Leaning on the words of others when I can't find my own...

Earlier this week one of my former doula clients (now friend) shared this poem with me by Jan Richardson. I have a lot of mixed emotions in this advent season. I connect to themes of darkness and light and to the longing. At the same time I'm so angry about how white evangelical Christianity uses even this season to promote violence and domination. I'm glad that there are many people out there who can parse out the beautiful and share their reflections, creativity and brilliance with all of us. I love this:

Wise women also came.

The fire burned in their wombs long before

they saw

the flaming star in the sky.

They walked in shadows, trusting the path

would open under the light of the moon.

Wise women also came,

seeking no directions,

no permission from any king.

They came by their own authority,

their own desire,

their own longing.

They came in quiet, spreading no rumors,

sparking no fears to lead to innocents’ slaughter,

to their sister Rachel’s inconsolable lamentations.

Wise women also came,

and they brought useful gifts:

water for labor’s washing,

fire for warm illumination,

a blanket for swaddling.

Wise women also came,

at least three of them,

holding Mary in the labor,

crying out with her in the birth pangs,

breathing ancient blessings into her ear.

Wise women also came,

and they went,

as wise women always do,

home a different way.

As I came alongside another family in the long process of laboring and birthing their little one, it felt like such an honor to be able to offer encouragement, physical support and accompaniment. At various points my heart would also feel the heaviness of thinking of the many women giving birth in Gaza every day right now, in conditions I cannot even begin to comprehend. It's so important for birthing people to feel safe and in an environment where they can relax. What happens when that is not possible? What are the short and long term repercussions, for those who make it through the harrowing ordeal? It feels so wrong! 

And here we are on Christmas Eve. A yearly letter from one of my aunts expressed some of what I'm feeling so much better than I feel able to. Words fail me often these days. "How, and whether, to nurture levity of spirit given our trouble globe's ruinous ills." That is the question!

But babies! They just fill me up! Their sweet newness. Their curiosity. Their innocence. Their proclamation of their needs and expectation for them to be met (at least if that is what they have experienced). And the way they slow me down and calm my nervous system. Whether it is holding a little one for the first time that I watched emerge from the womb (as I am here with precious Ruby Jane) or nurturing a growing little one that affectionately calls me "Nel Nel" (thanks Luca!!), this is my happy place!

From my aunt again: "And so, yes, mindful of calamities, we give ourselves over to joy, to foster what is beautiful in the world, to right the balance, and to gratitude that we have so much to treasure and delight in..." Here is us giving ourselves over to delight with the little people we are so privileged to love and care for.

I know no better way to end this short reflection than with my aunt's words once more: "We grieve for those devastated by war's atrocities and for the ensnaring complexities of its waging. We grieve for the planet. We change our habits. We celebrate the spirit of resilience, survival, humanitarian aid. We celebrate the light, the word, the otherwise, spilling through the jamb..."

Odds and ends...sweet and fun ones mostly!

I ran out of time yesterday to do the full catch up so I'm here in the downstairs alone now as Jason and Terah slice and freeze bacon in the garage and Kali and Alida usher at the American Shakespeare Center. 

The girls and I spent much of today out and about shopping. Our kids are no longer being clothed entirely on hand-me-downs or hand-me-arounds! There were a few notable gaps in their wardrobes which, thanks to Gift and Thrift, Once Upon a Child, and Super Shoes, are now filled. If I'm going to go shopping, I could not ask for better company than our three girls. That said, while I enjoyed parts of our day together for sure, I also felt really distracted in some moments. My mind and heart were traveling all over the place from the major life challenges and losses being faced by people near and dear to me to the large scale suffering being experienced in various places. I've found myself thinking recently of the season of our lives when Jason and I were planning our wedding (happening simultaneously to me taking my first peace and justice classes at EMU). I was unlearning and re-learning history and especially being exposed to a lot of new knowledge about my country's involvement in many armed conflicts around the globe. I really struggled with thinking about hosting a celebration of any kind alongside the current events I was learning about. Now 25 years later, I still am grappling with how to hold grief and gratitude, suffering and celebration, my daily reality alongside that of so many others. My strong desire to be and do enough kick into high gear and yet any contributions I make just feel like they are drops that disappear in the vast ocean of need... 

So with that swirling around inside, here are some things that have filled parts of our days in recent weeks!

I have dried SO...MANY...APPLES! We pick up pig scraps in town on Fridays and sometimes what we pick up ends up being more food than the pigs need and/or high quality seconds (like the 3 boxes of apples I came home with a while back). They are melt in your mouth delicious...

Yep, gotta throw in a sky picture! I love that I'm outside often enough to take in the ever changing sky. I don't seem to tire of it!

