The Garden is a Mess

For the first time in a while, I stepped off the path, over to the tomatoes, and discovered a jungle mess that had been out of sight.  The furrows we worked on so hard last spring have worn down or are completely hidden by the overgrowth.  We were so good at weeding until it got hot.  Those little weeds have grown into huge spindly monsters.  I pulled the ones that came out easily, but then I just gave up.  I'll till them in later.

How much it is like my life.  Just a mess.  My brokenness overgrown and big.  Some sins easy to pull out, but others so entrenched that I just leave them alone.  Many gain strength simply from lack of attention.

As I walked through looking for tomatoes, I couldn't even tell where the rows were.  Those pitiful little tomato plants I put out last June have spilled out everywhere.  Some never got a cage around them and have sprawled out five or six feet.  Others got cages, but grew out more than up.  Others grew up and knocked their cage over.

Looking at that knocked over cage was like taking an honest look at my life.  My own need for control overgrowing and knocking over others with unrelenting pressure.  My self-centeredness searching for a place of importance, but with no support, flopping over in a heap on the ground.

Christina came to say hi while I was walking around.  I don't see her much any more.  I'm too lazy to go say "hi" just for fun, and with no milking to be done there isn't much reason to go out there.  I admit that fear is part of my problem.  She is a large animal and can be pushy.  I don't know how to respond to that, so I stay away.  But she hasn't forgotten me.  She gently walked over, sniffed me, and watched my excursion.  I get lazy and scared of God too.

Some weeds are going to seed.  I can hear my father-in-law, dead almost eight years now, saying, "better get those pulled."  But there are so many of them.  The ground is hard.  The roots are stubborn.  So I walk away, let them spread their seed, providing certainty that they will be back next year.

Weeds discourage me, the same as sin does.  I walk through these uninvited plants and feel overwhelmed.  I wonder if this is how God feels walking through my life, discouraged at the sins grown large from lack of attention and lack of will.

But as I walk I notice other things too.  The broccoli plant I hadn't gotten around to pulling had a new crop of blooms on the back side, down under the dominant topgrowth.  They are perfect flowerettes, dark and dense, better looking than anything we got last spring.  Could there be parts of me flowering on the back side, places where God has been quietly growing something better than I've ever seen?

The cantaloupe plant is dying back, and plump orange cantaloupes are standing up out of the declining vines.  They sweeten as the plant recedes.  I hear an echo of the cross, a dying body, that left such sweet fruit for all humanity.  Are there parts of my life that are like the dying vines, leaving sweet fruit behind?

I looked under a large squash canopy and found perfect fruits in their final preparation for winter.  I didn't even know they were there.  There were lots of them, round, beautiful, and hardening for a long cold wait until they warm and nourish our family.  I have ignored these plants just like I ignored the weeds, but they have produced.

The weeds have grown, but the garden has grown stronger.  The weeds may be big, but God didn't let that stop abundant growth.  In fact, as I look back over the garden, most of it looks as if the weeds didn't make any different at all.  It just looks neater to me without weeds. But God doesn't need the weeds to stay away to make amazing things happen.  My attention or lack of attention doesn't seem to make a big difference either because with God there is new life.  With God there is fruit.  With God there is a harvest.  My job is only to look for it.

The Power of the Sun

We find ourselves using the power of the sun more often.  Of course the sun is ultimately the source of all food — causing the garden to grow and the grass to grow which feeds the cows — but there is more to solar power.

Solar rays are effective sterilizers.  I read that several hours of direct sun exposure is as effective as a bleach rinse.  Because we drink our milk raw, without pasteurization, I'm especially careful about sterilizing the milk jugs.  After thoroughly cleaning them with soap and water, we set them out all day in the sun to knock off any germs that survived the washing.

Actually, I probably don't need to be so fussy.  While Christina was milking, we never had milk over four days old because the frig would get too full!  3-4 gallons a day fills up a frig pretty fast.  But since she's dried up, we actually had some milk sit in the frig for nine days before we used it.  At nine days, the milk smelled as fresh and sweet as the first day, so even raw milk takes a long time to sour.

