So Close to Home
I grew up without winter. For the most part, at least.
Winters in central Texas were brown and chilly, but you never knew when it might hit eighty degrees. In December, we never bothered to ask for a white Christmas. Instead, I would secretly pray that it wouldn’t be so warm we’d need the air conditioner. Even at eight years old, I found air conditioning very depressing.
As a young girl I read every one of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books repeatedly. But I read The Long Winter more than any other. It isn’t a pretty story, far from it, but something about the extreme cold and snow fed my soul. Even then.
It’s a truism that home is where you come from. Home is where you began.
I disagree. I think home is the place we’re headed. Home is the destination.
Here in my little southern corner of Pennsylvania, winter’s grip is fierce. Not Midwestern or New England fierce, to be sure, but strong enough to leave me feeling more than a little battered. More than a little caged-in.
Replacing the chickens’ frozen water with fresh, I feel like Laura Ingalls herself, but by the fourth trip out to the henhouse the literary novelty has quite worn off.
And yet I love winter.
Recently, I dropped the baby in her father’s arms and escaped out the front door with my other daughter, my firstborn. I don’t have ice skates of my own, but I carried hers. We opened the gate in the split-rail fence and we half-slid, half-stumbled down the sledding hill until we could cross the street to the frozen pond.
I stood in the snow, my toes slowly going numb, and I watched my daughter slice one foot and then the other across the ice. I said to myself, “This is Pennsylvania. This is our home.” The word Pennsylvania felt awkward. Perhaps I should blame my frozen lips. Or perhaps not. We are still learning the contours of this place and these people.
She circled the perimeter three times before I made her come in. I might lose my toes, I shouted.
My poor toes. They really did hurt, buried in snow like that, but it was a good kind of pain. Like the sharp, stinging realization that comes at the end of a very long walk. You know you’ve gone farther than you can handle, but it will be worth it. You are so close.
Three times around may have been too much. My daughter fell to her knees only part-way through our climb back up the sledding hill.
You’ll make it, I said. We’re nearly there.
Look! I can see our home from here.
*all photos taken by yours truly (with apologies to our talented, much beloved Photographer)
Returning to God in Winter (Or, Why it Hurts to Rest)
In late December, the seed and nursery catalogs began arriving. I dove in. When I came up for air, I tried to remind myself I was planning a vegetable plot, not an eight-hundred square foot formal rose garden.
It is easy to get a little lost in a pile of seed catalogs.
These are the days for rest, both for you and your garden. Unless you live in Florida.
I’ve heard it said that southern gardeners should take their winter break in late summer. Which is sort-of true. No one can grow tomatoes in Florida in August. But, it is also not true at all. You may give your vegetable beds a break, but the grass, the weeds, and those horrible invasive vines covered in thorns do not take a break. Unless you want your house to disappear back into the primeval jungle, you had better not neglect the August garden entirely.
I only gardened in Florida for two years, but I am still recovering. As it turns out, I need a good long break from working my bit of ground.
I need a season for rest. I need a season for dreams.
Rest can be painful. A persistant ache. Dreaming hurts.
I love winter in the north, but I don’t find it easy. I long for sunshine. For warm air on the skin of my arms. For flowers and green grass and those little breezes that feel like a caress. It is a season for rest, but this means it is also a season for waiting, for desiring, for pressing hard against the blunt edges of everything you dream about but do not yet hold in your arms.
It is a season of emptiness.
True rest means returning to God. But this is not as easy nor as pretty as it sounds. It is often anguish that sends us back.
Back to the source of dreams, back to the source of every good and new thing.
Back to the only One who can renew our hope.
These Farmhouse Bookshelves (Kitchen Edition)
Last weekend, on facebook, I promised you a peek at the bookshelves in my kitchen.
That’s right, I said, BOOKSHELVES IN MY KITCHEN.
Yes, I have all-caps feelings about the bookshelves in my kitchen. I don’t care all that much about granite countertops or stainlesss steel appliances, but I love having a built-in bookcase for my cookbooks.
Here are three of the books I reach for most often in that room … (p.s. you can see an actual glimpse of my kitchen bookshelves on instagram).
The Homemade Pantry: 101 Foods You Can Stop Buying and Start Making
Plus, it’s inspiring, never shaming. This isn’t a book to make you feel guilty for buying your sandwich bread. More a book that nudges you to say, “Why wouldn’t I at least try making this if it tastes so good and takes so little extra time?”
At least, that’s the voice I hear as I flip these pages.
Also, despite what you might imagine after reading the subtitle, these are not gimicky recipes. This is good, basic, family food: yes, there are recipes for chocolate peanut butter cups and toaster pastries, but there are also crackers, pasta sauce, and breads. You can learn how (and why) to make your own applesauce, yogurt, and canned tomatoes. I even adopted her granola recipe. Apparently, granola is better with lots of cinnamon and a dash of almond extract.
From the vanilla ice cream to the vanilla extract, this is one of my favorite cookbooks.
Fold down this page. You are going to want to come back to this recipe a lot. If you are going to ditch one packaged thing from your pantry, I suggest the cereal box. – Alana Chernila
One of the biggest changes my family has made in our eating in the past two years is to add fermented foods to our diets. And while stomach bugs and the flu and various colds run rampant through all our friends and neighbors, for two winters in a row, these bugs have mostly passed us by. I no longer spend my winters moving from sore throat to nasty cough and back again, and when my children do get sick, they almost always bounce back quickly.
Fermented foods have been a major part of the human diet around the world for thousands of years, but, in the past 50-100 years, we Americans have stopped consuming them almost entirely. There is growing evidence that we should rethink that.
And don’t let the word fermented frighten you off. I’m talking about yogurt, pickles, sauerkraut, kimchi, and kombucha, the soda-like drink my kids can’t get enough of. So, nothing nasty, everything delicious and tangy.
Real Food Fermentation
Here’s another reason to check out this book: unless you can purchase raw pickled goods from your Amish neighbors (ahem), then you have to make this stuff on your own. The heat-treated pickles on the supermarket shelf have had all of their living, immune-enhancing ingredients cooked out of them in the name of food safety. One exception is kombucha. Buy it from Whole Foods to see if you like it, but one glance at the pricetag and you’ll understand why I make my own.
When we make our own food, we regain some control over our lives – especially at a time in history when many of us feel at the mercy of events, governments, corporations, and industrial food producers. – Alex Lewin
Here is a book to watch out for in the second-hand shops: The Fun of Cooking
This is a book for kids by kids (from really little ones to teenagers). The recipes are good and diverse, but the real treat for me has always been the stories. This is a book with an urban/New York bent, and I loved imagining a world where kids my own age might hop on the subway to pick up ingredients for the dinner they’d make before Mom arrived home from work. So, pretty much the opposite of my life then.
It’s quite possible that my city-living dreams began with this book.
And dreams can be passed down. This year, my daughter made the teddy-bear bread for her teacher, just like I used to do.
Last year we had a baby-sitter named Jean Williams who taught me how to make teddy bear bread. I always make two of them so I can give one away to a friend. – Jessica, age ten
Tell me, do you keep books in the kitchen?