Busy Hands Homestead

Sylvan's blue and orange glove keeps slipping out of my knitted mitten. He and I wave to Ivory on the school bus, go down the street, and up and over the bridge. There is a skiff of snow on the ground, a hint of sunlight through the clouds, and the sound of birds chirping. Flocks of black birds morph across the sky, the morning light flashing off of their wing flaps, and for an instant they are foating glitter. Our hands slip and we switch sides. I can't remember what we talk about, but the kid walking next to me is happy and bubbly and is rattling on barely audible over the drone of trucks. It is hard to imagine that just half an hour earlier, he was screaming about breakfast and shoes and going to school in general. The snow and cold surprised me. I wasn't ready. Sylvan is bundled up in snow pants and bright orange sneakers. His sister's hand me down bogs I saved from last winter are still too big, and I haven...

The two of us are face down in a giant pile of leaves. I'm laughing, and it hurt. I raked the maple leaves in our yard into a giant pile thinking that the kids would be excited, or at the least, would want to jump into them just once. Instead they watched me for a few minutes, shrugged their shoulders, and asked to walk down the street to a friends house. I let them go, think that this is just what 6 and 9 feels like, and continue to rake the leaves waist high. I am slowly, grudgingly coming to terms with the delay of our house remodel (again). The many moving parts that need to come together to start the process of tearing down and rebuilding our house, didn't come together in time to move out and start before the cold set in. For weeks, probably months, I've been avoiding a house, that no longer feels welcoming to me. I avoid my garden, my kitchen, my living room (there is no where to sit anyway), barely see my family. I've move through sadness, ange...

Sunday:  SNAP Challenge Day 5  Sylvan and I made Oatmeal Muffins. It is a recipe from another of my standby cookbooks. It is a cookbook that I grew up with. My mom had a copy of an earlier edition, and my Oma gave me the one I have. It is the More With Less Cookbook. To total cost for 12 muffins (we ate 8) was $1.78 . The cost of the coffee share $1.52 . Total cost of $3.27. Breakfast was late again. Very Late. Adam resumed working on the bus and I finished moving around plants, cleaned the kitchen, and started the weekly task of baking bread. My new favorite bread recipe is the Basic Bread from Make the Bread, Buy the Butter by Jenifer Reese. It involves scooping a bunch of ingredients in a bowl, giving it a stir and dumping it into a loaf pan for a few hours to rise. To cost per loaf, is $0.60 . I also started the process of making Pork Liver Pat é . I first experimented with pat é, when I purchased a few whole chic...

I haven't ventured outside or changed clothes since I got up Saturday morning. Yesterday I went through the annual ritual of cleaning and rearranging the house to accommodate all of the house plants moving back into our living space. By the time I looked at the clock is was 5:30 and I figure I might as well spend the rest of the day in pajamas. The whole point of these posts and participating in the #SNAPchallenge is to raise money for Double SNAP Dollars, which doubles the purchasing power of SNAP benefits spent on fresh fruits and vegetables.  So please, if you have the resources and value expanding access to fresh fruits and vegetables, take a moment to DONATE HERE!   My family has lots of practice cooking on a limited budget, because SNAP used to be our food budget.  These posts might make it seem too easy, but it wasn't.  I am calculating the Double SNAP Program into my daily expenditures, which helps a lot! I also have the benefit of being raised in a fa...

I gave myself permission to delay posting about day 2. Day 2 was the day of the Northside vs. Westside Softball Challenge with I helped organize. There are still a few banners in the car that need to delivered back to the game's sponsors, but other than that, it is over.  It is a fundraising event for the North-Missoula Community Development Corporation , and I still need to tally up the final expenditures and earnings, but overall it was a success. The Westside won 18 – 9. Back to the #SNAPcallenge and food related issues. Breakfast was oatmeal. Oatmeal is a perfect breakfast choice for my family of picky breakfast eaters because it is easily customizable. Adam and I eat it as a savory dish topped with onion, cheese, eggs and greens, while the children opt for brown sugar and cinnamon. Oatmeal (4 x .043 = $0.172) Cheese (0.16 x 2 = $0.32) Eggs (0.21x 3 = $0.75) Swiss Chard (CSA) Brown Sugar (4 tablespoons = $0.096) Coffee (cost of my coffee ...

We got up a little earlier than usual. Today was ONE LESS CAR DAY in Missoula and rode my bike down to the end of the street to walk back through the neighborhood and scoop up kids along the way.  I wore cloth shoes and it rained, but the rain has finally cleared the wildfire smoke from the air, and everyone was in good spirits.  Breakfast was quick. 4 tortillas (0.15 x 4 = $0.60) 5 eggs (0.25 x 5 = $1.25) 2 ounces of cheddar cheese (0.16 x 2 = $0.32) Coffee (cost of my coffee share per day $1.52) Cherry Tomatoes (FREE – no really – I have been saving these seeds for 5 years now.  These were tomatoes that volunteered in my yard when we moved to our house and I have replanted them every year since.  I grow them for the cost of water, except I have a flat rate water bill that doesn’t change based on use…  so we will just call them FREE!) Total Breakfast Cost: $3.69 for a family of 4 Wet shoes and all, I walked to the Clay Studio to get a...

