Something I Can Do

The last thing I wanted was to be like everyone else. It seemed to me that everyone else was moving in one direction. It was a direction I didn’t want to go. It came from anger perhaps. The anger of losing my sweet baby to brain cancer in a world which holds no answer. Give money, give money. But still no answer. We are helping people, but I am not helped. Everybody I see is eating stuff which isn’t really food. Stuff which comes in wrappers and foils, boxes with pretty writing and fancy artwork. Little plastic cups with tasty stuff, but none of it food. Treats at the walk-a-thon, rallies and benefits, taste and smell good but don’t resemble food. Plastic water bottles, juice boxes and bottles and liquids in plastic. Plastic bottles piled high in cans, dirty, smelly. On garbage day, large cans lining the road on both sides, full of garbage. Everyone putting everything into their mouths. Nobody saying, “What is this?” Nobody questions. All the people saying, “Eat this way. This is what we do. We eat this at breakfast and this at lunch. We go to places where they feed us for dinner. We like it like this. You do this too. It is easy. It is fun.” All the people going to doctors and taking medicines. This is what we do. We all do this. Everybody has pain. The doctors say, this is what happens it is normal. The whole world is drinking and eating the same thing. I see pictures from other countries, they all have plastic soda pop bottles. They all have Coke. The food is in packages with pretty writing, boxes and bottles and tubes and tubs. Food is not in sacks and baskets. Everybody says they don’t feel well. Everybody is hurting somewhere and feeling afraid, but they keep on putting this stuff into their mouths. I don’t want to eat like that. I just can’t do it. I read and read. Every package and bottle, box and tub has words. Really small words. Sometimes the words are so small I need a magnifying glass. I read the words under the title ‘ingredients’. Our family stands in the grocery store and reads the words. We say, “What does this mean? How do you say this word?” We look for the food in the list. We don’t buy it because we don’t know what it is. The first time I went to the store and read the ingredient lists I came home with nothing. I cried. I went to the garden and put my hands in the dirt. We turned the earth and planted seeds. We weeded and waited. Meanwhile we bought fruits and vegetables fresh at the market and at the store. We bought organic, we bought local. We did not buy boxes or packages. We did not buy tubes and tubs. We put food into our cart. It didn’t look like much. We bought flour and yeast and baked bread at home. We rolled out our own tortillas. We made our own cookie dough. In the spring and summer we ate from our garden. Peas, lettuce, radishes, asparagus, onions, peppers, tomatoes, beans, potatoes, eggplant, cabbages, cucumbers, zucchini. We had too much food. We gave it away. We worked hard. It was fun and it was easy, it took time and it drew us together. I take my basket out to the garden and bring it back full. We feel well. We don’t go to the doctor. We don’t need a doctor because we are well. We don’t need medicine. We don’t eat what isn’t food. We aren’t like everyone else. We do different things. We don’t put garbage out on Thursday’s. We don’t have much garbage. We compost. Making food, growing it and storing it takes a lot of my time. Sometimes I am tired. Sometimes I don’t want to make my food. I think that it is a lot of work. It would be nice to eat what is already prepared. People think it will be OK but I studied the big foreign words on the ingredient lists. It is poison. It would not hurt you to eat a little poison one day in your life. But everyday, all day long, all the food that people eat is poisoned. Poisoned with artificial ingredients, colors, flavors, enhancers, conditioners, emulsifiers. It is all poison. It says ‘natural’ but it is still poison. People get sick and then they take medicine which is also poison. Their bodies get tired of fighting the poisons and begin to break down. Bit by bit people don’t feel well. Bodies which are deprived of nutrients and real food don’t have much to fight foreign germs with. Diseases begin to spread. Fear spreads too. The body is too weak and cancer begins to grow. The doctors say, “More poison is the answer.” The body becomes too weak and cannot heal without good nutrition. The doctors say, “Artificial vitamins will help.” The artificial vitamins contain more poison. My body is not artificial. It needs real food. My body is a part of nature. I need to eat from nature. I decide it is not easier to eat the way the rest of the world eats. It will be easier in the long run to provide my own food from nature, bake my own bread and roll my own tortillas. I decide that I have chosen a good path. I have chosen a healthy path. I am not angry anymore. There is something I can do. I can feed my family real food. I can grow herbs for healing. I can keep busy growing and storing and preparing good healthy food. I am thankful for the dirt and what it will grow for us. It is a good thing that I can give other people hope for a healthier life that isn’t expensive and doesn’t cost much more than effort. This is a lifestyle. I am beginning to notice that I am not alone. There are other people who eat real food from nature and prepare it themselves the way people did before there were packages. It is a good life.

