Earth Outdoor Living Diaries

Sadly, this is the last day of my diary. It's been a busy and tiring day. I was up very late last night sewing the final two strips of my patchwork quilt. A few more nights worth of work and I will be ready to put the backing on. On just a few hours sleep, I was finally able to finish my fall cleaning and do about eight loads of laundry consisting of curtains, bed coverings, pillows and everything I pulled out of summer storage trunks so that they smell fresh and clean. I'm very glad it has not rained the past couple days so that things could come off the clothesline pretty quickly. Tomorrow it is supposed to be in the nineties and here I am hanging long curtains to keep the heat in! But, like I've said before, New England weather changes sneak up on you. There is no easing into fall. One day you're at the beach and the next, it's the first day of sweater weather. I like to be prepared for Mother Nature's stealth approach!

I've got more tomato sauce boiling away on the stove. The quality of the tomatoes we are getting now does not seem to be as good as that of last month. The sauce doesn't get as thick or as red as that which we've already canned. However, it will have to do as I need to clear all the tomatoes out of the refrigerator to make room for all our picnic food this weekend. I am making grilled salmon, black beans and rice, pepper shrimp, fried green tomatoes, corn bread, beef jambalaya and shoo-fly pie.

I picked up one of my favorite magazines today, Flea Market Style, and it just happened to contain a story about collections, which I was just blogging about the other day. I truly love this magazine because it has the absolute best ideas for buying broken and ruined items at yard sales and flea markets and giving them new life. Anyway, after reading the story about collections, I realized that while there are things I am totally drawn to for their historic and sentimental value, there are other vintage and antique items that I wouldn't take if you gave them to me! One woman in the story was talking about how much she loved old vintage medical equipment, such as hospital tray tables and old dentist chairs. I could never in a million years welcome anything medical into my house no matter how old! I am so uncomfortable with the thought of anything that has serviced sick or injured people. I know, this may sound strange but it is definatly one type of collectible that just repels me. I will not even buy antique quilts because I can not get past the thought that they may have been wrapped around a small pox patient during their last earthly breaths. Of course, I realize that nearly everything I have has belonged to someone who has passed on, and that is what makes every item so special to me. I guess maybe I don't want the "vibes" of an item that has been associated with suffering.

I also do not like industrial type items, which are apparently big sellers, either. Anything shiny, bulky or metallic is not for me. I love items from the colonial period and anything from the Civil War era through 1950. Things must be usable for me, in some form or another. Old farm equipment which can be made into benches or tables, hand-embroidered items which can be made into pillows or towels, old recipes, old books, old dishes are what I look for. For me, if something is going to be merely decorative, it usually has to be handmade or something completely artistic in it's simplicity.

Since school starts tomorrow, we tried to get in some fun things today. We drove up to Pelloni's Farm for ice cream but they were closed so went back towards home and stopped at Festival Farm. The animals were all in their barns but came out to see us and all seemed so happy to have company. We fed the horse, donkey, sheep and goats handfuls of grass. The goats were babies the last time we were there and it was amazing to see how big they've gotten. The llamas, with their big, beautiful eyes, didn't come close enough for us to pet them. And we didn't get close enough to the emu for it to bite us! My daughter is terrified of emus because she actually was bitten by one several years ago. I don't know much about emus but they definitely look unfriendly.

We came home and my intention at that point was to simply wash all the windows, inside and out. Before I knew it, the house was torn up and I was fully involved in total fall cleaning. It took me most of the night but I got the kitchen and dining room done. Tomorrow I will tackle the bathroom and living room. Fall curtains always take me a long time to get used to. I like sheer, lacy curtains with the light streaming through. I don't even like shades or blinds so the darkness of the new curtains I've hung is going to make the house seem strange for a while.

We finally made it to the beach today. We took sandwiches and a picnic blanket to Burlingame and the kids got to swim while I fed the seagulls. They were afraid of me at first and would only come up within four or five feet of me to get the crumbs I was throwing to them. They began trusting me I guess because, an hour later, they were walking right onto the blanket to grab the crumbs off it, with me sitting right there! We then felt some raindrops and heard a few rolls of thunder so decided to get going. No real rain has materialized yet but tomorrow is supposed to be very wet.

I've spent the entire night making and canning relish and pickles. Because the woodchuck got all our cucumber plants, I had to go to an organic farm in Charlestown today to buy cucumbers. I love their roadside stand there, the only organic one I know of in the area. It comes in handy for supplying us with the vegetables we need which, for one reason or another, weren't able to grow ourselves.    

