The past 10 days - what is sustaining me!

It seems likely that in the foreseeable future any blog posts that get written will mostly likely happen on Sundays. They will be much cheerier than if they were written on any other day of the week! At one point in the week, I found myself literally shaking from the panicky feelings coursing through me related to all I needed to accomplish sitting in front of my laptop. It was a moment that has stayed with me, as it was a bit of a wake up call that I will be no good to anyone if I completely fall apart. A few friends have emphasized that same lesson on a few physically distanced/socially connected hikes this week!

So the entire focus of this particular "scrapbook entry" is going to be on the bright moments that have colored my life and brought joy since the last time I wrote. As I sit down to write this, there is some impressive block tower construction happening in the background. A massive tower just collapsed, all around and on top of Terah, but thankfully giggling followed. The moods in this home are normally pretty bright on Sundays. Sabbaths - what a grand idea! We all look forward to them so very much. And today was no different in serving a very important function of providing some rest, some play, some rejuvenating connecting times, some hands in the dirt, some exercise, some tasty food and some laughter. 

But let me back up a bit! Last Sunday was Easter and probable rain delayed a planned hike freeing up time to slip an egg hunt into our day. I have to say that my all time favorite hiding spot this year was down in the middle of a mullein plant. I'm also just a general fan of mullein right now, and thrilled to see it popping up in many places around our property - it's a favorite tea in our household when anyone has a cold/cough. But I divert from the Easter egg hunt. The rain held off long enough for us to also enjoy our first family picnic in Terah's turtle shell. That is going to be one sweet spot in the heat of summer! The chickens have been enjoying it too and so they came over to check out who was in their hiding spot. And they were not disappointed as it wasn't long before the girls were sharing our picnic breads with them. 

This is a different breed/group than the ones that crashed our picnic but Alida has now taught many chickens to jump up and get popcorn or bread from her hand.

Food right now is a mix of the abundance of last year and the firsts of this year. We are still taste testing lots of winter squash and need to up our game so we get through the best ones before planting time next month. The trombone squash here did not disappoint! I'm glad for some cool weather that has soups still tasting good. A new favorite too was a sorbet where I just pureed cooked squash with frozen raspberries and maple syrup. Yum! We now also have enough fresh spinach to enjoy it in multiple ways - steamed, in salads, on pizza... Kali has been the spinach harvester to date this year, for which I've been very grateful!

Many things are flowering right now, which is not only exquisitely beautiful but also a promise of things to come. Our over wintered peas are putting on a show! We are pretty excited about this breeding project. We are working on selecting a cross of Austrian Winter Pea and Sugar Snap. Wouldn't it be great to be able to plant peas in the fall, have them over winter without protection and be ready to go in the spring in any warm snap? We are just a few years in and so we don't have seed that we are confident will consistently yield delicious peas but just as soon as we refine it, we hope to share it around!

The turnips are flowering, we are hopeful that we'll have a good seed crop. That will be great, as I have a feeling we'll be growing even more turnips going forward. It was the best raw veggie that we were able to enjoy for most of the winter.

Another exciting new thing that we are hoping to harvest seed from before the voles and/or chipmunks get it all is this Ethiopian naked barley. Yep, a barley without hulls. We were unable to find a winter-ready naked barley, so we're trying to select one. These are the kinds of things that get the Myers-Benners amped up!

That and baby chicks. Terah was jumping up and down all around the back kitchen the other evening as our second incubator of eggs were hatching. It was particularly exciting since, due to not having any reliable broody hens at this time, we were going to need to keep the chicks inside for a bit. This brought sheer joy for our littlest gal who adores them. They are getting lots of human contact - Terah just said "can I go play with the chickies?" as I typed this! The females from this hatch will be going to two other families and so I'd say the girls are doing them a service by hopefully increasing the odds that these birds will be accustomed to people! Other than at night I'm very happy to have them inside. But I feel a little like we have had an infant in the house the last few nights as one will get out from under the brooder and get chilly and peep loudly enough to wake us up. Jason and I have taken turns going and tucking a little one back under its heat source. It's hard to stay upset at all at something so cute!

