laundry hanging job.  Alida came to help me, chattering the whole time and hanging a few things on her little line.  All the lines were full by the time we were done, and then in to cut up a large Pennsylvania Dutch Squash to go with our homegrown ground cornbread, steamed spinach and leftover pork and venison roast for lunch.

Terah is making us feel rather guilty for not including her at meal times so she has now added squash to the list of foods she has licked, sucked or otherwise sampled.  She loved it.  She started the meal already nearing her next nap time so her interest got more and more desperate until I couldn't keep her happy with the little bites and she dissolved and was asleep nursing in a matter of minutes.

I got food put away but then settled down with Terah's baby book, my journal and the recently arrived Sun magazine.  I did some writing, a little reading, took a short snooze and all the while Terah slept and nursed intermittently.   Kali was reading and Alida was looking at books.  All was peaceful and quiet!  I offered to read Alida some of the many library books we had brought home yesterday.  Thanks to tips (books lists and how to put them on hold) from my friend K, we came home with books I was looking forward to reading. I think Alida was in a slight state of shock when I read book after book without falling asleep and without saying I needed to do something else.  It felt really, really good!

Eventually I was itching to get the lunch dishes done (before supper) and so passed a sleeping baby to Kali. She looked a little bigger than the last time Kali had held her sleeping. She soon woke happy and was our side kick while we got our roasted squash spread on dehydrating trays to try our one ingredient squash leather, I finished cleaning up from lunch, made some egg salad, got the butter washed and in the freezer and likely some other random tasks I'm forgetting.

The older girls had decided to go outside and when I looked out they were with Jason in the garden.  Jason had finished up making tomato and pepper cages and was digging carrots. I got Terah's little sweatshirt and hat on and out we went. She loves being outside and is so interested in everything around her.  We watched the chickens, checked out the carrot digging, and noted the purple crocuses blooming in Nora's garden.  Speaking of flowers that remind us of Nora, Jason found a clump of yellow flowers blooming - 6 of them (one for each member of our family!).

We concluded our afternoon by going for a family walk, and snagging Terah her third and final nap of the day.  Now we are back, Jason is washing up carrots, Kali is keeping the fire stoked and folding laundry, Alida is entertaining Terah in her bouncy seat and I'm thinking about getting supper underway.  But first a few other things I wanted to mention.

It's nothing new but I recently commented again to Jason how Kali is spoiling me.  She continues to ask how she can help many times a day and now knows enough ways to be helpful that she doesn't even always need to ask. If I make a little list for her, she happily goes about the tasks without reminders.  On my last work day at home I told her there were a few things she could do if she wanted to. I was back in our bedroom working while Terah slept and I heard Kali loading the wood boxes and then coming in from emptying the compost and then the sound of her sweeping the floors. She's too much!

Alida's forte is still in other arenas but when she is rested and has had enough cuddle time she's an incredible kid too.  She is pretty cute about not participating in our family Lent commitment to make no food purchases. I'm not in the least bothered by it - I actually get a pretty big kick out of the four bananas she bought for herself with her money at the co-op yesterday when Jason went with the older girls to the post office next door.  Kali, on the other hand, would not even get herself a piece of free fruit at the co-op as she thought that was close enough to cheating.  I love how different each of our girls are and how amazing they are!  Here they are in the matching hats Kali made for them.  Off to spend time with them...

Growing a culture, starting at home

The following blog entry is "guest posted" by myself, Jason:

Tonight was our second Family Night of the year.  Janelle was the Decider this time (move over, W!), and she didn't think she could top my family night from January which was ice skating at the Bridgewater Generations park, so she decided we'd just take a walk, eat supper, play a game, and read a book together (the book was my idea).  Actually, the ice skating was her suggestion, so let's give credit where it's due.  But this was not an ordinary walk--oh, no--it was mighty unusual in that it was a walk with ground rules: no talking about schedules or logistics or the to-do list...the only topics of conversation that were allowed were things we observed in the world around us.