We started hanging our laundry whenever we could about a year ago.  I've already noticed the difference the sun makes.  Some of the musty smell that I thought was unavoidable, vanishes completely in the summer, only to return in the winter when we're using the electric dryer.  I've found that I love the peace and solitude of hanging laundry.  I love the quiet movement as the clothes go up and I enjoy the camaraderie of taking them down in the evening with whichever daughters are around.

We will use a root cellar this winter for the first time.  The book says that onions need to dry for ten days after they are pulled to harden their skin and make them last longer in storage.  We pulled our first batch of onions and set them on the step to dry.  This is from the patch that grew the worst.  I'm hopefully for a much bigger harvest from the other patch.

Our three walnut trees have started dropping nuts.  We set them out for the husks to dry to a dark brown before we remove the them and crack the shells this winter.  I'm thinking of seeing if we can grind the walnuts into a walnut butter.

Using the sun these ways is slow and quiet.  Nothing needs to be done while the sun's rays silently do their work.  It requires patience in waiting and the ability to remember to bring things in when they're done.  But that's about all that is needed from me.  I don't actually do the sterilization or drying, the sun's rays do.  I just put things out.  God's activity is the same way — often slow and silent, but it is the real power behind the work.  I just show up and put things out.

Slow Pepperoni

After three days curing in the frig, we dried the pepperoni.  We rolled the meat into two-inch diameter logs and put them on roasting pans.  Using wax paper makes it easier to get them shaped.  The first time we tried, it really was a big mess.  After all the meat was rolled, we put them a "warm" oven (170F) for seven hours.  The kids commented several times during the day that they craved pizza.  Tomorrow we'll run them through the slicer and freeze most.  From the six pounds of hamburger we started with, we'll probably have about four pounds of finished pepperoni.  New pepperoni with homemade Christina mozzarella on whole wheat crust... I'm beginning to crave pizza too.

Things are still slow moving at our house.  The stomach flu has subsided, but energy is low.  Homeschooling for the younger ones today was only the things that we could read outloud to them.  One of the benefits of homeschooling is that things don't have to stop when you're sick, like missing school, they just slow down. 

Another benefit of homeschooling is freedom of movement.  My 15-year-old often moves outside to study when the weather permits.  The gentle sounds of outdoors, the light breeze, and the cool feel of grass energize her and make her feel whole.  I am reminded of the days sitting in classrooms when I was young, longing to be outside.  My longing wasn't to get away from the learning, but just to get outside.  I am so grateful that she is able to satiate that feeling.

We made spaghetti for dinner.  I made pasta for the first time less than a year ago and now I always make it.  It takes about thirty minutes to make a batch for dinner and it tastes so good.  After mixing 2-3/4 cups flour, 3 eggs, and enough water to bring it up to 3/4 cup, the fun begins.  I have the extrusion attachment for my KitchenAid, but I prefer this hand-crank pasta maker.  First you roll the balls out flat and even in a wide setting, then roll them through a fine settling.  Lastly, crank them through the spaghetti cutter.  I just dump them on a towel while I get it all done.  After throwing them into boiling water, they are done in three minutes.  We dined on spaghetti with homemade Christina ricotta and cottage cheese.

Ghost of Parenting Present

Last night we were visited by the Ghost of Parenting Present — a daughter with the stomach flu and gastric reverse action all night long at about twenty-minute intervals.  Things finally slowed down about 6:30am.  Today we feel like ghosts ourselves.  A life in synergy with the land means that nothing we were going to do today couldn't wait until tomorrow, but the rest of family life went on.

Yesterday I made pancake syrup.  It's so easy I can't believe that I bought the high fructose corn syrup stuff for so long.  Mix one cup water,  two cup sugar (we get organic fair trade sugar from Costco), and 1/2 teaspoon mapleine.  Bring to a full boil for 2-3 minutes.  Let cool for a bit and put in jars.  We found these old syrup jars in my in-laws stuff.

