It is a cold and still morning.  Nothing moves.  Pink light seeps through the icicles.

A month off in near isolation and reflection is a precious thing.

For the start of this new year, we took a month off.  Not really “off” in the typical way of imagining it.  No, for all but about 6 days of it, we worked.  Hard physical work, demanding work, work to empty the mind, finally, of clutter and conflict.

Many years ago, I read Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, and was struck by this passage:

Another row, and yet another row, followed–long rows and short rows, with good grass and with poor grass. Levin lost all sense of time, and could not have told whether it was late or early now. A change began to come over his work, which gave him immense satisfaction. In the midst of his toil there were moments during which he forgot what he was doing, and it came all easy to him, and at those same moments his row was almost as smooth and well cut as Tit’s. But so soon as he recollected what he was doing, and began trying to do better, he was at once conscious of all the difficulty of his task, and the row was badly mown.”

This passage has come back to me many times in my life when I was working hard physically, or attending others as they worked.  I have no intention of making this a college essay analyzing a literary passage; I wanted to see the words in print here again, because I have felt them so many times.  There is a release that comes with physical work and exercise - a clearing of the mind, an easing of the perception of hardship, when one lets go and reaches past the stage of considering giving up.  If I do get all philosophical here, it is only to take this truth into a wider consideration.

Last year was a very hard year.  I do not exaggerate when I say that I have never in my life been happier to welcome in a new year, with a new start and new changes.  Somehow, last year was a year that became a series of situations that relentlessly took a great deal from me.  There were many blessings and delights as well, and I am grateful beyond words for my amazing husband, for the earth that sustains us, for those around me who gave me hope and brought me smiles.  But at the end of that draining year, I found myself deeply in need of renewal and restoration of damages.

I thought at the start of the month off I would write a lot.  This winter I gave in and joined a blog “challenge” - the Dark Days eating local challenge.  I have been a past skeptic of, for example, local foods challenges, because I have observed people go about them as just something to get through - okay, that’s done, whew, I did it, let’s go get some junk food, or some fruit from Equador to celebrate!  I felt bad being a skeptic, because these challenges are such a good thing, to raise awareness, to result perhaps in some permanent changes for the better, to teach others from your experience, etc.  I thought it would be easy, because what we eat through these dark days of winter still is, to a large extent, what we have grown ourselves and stored in the pantry, the canning closest, the freezers, or what is still on foot and on the ground outside, despite winter.

And that part was easy.  What was not easy was wondering why I was doing this exactly, when this was the way we ate most days anyway.  And I found that I did not need another deadline in my life to meet, just at this moment.  When it’s 10 pm after an exhausting day and a post is due at midnight, it just suddenly takes the joy out of writing and becomes one more depressing unfinished task.   I did not like the feeling of trying to prove myself to other people on one more level, or to meet their requirements, kind-hearted even as they may be.  Self-doubt is sometimes only enhanced by trying to prove yourself too much.  And was it getting competitive?  Was there some kind of glory we were all seeking in a see-what-I-accomplished sort of way?  Sigh.  With some clarity of meditations, I find I just don’t need that.  I find I will be freer to just be, and share, and write of what we live, without trying to meet a challenge.  So I’ve let my part in the Dark Days Challenge go, with much respect.  Nothing’s changed; we’re still making salad out of jerusalem artichokes, celery and cabbage that have been in storage since October, eating chicken we raised from the freezer, and our eggs, but it’s such a day-to-day, permanent, lifestyle that I am not going to document it as though it’s a novelty.

There is a very humorous side to this, as well.  My old digital camera has started showing its age, and one day when it was being uncooperative, I borrowed my husband’s IPhone to photograph the process of making yogurt from the lovely local milk we enjoy - for, you guessed it, the blog and the challenge.  Now, IPhones can be slick slippery devils at times, and somehow, after many shots of all the steps of the process, the thing slithered out of my grasp suddenly, and as luck would have it, submerged immediately in the bowl of 112 degree fluid milk-and-yogurt mixture.  Completely submerged.  Of course, I yanked it out before I’d even really registered what had happened. Fast forward through several hours of agonized phone triage, and somehow, it survived seemingly unscathed.

