Culling the list

I know what needs to be done, a list is a fun way to plan time.
Four buckets of water
Two loads of laundry.
Sweep the nights remaining chips of wood fanning out from the stove door. Cedar dust.
Dishes, something that is forever on my list, we like to eat, and I like to cook.
Cook.
Tonight I have a Jamaican style bean medley that Raene brought. She says she has no time for such slow cooking.
I'll add chicken or bacon and make some chapatis. Sour cream on the side.
And it's a bread day. Save some dough for fun things like cinnamon buns. Fats loves to make those. Mostly though he loves to eat them.

Burn that which needs to be burnt. We're not talking cooking or baking anymore.
Garbage. Burn the garbage.

Then wipe down the house with sunshine till it's basking.
Wash myself, Oh this is not really a list. Wash my mouth out.

Keep the home fires burning.
The radio on about local gin and vodka.Not for me. Instead, let me taste some lavender in the beer. Have you tried that local beer? Have you tried to make your own?

To hear the morning show's host give the weather details, you'd think it was cold out there.
Give me local mittens and toques.
'Cause it is. Minus 20.
Wind chills, it's all the rage
Biting shrieking shrills. Eat you up in seconds.

Sample tonight's feast, sadly not from here. Cheap oil a-la- king.
Should not have got on this flight tonight. Sham-wow organic lettuce, California style. That's the taste of Not From Here.

Home is good. Yours or mine, but home.

Was he cold? Did he dress? Where were his slippers?
Did he bring his cat?

Not tonight, not yet, I had no invitation.

Still, I invite, a need to finish my list.
Come when the sun is warm, planting.
Warm your face and tell me stories.
Close your eyes and breathe.

We are the same, you grew into me

Pull don't push
Love don't laugh
Pause don't cry

Breathe don't die   

-Tammy

To cow or not to cow

Dennis has described to me the joys of a Jersey cow. An almost spiritual experience. Milking in the cold, dark winter night. The smell of hay and soft cow, mixed with the sound of chewing and deep breathes as you lean your head against her big round belly and squirt foamy milk into your pail. A dreamy contented connection with you and nature.

It has to be a Jersey, They are the sweetest, he tells me. And the richest milk. Damn near half cream.

The romance is most definitely romantic. I think in spite of all my hesitation, we will be rich with milk. Milk that we think is disgusting and won't drink. We've been forcing down the the throats of our six children organic soy, for years, much to their dismay. Not ever converting them,  no, they love the big full glass of the cow.

Cheese, however is a thing we can get behind. Dennis almost lives for cheese. Yogurt is delightful and who doesn't like sour cream on a baked potato?

To make our own cheese? To have rich cream for baking? The undoctored raw milk just as it should be, full of nutrients and goodness, just might be worth the commitment.

The commitment is huge. No spur of the moment backpacking trips. No whimsical overnighters. Nope, she needs you every night and every morning. We'll need to have people for sure, so good thing all six of our kids love milk.

What I'm starting to realize though, is this, I just might need her. If the milk in the big box stores (from gross factory torture chambers) stop arriving by truck/oil, what on earth will I do? If a life without cheese freaks me out, maybe it's cow time.

 If I can head into the barn on a cold winter night and feel a connection with a beautiful pet/friend and make ice cream for the grandkids or Dennis, then maybe it's time. Time to settle down, to get connected to the land and grow my own food, no matter what the commitment.

No chemicals, no watering down, no bureaucrats telling me what I can and cannot eat or drink. Just me, in the old country milking my Jersey. OK, me dreaming about the old world and the way things were before we really started screwing it all up.

Yep. To Cow.                                                                                                                                   

-Tammy

Count your drops

Four, five gallon jugs. That's what I can use. As much as I want. I huck it out the window when I'm done with it. A light shade of grey... not black. Black is the color when it's hard earned. So now, with the little stream a few hundred metres from my doorstep, I revel in the new lighter shade of grey. Grey water. That's what it's called.

I wonder what next. A tap? A waterline? One that goes up the path up the steps into the kitchen? Not the bathroom cause if I turn around I'm in the kitchen. Duh. I know most of you have several faucets, but I find myself  shunning even one. If I have taps I'll turn into a user and an abuser. I will turn on the tap and brush my teeth watching the water drain. Draining, a thing that goes well with the flow.

If I lug and tug my bath, heave it out and down the steps, it most certainly seems like a lot of water. But to pluck a rubber stopper or to simply flip the switch? Oh where oh where does our water go?

I'm just sayin' if I can pack or slide my buckets across the snow. Why wouldn't I? My stream won't run dry. I wonder how long till the tap would hiss and suck and drain all there is to drain. I wonder how lazy I would become, How careless, How thoughtless. I live in the Okanagan. A dry, dry day, and they bitch and sneak to keep their grasses green.

It is thoughtless to build house after massive house with not one or two, but 15 pipes with a twisty turn-on flow valve. And the pool.

I know what you're thinking. It doesn't matter the number of taps a house has, just the number of users in it. And how they choose to use or waste. Imagine though if you only allowed the use of one tap. Say the laundry room. I'd pick that sink because it's big. Go there with your five gallon pail and pack it to the toilet or tub. You'll cut your wastefulness big time and get fit doing it.

I'm youngish...

Ok I feel younger than I am. 38. It is a bit of a challenge at 4 buckets a day. When I'm 80? who knows. maybe I'll settle for a hand pump just outside the back door near the salad garden. Eighty is a long ways away.