The girls discovered an injured chicken today.  It was on the ground not moving and the other chickens were pecking it.  Cannibalism is a problem with chickens.  The books say that they sense when one is injured or sick and a group can quickly kill a defenseless bird.  My husband rescued the hen and moved into a pen by itself.  He put food and water near it.  My daughter asked, "are we going to have to kill it?"  We'll give it several days and see if it heals.  If not, it will have to become a stew hen.  I hate butchering.

While outside, I noticed how much the fruit trees have grown.  We planted sixteen fruit trees in the chicken pen area last spring.  We have apples, pears, cherries, plums, peaches, nectarines, and apricots.  Chickens love nothing more than bugs.  I've read that if you have chickens around your fruit trees, they will eat all the worms before they crawl up into the fruit.  We have big plans for lots of worm-free fruit without any poison spraying.

Since my other children were feeling fine, I asked them to flatten the onions.  When onions get big, they need their tops bent over for the final maturing.  In a few weeks we'll pull them out of the garden and let them dry on the patio for their final preparation before long-term storage.  Even the two-year-old got involved.

When you are a person who wants to follow God, discerning God's direction can feel like such immediate work.  Sometimes I wonder if it's more like today's work.  God welcomes time of rest and times of work.  God's opportunities aren't one chance and then gone.  Instead, if today is good, God work things out.  Or if tomorrow is better, that's OK too.  This garden is more God's work than ours, so it seems that the patterns we find there must have some reflection of their Creator. 

Jerky and Sabbath Rest

My  husband made jerky yesterday for the first time.  Last month we bought a full beef from a fellow here in the valley.  It's not the same as homegrown meat, but buying directly from a local producer is the next best thing.  We've gotten meat from him before and were impressed at how good it was.  I asked him about the breed.   It's Jersey steer!  He said that Jersey is one of the best meats, but because they don't bulk up as much as the meat breeds, they usually aren't raised for meat.  Music to my ears!!  Our little calf, beefy, is a Jersey steer and we'll raise all of Christina's boy calves as Jersey steers.  Praise God!

Making the jerky was pretty easy.  He mixed up hamburger, spices, and cure salts, then loaded them into a "jerky maker," a thing like a caulk gun.  They pressed out into even strips.  You could probably form them into strips without the gun, but the gun made it fast and easy.  We filled our dehydrator and ten hours later pulled out rich jerky.  For each two-pounds of hamburger, we got about a pound of jerky.  My 15-year-old daughter ate several strips before we got them away from her and put away.

Yesterday was a full day of American mom life for me.  Our nine-year-old twins volunteered at Museum Comes to Life with their girl scout troop.  They helped with the children's games and had a good time with their troop.  I've always enjoy the period costumes, activities, and machines, but after four hours on my feet and counting heads a hundred times, I was tired.  I wasn't the only one.  Our weeks are full and by Saturday evening we are ready for Sabbath rest.  We naturally fall into the Jewish tradition of Sabbath beginning at Saturday sundown.

Sabbath rest has taken on new meaning for us.  Most mornings begin with me filling the white board with our to-do list, and then we spend the day methodically erasing items as they get done.  On Sundays, the board is empty.  I still look at it habitually, and remember each time that it is Sabbath.  We still do things, but only as they strike us, not because we *have* to.  This morning my 13-year-old is making crepes for breakfast, something she never has time to do and always enjoys.  We will eat with leisure.  We will read, play, maybe watch a movie, and rest.  Even dinner is left-overs.  How wonderful that God designed our lives to follow this pattern, to value rest as much as we value work.  My Monday morning has new energy after a full day of no "shoulds." 

Waiting

Our life is full of waiting.  I thought it would be the hardest part of this life-style, but I’ve found that it feels more like a promise than a burden.

Today I made granola bars.  I discovered that our stock was out and the kids eat granola bars and cottage cheese most every day for snack.  The granola bars I made today won't be ready to eat until tomorrow.  We’ll wait.