That was camera episode one.  Camera episode two came while photographing some other soup or stew-making process, this time with my own camera, and from a place of being deeply engrossed, I became aware of a burning plastic scent wafting through the kitchen.  Searching the source down, I discoverd I’d turned on the wrong burner, and edge of my camera was sitting on, and melting to, the heating empty burner I’d carelessly put it down beside when my hands were full.  Amazingly, the camera mostly survived this too, but is even less reliable with how it uses batteries now.  So - there are hazards as well to photo-documentation of a cooking process!

And, so, I find myself in need of simplicity and joy.  There is so much to navigate as the world tries to bring in its drama, darkness, depression, and neediness.  I take inspiration once again in the beautiful passage of Levin’s work, above, and its lesson: first he fears he’ll fail, fall behind others, and works in competition and strain.  But by the end of his work, all that slips away, and he is working in satisfaction in the work only, and enjoys the peace found there.

“Another row, and yet another row…”  and so we go on, into the next chapter.  Happy New Year, everyone.

Outside, the cold wind bites my face as I walk across the path next to our newest field, the one we covered with sheep manure compost a month ago, and then covered again in raked leaves.  I can feel my cheeks and nose getting red, and my fingers are wanting mittens instead of these ragged work gloves.  I’ve only been outside 10 or 15 minutes.

Twice a day I come out to open and close the chickens, and stay outside for a bit of chores each time.  Tonight it was restocking one of the woodpiles nearest the house, and gathering some wood chip snacks for the stove.

It’s not that cold tonight, about 20 degrees, but the wind is blowing hard out of the north.  I wear my coveralls and thick sweatshirt on top of a few layers underneath, doubled up gloves and a stocking cap.  The path is drifted over with blowing snow, but we’ve had so little snow (compared to the rest of the eastern US this year) that there’s only an inch or so covering this morning’s footprints - mine, and a small deer’s, and a polydactyl cat.

This is still new to me, this sense of being a farmer and not just playing at farming.  I’m outside working every day now, cold or rain or hot.  There’s always something to do, and always something to get out of hand if you don’t.  We have over a hundred creatures outdoors depending on us, so it’s not exactly a choice.  I lived fifty years as a city boy, and now I’m a farmer, inside and out.

The outer part is this, the cold wind and chapped cheeks, the everyday get up and go do and be.  The inner part is… well, what is it?  How do I explain the city-to-farm boy mental adjustment?  How do I convince someone that inside me there has always been a farm boy waiting to come out? Or is it something else?

I have journal entries from my teen years, places I kept lists of hopes and dreams for the future, visions of living off the land and living simply on less.  I wanted to grow my own food, I wrote, and chop wood.  I created these records apart from any attachment to any life partner plans… I didn’t have a girlfriend at the time, this was something of my own imagination.  And it was imagination certainly, because I lived in an Ohio industrial city and was allergic to every variety of mammalian hair and avian feathers… I couldn’t sleep under wool or down, I couldn’t ride horseback without getting asthma and just forget about pets.  Just a fluffy dream that fit with my growing aspirations as a 70’s environmentalist mainly, and sounded like fun even if I had no more idea how to grow my own food or chop wood than I did to build an airplane.

I chose a different path.  Oh I picked geology as a college major to keep my butt outdoors, but after college I took urban jobs and rarely did field work at first.  Then to another city for my PhD, then to another university to teach, a city boy teaching geology in the city, with the occasional field trip to keep it real.  I taught environmental truths and sustainable dreams, and personally recycled more than the average urbanite, but I never came close to my earlier aspirations.  I had left childish things behind.

It’s dark now, and the chickens are roosting, the woodstove is near and I’m writing this for… myself.  Outside is a tiny farm that I know nearly every square foot of, and everyday I’m tromping across part of it.  It comforts me to walk in the cold and rain and heat each day, to feel in my bones instead of my brain how short the days are now, and how long they were six months ago.

I have chickens who know me and trust me, as well as a few who know me and don’t (it’s mutual).  I have cats who climb onto my shoulder and ride shotgun for every chore except chopping wood.  If the wood doesn’t get chopped, we’re cold.  If the chickens don’t get watered, they’ll die.  I have to go out, I have to live part of every day outside, working on the farm.

But I don’t.  I don’t have to.  I want to.  I have longed for this all my life.  At certain points in my urbanified life I tried to make more money per hour so that I could pay others at less money per hour to do some of my more mundane chores for me.  Now I rejoice in the opportunity to trudge through the blowing snow to feed chickens in an operation that barely breaks even, but makes us ever so happy.  The eggs are, of course, to die for.  And the joy of sharing those wonderful eggs with grateful others (at $4/dozen to cover our feed costs) is icing on the cake.