It seems like everyone around here is suffering from seasonal allergies. Sneezing, swollen eyes, coughing, headache and a variety of other unattractive and annoying symptoms are common at this time of the year in Rhode Island. Prescription and over-the-counter medications have side effects so, just like where any other minor health issue is concerned, I prefer to exhaust all natural remedies before resorting to anything man-made.

My number one "cure" for seasonal pollen allergies is honey. However, most people who have heard of using honey for allergies do not realize that they must use local honey and it must be recently collected. That means honey bottled in a different state will not be as effective, nor will local honey bottled last year. Buy a jar of honey from the closest producer to your home and make sure it is from this year's batch. As the local bees collect nectar, bits of pollen become part of the honey. When a person ingests small doses of it daily, their body stops over-reacting to the presence of it. And that is all allergies are anyway - your immune system over-reacting to something foreign which is really not dangerous. Take at least a tablespoon of honey per day, either alone, in tea, on toast or any other way.    

I wasn't able to sleep much last night. (I felt excited by the cold breezes blowing in the window and knowing that fall is soon to make it's introduction!) This distracted me from falling asleep for more than a couple hours so I was amazed to feel so awake when I arose early to start out for some yard sales. I picked up my mother and hit the road in search of treasures. I came home later in the day with a stack of books. One of them was about collecting. This got me thinking about the many different things people collect, and what leads some people to collect one thing while someone else collects another. I realized that my collections, like most other things in my life, are very unique. I have no interest in expensive antique jewelry, rare china or the types of things that most other people collect. In fact, some of my collections started in the same way that I obtained many of my belongings, from someone else's "trash".

One of my most prized collections is that of handwritten notes, penned decades ago and tucked inside old books or boxes before being forgotten about. I frame them to display around my house. My favorite looks to have been written by a young girl and states, "Mother, I have gone to get the milk". Another reminds a young man that should he and his father want coffee in the morning, there is some available. I have old notes addressing "my dear daughter" and "auntie" and "sir". I have notes written in pencil, in crayon and in ink. They are fragile, wrinkled with folds, faded, torn and completely cherished by me every time I look at one of them. They are personal and one-of-a-kind; representative of a few moments in the life of someone who was here in this world generations before me. 

We went over my brother's house tonight to pick up ten pounds of salmon. He works at the dock in Narragansett and one of the fisherman gave him the catch. However, my brother's family doesn't like fish so he told us to come and get it. It's now packed into my grandmother's large standing freezer in her basement and our plans are to cook it up southern style for our picnic next weekend! I had been wondering what to make for the main course so this was a lucky break!

We spent some time rearranging outdoor furniture today. I have three great "sitting places" on the property; one is the small back porch which holds two small tables laden with potted flowers, an antique rocking chair and a cushiony loveseat; another is the larger front porch which holds a small eating table, two chairs and a small rocking chair; and the third is beneath the huge tree which towers over a portion over the backyard where our picnic table sits. I realized, however that we never use to the picnic table or the front porch, despite how inviting they are. The picnic table is so far from the house that it is almost illogical to haul food out there for a meal. And the front porch table is two small for more than two people to sit comfortably at. So, I figured that some arrangements could be made to make all three areas more usable. We carried the picnic table to the front porch and, after moving the other furniture out of the way and getting the table into place, realized it didn't fit the dimensions of the area. So we carried it back to the backyard and placed it closer to the house. Without the shade of the tree, however, we knew we wouldn't be using it anyway. After all this, we put all the front porch furniture back into place and moved the picnic table back under the tree, then sat and relaxed on the small back porch as usual!  

We've spent most of the night making garden vegetable sauce (with home-grown tomatoes, onions and peppers) and tomato soup to can. Unfortunately we have nearly run out of canning jars so will have to finish the job tomorrow. I asked our neighbor how his tomatoes were doing and he said, "I can't keep up with them!" Seems we have had a banner tomato season here while potatoes, corn and apples have not done well at all. From what I hear, it's been a great year for cucumbers as well. I wouldn't know, as our trusty groundhog ate all our cucumber plants down to the ground. 

We had to haul water to the gardens again today as it has been a few days since we've had any rain. The ground sure dries out quick. According the Farmer's Almanac (which I now study religiously!), the winter weather is going to start in November this year. Never knowing when we will get our first or last frost makes decisions a real gamble when you grow your own food. This past spring, I jumped the gun and began planting when I was sure we wouldn't be seeing anymore icy mornings for a while. My brother followed suit with his own planting. Then, soon after, word was getting around that a pretty bad frost was coming that night. I called my brother and told him I didn't believe it. He did, however, and went and dug up all his herbs and vegetables and brought them in the house! The next morning, all my dead plants were literally black. A few days later, my brother replanted his healthy crops while I had to start again from scratch. Therefore, I am not taking any chances with the first frost. I have begun cutting as many herbs as possible to dry. I leave just enough so that we can go out and get fresh herbs when we need them for cooking or canning. The final herbal harvest of the year will be packaged and frozen for use this winter.          