Christina and the calf, who we call beefy, moved to the east pasture today.  Our acre pasture is divided in half so they eat one half while the other grows.  The book says to give the grass six weeks to grow, but after three weeks their other pasture looked pretty mowed down.  Moving them means that we have some work to do in the west pasture — cutting down any weeds they didn’t eat and breaking up or scooping up the cow pies.  Cows won’t eat anything near a cow pie for three years.  Pretty smart.  But, if we break them up good, the irrigation will pull them into the soil and they will be absorbed as just good fertilizer.  The last time we moved Christina to a new pasture, the fresh grass gave her a little spike in milk production.  This time, there will be no spike.  She is dry.  While she grows strong on fresh grass, we wait.

When my in-laws built this house, they put in a mechanic’s pit.  It’s been concealed under oil-covered boards as long as I’ve known this place.  My husband is converting it into a root cellar.  He cleaned it out and cut new boards to cover the top.  Something about those fresh-cut boards makes it look and smell like a cellar now.  We have potatoes and onions ready to go down there.  Soon squash will be ready too.  It will all sit there through the winter and wait.

Last spring we planted nine rhubarb plants.  Nine is really a crazy amount.  A single full grown plant is usually more than a family can eat.  We love rhubarb and when I was ordering plants, I put it out to the family, “should we buy one or three?”  Their response was, "can we get more?"  "Well, they have a bundle of nine."   We watched the plants come up this spring, knowing that if we touch them it will hurt long-term growth.  So we stayed back and waited.  Next year we’ll harvest a little and the following year I think we’ll be market growers of rhubarb!  But for now, we wait.

I’ve always hated waiting.  The week before Christmas was painful.  The time before vacation was agony.  It took monumentous will power to wait until payday for something I wanted to buy.

This waiting is new.  I’m not waiting until I can get something, I’m waiting until God gets it ready for us.  I’m not wishing time to go faster, suffering from the self-denial.   Instead I enjoy the quiet delight of somebody getting a surprise ready for me. While I wait, I find myself savoring the hunger gently growing and knowing that the satiation will be sweeter.  Our I-want-what-want-when-I-want-it culture takes away specialness.  When I ate apples everyday, they were plain.  Now when I only eat them in October and November they are a special.  When I had dessert every day, it was just another part of dinner.  Now when we only have dessert for celebrations, it is special.

So today I wait with a goofy grin on my face while God gets things ready. 

Unexpected Water

This desert land where we live is fruitful only when irrigated.  It parches by July without water. The old system of canals and ditches delivers water flowing downhill, seeping deeply into the soil and making plants strong.  It’s a great system when the land is flat and graded.  Ours isn’t.  For us, irrigation is an all-day project of coaxing the water to flow over the garden, pasture, and lawn before the time is up. We often don’t get everything done before it’s gone.  We always wish for more.  Today a full load of unscheduled water arrived.

We opened up the values to the garden, happy for the extra moisture.  The garden was watered and there was still more.  We put it on the pasture.  Pasture was watered and there was still more.  Today it’s flowing into the lawn and around to the fruit bushes. 

We weren’t planning on this water so it feels like a surprise present.  The land needs it, which means we need it.  But it messed up my schedule.  I was going to mow the lawn and do some harvesting.  Now we have to wait for everything to dry out.

God does the same thing to me.  God flows into my life with a full head, pushing over obstacles, hydrating everything, and messing up my schedule.  God usually arrives just as I thought God was farthest away and pretty soon I’m doing all kinds of things I didn’t plan on — like coming to this land and raising our food...or speaking in front of crowds...or writing a book...or blogging. 

I didn’t intend to start this crazy life of intimacy with the land.  It came to me.  This land and house were an inheritance from my husband’s parents.  It was unearned and honestly unwanted — unwanted until we started loving it. Now I have a fondness for this land that is tied to my love for my in-laws and my love for my children.  This land embraces us, like a sanctuary of thick chili, pie and ice cream.