When Terah is not playing with chicks, which is most of the time right now, she may be found coloring. I don't remember Kali being a big coloring book person at all. Alida maybe a little more so but Terah loves to color. Sometimes we won't hear anything from her for an hour or more as she concentrates on her work. It is really fun to see what sparks the interest and attention of each of our girls. This was one of her recent masterpieces. She has enjoyed sharing it - when she finished it, she told me that I could share it with anyone. That I could share it with my students. :) She had shown a few of them via zoom when it was still in progress. Anyone I was with on zoom, she wanted to share her work with. IF they were people that knew her, I allowed a little show and tell!

Speaking of show and tell, this flower is putting on quite the show on our front windowsill. The tiny Amaryllis seeds leading to these spectacular blooms were given to us by a neighbor and friend before his death. As I look at them today, I feel sadness and gratitude within me. I also find myself thinking of friends who today are journeying through the first anniversary of their daughter Norah's death. I feel so in need of better developing the capacity to hold the seemingly contradictory emotions that fill much of life these days!

Today had a lot of joy in it for our family. We took a hike up the trail behind our home that we had cleared awhile back. We all love it - both the journey and the destination! All photos of our hike below were taken by Alida. One more trip up and back and we'll have the junk pile/remains of a couch cleaned up!

 When we returned home, we did do just a bit of gardening. My work schedule is such that I'm not getting in on much outdoor gardening time right now and I miss it. So it felt wonderful to be outside for a bit together. I got to help fill a basket of weeds for the pigs and then we planted some cole crop seedlings and also transplanted some Cottonwood sapling volunteers and planted out some elderberry cuttings we had rooted inside. The girls found a new fun spot in the process for digging and making clay balls. It was hard to coax them inside, even with the prospect of popcorn and playing games!

So big announcement: Tonight was the final popcorn taste testing of the year. I will admit that I never thought we would get through the hundreds of cups, but we did it! So we will be ready for popcorn planting!

Well, I think that is all for this evening. The daylight is waning and I am determined to get to bed early tonight to set me on a good path at the start of what will be a taxing week with this machine on my lap for much of it! I'm so grateful for a day like today where I was away from it for many hours of the day. I am hoping that in time I can carve out more than one day a week where I'm not glued to a screen. But for now I know that my computer is one of the tools I have available to keep adding "mi granito de arena" (my little grain of sand) to the work that needs to be done. So I hope to keep a mostly friendly relationship with it, which means we also need to have some time apart. With that, I'll sign off!

How to sum up these days?

There is just a hint of light left in the sky. Another day is winding to a close. I often have to remind myself what day of the week it is. I figured I probably ought to bring some balance to our scrapbook and share a picture that more accurately reflect the reality of many hours of many of my days. On my "office days" I've been clocking 10-12+ hours in front of my computer, and many of those hours staring at myself in a whole smattering of zoom meetings. I try to break things up a bit by moving from living room to dining room to kitchen to guest bedroom to in-law quarters to swing set to picnic table. 

The screen time is wearing on me, but I think I'm slowly finding ways to build in some rejuvenation. You will see snippets of that in the words and pictures below. I am not wanting to complain about the state of my work life, only to say that I'm still definitely trying to find my way - the learning curve on many fronts is very steep and figuring out how to contribute what I can and also maintain my sanity such that I can be useful for the long haul. I'm definitely learning that taking my work outside when I can is a good choice!

So before I get too far into this post, I promised those that are landing here from Facebook that I would share a "Tangly Woods tip!" Folks don't have to know us for long to observe ways that we live that are counter to the dominant culture around us. The list is long and it is intentional. Often, even while being deeply committed to the choices we have made, it can make us feel a bit odd. We can often chuckle and find humor in it - like when Jason is cutting the driveway with a grass whip while a neighbor buzzes by on a riding lawnmower - but at other times, it would only be honest to admit that it feels a bit lonely or alienating. But, all of us a sudden, some of these ways of living don't seem so odd, and I'm even inclined to invite others to join us. So here goes: use cloth wipes when you pee in place of toilet paper and to blow your nose in place of tissues!