I've always felt more comfortable with people decades older than me.  It started when I was in the Brownies and our troop made crafty gifts to pass out at a local nursing home during the Christmas season. I was fascinated by the people I met there and began making crafts on my own, at home, and having my grandparents drive me to the nursing home to pass them out.

I loved sitting down, as a kid, and listening to my grandmother's stories of the Depression and my grandfather's tales of serving overseas during World War II. Older people were like living, breathing history museums to me. My grandmother has told me many times the story of how she celebrated her birthday as a child of the Depression era. With very little food or money available, there was simply no way her family could present her with a birthday cake. So her next-door neighbor brought her a piece of bread sprinkled with sugar. She remembers this as one of the most exciting events of her childhood. Memories like this really put things into perspective for me.

Am a little stressed out today. I spent the day running errands and only got a fraction done of what I needed to. The majority of my kids' back to school clothes are purchased from thrift shops. I refuse to spend hundreds of dollars on clothing they are only going to wear for a few months before growing out of them. I estimated that one more trip to one more thrift shop should amount to enough school clothes for fall. But once I got home and took out all the bags of clothing I've bought this month, I realized two things: my daughter had an over-abundance of pants and hardly any shirts, while my son had way too many clothes to even fit in his closet. So, this chore isn't finished yet and I must make another round of the thrift stores later this week to obtain more shirts for my daughter.

I didn't have time to get up to the organic farm stand where I purchase the types of vegetables that we lost to our infamous woodchuck, such as squash and eggplant. Nor did I have time to clean out the paperwork in my office which I try to do every week. As the weather cools, I am starting to feel restless. With very limited storage space, my two closets are bulging with birthday and Christmas gifts (I buy year-round and pack them away, and just happen to have a little too much this year), bins of winter clothing and coats, and a zillion other things that make me realize I really need to pull everything out an organize it a little better. I think the stress is due in part to the whole summer-into-fall transition that the entire household goes through in a few weeks. It is, in essence, fall cleaning and I feel as if I have still not yet recovered from the two weeks spent spring cleaning! Stripping the beds, windows and floor coverings means loads of laundry to wash, hang out and pack away. All our summery surroundings will be put in crates until next year as well. Once this is done, I can relax a little until the day after Thanksgiving when all the Christmas decorations get pulled out. It takes us a full week to decorate for Christmas! But I'm not going to be doing much transitioning to anything unless I get these closets in order!

One of the bad things about living in an old house is that it's always dirty. You could scrub these wide-plank floors all night and the water in the bucket would never pour out clear. That's what comes from people walking these floors for over 150 years. There are cracks above us, below us and around us, just wide enough for dust and dirt to sneak through. And the single-paned windows need to be cleaned on a weekly basis.

This is not the oldest house we have lived in, however. Many years ago, we resided in a structure built in 1760. That place will always feel like home to me, despite the drafts that came in around the windows and nothing but horsehair plaster separating us from cold, snowy winters. Before I moved here, I lived in a modern house. Well-insulated and free of dust and moths, I never felt at home there. The entire time I resided in the house, I felt as if I was simply visiting someone else.

What a day! It finally stopped raining so we set out this afternoon for the church picnic. What a wonderful event they put on. There were crafts for the kids, face-painting, miniature golf, jump rope and volley ball. The long table laden with food offered enough for everyone to have seconds; hamburgers, hot dogs, a multitude of salads, home-made pickles and baked beans, a variety of pies, kielbasa and so much more that I can't even recall now. After lunch, they held a pie-eating contest and then a Bingo game. I won a big pot of white mums! 

Back at home, there was a lot of laundry to do as the clothes on the line had been hanging in the rain for days and there were more loads to wash and hang now that the sun was finally out. Once that was done, I decided to take a couple hours to can all the rest of the tomatoes ripening on the window sills. This should have been simple. However, when it came time to put them into the boiling water bath, I realized that when I made sauce the other day, I had completely forgotten to boil the filled jars! Because they had already been put onto the pantry shelves, there was no way to tell them apart from all the other dozens of jars of sauce that have been canned and boiled. Therefore, I had to bring every single jar back into the kitchen and boil them all! As the boiler only takes nine jars at a time, this chore has taken me all night! 