We planted soup beans for the first time this year.  Today we picked the dry pods and began shelling.  Half an hour later we had a small bowl to show for our efforts.  I think about the huge bag I bought for $10 and an old stab of conscience pricks me.  How can people raise food, sell it for so little, and get by themselves?  I've known all my life that farmworkers really don't get by.

The cool weather made chili seem like a good idea for dinner (here's how we do chili).  I’ll make a big pot, enough for several days.  My nine-year-old asked to help while I was sorting beans and I said no, wanting to get it done and move on.  Then I remembered a story my friend Carol told about prayer.  She says that God puts prayers in our hearts for good things God was going to do anyway, and therefore lets us enjoy the dignity and satisfaction of being part of something good.  My daughter wanted to be part of feeding her family, so I called her back, and even though it took longer, gave her a little taste of the satisfaction of feeding others.  Today I prayed for God to heal several friends who have had surgery.  They will probably all get better, regardless of my prayers, but I feel that in some way my love has helped them. 

Keeping Body and Soul on Speaking Terms

I’m reading Christy by Catherine Marshall.  My teenage daughters will read it later this year for their homeschooling.   It is set in 1912 when a young woman goes to teach at a mission school in Appalachia.  When she arrives a kind woman feeds her and afterward asks,  “have you eaten well enough to keep body and soul on speaking terms?” 

What a potent question.  It makes me ask myself the same thing.  Have I eaten well enough to keep body and soul on speaking terms?  I think that actually they've maintained a polite distance for most of my life and are just beginning to get reacquainted.

I've already noticed that food tastes different when I cook it.  Perhaps it's because I pay attention in a different way, wondering if I would change the recipe the next time.  Eating food that we have raised has taken on a similar quality.  There is a depth to the experience beyond flavor and texture and chemical calories.  Every time I eat our own food, part of me is thinking, "I did it!"   I marvel at the way I contributed to its production and at the same time am in awe of God’s creative power.

A month ago I tried to plant lettuce for a fall crop but it was too hot and few of the seeds germinated (the weeds did fine).  So I started some in the basement under lights.  Today I put them in the garden for their final month of growth. 

When I went out, I discovered that God had a similar idea.  A plant I had let go to seed had fallen over and under its head was a forest of little lettuce plants.

Today we spin another rotation on a cycle of the land.  Chickens need lots of calcium for all that egg laying.  We can buy crushed oyster shells, but that can get pricey over time.  Instead, we save our egg shells, toast them in the oven, crush them, and give them back to the chickens.  We could probably give them the shells straight, but I don’t want them looking at their freshly laid eggs with hunger.  I’m told that happens sometimes.  So we toast and crush (and still occasionally buy oyster shells).

toasting egg shells

ground egg shells
Now I just need to find a little girl to take it out to the chickens.

Tonight at 3am is the fall equinox and with it comes the official beginning of fall. We will celebrate this mid-point in God's seasonal design with strawberry rhubarb pie and ice cream (homemade and mostly homegrown, of course). 

Salty Coffee

Weird.  Raising food means dealing with what you’ve got.  The milk and cream from Christina’s last milking tastes like somebody spilled salt in it.  We have milk and cream in the freezer, but it won’t be thawed until tomorrow. So this morning I drink salty coffee or I skip it.  That’s OK.  I can deal with a little salt.

One-and-a-half gallons of salty milk...hmm... I’ll make yogurt and see if it’s OK.  If not, I guess it’s chickie food.  (check out Recipes Page for making yogurt)

Usually home grown food is better than what we’re used to from the store.  The watermelon we ate yesterday was perfection — sweet, juicy, and crisp — picked right off the vine.  Well, the second one was perfect.  The first one had a dot of rot on it, but I figured I’d just cut it off and the rest would be fine.  The knife sunk in and all at once liquid flooded the counter.  I whisked the fruit to the sink and we threw down towels.  After the crisis was over, the twins took the rotten watermelon to the chickens, who swarmed it.

