so much depends upon a red wheelbarrow glazed with rain water beside the whitechickens. -Wiliam Carlos Williams ...
A Gift From New Zealand
I have always imagined that when I am old I will sit out on my front porch on my rocking chair, chatting with friends and loved ones while peacefully drinking a cup of tea. I look forward to it. My fellow crafter Marie Pickering of Softearth's World in New Zealand posted this to her blog one day about these lovely ladies she felted to sit in handmade clothespin rocking chairs she ...
Past, Present and Place: Getting to Know Your Local Natural and Cultural History
This past weekend I had the opportunity to visit one of my favorite museums, the High Desert Museum near Bend. As I stopped and read a plaque in the birds of prey exhibit about the founder of the museum, Donald M. Kerr, I had a moment of realization about the importance of natural history museums. The fact that they are important has never been lost on me, neither has their intrigue, wealth of ...
Please Remove Your Shoes: An In-depth Look at the Barefoot Truth
You show up at someones house to visit and you notice shoes piled outside the door. This may seem curious, until children come running up to greet you and let you know in the same sentence as their greeting, to please remove your shoes. It may seem radical, but this is a shoe-free house. I discovered this foot loose and fancy free lifestyle when I was going to baby playgroups, and noticed that ...
Plant and Veggie Dyes for Colorful Spring Eggs
For our Spring Equinox egg hunt, we made our traditional plant and vegetable dyed eggs. We have been doing this since my children were four, and it is something they look forward to every year. This year I let them color pictures on the eggs with beeswax crayons first to try something new. There were baby chick eggs, fairy eggs, eyeball eggs, mother earth eggs, you name it. While they were doing ...
A Mountain Hearth Breakfast: Acorn Pancakes
My daughter recently had a sleepover with a friend from her class who was moving away to California and it was possibly the last time they would see one another. I decided that this was occasion for a special breakfast. All fall we had gathered the fat brown acorns from the ancient oak trees in our field and saved them in baskets. When it became cold and rainy in November I began cracking them ...
Rainy Morning Daydreams
Some people have amazing vivid dreams that they are able to recall and retell like stories. My children are like this. My friend Taryn is like this. I am not like this, but I am a daydreamer. Sometimes I'll realize that many minutes have passed while I was lost in a stream of thought. Sometimes I like to entertain "winning the lottery and what I would do with the money" daydreams. I have noticed a ...
Where There’s a Will, There’s a Whey: Adventures With Nourishing Traditions
"One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well." -Virginia Woolf Over the last few years, Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon just kept popping into my life. At first, I wondered about all these people I was meeting who were excited about whey, lacto-fermentation and organ meats. The people I knew who used this cookbook were "whey" into it. Then began a series of ...
Tools of the Trade: The Homemaker’s Broom
I will begin by laying out the confession that I am not into cleaning. This, coming from a homemaker, may sound strange. I keep my house tidy, and do what needs to be done, but the mopping, scrubbing, dusting and scouring are not favorite pastimes nor can I claim them as skills. However, I love sweeping. There is something meditative in the rhythmic, methodical work of clearing the dirt and ...
Spring Arrives at Dorris Ranch: An Afternoon Walk in Photographs
Every spring, I like to go on walks at Dorris Ranch, my favorite park and living history farm. One clear March day I went with my children and our friends after school to gather nettles. We walked along the gravel roads winding through the filbert orchards and stopped at an old tractor for the kids to play while we picked at the base of an old tree. As I was picking the nettles, I kept ...