An Ordinarily Extraordinary Day

Right now, atthisverymoment, I'm rather stiff and feel as if I've been on my feet all day which makes sense because I HAVE been on my feet all day. But, on the inside I feel alive and invigorated and not at all ready to go to sleep even though it is almost midnight.

Perhaps that is because I'm still riding the wave of satisfaction I feel at being rather domesticated and homey today. And, I don't mean simply cooking and cleaning because I DO do that daily. What I am referring to is more of an attitude of domesticity, of delighting in nurturing and caring for my family rather than simply seeing daily tasks as necessary evils.

Here's a run-down of my day:

First, I went out back to the jungle we call a garden and picked some ripe tomatoes and zucchini. I put the not-quite-ripe tomatoes in the kitchen window and the others I placed carefully and neatly in little rows on the counter top to await the boiling hot cauldron into which I planned to plunge them. More on that later.

Next, I'll confess I had myself a little computer time. There are four of us and one computer and no TV so the computer is used quite a bit and when I find it unoccupied I take advantage of it.

After catching up on blog reading, I piddled about doing laundry and sundry household tasks. Then I cooked lunch. After which, I got busy putting up some of our garden produce. I knew we would not eat up all of the zucchini we had so I shredded it and put it in Ziploc bags and froze to use in zucchini cake which I've never made, but I have a recipe for it and it looks to be sort of like carrot cake which I have made and quite enjoy.

Speaking of carrots, the girls picked some yesterday (oh how they do love to pull up carrots), and we made a carrot cake to take to church out of some of them, but there were plenty left. So I shredded those suckers and froze them, too.

Later, while the kids and their daddy went swimming, I mulled over what to do for dinner. Shockingly, inspiration hit quickly, and I got to work. We had green beans from our garden, baked beans, and a barbecue chicken recipe I found in my latest Simple and Delicious magazine. I think it was called Monterey barbecue chicken or something such as that.

The chicken was topped with barbecue sauce (of course), chopped green onions, tomatoes, a slice of bacon and some shredded cheddar cheese. And, I was thrilled to put this dish together using green onions and tomatoes from MY garden. Plus, we had the green beans from the garden, too. It IS exciting to grow one's own food especially when one has never done it before. Who knows, the novelty may be gone next year, but I don't think so.

Our delicious dinner was accompanied by yummy cheese biscuits which I made from scratch from a recipe in what must be Paula Dean's first cookbook ever.

And, and, I also made a blueberry crisp for dessert! With blueberries we picked ourselves! For free! Blueberries are quite expensive at the grocery store so when friends offered to let us pick blueberries from their bushes, I snatched up the nearest buckets I could find and set off to get enough to last a while because, guess what? I freeze them. And, do you know that frozen blueberries make tasty cool treats to eat by the handful right out of the freezer? They do. Yum!

After dinner, I set my cauldron, I mean kettle, on the stove to boil water for my tomatoes. After the water begins boiling rapidly, I will drop the tomatoes in for no more than a minute. After which, I will scoop them out and immediately plunge them into a bowl of ice cold water. Doing this causes the tomato skins to virtually slide off.

Doodlebug came along about this time and wanted to help so I told her what to do and let her go to it. She peeled the tomatoes, cut them up, squished the seeds out and put them into Ziploc bags. Then, she made tomato juice out of the leftover bits by squeezing it and running it through a sieve. There wasn't a lot of juice, but after Doodlebug got through with those tomatoes there wasn't anything left, but a little squished glob of tomato skins and seeds, and that went into the compost so nothing was wasted.

Really, my day was quite ordinary, but to me that was the beauty of it. It has taken my husband and me almost sixteen years to get where we are, but we are trying to live more deliberately. To find joy and satisfaction in growing some of our own food and freezing it. We are trying to stay closer to home and live a less hurried life and teach our children to do the same. Everyone is so hurried these days which is not necessarily the same as being busy. We were busy today, but not hurried.

Sure, I've had days like this in the past, but they were always scattered sparsely amid the hurried days, but now these unhurried, satisfyingly busy days are becoming more frequent. Oh, I know I'll have other hurried days in the future. They can't be entirely avoided, but my goal is to make them the exception rather than the rule.

In Praise of a Perfectly Lovely Day

Oh, the loveliness of today! Here in West Georgia we have had unseasonably cool weather the past couple of days, and it has been glorious. I love coolish weather. Autumn is my favorite season because of the crisp, breezy coolness it brings round about October/November. Yes, here in the South, fall comes a bit later. It's usually still rather warm in September.

But today! Today did not feel like July 1. I told my husband that I imagined this is what summer is like for those who live in the far North. "Um, sure," he said, disinterestedly while busily sketching plans for our new deck. I'm sure it gets hot up North, too, though minus all of the humidity we have here. How I loathe humidity.

First thing this morning, I took full advantage of the lovely weather and went for a walk, then picked some vegetables from the garden, weeded the flower bed and cut some flowers for an arrangement. After I came inside, I opened all of the windows so we could get a little cross ventilation going, arranged the flowers in a couple of little vases, and prepared the tomatoes for the freezer all while enjoying the gentle coolness of the breeze blowing through the kitchen window.

Doodlebug and Little Munchkin played with some air-drying clay, happily molding it into such things as flowers in little pots, animals, and other indistinguishable objets d'art.

Later, I stood outside in our wonderfully thick, lush grass while my husband muttered and puttered about measuring for the deck he plans to build which will greatly aid our al fresco dining capabilities. I would occasionally hold the measuring tape for him, but mostly I stood there soaking in the day.

Eventually, I found myself flat on my back in the freshly cut grass which smelled faintly and deliciously like watermelon. I hadn't fallen or anything. I purposefully lay down in the grass. I've dreamed for a long time of having thick, luxuriant grass in my yard and now I have it. Today was the perfect day for exulting in it which for me meant rolling around in it. So, I lay there while my husband measured and muttered, and I inhaled deeply the beauty of the day.

At one point while lying on my stomach, I imagined that if I stretched out my arms, I would kind of be giving the earth a big hug. That's just what an exceptionally lovely day will do to me--turn me into an earth-hugging nature nut. Now as I sit here typing while my girls drift off to sleep, I can hear the night song of the crickets, katydids, and frogs through the open window.

And I wonder how anyone can possibly believe the beautiful complexity and diversity of the world around us just evolved.

"The heavens are telling of the glory of God; and their expanse is declaring the work of His hands." Psalm 19:1

Abundance

Ah! Our first garden harvest from our first real garden. The girls were so excited that they even ate the cabbage I cooked for supper. Well, Doodlebug did anyway. Here is a pic of Little Munchkin (on the left) and Doodlebug (on the right, of course) holding their haul from our garden which actually was several weeks ago now:

No tomatoes at the time the above photo was taken, but just a couple of weeks later we had these:

And the flowers were the result of some wildflower seeds I let the girls scatter wildly in a little patch of dirt near the garden. Just looking at the picture of those lovely red globes of tastiness beside a vase of simple wildflowers makes me feel all cozy and homey and thankful.

Just look at those beautiful blueberries! I wish I had a better camera so I could zoom in and get a close up of those toothsome blue gems. We don't have blueberry bushes but we do have friends with a blueberry farm. The blueberries were plump and delicious and practically falling off the bushes. They are frozen now. In my freezer frozen. We didn't have some freak anomaly in local weather patterns in case you're wondering.

I'm a city girl at heart, but there is something to be said for country living especially with children. It is just so compatible with all that is, or should be, magical about childhood.