We don’t count eggs anymore.  We used to count daily and be amazed that we just had to go get them.  For free!  But now our chickens are laying a dozen a day and we are having trouble keeping up.  The books says that hens will lay a lot less when it gets winter dark, so I’ve been freezing some.  This morning I found almost 4 dozen eggs in the frig.  Too many.  While breakfast was cooking, I broke 5 eggs in a bowl, beat them, and poured them in a one-cup tupperware.  After I filled three, I took them out to the freezer.  Tomorrow I’ll pop them out and store them in a bag for winter.  We still have two dozen left.  I need to cook something that uses lots of eggs.

Homeschooling amplifies every parenting issue.  I got hit by that stick again.  I found out that the twins have been skimping on the work they do by themselves — only reading half of the assignment, only doing half of their Rosetta Stone, only doing half of their recorder practicing.  I think back to yesterday afternoon and the barrage of “Mama, can I...” that flooded me while being assured they had finished their work.  It makes me so mad (and hurt).

When the kids were in school, if they didn’t do their work, I was frustrated and worried, but not personally hurt.  Now that I’m the one giving assignments, their laziness feels like a personal insult.  I’m not good at separating my hurt feelings from an impartial analysis of their educational situation.  It’s one more instance of my poor mothering.  Now I taste salt and despair.

The conflict unearthed, contrite faces look at me as they go through their work.  I’m still upset, but they are so cute.  Reading about magnetic fields, a simple experiment was explained and they looked at me hopefully.  We laid down two books with a bar magnetic between them and paper over the top.  We sprinkled some iron filings and there it was.  OK, now I’m not as upset with them. 

Bread Rising in a Warm Oven

It is a bread-making day.  Timing has become routine, grinding the wheat while we clean up from breakfast, letting the machine rest, and then making the dough after family prayer.  The wheat grinding is noisy and can be a little messy, but the bread comes out sweet and deep flavored.  I used buttermilk saved from the butter we made last Friday.

I love fresh ground flour, full of the wheat germ and bran that is missing from “whole wheat flour.”  But we grind it with a machine.  The motor died a few weeks ago, still under warranty, and we were without a grinder while they shipped a replacement.  I felt our dependence.  We have to have electricity and this machine to make flour.  I looked over the hand-crank models again, thinking maybe now is the time to get one.

My life has become like the dough sitting in the warm oven, slowly rising.  As I’ve stepped out of full time ministry for almost 18 months now, telling the world I’m taking a little break, I’ve wondered many times if actually ministry was just a phase in my life, not this break.  Am I turning to something different, or is God resting me in the warm oven, letting the yeast slowly rise until I become sweet and deep flavored?

From the kitchen window, the garden looks healthy but not urgent.  Then I remember what’s out there, ripening under leaves, waiting to be harvested — watermelon, cantaloupe, corn, cucumbers, tomatoes, onions, peppers.  It is urgent.  Tonight we’ll pick a watermelon for dinner.  We’ll put cucumbers in the frig until we’re ready to make pickles.  We’ll pick tomatoes and freeze them until I’m ready to make sauce.  God’s abundance can be demanding. 

The Last Day

We milked Christina for the last time today.  Well, until November.  But it feels like the last time.  Seven weeks ago when she arrived, I longed for this day.  Milking our first week was an ordeal.  I had read lots of books but had milked only twice in my life.  I felt incompetent and overwhelmed.  At the end of each milking I remember thinking, "oh my God, I have to do that again in 12 hours!"  I had to hold on for seven weeks and then it would be over. 

But today I don't feel relieved; I feel sad.  I'm not overwhelmed any more.  I've learned how to grab the top of Christina's teet and pull with a satisfying gush of milk and cream.  I've learned to love the taste of her milk, more than I ever thought I would love milk.  I've learned how to make butter, yogurt, ice cream, sour cream, and cheese.  And I've felt cared for by a large brown animal with dark eyes. I've seen God's abundance in the simple grass transformed into milk and cream just waiting for us.  All we have to do is go get it.  But tomorrow it won't be there.