It was years ago when we had babies in cloth diapers that this practice emerged naturally for us. Cloth diapering websites charged many dollars for little packs of cloth wipes. A tip from another frugal Mennonite gal (which I still am at my core), helped me see this was entirely unnecessary. A trip to Goodwill netted a handful of baby blankets for 50 cents each. A few moments to cut them into squares and we were ready to roll. So we found ourselves washing cloth diapers and baby wipes - why couldn't the rest of us use them and cut down on our toilet paper? In fact, we could! We started then and have to this day and I recommend it wholeheartedly! Are you intrigued? Here's a few more tips and benefits:

• Thin cotton blankets work great but we also used things like old pajamas. Anything soft that you can cut into squares. Flannel is ideal.
• I strongly recommend squares that are at least 6x6 inches. Smaller has its pitfalls.
• We only use them when we pee or to blow our nose and throw them into a small bucket next to our toilet that we then dump into any load of laundry.
• Gone are the battles of kids using too much toilet paper - just grab one wipe and you've got what you need!
• Our noses are much less raw when we have colds - the cloth is much gentler on our skin.
• In the dead of winter, you may wish to hand them on drying rack inside or at least shake them out before you take them out to hang or you will be trying to shake out little frozen balls of cloth.
• To save on clothespins, hang two wipes with one pin in a double layer

And for our remaining TP needs, we enjoy supporting Who Gives a Crap. They provide TP we feel good about using AND their emails and TP wrappers are very entertaining. That said, right now the best you can do is get on their wait list!

Thus concludes Tangly Woods Tip #1. Now for what is sustaining and nourishing me these days: garden time, growing things, cute kiddos, fresh foods, family work time and hikes in no particular order:

We are often pretty busy and moving at a pretty fast clip when we are outside on the farm. Sometimes having the camera out with me is a distraction and sometimes it helps me to pause and notice the beauty and sweetness right in front of me. There has been a lot of that recently! Probably my most favorite moment in the last week was when we were filling potato trenches with biochar, covering the biochar, planting potatoes and then covering them. Terah got inspired to help cover with her little hoe and she was dedicated and giving us updates by the minute of how far she had gotten. When I looked up and saw this I had one of those heart melting moments. She kept shouting, "Did you ever think I would get this far?" That may also have been the work session where out of the blue she shouted out to us,"When we die, do we become dust?" Oh the conversations that we have in the garden!!

We've spent a lot of time as a family in the root patch lately. First there was the aforementioned potato planting. It is worth noting that we had EXACTLY the number of potatoes that we needed. That was just a bit too close for comfort - so note to us that we need to keep at least 2 very full (plastic, to retard moisture loss, but leave a hole for breathability) shopping bags full of seed potatoes for next year.

And then after Jason spent considerable time and energy weeding the garlic (with a little family assistance but we can't take too much credit), we side dressed it with compost from the composting chicken coop. Yes, all 6 rows with 96 feet of garlic in each - we use it by the bulb in this household!

Now not everyone stays on the job the entire time, especially when the sprinkler is on the next rotation and it's sunny out. And a common diversion for Alida is taking a weeder and bucket and popping out dandelions for the pigs. They love to see her coming - for both the treats and belly rubs!

We pushed pretty hard this past week through Saturday night, determined to make Sunday a true day off - no CJP work for Janelle, no heavy farm work for Jason. I feel confident I would not have been in a very good space at this moment had it not been for the sense of having a true sabbath break. It was such a lovely day, with the highlight definitely being packing up and heading up our woods trail to the top of hill behind our home with a picnic, blanket, books and drawing materials. Good food, beautiful people, time to read and a short snooze.