Elizabeth Williams, writing exercise, 1,035 words.

Lucky Me

The sun is just beginning to rise. I will go and open the doors to the different coops out back. The back porch, which is a new room I am in love with, is full of ripe tomatoes. The first jars of summer canning have sealed and adorn the small table. Salsa. The sunrise glows orange on the horizon. It is raining. It is the second day of rain after a long dry spell. I’m happy about the rain even though it makes messy mud for me to walk through. The dog is wet and stays on the back porch which has a nice floor for getting mud and water on. I’m typing this story out and I get a nice surprise from my husband. He comes home for a second cup of coffee and even though I got up too late to kiss him goodbye this morning, I get to give him a kiss now. His work is only one mile down the road. I suppose I could be putting a load of laundry in the washer and setting up my work station for canning tomatoes but I’m not, I’m typing, I’m writing. When I’ve finished my typing and posted it to my blog, then I start my day, but not until then. After I am done with writing I feel like the most challenging part of my day is behind me and it’s all downhill from here. It is a wonderful feeling which is powerfully changing me. I am one of the lucky ones. I have the peace and freedom to choose my daily routine. The garden has been blessed this year, not with everything I wanted, but with plenty of what we need to get us through the year. What we aren’t able to grow we can purchase from a local farmer or grocery store. I wake in the mornings to only the hum of the fridge or the whir of the air conditioner. The roosters, we can’t forget to mention them, but I can’t really hear them inside the house. Everyday when I wake there is plenty for me to do.

Today there is thunder and rain. The thunder is harmless. I am not threatened by it. I am not experiencing any hurricane or tornado. There is no noise of rockets nor explosions of war. My drinking water is clean and pure, straight from my well, through a series of filters which we installed in our home. My children are well and healthy, except for Debbie, but she is healed and in paradise. Chloe is waking up and getting her gears going for a new day at home school. My husband loves me in his quiet unspoken sort of way. He stays busy from sunup to sundown. Not busy, busy, but continuously moving, working, helping, fixing, building. People come and go when he is here. They bring things to him and he fixes them and they come back and he shows them what he did and they are happy. We bow our heads together at mealtimes and take turns saying the blessing. On Sunday we drive to church, a little church with a steeple. Yes, we are the lucky ones.

I heard recently that oil was spilled into the Ohio River and is ruining it. I asked someone who faithfully watches the news about it. I had to ask because I haven’t watched television for a very long time but was wondering if this oil spill had been in the news, or was I the only one aware of it. It seems pretty big deal to me. At first my friend drew a blank. Then I mentioned that it didn’t happen today and she said that it was yesterday’s news. The way she said that alarmed me. It’s not important because it was yesterday. But it is our Ohio River. Seems to me that it is just as important today as the day they ruined it. But today there is new news. And I remember when I used to watch the news that it was one thing after another. A tragedy in one person’s life, a death, perhaps a murder, reported on and then moving right on to the next news. Maybe news about where a celebrity had their wedding or something silly like that. War in one country, complaining in another. At any point in every day, someone is hurting and children are crying from neglect and abuse, some are hungry and someone is killing someone and countries are at war and corporations are lying to get around the laws and people are unaware that what they are eating is poison and children are afraid in the schools and other people are planning disasters. Some places are experiencing fires and some floods. Some places there are tidal waves, tsunami’s and earthquakes. Really important things happening to real people all over the world. Christians are being persecuted. Even the environment is being a bit more destroyed each day. As I go into this day I am aware that there is suffering all around us in the world and that I am blessed and I am thankful. I am allowed to sing, and so I will. Not that it’s much to listen to, but with all that is going on, someone needs to sing, someone needs to dance. Someone needs to smile and say kind words. Someone should, and that someone is ever so lucky me. To be happy and thankful and kind and share the same. Is that what my job is? I think so. There must be place in this world for good. It isn’t bad everywhere. I’m not ignoring what is happening everywhere, I’m praying for the hurt and the suffering, the cancer patients and the hopeless. I have not been given the job of bearing the weight of the world, that’s Jesus job. I’ve been blessed to bring a ray of sunshine, a word of thankfulness, a flicker of hope, an encouraging word. I am one of the lucky ones.