As I looked through some handmade vintage doilies at a yard sale, my 8-year-old daughter sighed. "Mom, do we really need more of those?" I guess a lot of people don't even know what a doily is. The small lacy pads were put under everything in my grandmother's house when I was a child and I grew up believing that every house was supposed to have doilies. When my husband and I were moving into our first house and I asked him to bring me the box of doilies, he asked, "What's a doily?" My fascination with them became a running joke, so I gave my daughter the same piece of advice I always gave him: "You can never have too many doilies". She rolled her eyes. "Might as well get them", she said. "Half our house looks like a yard sale anyway".

I later asked her what she meant by that. She reminded me that all of our stuff is old, repurposed, recycled, reincarnated for use once more. What I call my treasures, she calls "our rusty, dusty stuff". She didn't seem to notice our unique living atmosphere until a few years ago when she began going over friend's houses and noticing they had new, modern things. "We're different", I'd reassure her. "And it's good to be different". She accepts that, though will occasionally make comments such as the one uttered at the recent yard sale. More often, she will defend our way of life against those who just don't understand. One year, for Christmas, I got my husband a large wooden box with a crank on the side wound with thin rope. The woman at the flea market said she had no idea what it was, but I thought it was beautiful. Strands of cobwebs hung from it's splintery sides and the interior contained some lose dirt. It was dusty and worn and it's original purpose lost to history. The box was given a place in our living room, on a small table next to the chair. While playing a game in the room one day, my niece mentioned something being over next to "that piece of junk on the table". My daughter took a firm stance and sternly informed her cousin, "That is NOT junk! That is my dad's Christmas present!"

One of the things that is truly missing here at our home is chickens. Unfortunately, if you have chickens, you must come to terms with the fact that there is a chance they will be killed by predators. I was never able to accept or handle that part of it.

Before we ever got chickens, we got guinea hens. This was because of the high rate of Lyme Disease here. These types of hens eat ticks so we got several of them and let them roam the yard. I was soon to learn that these hens are not the brightest animals in the world. We couldn't get them to stay in the yard in order to eat the ticks. After some research, we learned that we needed to train them to stay on our property. So we closed them into a pen for a while, letting them out only momentarily during the day. However, the only things these birds did was plan and execute their escapes which would send us trolling the woods for hours looking for them. Unlike most animals, they had absolutely no survival instincts. They did not seem to care about food, water, shelter or safety. All they cared about was the opportunity to flee. We  eventually realized that our long treks through the woods, searching for them, was actually raising our risk of contracting Lyme Disease so we decided to let them stay on the run.

My sewing box is filled with items that you can't find in stores anymore. Old tatted lace and aged embroidery thread that my grandfather bought decades ago are used sparingly. My grandfather loved yard sales, auctions and flea markets. I think it was my mother's respect for history and my grandfather's love of old things that made me the person I am. My grandfather would buy anything that was old and interesting. I remember the day he came home with that tattered shoe box overflowing with sewing notions and asked me if I wanted it. I was just a kid then but I was glad to have anything and everything my grandfather ever offered to me. Now those laces and threads adorn the pillows that my children sleep on and the curtains that hang from my windows. I wish everyday that my grandfather could see what I've done with some of the items he brought home in that old shoe box.

My mother is a wonderful seamstress and makes doll clothes which she sells at a local shop. She taught me to sew when I was young, however it took me a long time to get the hang of it and I'm still not as good at it as she is. I sew quilts, pillows, curtains, handbags and other useful things but I have never had the talent to make clothing for dolls or humans. I tried a few times, my last effort being a dress for my daughter. She cried and begged me not to make her wear it! It was promptly packed away as simply a bad sample of my attempt at wearing apparel. Neither my mother or I use a machine, doing all our work by hand.

Tell me what is ailing you and I will most likely have a natural remedy for it! Those I have not committed to memory are written down in my little brown book and can be looked up in a matter of seconds. I am always suggesting natural remedies to friends and family members when they complain of a physical ailment. Sometimes they take my advice. One of the most common complaints I hear is that of seasonal allergies. I tell them to take one tablespoon per day of recently jarred honey from the honey producer closest to your home. Whatever pollen is presently in the air which is causing your immune system to over-react will be in that honey. Small doses of it, carried out over several days, will desensitize your body to it. Nearly everyone puts this remedy into use and later reports it's success. But sometimes, people do not take my advice. Usually it's when the remedy includes garlic, vinegar or onions. It's too bad because those three items possesses a wealth of healing properties.