Before we headed back down through the May Apples, we started the clean up project on the old bench someone placed there years ago that is disintegrating up there and some animal has shredded apart. We made a good dent and will be back for more.

Sabbath day or no, we are trying to eat outside as much as possible right now. My mom says that food always tastes better outside and our family unanimously agrees with her! So lunches are often on the concrete pad under the shade of the pine trees - which today had a few of us shivering. Supper tends to be at the picnic table right by Nora's garden. The chickens normally find us at either location, hoping for some droppings. Tonight Alida was training a chicken to jump up to her hand for a bread crumb - it was better than any Netflix show. :) 

Whether eating inside or out, we are savoring spinach salads daily. We are in the thick of violet-season, red-bud season, and hard-boiled egg season! We then recommend that you top it off with some soaked dehydrated pecans from Koinonia Farms! I don't tire of this combination and always feel this desire to find a way to "freeze" or "can" this time of year (we have yet to find any way to preserve red buds or violets and so we just savor them and eat a lot of salad). And my kids remind me often that you don't have to make a spinach salad to eat red buds.

What else is growing at Tangly Woods other than plants? Chicks! They have ravenous appetites and a very protective mama. I've been enjoying doing chores a few times a week and look forward to this stop on the rounds. The last few times, though, it's been hard to get the feeder out without the chicks practically jumping out of the coop out of eagerness for breakfast (which would be about a 4 ft drop). Today my care in one area, led to tragedy in another. It's so hard to even type this as my stomach turns all over again thinking about it. 

Terah and Alida were with me and were eager to see the feisty little birds. I managed to get the feeder and was pulling it out carefully and trying to close the door so none fell. My lack of experience and in my haste, I never saw that one little chick had its head out and I felt some resistance as I closed the door, opened it immediately and to my horror saw one of the chicks flopping around clearly not ok. I wanted to take that second back but the best I could do was get it into my hands before it got trampled on. By the time that I got to Jason, it had died in my hands. I felt its little warm body and stroked its just emerging wing feathers on the walk to the compost. There I was assured again that my tear ducts do still work and I stood crying while Terah and Alida hugged me. There was nothing to do but acknowledge how heart breaking it is when you are trying to care for creatures and you end up causing harm. My daughters were the greatest gift to me - I was pretty upset at myself and all I felt from them was unconditional acceptance and their full presence with me while grief washed over me. 

In brighter news, but still chicken related, Terah has decided she wants her own chickens. It's not the time for building chicken coops, so the outcome of a recent family meeting was that she could "adopt" one of the roving pens as hers for now. We figured this could help determine if this is a passing whim or is around to last. So far she has enjoyed it and I think they are a fan, as they now get popcorn treats (chickens love the duds). Most days, Alida willingly does her own chores and then helps Terah with hers. When those girls don't get along it is not pretty, but the vast majority of the time it's so very sweet!

In closing, while most in-person social gatherings are but distant memories, we are still enjoying weekly hikes with Jonathan and Christen to Hensley's Pond. We all do everything we can to honor being 6 ft apart, yet maintain emotional closeness. It's good to have some outside perspectives and to process how life is unfolding for us and those around us. To do that while hiking and enjoying the unfolding of spring around us is a gift I treasure, and a privilege I know that many are not able to enjoy presently. 

In light of the above thoughts and on Easter weekend approaching, maybe I'll leave you with a Wendell Berry quote: “So, friends, every day do something that won’t compute … Give your approval to all you cannot understand … Ask the questions that have no answers. Put your faith in two inches of humus that will build under the trees every thousand years … Laugh. Be joyful though you have considered all the facts … Practice resurrection.”