Elizabeth Williams, daily writing exercise, 1,007 words.

My Garden

The garden is my peaceful place. It has become that for me. I dare not go in there unless I plan to stay. It is a place where I easily lose track of time. I wander from plant to plant, row to row, pulling weeds, tying up vines, trimming off extras, making mental notes on what needs to be done. I used to get really anxious about it. The garden was half the size and large walnuts and mulberry trees hung over the North side. Before that it was not fenced and the edges kept creeping over it. Before that it was in a different place. It was in a lower spot in the property, right next to where it is now. It had been a garden since the 1930’s until the last few years before we moved in. Chloe’s Great-Grandpa and Grandma grew everything there and fed the family all over Springfield with this garden. Grandma tells how she would come and help with the canning. Grandpa tells how he sat together with his mother under the maple tree and shelled beans. He told about this as we sat at our dining room table together last fall, shelling beans. They tell about how Great-Grandma took the harvest into town to share with relatives and days when relatives came to help with harvest. I came to know these stories bit by bit, but not until I started to garden in earnest. In the spring of our first year in this house we planted a garden in the usual spot. We waited a long time for the ground to become dry enough to take a tractor in there. The ground lay low and water pooled. It was past the middle of May when Mark finally took a plow to break up the sod. We planted corn and watermelons and potatoes. I don’t remember what else we planted but nothing did very well. The deer came in and made beds in the corn. I insisted that we plant in a different spot but I got voted down each year. Each year we planted but we lost interest quickly. June was a busy month for me at work and I worked long days in the office. By July the weeds would have taken over most of it. Mark put a chicken wire fence around the garden but it didn’t really keep anything out. It mostly marked the place where weeds were free to grow. Every spring we got excited about a garden but by July we were done with it. I remember that we ate a meal of corn once. It was different. I began to go to the farm market down the road for canning tomatoes and beans. I bought boxes of corn to freeze. I canned tomatoes together with my neighbor one year and she taught me about timing and where to buy vegetables. Every year after that I would order my tomatoes and can them. They were pricey compared to homegrown but they tasted so much better than store bought. The spring after Chloe was born I planted 24 tomato plants. I was able to fill the canner a couple of times before the plants died. I planted beets and kale and carrots but nothing came of them. The only other thing in there was a bed of strawberries and that became a thistle bed. One year I decided to move the garden spot. There was a piece of higher ground on the North side of the property where the water never pooled. It was rough but I was hopeful. Now I was armed with all the knowledge on the internet. I had started to raise chickens just for this purpose, manure. I used leaves to cover the ground in the fall. Mark tilled a small area and I was happy. Next spring he was able to till it up much earlier. I planted beans, tomatoes, onions, cabbages and asparagus. I was excited about it and I did get some beans and a few tomatoes, but nothing did really well. It was the same for a couple more years. The bean beetles were horrible and cabbage worms ate everything, the clay was thick in most places and the hot sun baked it. The next year I began to use more straw and we put all the chicken coop bedding onto the garden and horse manure from a nearby stall. We tilled and tilled. I rotated crops and Mark doubled the size of the garden. A gardening friend gave me 12 small garlic cloves and I planted them in the fall. I also planted potatoes again. Those two crops changed everything for us. The garlic was so easy to grow and tasted so amazing. The potatoes were so delightful to dig up just in time for dinner. As Mark began to get to know the local farmers and glean useful methods and tips from them, our garden also grew and flourished. Last year I grew the best beans I had ever grown. They just kept coming and they were beautiful and I had extras. This year we will have corn. We have a tall fence but the deer still jump over it and eat what ever they want, but we planted extra of everything. The deer did eat all my beets though and this year my onions all died or were eaten, I don’t know, they are gone. The soil in the garden is becoming soft and balanced. The trees which were hanging over the North side have been trimmed back. I have cabbages, broccoli, beans, shelling beans, tomatoes, peppers and squash. Eggplants, peas, cucumbers, asparagus, rhubarb, sweet potatoes, corn and popcorn. The garlic is hanging in the garage, over 80 heads. The garden is my place where nourishing things grow and my soul is peaceful and blessed. This is where I connect with the earth and God’s creation, where I bring the children and show them the dirt. I instruct them to take care of the dirt because from it comes all this food.

Elizabeth Williams, daily writing exercise, 1,017 words.