My husband, who had always simply reached into a medicine cabinet before he met me, has been a very willing participant. But that's not to say he has always been thrilled with my natural course of action. I am a big fan of poultices and plasters. During one terrible cold, he couldn't seem to find any relief so I suggested an onion plaster for his chest. I had never used one of these on anything but a bare chest before so it was a new problem I (actually, we) encountered when it was time to remove the plaster. It had hardened on his chest, strongly attached by chest hair. A really good sport, he resorted to another of my remedies for a later cold. This time I made up a poultice to lay on his chest. Traditionally, a hot water bottle is supposed to be rested upon the poultice but, being without a hot water bottle, I had to be inventive. I figured that if I heated up a cast iron pan, smaller in diameter than the poultice, I could hold it on top of the poultice until it became warm enough to be beneficial. However, I became caught up in whatever I was talking about and forgot about timing the process. Suddenly, he interrupted me and said, "Is this supposed to be getting this hot??!!" 

I thinned out the herb garden today, pulling up dead stalks and yellowed shoots. Crushed the herbs that have been drying and cut and hung more. We have several varieties of mints; including apple, chocolate, spearmint and peppermint. We also have several types of basil, oregano, parsley and thyme. Lemon balm, lavender, tarragon, chives, cilantro and dill round things out. Another huge bucket of tomatoes was brought in today which means I will be canning more ketchup tonight.

Our little friend Pal was outside watching me work today. I've begun leaving small dishes of bird seed and water for him on the back porch. I filled the suet feeders and the birdbath and felt a big twinge of guilt when I cut the flowery tops off the tall apple mint plants when I saw the bees flee away. I will leave the next flowering plants and let the bees have them. I am completely willing to share with the wildlife, except when it comes to that groundhog who has greedily taken way more than his fair share of our garden! We now have a solar-generated sonic device that emits a noise which keeps him away.

Today was pierogi-making day! The kitchen is like an assembly line whenever we do this. The dough must be made, rolled, cut, filled then sealed. The pierogies then must be boiled, cooled and wrapped for freezing. It takes a lot of practice to to get it right. If the dough is not sealed around the filling perfectly, it will all come out during the boiling process. This makes a huge mess in the pot which will then have to be emptied, refilled and heated again. It also takes a lot of practice to learn how to carefully stretch the dough over the filling, which consists of potato, farmer's cheese, onion and chopped chives. Pull too hard and the dough will break and lose the filling. Don't pull hard enough and all your filling is going to ooze out around the perimeter. We successfully made several dozen tonight with only one breaking open during the boiling process. We froze them all for use this winter. Fried in a cast iron pan with butter, onions and dill, they are a perfect meal, especially when topped with sauerkraut.

We picked more watermelons today and also picked most of our potatoes. The tomatoes continue to overwhelm us this year! I spent several hours this afternoon making and canning more tomato sauce, a cinnamon/vinegar variety which will be used for pasta and meatloaf. Our next big cooking day will be making and canning baked beans. This is something I definatly do not want to do during this heat spell as the beans must cook for about 6 hours.  

This humidity has ruined my cheese! With all the rain and the wetness that hangs in the air, the cheese-making process was a total failure this time around. Unable to dry properly, both blocks became elastic and crusty. Trying to be optimistic, I figured we could ignore the texture if the taste was acceptable. The taste ended up being worse than the texture. So the whole batch was a total loss.

We began picking our watermelons today and, of course, more tomatoes. We canned more ketchup tonight. You might wonder why anyone would need so much ketchup. Well, I make a lot of soups and stews in the fall and winter, including a vegetable stew which uses watered down ketchup as a base. Each pot of stew is going to take about a pint of ketchup, so the more we have on hand, the more stew we'll be able to have.

While it has indeed become cumbersome to answer so many questions about why I live the way I do, there are perhaps a couple of things that might invite such questions. For instance, maybe I can understand why someone would ask, "Why is there a big pair of underwear hanging on your bathroom wall?" The pants are actually called bloomers and they most likely belonged at one time to a large-sized woman. With a drawstring waist and wide lacing along the hems, the white bloomers have a prominent place on the wall beside my bathroom sink. There are actually two pairs. The other is hung at the head of the cast iron tub and are difficult to notice unless you are inside the tub.

An old nightshirt hangs on the wall behind the door, a pair of discolored socks and children's underpants hang over the toilet. Just outside the bathroom, the wall is lined with infant nightdresses. The answer to the question of why I have underwear, or any of these other items, hanging on my wall, is really quite simple. And, no, they are not there to serve the purpose of primitive decor. They are there for the same reason that other people would hang a painting or large photograph on their own walls. To me, these items are art. They were created by someone's own hand to serve a purpose. I am greatly inspired by their usefulness, beauty and simplicity. I know it is impossible to make most people see these items that way, so I don't try. "I like them there", is my simple answer.