Quarantined for Alida's 9th Birthday

On Alida's birthday, I noted (with an over-exaggerated amount of sorrow) that we were leaving behind the cool number combo of having a 4 year old x 2 = an 8 year old x 2 = a 16 year old. Without missing a beat, Kali informed me that now we have 3 girls in ascending square numbers. 2x2=4; 3x3=9; 4x4=16. Ok, so that is even cooler! So, until August when Kali messes things up by turning 17, we are good!! 😉

For weeks leading up to Alida's birthday, Terah wanted to give her a present. Most days at some point she would ask Alida, "Can I give you your present now?" Finally on the eve of her birthday, Alida gave in to her younger sister's excitement and insistence. Terah had drawn a sweet rainbow and hearts picture and had wrapped up her little glow in the dark duckie for Alida. I didn't even know what she had been up to, but she had clearly caught on to the joy of giving. It was very sweet!

With all the birthday party plans cancelled, Alida was "stuck" with her parents and sisters for her birthday. Weeks and weeks before her birthday, when I introduced the idea that a large gathering may not be in the cards, she piped up that that was ok and that she had already thought of that. That gal doesn't miss a beat. And while I'm sure there were flickers of disappointment, my sense was that through and through she felt loved and celebrated on her birthday.  But here I am getting ahead of myself.

With so many fun things planned for her birthday, we had to get a head start the night before. One silver lining to not having 40 or so other people join us for her birthday dinner was that the very special cherry pie only needed to be divided by 5! Why so special you may wonder? As Alida's due date was approaching in 2011, we learned of a cold storage unit that was pitching pallets and pallets of sour cherries from a unit that someone had stopped paying for. Thanks to some personal connections, we got several boxes of pitted sour cherries. Too many for the freezer, so on March 26 my mom and I got into a sour cherry canning project and partway through labor started! We canned cherries while I labored and at 9:08 that evening (right on her due date), Alida arrived! We've been saving the very last jar of cherries for some special occasion: how about her 9th birthday!?

The other thing happening on the day before her birthday and spilling into her special day was the first chicks hatching! Most beat her, but a few lingered and hatched on her actual birthday. These fuzz balls were more a gift for Terah, as she would have just sat and held them all day. She had a large meltdown the night before Alida's birthday when she held a chick, washed up for bed and then noted that Kali and Alida were still holding them. This was right before Jason took a dishpan full out to stick under the broody hen who was hatching some at the same time. This was too much for our tired little gal and she grieved loudly for quite some time! At least she got it out of her system BEFORE Alida's birthday!

It was only about 7 a.m. on her birthday when I heard the first peep out of Alida. I invited her to snuggle with me in bed, but I could tell there was no chance of her going back to sleep. She was too excited for the day ahead. So the two of us got up and enjoyed a quiet game of Cribbage with some hot chocolate for sipping to kick of the day! The night before I had put my auto-responder on my work email so I was fully dedicated to celebrating with Alida for the day, and was looking forward to the break from screens too!

Terah must have worn herself out the night before as we finally had to wake her to all go out to do chores together. But before that we woke Kali to join us for giving Alida one of her presents. I had created a personal email account for her on the sly and emailed her party attendees, family and some other friends, encouraging them to send her messages. She had over 35 emails waiting for her when she opened up her email account!  Her response was all I had hoped for - she was thrilled! But even she needed a break after getting through about half of them. She got through all the emails that day but we didn't even get into the google photos folder that folks had dropped videos and pictures into - also for a surprise. We just started those last night and she felt asleep cuddled up to me before we got through them all. So the celebrating is being spread out (not to mention that the little present we ordered for her online has arrived but we've been quarantining our mail for a few days so she hasn't actually gotten that yet either)...

But I digress! Once we roused Terah, we all headed out to do chores together at Alida's request. I think it's sweet that she didn't ask that someone do her chores for her, but that we all go out together. I love that her "perfect" day is also a gift to all of us - as we all enjoy doing as much of our day's activities as we can TOGETHER! And getting outside for some fresh air and a little exercise before breakfast always makes it taste even better. We got to mixing up pancakes just as soon as we got in - she liked that we pulled out the recipe I always used to make pancakes for my daddy on Saturday mornings when I was young. They were a hit!