Jason had a much smaller role in filling the woodshed this year. He worked with Kali some, but it ended up being done mostly by our three girls. 

I slipped away from the home front one day to enjoy a long anticipated hike with a dear friend! We made it to the summit of Furnace Mountain where we were rewarded by a gorgeous view and where Wendy introduced me to the delicious wintergreen flavor of birch bark. 

The little people in our lives are still such an incredible source of joy and laughter and amusement. Luca's vocabulary is exploding. It's such a fun stage. We love our Thursday times together with just him and our weekly meals together as a family. Luca doesn't have a lot of patience for the many conversations we would enjoy having at length together. But he absolutely loves when we are all doing something together that involves him. Last night it was writing names on his little board and me saying, " Give me an M" and everyone replies, "M" until we have spelled a name. He started to pick up on it and before long when I would get to the end of the name and say, "What's that spell?" he would shout before any of us, "Mama!!" He was so pleased, as were we!

Bear's vocabulary isn't changing quite as fast but the number of things he enjoys gnawing on is! He's "helped" me bake cookies recently, he's had his first piano lesson, and he has graduated to sitting in the high chair at the table with us. So fun!

And, while on the subject of little growing things: why do I love bringing the little piggies their slop bucket and finding them all buried in the hay in their house and then watching as their little snouts come up as they sniff the air and then they slowly emerge to check out what I've brought with hay strands all over them?

Less exciting news, but it is probably worth documenting that Jason is still working on the shop shed ceiling insulation project. It's been another one of those projects that is completely impossible to predict, one in which he is trying to mostly use materials he had accumulated for this very project, and which has taken much longer than we had hoped it would. It felt important to get those materials off the floor of the shop shed and into the ceiling cavities so that the shop shed could be more useable once again. So it needed to be done AND I know he is eager to move on to other things!

We haven't quite worked ourselves out of a job, but the Adopt-A-Highway trash pick ups we've committed to doing along our road twice a year feel less and less "worth our time!" We feel like we aren't doing much when we walk nearly a half mile in some places without picking up anything and then must remind ourselves that that is a wonderful thing and way better than when we were filling multiple large garbage bags every time we did it!

With all that there is to cry and scream and rant about, it does feel so very good to laugh! And that is what we did a lot of on our second Ted Lasso weekend. In addition to getting about halfway through the third and final season, we also fit in some Dutch Blitz, soccer playing and delicious meals together! Terah was especially glad we didn't make it to the end of the show, since she knew that meant we'd have to plan another weekend together with Alena and Andrew soon! Time with good friends that you can laugh with, while also being real with each other, feels like such an immense gift. We are already anticipating the next time!

And here I am still alone downstairs, with my book calling my name! I might get a fire going in the wood stove and cuddle up for a bit! The headache I've been nursing for the last few days is easing up a bit, but I'm ready to not work it too hard for the rest of the evening. I am through two of the three new romance novels I just got out of the library. I'm really enjoying my introduction to another new author and my kids are ready for me to get through these so I'm not so eager to jump under my covers and read at night. I actually get through more than a page or two of these before falling asleep!

The first snow deserves a post of its own!

If ever a post should be dedicated to my mom, this would be the one! Sunday evening I noticed the weather prediction for a little snow overnight. When I woke to pee around 4 a.m. I came out to the front room and turned on the outside lights. It was a winter wonderland. I sent an email to my mom with the subject line, "Saw it before you!" and this message, "I love thinking of the thrill you will feel when you wake up and look out the windows." Who was I kidding? I should not have been surprised in the least to receive her reply that came in shortly after 5 a.m.: "Actually I saw it  at 3 a.m. when I got up to go to the bathroom. I was so excited I could hardly go back to sleep. Haven't stopped smiling since. LOVE IT!" It's very hard to be grouchy about snow when my mother is around. Her enthusiasm for the white stuff is catching! But, honestly, this time I didn't even need her encouragement. I couldn't get enough of the beauty of our surroundings. It was a wet snow that clung to everything. While the ponhoss and lard kettles got rolling, I went around and did the chicken chores and kept pulling out my phone to photograph the landscape as it sparkled and changed with the rising sun. There's no point in me trying to describe it. See for yourself!

The sun got the melting process rolling pretty early in the day, but not before some snowballs were made and thrown and before Terah pulled a few sleds out of the crawl space. I was still doing chores when I heard Alida join her and before long I heard Mom out there with them. She was not about to let her granddaughters have some sledding fun right outside her windows without her! I was back at the butchering operation by the time Kali got out to join them for a sled run all 4 of them together before we were back to mostly bare grass. It was a short lasting snow but a glorious one! 