After moving from the dairy and feeding us for seven weeks, Christina gets these two months off to grow strong for the birth of her calf.  On or about November 18th we'll go through our first calving.  Another first.

I've felt so called to this life of sustainable living but it's been a year of crazy firsts.  I'm a city girl.  There's no farm or livestock in my past.   We've read lots of books and had wonderful people with real knowledge who have helped us along the way, but we've been living a sitcom learning so many things the hard way.   Only a year-and-a-half ago this all started when we moved to a house on 1.5 acres.  Now we've got a big garden, 14 laying hens, about 20 meat chickens in the freezer, a milk cow, and a beef calf that will be ready for the butcher in another year.  We've rejected most every disposable that had been part of our normal American life (except toilet paper, good God!).  We've reduced our energy consumption by putting in sky lights, switching to low-energy appliances, hanging our laundry to dry, and learning to live with heat in the summer and coolness in the winter.

It has only been as we've intentionally moved to this life that I've realized how dependent we have  been on modern food systems.  I carried an assumption that since I had money I had a God-given right to the food I bought and that it would always be there — magically, just always on the shelf, ready to be bought.  But the truth is that I was profoundly dependent on the labor and intelligence of others, many of whom don't have the money to eat as well as I did.  I also had become dependent upon the practices that provide cheap meat, food in boxes, and ingredient names that look more a chemistry supply list than God-created food.  Food was a factory product.  I was a committed Christian who had lost touch with with the God who feeds us.

Today I am slowly moving to dependence on God the Creator... God acting on this land, growing things in their own season, as is proper and right for the plants of God's creation.  What I used to see as just plain old land, a source of dust and dirt and weeds, I now see as sacred ground, as life-giving, as a way to find God.

Our family-life has been redirected toward the fertile soil.  My nine-year old twin daughters begin their day by "getting up the chickies."  Early in the morning in their outdoor shoes, they fill the feeder, open the coop door and rush out of the pen.  They love the chickens but are still a little intimidated by them.  Our 15-year and 13-year old daughters have become competent milkers, taking over my spot in the evening milking with their Dad.  Our 2-year old son has learned to play in the yard while we work in the garden right beside him.  He joins his sisters when he can talk them into it and squeals, "Christina," every time he sees her.  Our 19-year old son moved out this summer and shares little in this adventure, making me struggle with how do you be a family member without being a household member.

Our lives have taken on an easy rhythm of caring for animals, homeschooling, cooking, harvesting and back to animals before the night slows the tempo into satisfying rest.  Our family life has become centered around food and family rather than clocks and schedules.  Sabbath rest is an exciting freedom from weeding, harvesting, and cheese-making giving time for lazy eating, movies, books, and music.  But every day is each other.

Even our education has moved into the family.  We've homeschooled for several years, off and on, but there is a contentment in homeschooling this year that I've never felt.  Learning, a life-long activity, has become interwoven into the life-long activity of eating.  After trying lots of different things, we've settled on a curriculum that uses lots of narrative.  Starting our third year with Sonlight, I have fallen thoroughly in love with their approach and don't plan to ever use anything else.  Immersion into history and historical fiction makes deep learning nearly effortless.  After many years of mistakes, we've learned how to push enough to create the excitement of challenge but not the despair of burden.  Watching their eyes spark as they grasp a new concept and their shoulders square as they approach a problem with confidence is a constant source of joy for me.  My husband and I joke that each evening we arm-wrestle to see who gets to homeschool the girls the next day.

Our two months "off" begins.  We can leave if we want, only needing someone to feed the animals while we're gone.  Our milk will come from the 20-gallon store in the freezer.  My arms will rest and heal into a strength that I hope will prevent the carpal tunnel from returning.  Although we are approaching the equinox, it feels like we have entered the winter solstice and will wait for the silent land to wake up.