After brunch, she "zoomed" with my parents while she opened a present they had left at Tangly Woods for her. That was a new experience to be sure - but we are having a few of those these days. A bit later in the day, she had another zoom call with her aunt and uncle in Pittsburgh so they could watch her when she opened their emails, the one complete with a very entertaining dance to our 9 year old (she has been known to give out ballet lessons at family gatherings and so her uncle was showing off his skills from those lessons)!

With brunch dishes done and Jason in from doing the hiding, the next planned fun in the day was an Easter egg hunt! Alida and Terah had gone through all our plastic eggs and picked out 108 to hide. That was important because it was divisible by 3 but also take note that it just happens to be 9 dozen! Yes, I was indeed thrilled by yet another fun number coincidence! Alida had chosen for Jason to hide them along the lower part of the wood's trail that we just completed on Sunday. That may be a topic for a future post, but I'll just say that we LOVE it! It's a perfect short doable hike that I have a feeling we will be doing often. From the top we can see mountains in both directions. Oh, I should add that we found 107 of the 108 eggs - not too bad!

With another dose of fresh air in us, we settled in with the snacks from inside the eggs and the Farming Game. I really can't believe I used to like games like this or Monopoly. I really needed a knitting project as I was antsy from the beginning. But I was able to settle in enough to enjoy her enjoying so much having all of us (well, Terah was in and out doing her own thing) playing with her. It was well worth it, but I do consider it a birthday present to subject myself to several hours of the Farming Game. I'm glad that we were all ready to bring it to a close at about the same time!

It was time to work on the "fancy" birthday dinner, for which there was a dress code announced. Alida set up "shop" and folks lined up to get their "fancifying" accessories. We then sat down to enjoy a dinner of baked sweet potatoes with sausage gravy and sauteed green bean with garlic (just one more bag of green beans left!). Her choice of birthday meals was a hit with all of us. I can't say we maintained our "proper behavior" for the entirety of the meal, but we all enjoyed ourselves! Jason didn't seem quite ready to turn his "thneed" back in at the end of the meal. 

Jason was happy to give up his spot in the Dutch Blitz game after dinner, so he cleaned up while us gals played. We had just enough time to look through the rest of the 1000 or so pictures my parents had shared of Alida before she officially turned 9! Around 9 p.m., I decided that maybe I should double check in her baby book that she was indeed born at 9:18 p.m. Good I checked - she was 10 minutes old then as 9:08 was the actual birth moment. So we had to get the candle lit in her cherry pie fast and we were just a few minutes late singing!

Her party was to include a sleepover so sleepover we did - all in the living room. Alida picked a nature video on Netflix and we all bedded down (some of us falling asleep during the movie). I can't say that I slept wonderfully on the futon, but it wasn't too bad. Everyone was up earlier than normal but that was a good thing since their was one more birthday meal to enjoy together - her post-sleepover brunch of sausage quiche, funny cake pie and fruit salad. That officially ended the festivities but I see the birthday sign still up, there are Easter eggs all over the house, and we still have more photos and videos to look at that family and friends shared with Alida. Oh, and that quarantined present is in her future also, along with cashing in a variety of birthday coupons received.

Overall, it was an incredible day - she kept commenting throughout the day what a good birthday she was having. It was truly a gift for all of us. While the focus was on Alida, in many ways the focus was also on celebrating love and togetherness and I think we all were in need of a dose of that. We have been together a lot (more or less 24/7) and while we often spend days on end together, this day had the unique flavor of not having a lot of other "intrusions" into the sacred space of the day. I was so in need of a media and email break and in many ways the day was also more enjoyable and relaxing for me not prepping much of the day for a big party and hosting responsibilities. I felt more present with our special, spunky, creative, giggly, sweet, intelligent, and mischievous now 9 year old! The future feels really uncertain in so many ways, but for that one day our family celebrations felt like a really bright and beautiful burst in all the anxiety churning around.

p.s. For any consistent readers, it seems important to note that I also got the good news yesterday morning that my repeat blood work had my white count and platelets solidly back in the normal range. I'm relieved!