Outside, it’s cold and the wind is blowing - I can hear it right now.  Inside… inside me, I’m having my cake and eating it too.  I can’t wait to get outside in the cold and rain and heat every day.  I am thrilled that I have to plan my days to allow an hour before anything else to get those chickens out free ranging in the morning… it’s my childhood dream completely realized.  At one point I thought I’d have died if I had to live on a farm, what with my allergies and all.  At this point, I don’t know what happened to all those allergies.  I help drive horse teams for other farmers, stack hay bales in the mow, and live with cats and chickens.  I couldn’t be happier inside to be outside every day, and needed out there.

Yes, the wind makes my cheeks cold.  But that cold is all on the outside.  Inside I’m warmer on this winter farm than I ever thought I could be anywhere.  And it just keeps getting better.

Why I feelz lik howling? What es howling?

Winter is here.  Today is the solstice, and the full moon, and a lunar eclipse.  The moon came up a couple hours ago… here’s M. and Possum (the cat) pondering the ramifications. We’ll probably stay up late playing Dominion so we can bundle up and go out and howl for the 1:30am peak.

Over the past weeks of pre-winter, we’ve had hard freezes and only one snow.  There’ve been flurries, little ones, but while the southern midwest (and south!) got hit hard with ice and snow, we were only dusted with a dainty 2″ of snow, although it has been cold, barely into the 20s at the warmest these past many days.

Although not actually crinoids, I pretend they are.

My phone is always in my pocket when I go out to open up chickens (or shut them in at night) or split wood, or whatever.  So in the freezes, I snapped a morning shot of these ice dwellers in our flower rows in the front yard.  It’s hard to get a good focus on a gently waving crinoid calyx like this, but it obliged me.

Then on the path over to the East Flock, I crunched into a flock of tiny castles.

No one lives in this castle. I knocked, no answer.

These tiny dwellings are no less elaborate for their size than any human constructs… amazing things. Pine needles for scale.

Finally, after our 2″ of snow fell and sat for several days, just beyond the site of the ice castles I found the most amazing snowy Christmas trees.

Again, amazed that the phone camera can focus this close and catch the details… these crystals grew right on the snow in this sheltered place with morning-only sunshine.

Snowy little Christmas trees.

Breakfast here tends to be pretty local.  There are no packaged cereal boxes in our kitchen.

Veggie hash with eggs

There are bulk rolled oats and steelcut oats, but honestly oatmeal is not my favorite, and breakfast usually involves  other things.  In the summer, autumn, and early winter, very often we have some sort of a veggie hash with a couple of eggs.  Veggies are whatever is available right out of the garden, but often uses peppers, a cole crop such as broccoli, cabbage, brussels sprouts, or kale, and a onion of some sort.  Cheese on top is nice.  Homegrown potatoes are frequently part of it, sometimes as hashbrowns, sometimes refried from leftover boiled potatoes, or chopped and broiled quickly in the oven.  Our brussels sprouts have come in heavily and nicely this time of year, and a typical breakfast side is a quick steam of a couple handfuls of halved brussels sprouts with butter and balsamic vinegar.  It’s easy to get enough greens every day when they are part of breakfast too.

We’ve been doing well keeping up with making yogurt.

It is so nice to have yogurt that minimizes contact with plastic.  Local raw milk that stores in a glass bottle, and a glass container for culturing and storing the yogurt.  I have a hard time looking at the yogurt aisle in grocery stores, and seeing what a healthy food has been reduced to, and what an impact on the environment its packaging is having.  There is no need, and it is so sad, to contemplate the waste of the individually packaged yogurts, and the crazy overpackaging of a few tablespoons of heavily sweetened yogurt to appeal to kids.  The yogurt we make at home is heavenly-tasting, high quality, and free of plastic and landfill dependency.  If we want it sweet, adding maple syrup and canned pears, plums, peaches, or frozen berries, or homemade jam does the trick, and tastes so much better than flavored packaged yogurt.  When we were in Canada, I found some good yogurt (or…yogourt!) that tasted like the yogurts in Germany.  I brought it home and cultured it and was able to keep the culture from that one package going for a long time, with delicious results.

