Summer Reading #4

Last night I finished Letters of a Woman Homesteader by Elinore Pruitt Stewart.  Sort of ironic isn't it that the inaugural book on the Kindle was hand-written correspondence by a spunky pioneer woman?! Perhaps that's a little personal statement that I am not wholeheartedly in the digital age.  Some days, I'd very happily throw my Kindle, computer, and cell phone away and travel back in time to the frontier.  Some days, I think I was born in the wrong century.

I loved reading these letters, loved imagining the strong, brave, tenderhearted, practical woman who wrote them, loved the time and place, the beauty of the rugged country, the community of neighbors, the hard but fruitful labor of turning a wilderness into a garden.

Some of my favorite sections are descriptions of her travels, including this one:

"Soon we came to the pineries, where we traveled up deep gorges and canyons.  The sun shot arrows of gold through the pines down upon us and we gathered our arms full of columbines.  The little black squirrels barked and chattered saucily as we passed along, and we were all children together.  We forgot all about feuds and partings, death and hard times.  All we remembered was that God is good and the world is wide and beautiful."

and this one:

"Our improvised beds were the most comfortable things; I love the flicker of an open fire, the smell of the pines, the pure, sweet air, and I went to sleep thinking how blest I was to be able to enjoy the things I love most."

and descriptions of the work she did, like this lengthy section:

"I never did like to theorize, and so this year I set out to prove that a woman could ranch if she wanted to.  We like to grow potatoes on new ground, that is, newly cleared land on which no crop has been grown.

Few weeds grow on new land, so it makes less work. So I selected my potato-patch and the man ploughed it, although I could have done that if Clyde would have let me  I cut the potatoes, Jerrine helped, and we dropped them in the rows.  The man covered them, and that ends the man's part.  By that time the garden ground was ready, so I planted the garden.  I had almost an acre in vegetables.  I irrigated and I cultivated it myself.

We had all the vegetables we could possibly use, and now Jerrine and I have put in our cellar full, and this is what we have: one large bin of potatoes (more than two tons), half a ton of carrots, a large bin of beets, one of turnips, one of onions, one of parsnips, and on the other side of the cellar we have more than one hundred heads of cabbage.  I have experimented and found a kind of squash that can be raised here, and that the ripe ones keep well and make good pies; also that the young tender ones make splendid pickles...They told me when I came that I could not even raise common beans, but I tried and succeeded.  And also I raised lots of green tomatoes, and as we like them preserved, I made them all up that way....I milked ten cows twice a day all summer; have sold enough butter to pay for a years supply of flour and gasoline. We use a gasoline lamp.  I have raised enough chickens to completely renew my flock, and all we wanted to eat, and have some fryers to go into the winter with.  I have enough turkeys for all of our birthdays and holidays.

I raised a great many flowers...

I have tried every kind of work this ranch affords, and I can do any of it.  Of course, I am extra strong, but those who try, know that strength and knowledge come with doing.  I just love to experiment, to work, and to prove out things, so that ranch life and "roughing it" just suits me.

One tough lady.  Now I want to go out and pull weeds and move stumps.

A sweet moment

I had a sweet moment yesterday.  But I have to back up a little bit.

Joel and I have been trading books this summer.  He often comes to me and asks what he should read next.  I sometimes pull out the "official" list, the one our co-op writing/ literature teacher sends out every summer.  He's read a lot of the books on that list.  It's a good list.  There are other good lists out there, but there are still plenty of great books that haven't made those lists ... yet.

So, early in the summer, I suggested Unbroken.  I hadn't read it yet, but Coty (and everyone else who's read it) liked it.  Joel read it quickly and told me I needed to read it.  So, I did.

Then I read Island of the World.  Next time he came asking for a book, that's what I suggested.  He's about 600 pages in now and I ask him just about every day what's happening.