This was much harder than expected.  Any time lady nature failed to dazzle us with some unusual tree shape or a swollen stream or beautiful cloud or whatnot it was all too easy to fall straight back into using the time to hammer out some detail of our lives.  Kali was our referee, but she broke the rule a time or two also and had to be called on the carpet.  Alida had the easiest time with it.  O.k,, I guess Terah was the only one with a perfect score, but she was asleep for most if not all of it, so she is disqualified.  What a good activity!  Hopefully by the time we hit the driveway entrance again we had gotten a bit of a taste of what it could be like to develop a family practice of mindfulness, and had gained a realization of how far from that we often are.

By the time we got back to the house, shutting in the ducks and chickens on the way in, we were all pretty hungry and ready for Kali's very fancy "S" meal.  Everything on the menu had to be prepared by Kali (her Monday night tradition) and had to start with "S".  So we had a Scrumptious Supper of Spaghetti Squash with Sauteed venison and Sauce, with Soybeans to the side.  Also a person could add Seasoning (including grated Romano, thankfully).  Yummers.

While we were baking squash, we decided to try something new.  I had discovered earlier in the day that our prize Tromboncino from this past year--all 50 inches of which has been displayed on the buffet throughout the fall and winter--had a secret bad spot developing on the back side.  That was a side effect, I suspect, of enduring the high moisture and temperature of the indoor human environment since early October; it gets a pass.  At Janelle's suggestion I started a gallon of winter squash ferment with the top half (it was still almost completely firm and juicy, by the way), then after considering together we decided to bake the rest of it along with the spaghetti and stripetti squashes for supper, scraping out the flesh of the tromboncino to cook down for pumpkin butter.  We had made some nice pumpkin butter earlier in the week from a PA Dutch squash that was boiled and pureed; it seemed reasonable that baking it would eliminate the need for steaming off all the excess boiling liquid in the reduction process, saving substantial time and energy.  The jury is officially still out, but it looked really promising as I spooned rich, relatively dry baked squash flesh into the crock pot and then quickly mashed it with a potato masher.  I had to be quick because everyone was starting to snitch the yummy stuff!  Do we grow the sweetest squash I ever met or am I just off of sugar?

Part of the joy of evenings like this is the family culture that is developing around our habits and activities.  I took special note of one aspect of that this evening while we ate the squashes together and decided which we wanted to save the seeds from:  "I guess it must be pretty rare," I observed, "for a family to get so much fun and joy out of evaluating and developing the varieties of plants and animals that they depend on year after year to meet their needs."  Janelle thought perhaps it is only rare in our time and place, and I suppose that could be so.  In fact I feel rather ignorant of the methods folks use and have used around the world and through time as they engage the selection process in their domesticated varieties.  But I suspect that usually it is not so much a family hobby as it has been for us (though maybe for some families it has been).  My suspicion is that often it has been the work of one or two members of the family to take on the selection task, or that it would be more a matter of selection being incorporated into the agricultural portion of their culture, consciously or unconsciously, and perhaps with changes in traits occurring imperceptibly over long periods of time.  Likely it looks vastly different in different times, places, species, and cultures.  I suspect also that global connectivity has delivered to us an unprecedented access to genetic diversity of plants, even though the total number of varieties worldwide is in sharp decline.