Last night we were at Jonathan and Christen's for dinner and we were talking with Luca about the snow and hearing how much fun he had playing in it. This got him thinking about snow and he went over to the door and pointed and then came back to Christen asking, "Mama...snow?!" It was a little hard for him to take in the reality that his mama could not make the sky put more of that fun cold white stuff on the ground for his enjoyment. I know my mom also wishes she could order it regularly!!

Hog butchering, our first snow, and welcoming piglets!

I'm gonna start this scrapbook-catch-up session a bit differently and start with the freshest news and then work backwards. 

So here's the hot off the press news from Tangly Woods: we welcomed three new piggies to Tangly Woods this morning! They are adjusting just fine to their new accommodations and seem pleased with the vast amount of food that awaited them. Terah and Alida got right on "piglet training" and some back scratches were accepted within the hour of their arrival. 

We are all wrapped up with the 2023 hog butchering other than putting away the things set out to dry last night and slicing and freezing the bacons tomorrow after they have one more day to cure. 

So here we are starting the yearly cycle over again! While I'd love if it worked for us to birth piglets here, it simplifies things considerably for us to buy them from a friend who raises pigs on pasture and is better set up for breeding than we are. Now we work to get them settled and comfy here as quickly as possible and give them a great home at Tangly Woods for the next year. 

Backing up to the hog butchering: this year we split up the schedule a bit differently due to the weather forecast of rain on Sunday (which came to fruition). And in the end it's quite possible we will continue with this system going forward as it made for a much calmer day 3! The more I get involved with the whole process, the harder it is to take a bunch of photos. And I still have mixed feelings about photographing some parts of it. It also doesn't look all that different from year to year, other than the size of the kids changing dramatically! I just looked back and this was our 5th year doing the butchering down at our place and the 4th year that Terah has been old enough to help cut up lard. 

Here's the brief run down of the 4 main days:

Day 1: set up (thanks to Grant and Jason for doing the bulk of this - I'm in charge of making sure we have corn ground for ponhoss and gathering other supplies, along with having a food plan for feeding everyone throughout the butchering days). This lands on Friday so I actually left early that morning for a day of doula work and errands in town and came home to the outdoor space all set up and ready to go.

Day 2: killing, scalding, scraping, gutting, and halving. It's always very hard to roll out of bed when the 4:30 a.m. alarm goes off but I also savor watching the daylight return as we get the fire going to heat the water in the scalding trough. I always feel so relieved when the killing part goes smoothly (which is mostly did - even with the transition from lead to copper bullets). It was too warm to hang the halves in the garage overnight, so we were grateful for the use of the walk in cooler up the hill for that. 

Day 3: cutting up the halves, cubing lard, grinding sausage, freezing various cuts, salting bacons. As predicted it rained off and on this entire day and we were very grateful for the roof over our heads that the garage provided. And that we were standing out in the rain trying to render lard and make ponhoss. It also meant that rather than being up late and working outside with headlamps to finish things up, we were done before dark! Terah alternated between helping and riding her bike between rain showers - that's the reason for her helmet, not that cutting up lard is likely to make you fall on your head!

Day 4: rendering lard, making ponhoss, and clean up! Day 4 is normally JUST clean up but we moved the outdoor fire processes to the non-rainy day, which ended up being a magical and gorgeous snowy morning. Other than keeping melting snow from falling into the lard kettle (Kali was on umbrella duty for a bit), this caused no major issues. We were putting lard in jars and ponhoss in pans by lunchtime and then had the rest of the afternoon for cleaning up and putting things away. When friends dropped by, we didn't have to scurry around in a panic but could visit for a bit. It was a lovely day (and I'll likely share additional photos in a subsequent post because I could not stop taking photos)...

Terah and Alida were up with us before daybreak. We all enjoyed potatoes fried in the lard, pig tongue from the ponhoss kettle and taste testing ponhoss for the correct salt/pepper spicing. 

All went really smoothly AND Jason and I were both exhausted at the end of yesterday. It feels like every year we learn a little more about how to make the process run smoothly and have a great butchering team! This year, I was somewhat distracted and glued to my phone since I was expecting to be yanked from the process at any point for a birth. In the end I was able to see the process through to the end (unless I'm called before bacon gets in the freezer!). I am feeling both gratitude for the three piggies that will provide us with delicious food over the next year and the fun the three new piggies will be providing us with in the coming weeks and months! Pigs are such enjoyable creatures to have around and are so entertaining to feed. I know they will get big fast on their rich slop, but for now it's fun to see the girls in there playing with them.