Now, here's the sweet part.  As I read the book, I put little slips of paper in various places to mark pages with passages I loved.  Then I went back and copied the passages in my quote journal.  I thought I'd removed all my little markers after copying the passages, but apparently not.  Yesterday, Joel walked in the room where I was working and said he'd gotten to one of my markers.  Now, since this is a library book, of course, I had not underlined anything.  I asked him where he was in the story and he proceeded to read to me the exact passage I had copied.  I hadn't even hinted at it.  Honest.  He just knew why I had marked that page.

I felt happy.  Warm.  Connected.  Known.  And thankful that my 16 year old son found rich and meaningful something that had so resonated with me.   Yeah, it was a sweet moment.

Summer Reading #3

I'm giving a talk on healthy eating and doing a cooking demo for a group of women later this summer. In preparation, I've added a couple of foodie books to my summer stack.  Yesterday, I breezed through this one:

This very quick read gives Pollan's 64 "rules" that help us answer the question, "What should I eat?"

The basic answer is, in Pollan's words, "Eat food.  Not too much.  Mostly plants."

He expands this answer with his rules which though commonsense, get lost in our day of nutritional information overload, conflicting health claims, fast food, and the decline of sit-down-at-the-table-and-enjoy-a-meal-with-your-family-and-friends eating.

Here are a few of my favorites:

#2 Don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food.


#13 Eat only foods that will eventually rot.


#18  Don't eat foods made in places where everyone is required to wear a surgical cap.

My favorite one,  #25 Eat your colors  

with an exception, #36 Don't eat breakfast cereals that change the color of the milk.

and finally,

#51 Spend as much time enjoying the meal as it took to prepare it.


Good advice.  Simple guidelines.  Pretty much the way we eat around here.

Finished it...

on my float, like I said.  

Didn't know the diving board would make such a shady little spot

 for an afternoon reading session. 

Summer Reading #2

"Louie found that the raft offered an unlikely intellectual refuge.  He had never recognized how noisy the civilized world was.  Here, drifting in almost total silence, with no scents other than the singed odor of the raft, no flavors on his tongue, nothing moving but the slow procession of shark fins, every vista empty save water and sky, his time unvaried and unbroken, his mind was freed of an encumbrance that civilization had imposed on it.  In his head, he could roam anywhere, and he found that his mind was quick and clear, his imagination unfettered and supple.  He could stay with a thought for hours, turning it about. (italics mine)

 He had always enjoyed excellent recall, but on the raft, his memory became infinitely more nimble, reaching back further, offering detail that had once escaped him.  One day, trying to pinpoint his earliest memory, he saw a two-story building and, inside, a stairway broken into two parts of six steps each, with a landing in between.  He was there in the image, a tiny child toddling along the stairs.  As he crawled down the first set of steps and moved toward the edge of the landing, a tall yellow dog stepped in front of him to stop him from tumbling off.  It was his parents' dog, Askim, whom they had had in Olean, when Louie was very little. Louis had never remembered him before."

I've been marveling at the resourcefulness and sheer will it took to survive 47 days on a raft in the Pacific, cringing in horror at the inhuman treatment of vicious POW camp guards, wondering how anyone could survive all that.  I'm reading Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption by Laura Hillenbrand.

I gave this book to both Coty and my dad for Christmas.  I knew my runner husband and track history and statistics buff would like it because it chronicles the incredible story of a man who literally ran his way out of a troubled youth to a spot on the 1936 Olympic track and field team. When WWII broke out, he joined the US Army Air Forces and while on a mission to look for a lost plane, his own plane crashed into the Pacific. Louie and one of the other men who survived the crash drifted in the ocean until they were captured by the Japanese Navy.  They spent the rest of the war in POW camps and were thought to be dead.

I'll leave the rest of the story for you to read.  Or if this isn't going on your reading list anytime soon, you can learn more here or here.

I'm heading out to my own little raft in the middle of a much smaller body of water to finish the book.  There won't be any sharks or bombers strafing me.  Just floating with a good book in peace  -  my own little "intellectual refuge" for a bit.