Housewives are the Original DIYers

My family moved eight times in my first eight years of life.   It wasn't a big deal, because everyone I knew did the same.  We were all Army brats.   It wasn't until I was 10 that I realized that some people never move, and, for them, there is a place that they call "home" - a place where they have grown, a place that they leave (sometimes), and (often) a place they go back to ... a place they belong.

As an Army brat, I didn't have that kind of home.  I had a different place that was a "home" to me.  

My dad's childhood was very different.  He lived nearly his entire childhood in the same little house in the same little community, where his parents and several of his siblings, many of his aunts and uncles and cousins still lived.  In fact, still do.  His father built the house my dad grew up in when my dad wasn't much more than a toddler.  

The closest place in the world I had to a hometown was that old homestead where my dad was raised.  It wasn't the whole community to whom I connected, but rather just that deep mountain hollow, a few of the neighbors, that house on the hill (my Granny's house), and those many people who lived there.  They were my family.  That was my home.  It was the one place I always felt like I really belonged.  

From the time I was around eight until I turned fourteen and my dad retired, my family would make the nine-hour drive from where we lived in the deep south to that little homestead in the Appalachian mountains.  Spending time on my grandma's farm with all of the animals and my cousins, who just lived up the road, was an idyllic summer for this suburban kid.  

It was about as quintessentially down-home as it could get.  They had a television set, but didn't have cable TV, because there was no cable TV service back in the hollow.  Neither was there much with regard to television reception, and Hee Haw was viewed through a veil of snow. I couldn't even see it to say who was heeing, and who was hawing.  In short, we had to find (and usually did) other ways to entertain ourselves.

Summers in the mountains were warm, not the face-melting hot of central Alabama, but warm enough that by the end of the day, especially after Granny had heated up the house cooking dinner for the many of us, inside was the last place anyone wanted to be, and most evenings, after dinner was eaten, and the farm had been tended, most of the adult males could be found outside on the front porch, in the cool of the evening, chewing tobacco, whittling a stick, and telling a tale.  Honestly, better than TV - not that I had much choice.  See above.

Today I spent a lot of time thinking about those nights, sitting on the porch and watching my grandpa and uncles whittling a stick.  I don't recall anything, in particular, that was ever carved out of those wooden sticks.  Mostly, I just think the whittling was a meditation, or just something to keep their hands busy so that they could justify the sittin' a spell and spinnin' a yarn.  As the saying goes, "Idle hands are the devil's playthings."

I was channeling those ancestors of mine today - although my whittling was a bit more practical than therapeutic.  

I've been planning this project using wooden spoons for a couple of weeks.  I told Deus Ex Machina about it, and I also told him that I thought I wanted to carve my own spoons rather than purchase them.  

I know.  Wooden spoons are cheap.  We can get them 3/$1 at the Dollar Store, but this is a very special project, and to me, it felt more right to have this hand-made piece rather than something that was carved in a factory, probably by a machine that is operated by someone who works very hard to churn out these millions of spoons that will be sold for pennies.  I felt like my project needed a more personal touch.

This past weekend, while we were splitting firewood, Deus Ex Machina split a birch log into some spoon blanks for me.  

Today was sunny and beautiful with a lovely breeze.  I could smell the ocean.  I grabbed my Mora knife, went out in the shaded front yard, and started shaping one of those blanks.  It could only have been better if I actually had a front porch.

I thought a lot about my grandpa and my uncles sitting out on that porch and telling stories while they whittled.  I can't remember any of their stories, but I do remember their voices, and their postures, and the comfortable way they carved a big stick into a little toothpick.

I found the process quite relaxing, and I knew, probably for the first time, why.  Why they would sit for hours into the dying day and just shave those slivers of wood off the larger piece.  Thoughtfully.  Meditatively.  They had no where to go, and that stick wasn't gonna whittle itself.  

At the end of the day, I have a very lovely wooden spoon, and I am happy with the result.  The fact that it actually LOOKS like spoon is pretty cool, to me.  I just need to sand it a little, and maybe use a fancier carving tool than a Mora knife to hollow out a bowl for the spoon.  It's pretty perfect for the project I'm working on.

And I am thrilled that I can now add spoon-carving to that growing list of skills I have, and ... you know ... I think I might start making all of my wood spoons. 

Spending a couple of dollars on a few spoons isn't going to break us financially, but knowing how to do something, how to create a thing, and actually being able to do it ... for free! ... is the one of the most empowering feelings in the world.  That I can make my own stuff is incredibly satisfying - especially from a self-sufficiency/survival point of view.  

And bonus, if I ever get lost out in the woods, and I have a knife (and maybe an ax), I can make a spoon with which to eat all of that foraged food I will be harvesting.

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Last week, we ordered some pork from a local farmer.  What I asked for was a couple of packages of Italian sausage, a couple of packages of garlic sausage, and several packages of breakfast sausage.  There's a theme here - we like sausage.  Not just charcuterie, but seasoned ground meat.  

It's a very small, family-run farm.  We have to pre-order the pork via FB messenger.  Then, they package it up for us, and we drive to their farm (it's not close) with cash in hand, and pay when we pick up the meat.  

So, we drove out, paid the farmer, grabbed our bag of pork, and came back home.  There didn't seem to be any reason to check the order at the farm.  I mean, it was typed out ... on FB messenger.

When I got home, we had Italian sausage and garlic sausage, but what was supposed to have been breakfast sausage was unseasoned ground pork.

It's the same price, and so I couldn't really be angry, except that I didn't want ground pork.  A few days earlier, we had picked up our cow-share, and so we had plenty of ground meat (beef) in the freezer.  I don't need ground meat.  I need sausage.

So, I found a seasoning recipe for sausage in the Google cookbook, and I just mixed up my own.  

It's delicious!

And next time I order pork from that farm, I'll probably just ask for ground, unseasoned, and season it myself.

Also, BONUS:  the recipe calls for a couple of herbs that I have growing in my garden - sage and thyme.  So, I was able to add fresh herbs, from my garden, to the mix.  Herbs are expensive, and so growing and using my own saves us a lot of money.  Plus, there's the whole, empowerment and self-sufficiency aspect.  

After I mixed the seasoning really well, I cooked up a couple of patties.  It's delicious.