And now, I’m 23, and 13 weeks pregnant, and I just watched this and wept.  You might not have the same reaction, if you’re not so into music, or if you’re not pregnant and hormonal, or if you have no heart.

You know the question.  ”What would you do with your life if money were no object?”  You know what I’d do?  I’d sing in a choir.

There’s never been a time when I felt more alive than when singing in a choir.  I can’t explain what it does to me.  I hope you know the feeling.   Maybe you get it in a different way, but I hope you know it.  Total elation, fingertips to toes.  Blood-pumping, gut-wrenching, heart-stirring elation.

And that’s my new year’s resolution.  Sing.  Be moved.  Weep.

Oh, and have a child.

Abby got a Spy Kit for Christmas, and it delighted me to watch her unpack all the elements. I still aim to find joy in small things: a barely-working compass, a disappearing pen, and messages coded so secretly that only a red lens reveals the true message. I felt disillusioned when I learned how to read the text without the red gels.

This picture is of our family friend, Jared Wright, a fully grown man who works at a bank.

We kept a charge account at Cobb’s Country Store. I used it to buy a lot of junk I did not need nor could our family afford. Our only source of income, except in the Fall when we sold cotton, was from the sale of milk to the local Carnation Milk Company. We three boys would milk about ten to twelve cows per day. At night, when we were through milking, we would strain it once or, sometimes, twice. It was gross what we caught in the strainer. If the cow put her foot in the bucket, which they often did, we would curse and pull her foot out and continue milking—just double up on the straining pads.

After a cow had had a calf we would allow the calf to get two teats and we milked the other two to sell. We would fill two ten gallon cans with the morning and evening milking. The cans were then put in a wooden 55 gallon barrel and we poured water around them until they floated, which kept the milk from souring. If it soured, the Carnation Company would send it back. We learned that one could put baking soda in the soured milk and send it back the next day and they would accept it. They later wised up and put food coloring in the bad milk. It was only good for the hogs after that. We also tried to beat the system by adding a couple gallons of water to each ten gallon can. Supposedly, one was paid based on the milk’s butter fat content and the overall weight. Our modifications only helped our earnings.

Later, we learned that our milk truck owner and driver, who owned no cows, received a bigger milk check than anyone on the route. He would stop on the route, take his own milk cans and fill them with a gallon or so from his customers. The moral of this whole story is that there is always a way to cheat, even in the most non-lucrative trades.

Homeschooling, check.  Lunch at Long’s Drug Store, check.  Bananagrams, check.

I’m feeling ultra girly today.  I just painted my nails and am two parts enamored, one part nauseated by the Barbie-ness of them.  (Side note on the Barbie issue–I wasn’t allowed to have them.  I applaud my parents for keeping her ill-formed body out of my psyche.) The good news is, they match my scarf.  They’re about as pink as a thing can possibly be.  Here’s the thing about my nails.  When I was around seven years old, I watched The Parent Trap for the first time–the one with Hayley Mills.  Hayley Mills taught me to bight my fingernails.  I saw her do it, and I wondered what it would be like, and I haven’t stopped since.  It’s been sixteen years.  Thanks for almost everything, Hayley.  So I’m trying to stop.  It’s been five days.  So far, so good.

I think cold weather makes me want things.  Here’s my theory.  With cold weather comes Christmas.  With Christmas come gifts and greed.  Pavlog’s dogs and whatnot.

I suppose that’s it for today–painting my nails and wanting things.  Vapid.

Day one of homeschooling was a rousing success.  There were games and manipulatives and crafts, and best of all, reading–reading in a rocker, with two sweet little girls and an incredibly intelligent little guy at my feet, on big, colorful pillows.  When the kids’ moms, Emily and Amanda, were putting the classroom together, they  asked me for any input I might have on the sort of things they would need.  My response?  ”Um, I like sitting on the floor.”  Huh.  And they still hired me to educate their children.  Nonetheless, I stand by my pillow suggestion.  Big, comfy pillows are perfect for snuggling into for a good story.  And if I instill nothing else in these kids, I hope to foster a love of books–of words and turn of phrase and a good story.  And the tangibility of books, too–not a Kindle or an Ipad or any other new fangled contraption, but good, old fashioned, paper and print books, with yellowed pages and worn spines and musty scents, of libraries and home bookshelves and local bookstores with honey-warm wood shelves and people who can recommend a good book to follow The Elegance of the Hedgehog.  Pillows.  Yes, I think pillows are the way to foster that.

