Autumn Harvesting

The weather has been so wonderful. After the very difficult weather this year it is all the more enjoyed and appreciated. It is so fun to be outside looking at all of the Fall beauty.
We gathered black walnuts for the hulls (I give the nuts away) and I will strip them off of the shells and dry them. We also located a large maple tree to tap next year (exciting!) and we found wild rose hips. They are so very sweet when ripe and loaded with vitamin C! We also found some persimmons and that was good for a laugh! (As soon as I could use my mouth again!) I tried them once before and my mouth puckered like crazy so I thought maybe they just weren't ripe enough. Well, that's not the case! It was very ripe and it dried up my mouth immediately so that it was hard to swallow. That's the last time I'll try them! (I hope.)
We talked to an Amish man that has a wood cook stove for sale. It is in very good shape and at a reasonable price. It would be good for a summer kitchen because it isn't an airtight one that you would want to also use for heat. Someone with us asked me why I want one. I was kind of caught off-guard because I hadn't thought about "why" in a long time. I gave all of the standard sensible answers (good in power outages for back-up cooking and heating, cheaper to use because you provide your own fuel, food tastes better cooked with wood) but felt like something was missing. When we got home I thought about it and realized that all of those things are very good reasons but there is more:
It takes more time and attention; involving me in the work, and slowing me down. It brings me to a place where simply living life becomes important again. And enjoyable. Living life becomes enough. Again. Does that make sense?
Nancy

Journey To Simplify-Part Three

We began to explore small towns and different areas of the countryside and decided on the area we were interested in. Our plan was to buy land and put a moble home on it to live in while we built a house. Someone recommended a place to buy a moble home and we went to look. After looking at the used ones, we ended up buying a new but inexpensive one. The payments were $160 dollars a month. We then set out to purchase the land. The only problem was that this particular county didn't allow you to put a mobile on anything that wasn't a huge piece of land and then only with the neighboring landowners' permission. Oh no. (I think it is pretty funny that it never occured to us that such rules existed. We were following our dream.) Now we had to find a place to put the moble home. We found a nice park (as far as parks go) that actually had yards in a small town of 1300 people. We had it set up there and we moved in. (As it turns out, just about everyone on our street had tried to do the same thing that we did. :-} )
Jack and I stood on the steps and looked around and he said, "A year at the most ........"

Nancy

A Few Blessings Of Simple Living

I bought this fabric in a bundle at a thrift store for three dollars. Here it is washed and dried!


Baby turkeys!

Hiding places for kittens!

Nancy