So, we bought a school bus. I'm hoping its not the worst decision we have ever made. Adam has slowly, much too slowly been morphing it into, what hopefully will be a living space.   And I have been trying to pack up our house, sew a million curtains, and keep life normal.  We have successfully (what is success anymore??) been navigation the line somewhere between a mess and a disaster. Some days I drop both of the kids off at the bus stop, other days I drop off one at the bus stop while the other would rather hold my hand the whole way, since I walk past the school on my way to work anyway. We always arrive just at the front just as the buses pull up to the back. I spend more than I ever imagined staring at a computer screen, navigating an entirely new and foreign world of a federally funded affordable housing project. Damn, that shit is complicated. Late August, I received an email about participating in the Community Food and Agricu...

Strong, cold wind blows down the beach, the water is so cold my toes tingled and the kids still get soaked from head to toe, splashing in the space between solid land and sea. The kids shriek and run.  They gather up rocks, poke at pieces of jelly fish, and these moments alone would have been worth the drive.  The moments with friends and the most decadent camping food, in the history of camping, would have been worth the drive. But, the excuse for this trip, is a moment 1 minute and 55 seconds in length. Intellectually, I had been prepared for this moment. We had listened to podcasts, heard other people's stories, shushed the children on the eleven hour drive split between two days: "Shhh!!! Listen, to this story.  They are talking about what we are about to see." "Don't look at the sun without your glasses.  It's dangerous." The sun was bright, the temperature dropped, our shadows become duplicate, the spaces between the leaves turne...

For an entire week our mornings and evenings were filled with the chink, chink, chink of cherry pits. Two cherry pies, cherry danishes , and quart bags of pitted cherries are in the freezer.   Jars of apple cherry jam are on the shelf. Once a year we drive up to Finley Point to pick cherries in the summer sun and then jump into the clear  cold water of Flathead lake.   The silver fruit picking ladder gets warm  in the sun and is almost to hot  to touch against my skin as we move from one tree to the next. The sticky, sweet, dark red juice runs down my fingers as I fill the same basket over and over, carrying it up and down the ladder, and we fill the cardboard boxes we brought along. The kids pick cherries for a while, and then get distracted and sprawl on blankets, eating lunch and running through a sprinkler the owner’s of the orchard left on. Between my feet and the ground, between where I stand on the ladder and where the ...

These days I am largely stuck driving to work, since I am juggling my husbands schedule, dropping off and picking up kids from friend's houses, unpredictable summer activities and all those other errands that have to happen.  When I have to the opportunity, I usually choose to walk the 1.2 miles from my house to work. During the winter months, in the dark and snow, I ride the bus. The commute gives me an opportunity to interact, talk with, listen to, and observe folks I might never bump into otherwise. This is a series of non-fiction snap shots that crowded around in my head into I finally put them on paper.  I entered it in the Missoula Public Library - 2017 Writing Contest, in a moment of boldness, that made my skin tingle, my heart pound and caused me anxiety for days... I didn't win. And even though the skin on my arms is already prickling and the heart pounding and anxiety is sure to follow, I am sharing my writing here: En Route The man across from me is...

“You know what's great about plants.” “I don't know. What?” “That they are plants!!!” Sylvan looks at me incredulously. “Don't you get it?” Ivory shrugs, and eats a raspberry. The sky is peach and glowing. We are sneaking a few raspberries at dusk. The kids are up, way to late, once again. The three of us walked down the street to water our garden plot. Adam is washing the dishes. The house is finally starting to cool down. These fifteen minutes of my day are the only ones that seem to echo the rhythm of past summers. I am trying to breathe – just breathe. The sky fades to dark. On the way home, I cradle a hand full of raspberries to share. Soon after, we fall into our beds, on top of sheets and blankets. I feel like I am treading water – cold icy water – that makes it hard to breathe. I could dip under any moment. My days and weeks are filled up. I run back and forth, back and forth, drop off ki...

I have been writing and re-writing an an artist statement to accompany my First Friday show at the Missoula Community Food Co-op. The official event is on April 7th, but my pots will be on display for the remainder of the month. "This will be easy," I thought. After all, the wheat design carved onto the surface of my mugs, bowls and plates is an external expression of a more than a decade long ritual I have created for myself to process the news of violence and conflict present in our world. But still, the words to articulate feelings and motions are hard to construct. I was 18 for 31 days when September 11th became a date marooned in the year 2001 and we entered a pre- and post- world. Slightly tipsy, from my first honey brown beer, at an elevation over 5000 ft, in my best friend's college dorm, I watched bright dots flashing across a night sky and I was struck by the surreal beauty of what could have been mistaken as fireworks on screen but what were in reali...