We read the first two chapters of the first book of A Series of Unfortunate Events.  I think the title sums up my view of my life right now.  It started with a string of misfortunes and culminated in the news of my grandfather’s inoperable lung cancer.  My grandfather, who I love so dearly, who looked so handsome when I saw him just a few weeks ago in his red plaid shirt, has a year to live.  And all is not right with the world because of that.  Never mind war and hunger and greed.  The real problem is that my grandfather won’t be around forever.  And I sort of always thought he would be.

And here’s the thing about God.  I won’t ever deny him.  I won’t ever lose faith.  But I have some serious questions.  I’ve cried out to him–cried out to him with such passion and grief and anguish.  I’ve approached his throne as boldly as I know how.  I asked him to put his hand on my grandfather’s body, and let it radiate shafts of light that would pierce the cancer that’s eating away at his lungs.  Because God is light, and in him there is no darkness at all.  And crazier things have happened.  It happens to cats all the time, right?  Friends of ours had a cat that needed surgery after being run over by a car.  They had a benefit concert for the cat.  Really.  Members of their church and community gathered for the sake of this cat. And you know what?  When they took him back for the surgery, the vet said he didn’t need it anymore, that his body was perfectly fine.  And I’ve heard of it happening in humans, too, with cancer.  So why would God heal a crippled cat and a man with brain cancer, but not my grandfather?  I truly believe in the healing power of Jesus.  I believe without doubt that he raised his friend Lazarus from the dead, that he touched a woman who believed in him and made her stop bleeding.  The fact that I believe those things makes it harder to accept that, for whatever reason, he’s chosen not to heal my grandfather.  His eye is on the sparrow, but how many sparrows perish, right under the watchful eye of God?  It makes me think God is sort of twisted.  And I guess that’s okay–I guess it has to be.

So, I’ve taken a new job.  While I’ve thoroughly enjoyed my time at home attempting to be a radical home-maker, and still stand by my commitment to never working a conventional job again, this is definitely a job worth taking.  It’s like it was tailor made for me.  The job–homeschooling.  The children–two kindergarten girls and a third-grade boy–bright, funny, and exceedingly pleasant.  The parents–friends from church who paint and write and teach at a school for Muslim refugees.  The classroom–a sunny little nook on the top floor of a colorful Victorian home in a downtown neighborhood.  I couldn’t be happier about my employment status.

Tomorrow, we start if off with a bang.  The curriculum is en route, and until its arrival, we have some paper, crayons, writing books, and   A Series of Unfortunate Events.

Tonight we had dinner with the aforementioned families and I made this snazzy cake.

Tragedy has recently struck on a few levels.  There is nothing I can do to change anything.  It seems absurd to make cakes and read books, but there’s nothing else to do but to go on with life, even when it seems fickle.  One for sorrow, two for joy.  So for now, there is a new computer, a handsome cake, winsome children, a perfect job, and beautiful weather.  And all of it put together doesn’t outweigh the loss and sorrow, but there’s nothing else to be done.

The only soap I ever used until almost grown was “lye” soap—homemade soap crafted in the wash pot with lye, which had to be “Red Devil” lye. This soap was used for bathing, washing, and any soap needs in the family. It had quite a smell, and not a good one.

After my Mother had rubbed the clothes on the rub board in the hot water, she would put them in the rinsing side. The rinsing water had a coloring we referred to as “blueing” where the water would look sky blue. After we got through washing and hanging the clothes on the line, we would have our baths, where Mother would put us boys in the tub that carried the color of the sky.

