I'm looking forward to the strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, rhubarb...all the things I don't have to plant this year!
Saul has spent this week gathering a lot of wood from a fallen tree that was cut down by the village. The pieces of wood are cut just the right length for our wood stove, although we still need to split it. He called the village and they said we could have the wood. It's a lot of work to load it in the pick-up and then stack it in our yard and then split it, but it's free wood! And our bills are so much lower now that we heat with wood. And it's recycling because this tree fell during a storm and now we can use it for fuel. So, it's sort of groovy. When we heat with wood we really have a grasp on the labor it takes to create our heat and I like that. I like that we have to work to heat our house instead of just moving the thermostat up which takes no work - or thought - at all. I like that every time we want to be warmer we have to clean the ashes out of the stove, crumple paper, get kindling, bring wood in the house, put the wood in the stove, and light the match. It takes all those steps plus all the work Saul is doing to gather and split the wood. It keeps us conscious of our energy consumption on a whole new level because we have to put out energy to stay warm.
Tomorrow I am going to an all day workshop about permaculture. Really, I just want to sleep in, but I'm sure I will really enjoy it when I get there. Part of the reason we started this blog is because we are just normal people who work and are raising a child and we don't do gardening, organic farming, canning, drying - you know all that stuff - all the time. A lot of our time is taken up with all kinds of other things, but we want to learn about how to live a more sustainable lifestyle. We experience on a regular basis how difficult it is to do that with the schedule we have. The hectic nature of life is probably the reason a lot of people don't make changes and it keeps us from moving as quickly on all this as we would like to. So, we just take it a bit at a time and do as much as we think we can. We also eat pizza and watch movies some Friday and Saturday evenings because we just need to veg after a busy week. Like I said, we are just normal people - not your radical types - and yet... It's all a balance.
So, that's what's up this week. In the garden - not much - lettuce and peas. In the overall scope of things - Saul has made lots of progress on our wood supply for next year and the year after. Tomorrow the permaculture workshop...and Mollie's lacrosse games and practices after school, my work with 60 middle school students every day, Saul's work with college students 4 afternoons/nights a week, Mollie's homework and work on her script with Cora...
Life in this modern world... Would we want to live in a more agrarian culture? Sometimes I wish our lives centered more around planting and harvesting, around a celebration of the seasons, around an awareness of the importance of water, sunlight, and soil quality. But what would it be like to live without some of our modern conveniences? What would it be like to have a life span of 45 years - or 25 years for women like it was in Ohio in the early 1800's. I think it's important to live the life we are living now with an awareness and an understanding of agrarian and indigenous cultures, but not with an idealistic, nostalgic viewpoint.
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