No.833: Last Week at the Farmhouse // The Granny Creed

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The decluttering adventure continues.  This week, I discovered a computer print-out from 2009!  The blog post described “Granny Day,” a day set aside each year to live life like Granny did.  At the end of the post, the author shared The Granny Creed and I’ll rewrite it here:

Make food for the soul with love in your hands; traverse daily to the well and draw from the living waters of creativity; from a generous heart give something away.  Rise early, stay late; call or write to one held dear, whether far or near.  Work until it’s done.  See to the needs of those around you, but never lose sight of your own.  Live each day with reverence and joy.

The timing of this little discovery was a little uncanny because the week took a very Granny-like turn!  Our dryer – only a year old – started making terrible grinding sounds so I was left to air-drying clothing all over the house while we tried to diagnose the problem.  I made a loaf of homemade bread in the bread machine almost every day.  I woke up with the sun, worked the garden and moved the animals before it got too hot.  It was a good, life-giving week.

Hoping to document the abundance around me all year long!

Around here, abundance looks like…

+ finishing up the Four Weeks to a More Organized Home challenge but forgetting to photograph the process!  Oh well.

+ returning to carnivore(ish) eating after a month of treats.  I enjoyed many of my old favorites, but I quickly went back to emotional/stress eating, my skin looks terrible (like I’m back in high school!) and my stomach issues have come back.  I know I can’t sustain any of those things, so back to the strict diet I go.

+ finding wild berries growing over our property fence.  I think they’re blackberries?

+ selling seven unneeded items for the Farm Sitter Vacation Fund: a stylus pen, two books, a homeschool curriculum, and three pieces of clothing.  After shipping and fees, I made $65.50!

Reading //

• Grandmother’s Wisdom from Andrew Skabelund at Front Porch Republic
• Housework from Mary Townsend at The Hedgehog Review // “To clean the thing is to care for the thing; to clean well is neither giving it a flick that leaves the edges obscured in dirt, nor scrubbing the thing away into nothing. All of this work raises up the house out of the confusion of its strands back into one single thing, the bulwark, the thing that makes the rest possible, both leaving and coming back; the sort of place where you could consider resting your head. Housekeeping doesn’t just enable us to dwell; housekeeping is dwelling, and also it is thought.”
• Paper Routes: Working Hard & Humanely from Paul Schweigl at Hearth and Field // “I think what I am really hoping for is that the lad’s first job will teach him everything that my paper routes taught me. Work ought to help reveal the dignity of the worker, while enmeshing him in a community where he can learn to be a stronger but also more compassionate man.”

New Additions to The List // 

• Chasing the Thrill: Obsession, Death, and Glory in America’s Most Extraordinary Treasure Hunt by Daniel Barbarisi
• American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers by Nancy Jo Sales

Loving //

• a new bread machine recipe // I omit the sugar and the kids don’t seem to notice.