To get a twelve or thirteen-year-old in a number two washtub was quite a chore. Our old house sat near the little gravel and dirt road where a tree offered little shield from the few passerbys. We were so embarrassed. We would try to duck down when a car passed since out in the country we could tell who was coming by the sound of their car. This bathing practice kept up until we rebelled at fourteen and started heating our water in the sun in a tub behind the house where we could hide.

Bathing was at best in a washpan that held about a half-gallon of water. Later on, as times got better, we heated the water on the stove. We would take a pan of cold water and set it on the back door steps and wash our feet and often remark that we “washed up as far as possible and down as far as possible, but ‘possible’ only got washed about once a week.”

Hog Killing Day

At our estate, hog killing day was quite an exciting time for all of our family. We usually got to miss school to supposedly help with the chores. The day just had to be the coldest day of the year or, at least as kids, we had to think that it was. Late November was usually about the best time since it was normally cold and dry. Both cold and dry were needed for the meat to keep. We normally killed five large hogs each year, one for each member of the family. Lard was as important as the meat since if you had lard and corn for corn meal and flour you could just about make it along with the vegetables grown.

We would start the day by going to our neighbor’s house and borrowing his 22 rifle and my daddy would attempt to shoot him right between the eyes. Most of the time he did. As soon as the hog hit the ground, Frank Morris, a large and very muscular black man, would jump down over the hog with a long, very sharp butcher knife and slit the hog’s heart to make him bleed as much as possible so the meat would not be dark. Frank would always have a glass nearby so he could catch the fresh, hot blood. He would drink two or three glasses of the hot blood.

Some of us children would get a piece of hollow cane and put in the bladder and blow it up like a balloon. It was quite a contest to see who was the best at this sport.

As soon as the hog was killed, it was put in a barrel placed in the ground at a 45 degree angle and “soughed” several times in the scalding water. The smell of the hog hair was not very pleasant. We would then scrape the hair and singe the remaining hair before gutting the hog. All the fat was cooked off in a large, black wash pot. What little lean was left on the fat of the cooking we had for cracklins, and the rest for lard. Some people made “blood” puddings, but I must say that I did not ever eat any.

Hog killing day was always quite a happy day for us: plenty of fresh tenderloins and sausage, and we felt we had arrived.

-Redefined sense of “need”

Just a few weeks ago, I would have said we had only what we needed and certainly did not live decadent lives.  But as I’ve considered need verses greed, I’ve been amazed at the excess I suddenly feel encumbered by.  I hope to continually question what we really need in our family, and live on that, plus a few happy luxuries thrown in there.

I’m not going cold turkey here.  I’m taking one baby step at a time.  This week, we purged our closets, hauled out about half of our furniture to the thrift store, posted our TV on Craigslist, and donated our DVDs to the library (this is a loop hole I created for myself so that I can check them out when I’m going through withdrawl.) 

Future baby steps include the following:

-Eliminating processed food, by making everything from scratch and growing a small garden on our deck

-Ditching our dryer in favor of a clothesline

-Replacing cleaning supplies, laundry detergent, and simple toiletries (as they run out) with home made versions from baking soda, vinegar and Castile soap

-Potentially raising hens–my innate sense of terror towards all fowl may hinder this one.  If so, no big deal, they sell local eggs at the Sutherland Market.

-Tossing the iPhone–I might save this for last because I’m getting really good at Doodle Jump

-Rethinking transportation–I thought we needed two cars, but we’ve been just fine with one.  Considerations include a cheaper car, a car that runs on vegetable oil, or no car, but instead bicycles and public transit.  This is a biggie and will probably take us a while.

So I this will be the basis of future posts–the road to frugality, one step at a time.

If you’re interested, here is some inspiration:

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, Barbara Kingsolver

The Irresistible Revolution, Shane Claiborne

Radical Homemakers, Shannon Hayes

07 Jesus Is All I Need, Caedmon’s Call

01 Old Radio, Greg Adkins

I’ll keep posting our little steps toward this goal.

Now I’m off to All Souls; feeling ready for it tonight.