Lacto-fermented red pepper pickle

I guess we don’t have much of the ordinary imported fruit either.  Bananas, citrus, etc, have become rare.  Berries and canned fruits are local, and berries almost invariably handpicked from the wild or a local farm, and frozen. This summer we had a bumper crop of gorgeous blackberries (blackberries, not black raspberries!) from a weedy patch of brambles about 50 feet from our backdoor, that yielded all we could eat fresh, and at least two quarts of frozen berries.  A local diet doesn’t have to be deficient on vitamin C and antioxidants, just because imported citrus is a treat, rather than a staple.

Another way to access Vitamin C is through lactofermentation of certain veggies.  One of our favorite lacto-fermented pickles uses a lot of red bell peppers - a great source of C.  I can understand how foreign it must seem to think of eating vegetable kraut with breakfast, for those whose breakfast is cereal.  But it is delicious with potatoes and eggs, and as convenient to quickly grab out of the refrigerator.  For me, it is as foreign now to imagine pouring out boxed cereal and putting processed milk from a plastic jug on it and eating that.

The thing is - everything tastes so good!  It’s not as though we are torturing ourselves through a breakfast of some weirdly home-fermented stuff combined with choking down our daily greens.  So often we look at each other and just say, “oh, THIS is soo good..”  It is a high-quality, low sugar, usually low-glutin, easily digestible, low on environmental impact, and hugely satisfying way to have breakfast.

That smorgasboard seems to sum up the week!   On our porch is a chicken in a cage, and two planters full of celery plants.  We butchered 17 meat chickens while enduring a communal cold, and something has been simmering on the stove almost all day every day.  I’ve had a bit of a break from work this week, and tried to use it for autumn catch-up, even while nursing a cold.

The young chicken on the porch in a cage has a broken leg. Total mystery how that came to be, she just turned up hopping on one foot with the other hanging, obviously broken.  Chickens are relentless at picking on someone who’s injured, and her companions turned bullies immediately.  She had to be separated from them to not be killed by pecking.  Between the options of putting her down, or going to the vet and ending up with a $500 chicken, I decided I couldn’t do either, and would try splinting her leg as best I could, and leave the rest up to her and the higher powers.  She has a break right in or above the equivalent of the ankle on a chicken.  She’s been doing great in her little homemade cast for the past week -immobilization made it comfortable, and she rests and eats and seems to be healing.  She is one of our new Aracauna pullets for next years’ laying flock; I was not happy about this damage.

On one particularly cold clammy afternoon, I made myself go out even with a throbbing head and runny nose and dig the celery to save it from hard freezing.  We are not as advanced with hoophouses/winter shelters this year as I had hoped we’d be.  We have a wonderful harvest of celery… finally!  It puttered all through the hot dry summer, but has grown to loveliness now in this last cool but not cold 2 months.  I harvested down as much as I can keep in the refrigerator, dug about 15 of the best plants, and replanted them in planters to bring in under cover.  They will keep on producing useable celery for us for a little while.  You just can’t make really good soup without celery, and yet it is on the list of the most pesticide-poisoned veggies you can get (and not easy to wash or peel!).  It’s so nice to grow our own, but it takes some strategizing to have it available more than only 1/3 of the year.

We’re filling our freezer with 6-9 months supply of homegrown pastured chicken, and traded some of the chicken for half a grass-fed organic lamb raised a few miles away.  I’ve been making stocks from boiled bones, from some organic grassfed beef we had in the freezer, and now from the chicken bones.  It is amazing stuff - lovely color, tasty, so full of gelatin and chondroitin that it gels up strongly in the refrigerator.  Making really good soups while we have colds has been wonderful.  Here’s one that disappeared really quickly…it was soooo good:  That rich chicken broth, our own Snowcap beans, and our veggies, including onions, leeks, celery, wax beans, garlic, and kale.

When the stockpot hasn’t been occupied with broth and soup, I’ve made a batch of quince jelly, and one of Green Tomato Chutney.  The chutney turned out really spectacularly.  Green tomatoes, apple, quince, red bell pepper, hot pepper, onions all get chopped and simmered in a pot with raisins, mustard seed, curry powder, cinnamon, cardamon, allspice, and ginger, some sugar, and some vinegar.  I use maple sugar/turbinado/sorghum when I can.  Oh, it was delicious this time!