-Tammy

On bush time

I'm not quite sore this morning, which means I almost worked hard enough yesterday. Hard enough for muscles to feel pleasantly used, though, and for a massive old fire-killed cedar snag to be stacked in the woodshed, blended with a smaller, sweetly-cured dead spruce.

Our return to the bush was too sudden and late in the season to allow for anything really resembling preparation. Now the hastily assembled woodpile has been pretty much taken apart. We've been promised a late winter buried in snow and gripped by savage cold. So far we've just got the snow, but February lies ahead. So for the past few days it's been wood. Yesterday's haul took me four hours with a lot of help from Tammy and a little help from Fats. Fats is our youngest kid, Kelty. Fourteen and fat as a toothpick.

If four hours sounds like a long time to haul home the bucked-up bounty of two logs then you, like me, live close to your wood. A normal, practical rural dude would have done it without help in less than half the time. Except that a normal, practical rural dude would never have allowed such a situation to develop in the first place. Only a fuckin' retard would.

Oh well. There I go again.

Actually, I could have done it that quick as well, and I usually do. By being practical and using my truck to haul the wood. The normal practice. Actually it's an infestation of those dudes that partly inspired my decision to be ridiculously slow. Cause logging is especially busy on our little road this winter. Some years there's nothing, some years a bit. Right now there are four trucks running, seems like four loads a day each. Empty, loaded that's 32 times a day the whole damn slippery little strip of twisty gravel is pretty much blocked by towering tons of truck and trees coming at you fast and without a lot of regard for anyone so unbusinesslike as to not even be calling his kilometres. Did I mention the highways department took over this former forest service road 30 years ago?

I've only had to burrow into a snowbank twice so far this year, though. And who likes a boring drive?

Anyway, to cut firewood like a normal person in winter ('cept they don't), the first thing you have to do is drive up a tree-lined road that's plowed. There are only two reasons anyone plows a road way out here in January. One is that it's a public road like the one described above. The other is that it's a privately maintained active-hauling logging road which is infinitely worse. Driving those, in a winter of heavy logging, is one thing. Parking on them while you set about butchering and loading up a few trees is something slightly more. Not that I haven't done it, but it's not exactly fun.

The other reason that I wanted to use my body instead of my truck to shift a couple tons of  wood is kinda the same as the first only simpler. It's just more fun. And more exercise. And...turns out the other reason isn't really that much simpler. Okay.

For example, did you know that if you use your body to pack firewood out of the bush in three feet of snow, it's condiditon improves? And if you use your truck for the same task, it's condition deteriorates? That's not a practical consideration, though. If you've got no time and lots of money. Don't let a splash of sarcasm confuse you. I remain a hopelessly impractical fellow. It's just that I've got all day.

Of course, it's much better for the poor old environment if you use your body instead of an internal combustion engine to move heavy objects from one place to another. Only it's not really. Because I tell you this, in the pompous prefacing of the Lizard King, this human race that you and I belong to isn't going to stop burning oil until there isn't a drop of it left. Unless we wipe ourselves out before it's gone. If you doubt that you just haven't been paying attention.

Anyway, there were a few good standing dead trees out past the outhouse and the future building site and through the ravine where the nameless little stream runs about 10 months out of the year. 

Here's how it works. You wade out there with your saw, ass deep in snow, shifting it's 25-odd awkward pounds from one protesting arm to the other. You knock the trees down, limb 'n' buck 'em, and backtrack with the first block, bellowing for reinforcements. By this time there's starting to be a bit of a trail. Oh, and your sweating, breathing hard. Feeling good. Turns out there are volunteers. Off the three of you go, then. By the time you're all headed back, you're actually walking on a pretty damn fine trail. It's still warm for January. There's a light snow falling, but the clouds are high and there's the odd bit of sun coming through. And it's looking like a pretty damn fine afternoon. 

Building site? Yeah we've affectionately referred to this place as the 'guest suite' since we gave it a bullshitectomy and set it free. We'll be the guests most of the time cause... that loft. Who wants to sleep all the way inside for most of the year? We've already had a taste and we like it. That whole, massive semi-outdoor space, in particular, remains forever part of a fluid future living arrangement that has come to include a separate little cabin at some future point. Mostly we just want to try some different things. And we've got the perfect spot. We're more sure of that than ever. Cause we walked right through the middle of it 30 or so times yesterday, stopping often. It's good to rest. And take long looks around. Figure out which trees we'd have to take out to get that view down the valley. Which we'll get to keep and which we'll wait and see about. More than firewood got moved a little closer yesterday.

Water got moved a little closer too. Sorta. We haul in all our water here, from nearby creeks. Yes in the damn truck. Or nearby snowman banks. But not since yesterday.

We got tired of stepping over the trickling little creek with our woodblocks, briefly discussed using it as a water source before writing it off as too small, bridging it with a couple planks. Then someone spotted a wider, deeper hole. So we took a break from wood and picked up shovels, dug it deeper and wider. Rigged a little plywood deck beside it. It was never practical to hand-bomb water from that little creek in all the years we were roaring right by better sources in the truck every damn day anyway. And of course a normal, practical rural dude would have drilled a well and backhoed a water line and tacked on some taps a long time ago. Which is what we used to think we oughta be getting around to. Why? Well that's still sorta out there somewhere.

There's a lot of wood still out there, too. Time to get a little more of it into the shed. Just a little, though. Cause there ain't no slower way to get it done. A glorious waste of time.

-Dennis