In any case we get a real kick out of it, and I am so excited to see what the next five to ten years brings in terms of the plants and animals we work with becoming ever more at home in our context--making our home their home, I suppose--and meeting our needs and desires ever more capably.  There is much to be said for finding a variety that does the job reliably and sticking with it (i.e., keep ordering that seed every year).  But why not take it a step further and use that variety or varieties as a starting point and take some initiative to hone that fit until it's so dexterously meeting your family's needs that you would sooner give up your TV or your favorite toothpaste or maybe even a juicy opportunity in another state than part with that strain of organism providing for your needs from the land you love?  Does anyone else want that kind of relationship with their sustenance?  Does anyone else want to love their seeds that much?  Man, I sure do.  It makes harvest time about doubly joyful and interesting...'Look what the crop looks like THIS year!'  From popcorn testing to squash evaluation (we are tough customers, let me tell you) to admiring each year's batch of chickens as they range in the yard to holding our spinach to a rigorous standard, this family has a burgeoning love affair with breeding domesticated organisms.  It feels like what will develop as a result may be something pretty special.  Our preference would be that just as my passion for this topic seems to have infected the whole bunch of us, we might begin to be surrounded by other families who take some of the same satisfactions in their own homes.  To me that would signify the possible beginning, at long last, of the true homecoming of our society; the establishment of an enduring stability; the making of peace with and in this land.  Once your eyes have been opened by this process, I will hazard that you will begin to see the human condition as I often do:  in our self-perceived impoverishment we blunder our way through a world positively dripping with potential.  Maybe this is some of what Fukuoka (The One Straw Revolution...highly recommended) meant when he held a piece of rice straw in his hand and asserted that if we really understood the potential in that one piece of straw, it would cause a total revolution in our way of being in the world.

But back to our evening.  After supper we settled into a lively round of The Marble Game (a homemade board game much like Sorry and Trouble).  Alida won, which made for an easy transition to tooth brushing and then starting in on a family out-loud reading of James Herriot's All Creatures Great and Small, during which Alida almost immediately fell asleep on my lap despite my giggles at Mr. Herriot's word choices.

On evenings like this it feels to me that if it weren't for money and climate change my life would be more or less perfect.  On the other hand, perhaps it is a reaction against the excesses of the money economy and the environmental crisis that has pushed us so clearly in these directions...so maybe we owe more to these than we usually think we do.

Experiences of life and death...

Jason went to town to play ping pong with a friend Friday evening.  He texted me when he was headed home, which was soon followed by another text that said, "Stopped for a deer. Be right home." I was, at this point, rather preoccupied with the nighttime routine, involving two overly tired children, so didn't reply to clarify what precisely he meant - texting often leaves much unsaid!  Upon his arrival home, I learned that there was in fact a deer in our car.

I do not take lightly animals being hit along the road and wish it didn't happen. But it does. And if we find them in time, it feels good to make use of the meat if we are able to. The next day I asked the girls if they knew what daddy had brought home.  It got the conversation started and I mentioned something about it being a new pet, named Fred (not really sure what inspired that comment).  That got Jason's creative juices flowing and before the end of the meal, this "ode to Fred" had been constructed.

We have a new pet deer named Fred.
He is dead.

Crossing roads successfully was not a good fit.
He was hit.

While he was alive we did not get to meet him.
We will eat him.

While on the subject of death, we had a funeral in our home today.  Jason had put "play foam" on our family meeting agenda.  It was bound to be a contentious subject. Someone gave Kali play foam many years back. For those unfamiliar with the stuff (you haven't missed much!), it's little colored beads that all stick together and you can play with it, kind of like play dough. That is until it is years old, has lost much of its stick-togetherness and is starting to stink. Jason got to clean up after the last time Alida played with it, thus the agenda item.

Alida's only comment on that particular agenda item was, "keep it."  The rest of us unanimously agreed the time to part ways had come. Jason suggested we have a play foam funeral, sing some songs, shed tears and lay it to rest.  Alida took care of the tears part.  We sang a variation of "Alleluia the play foam is over..." and we all, minus Alida, had some black clothing on to signify mourning.  While we were at it, we ditched some moldy crusty play dough.  Alida's grief was appropriate and very short lived.  Kids are amazing that way.  It felt like a pretty good process in the end - holding her while she expressed her sadness at the loss and then watching her bounce back and sing as she played with the remaining mediocre store bought play dough, still with tear stained cheeks.   Then this afternoon she and Kali made a new batch of pink play dough.  It is a huge hit and Alida happily threw out another container of store bought stuff, which now pales in comparison with the new soft pliable dough.  We are all happy with the outcome.  I love family meetings!  And the notes will give the girls many good laughs down the road.

