Mud season has arrived. The chaotic swing of temperatures has me either stoking the fireplace non-stop or opening the windows to let the cross-breeze relieve the indoor oppressiveness. Mud season is a bit like nature's menopause. Lol not lol. I can usually gauge the weather first thing in the morning simply by turning over onto my knees in bed and looking out the window. The car windshield tells the tale. If it's covered in a nice layer of crystally frost or even ice, then I'll be wearing layers for sure until I get the fire going again.
We finally purchased a kindling splitter. Life. Changing. Well, I should say Dave's. Life. Changing. I feel so guilty. He asked me to purchase one a long time ago, and I just put it off. "I really don't feel like losing a limb or one of my feet Allyson." He's got a good point. We're not trying to be Grizzly Adams here....just need to make little sticks of wood. The splitter arrived yesterday and Dave's life has never been the same.
To be fair, I've been the one cooking in a kitchen that has one drawer to it's name and about one foot of linear available counter space. Dave offers to do the dishes but always wants to use a dish-rack to stack them. I shoo him away and tell him to let me handle the kitchen things and he can handle the kindling things.
Over the week-end we purchased baskets to organize my shelving rack in a less chaotic- throw-anything-and-everything-on-it fashion and more of a throw-everything-in-a-cute-basket-but-still-sort-of-chaotic fashion. Dave: "Only put things on these shelves that you use for cooking." Me: "I'm putting a couple of trays for growing sprouting seeds on here too". Dave: "That's not really for cooking though...." Me: "Yes, I'll be cooking with micro-greens all the time now. So yes, it's for cooking. Can you go chop some kindling?" He relents, smiles, kisses me goodbye and takes another load of stuff to our storage shed. Continuing with my basket filling and finding a good spot for my seed trays I think, "What if the ends times come?! You'd want to know how to sprout and eat seeds right?!"
I'm always thinking about the "end times". Mostly because it wasn't that long ago I was standing in line at a outside local store just to try and purchase a bag of dried beans. By the time we got into the store the beans were gone. Bread doesn't necessarily come from a grocery store (if a semi-truck hasn't delivered any). If I have wheat, water and salt, then I have bread. And if I have kindling I have a heat source to bake it.
Back in the 70's my mother went through a bit of a granola (what would be called a crunchy-mom) phase. We'd come home from school and ask "What's for dinner?" She'd reply in her most upbeat sing-song'y voice "Ohhhh I made some burgers....try them they're delicious!" They didn't smell like burgers. They didn't even really look like burgers other than the shape. "What is this Mama?!" "Well...they're lentil burgers! Try it! You'll like it!" Our family had a rule of "you have to have at least one bite" before proclaiming our hatred of any food. I tasted it. Maybe if she hadn't called it a burger, I wouldn't have been so thrown off. But it wasn't terrible. I ate most of it, and secretly hoped that maybe lentil burgers would take the place of the beef liver she'd bread and fry with onions and bacon. If I ever smelled bacon cooking at dinner time I would be filled with dread, knowing that the bacon was the compensation for the liver we kids all detested.
Mama took us through a powdered milk phase too. She was probably worried about the end-times back then and wanted to make sure we were used to drinking it. She'd try to mix it with half regular milk and shake it up real well; but we always could taste the difference and we always disliked it. When we moved from the mountains and to a smaller city, she started purchasing raw milk from a neighbor that kept a dairy cow on their acre lot. I remember seeing the line of cream almost halfway down the top of the jug. She'd shake that up real well just like she used to shake the powdered milk, but this tasted like heaven. A lot of my school-friends drank skim milk. It looked to me like water poured into a glass that still had regular milk on the bottom. The creamy raw milk made the hot cracked-wheat cereal she served us on cold mornings much more palatable.
My mother-in-law Pearl fed this breakfast to my babies. Freshly ground hot wheat cereal. Sort of like cream-of-wheat or Malto-Meal, but so much more delicious. When I miss her, I like to make it the exact same way she did, serving it with a little brown sugar and some canned evaporative milk, and remember all the things she taught me and how she would grind whole wheat for me and bring me bags of it so I'd have enough flour to bake with and make hot cereal for the week.
Now I have my own wheat grinder. We have so many buckets of wheat that are residing in our storage unit, but I keep one bucket of kamut wheat berries here in the cabin and use it weekly. It's so pretty and deserves to take up the very limited counter-space we have, since it's both functional and beautiful.
I use beautiful cutting boards over the sink as additional counter space. This one that my father-in-law Ed made for me is so lovely and the quality is unmatched. I could hardly bring myself to use it, but he reminded me that he is looking forward to some home-cooked meals when they visit next and that's what the board is for. I rolled some sour-dough pie-crust for a strawberry pie for East dinner on it.
The tanginess of the crust set off the sweetness of the jam'y strawberries. I don't think I can ever go back to regular crust again. Delicious!
Yesterday was the solar eclipse. Total eclipse in some parts of the world, but not our part. I got this pic from one that Conrad posted; probably taken while he was in the top of some tree he was cutting. I don't like to ask him, because it makes me nervous that he does this for a living. We used to tell our children, "Don't climb a tree unless you plan on getting yourself back down!" I see the gear he uses to get up and be anchored, and I'm sure he's fine, but my children are, in my mind, forever young and in need of my warnings and cautions. Elisabeth texted our family group chat, "Why does it seem we've seen at least three of these "once-in-a-life-time eclipses?" She voiced my own thoughts. Feeling a bit left out of the excitement those in the total eclipse path got to experience I spent some time outside just to see if anything was possibly different.
I'm sure it was just in my mind, but the birds seemed to let me get very close to them. The other day a chickadee flew right into the window and knocked itself out. It just lay there on the snow. Freya kept whining at the window and staring at it. I asked Dave if he thought she was upset that it was hurt or if she saw easy prey. He said most likely easy prey. He's probably right, and that's the main reason she's an inside only cat. She can catch the occasional little mouse that finds it's way inside and won't become prey herself to another larger creature. The dazed little bird eventually got itself upright, fluffed it's feather for a few moments and then flew back off to the tree.
When Dave got home from work, I said "Let's go for a drive up the mountain and see how much has melted!" We both put on our boots and first walked a ways down to our someday garage and then further down to the creek.
Then a drive in the Jeep up the mountain. Still so much snow everywhere. That's a good thing.
That lake looks like the smoothest icing!
We don't make it all the way to the top. I have sourdough bagels rising at home and I need to tend to them. When the end times come we can have sprouted seeds, sourdough bread, and sourdough bagels. Now I just need a dairy cow, a beef cow (minus the liver) and some chickens.
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