Day: November 9, 2012

We work harder maintaining our country homestead than we did when we lived in an apartment in the city.  In the city we were DINKS (double-income-no-kids), and there was some cleaning, but there was no yard to mow or dirt coming in from outside.  Kids create additional labor in any household, but our rural, off-grid life creates a number of extra chores.

Our laundry never sees the inside of an electric dryer.   We do the upkeep on our solar inverter.  Heating with wood (whether we buy or cut it) is more time consuming than simply ordering a winter’s worth of oil, but last night as I was working on dinner, I thought of the unexpected annual rewards we are about to reap from our labors.

For the last few weeks, we’ve been stacking wood.  We’ve been stocking the freezer and the pantry in anticipation of snowy weather that can bind us to the house for days.  We’ve been catching up on laundry that will dry inside on racks for the next few months.

As November rolls in, however, the load becomes lighter.  Filling the wood bin becomes our one regular outdoor task.  Snow is imminent, enforcing a welcome break from mowing and sowing.  And the question of ‘what’s for dinner?’ is always, as it was last night, answered by the contantly bubbling pot of Stone Soup on the woodstove.

Last night I wandered back and forth between the pantry and the pot, tossing in dried veggies from the garden and other odds and ends from a cupboard that is stocked for the winter.  There was no recipe and no stress.  And when the pot was full, I sat on the couch to snuggle with the boys as it simmered.

This is our winter pattern.  It’s slow and quiet.  It’s warm and close.

So when night comes, the flames in the wood cookstove become embers that will kindle another fire in the morning, we may be tired from the day, but we never regret the labors we took on when we chose a life closer to the land and farther from the madding crowd.

 

 

I grow pumpkins every year. Some years I grow field pumpkins for Jack O’Lanterns, but I always plant at least a couple of pie pumpkin plants.  My pumpkin passion began a few years ago with a Thanksgiving dinner shopping trip that resulted in one can of  pumpkin pie filling and a long lesson about security.

I was expecting company and had waited till the last possible minute to do the shopping.  A glut of pumpkins the year before had prompted me to plant only one plant, but, a spate of cold weather resulted in a last minute addition to my shopping list.  Only when I got to the store and saw the empty bin did I learn that it had been bad year for pumpkins everywhere.

I moved to plan B – pureed pumpkin.  I headed for the baking aisle, but the pumpkin gods were not smiling on my dinner.  The shelves had been picked clean of canned pumpkin.  Plan C – premade pumpkin pie filling – was an unappetizing last resort, but as I was started going through my alternate dessert list, I almost tripped over another determined hunter kneeling on the ground and rummaging through the lowest shelf.

“Excuse Me!” I yelped.  The other woman about the same size as I pulled her head out from the shelves and gave me a broad smile.

“Hello, Rachel,” she said.  I knew her face and name; she was a teller at our local bank.  I was a bit surprised, however, that she knew mine.  We chatted about our pumpkin quests and our miserable harvests.  We compared garden notes and then said our goodbyes, both of us vowing to plant plenty of pumpkin from now on.

After that encounter I noticed that most of the tellers at her branch did greet our family by name as soon as we came in the door.  I never needed to produce a license  – I’ve passed the small town identity verification.  But I didn’t really think about the pumpkin powwow until I walked into the bank yesterday to chase down a suspicious charge.

In spite of all of the high-tech security out there, someone had managed to fraudulently charge over $200 to my debit card.  So I went in and chatted with my favorite teller about electronic security and safeguards, and she educated me while fixing my account to prevent repeat transactions.

I walked out to my car grateful for our teller’s help securing my account again. I thought about this year’s pumpkin pie insurance sitting at home on the counter,and I thought about what it means to be secure.  For me, it isn’t 128-bit encryption or turning over my digital life or home to a company to monitor.  For me, security is some source of food that’s 100 feet away from our table.  It’s a community we know and that knows us.  And it’s the knowledge that when one of us falters, we are not alone.