There's also lots of good living happening!  This weekend has had some really good low key hang out time with the girls for me. It's been so welcome!  Terah tried out the outdoor baby swing. I got out on numerous walks (as that is the best way to assure Terah her 3 naps/day, especially if anything exciting is happening inside).  The older girls have joined me for a few fun walks and I particularly loved the fashion statement Alida made on our walk today with her sparkly pink shorts over her footie jammies.  I so often wonder what the neighbors think of us!  Terah got to enjoy watching the chickens and ducks and we visited Kali and Alida's teepee that they made in one of their long outdoor play times. On my way outside with a picnic snack for the girls, I admired a patch of blooming crocuses and took a deep breath at the sight of Kali at the top of her climbing tree (she is careful, but my she is high up)! Inside the house, Terah has enjoyed a few short stints in the highchair, and was fond of sucking on a carrot circle.  She is definitely starting to seem interested in what the big people are doing when they sit down at the table with plates of colorful yummy smelling things in front of them.  She still seems most content in someone's arms but we keep trying play time in other locations.  Tummy time is still not a favorite but having increased control over her limbs will help with that I think!  She continues to be a voracious chewer and impressive drooler!  Here are some visuals of the aforementioned things:

And now it is Sunday afternoon and today has felt more sabbath-like than many Sundays of late. Rainy days always help with that.  Jason just collected the eggs with all three daughters for the first time and is now playing piano with Terah while the older girls play with their chickens and ducks.  I've been happy for a full day at home to stay in my pj's and gear up for another week. It is uncertain what new things this week will hold, but no doubt there will be some.  Terah has also been busy finding and using her voice and it is rather loud at times.  That, coupled with my sheer exhaustion, is making us wonder how much longer it will feel like a good option for us to go to work together.  So a bottle may be on the "new things" this week.  That comes with very mixed feelings for me.  While I can't adequately describe how tired I feel at times being tethered to our little munchkin, I also am pretty taken by how it feels to be such a bright spot in someone's life. We keep finding our way...

She did it - at least one of my 2016 predictions came true!

It's been a Benner tradition now for a number of years that at our holiday gathering at the end of the year we all make predictions about the coming year. I predicted that Alida would donate her hair this year.  As of February 13th, it came true!  She was showering Saturday (the one day/week currently that her hair gets clean) and somehow the subject came up and she decided she wanted to do it...and that very day!  It worked out conveniently that we were having a birthday celebration for my mom that evening and Aunt K would be joining (who cut my and Kali's hair when we donated).  She was up for the task once again.  Alida was so focused and serious as we got her hair parted in sections and braided and ready for the big cut. I will admit that I was a little concerned she might decide against it upon seeing how short it was going to be (I was having my own misgivings).  But she never swayed a bit.  I think she enjoyed (but might have even been a tad taken aback a bit) by all the attention she was getting by chopping a foot off her hair.  I got to watch the whole thing with Terah sacked out in my arms, and almost got a bit teary as I watched the transformation.  It's amazing how different she looks.  And how perfectly it fits her. Her hair is now as bouncy and spunky as she is.  And she loves it. She seems to particularly love jumping up and down and having her hair bounce along with her.  It's super cute!

And, speaking of firsts, look who tried out the high chair for the first time!  I haven't been brave enough to let her test any more foods since letting her suck on an apple sliver the other night and then having the worst night of sleep we had had in weeks.  So chewing on toys it is for a little bit longer:



Terah also got put to sleep by Grandma Myers for the first time the other day. Mom brought her grinder along so we could grind some wheat we had around (no food purchases in Lent will certainly help us be creative and use up what we have around!).  While we were at it, we did some cornmeal too.  Terah still enjoys the vibrations this makes, and was lulled to sleep (though Mom had to keep throwing some back in the hopper to keep grinding so as to not wake her by stopping).  I still would not call Terah a "good sleeper" but am happy to report that I think she gave me about a 6 hour block last night: if I fed her between 8:15 p.m .and 2:15 a.m. I do not remember it!