A week ago Saturday, I was in the kitchen considering what kind of dinner I could make with the ingredients I had on hand while simultaneously ruminating over fellow bloggers who were suddenly disappearing into the mysterious landscape that lies off the grid (see last post). Interestingly this combination thought process spontaneously resulted not only in my cooking up a new lentil soup recipe but also in venturing into cooking it very efficiently in our living room!

One of my favorite cookbooks of the last six months or so is Eating Off the Grid, Storing and Cooking Foods Without Electricity. (You can get this cookbook on Amazon via the link below but I frankly found it more cheaply at USA Emergency Supply.) It has a very useful array of simple recipes across twelve categories together with interesting historical information, menu plans, nutritional information and other practical information for off grid living with regards to food.

Anyway, I decided to try one of her lentil soups I hadn’t tried before AND to try cooking it in a way she mentions which I haven’t done before. Both were great successes. I will first give the very simple cooking explanation for cooking in an insulated box followed by the recipe.

COOKING INDOORS USING AN INSULATED BOX
(Please view the video linked at the bottom of the post for visuals for all of this.)
I have used this method with great results now with soup, beans and grain. In a heavy bottomed pot with a tight fitting lid, start cooking your dish in the usual manner. Bring it to a boil, put on the cover and cook at a fairly high boil for about 15 minutes. I adjust the heat here depending upon what I am cooking and how big the pot is.

In the living room (and this is simply because it was the only nearby spot I could find that wouldn’t be in the way), I set up a laundry basket. In the laundry basket is an unzipped twin size sleeping bag with the center of the sleeping bag squashed down into the laundry basket. Inside that I put a travel blanket that used to be in the car. Inside that is an old bath sheet (you know those giant bath towels?). At the bottom of all of this I put a flat, stable hot plate.

After the lentil soup boiled for 15 minutes, I carried the pot into the living room and set it into its insulated box. I wrapped the towel around it and then the blanket under it. I then wrapped another heavy cotton blanket around it all from the top and tucked that it all around but inside of the sleeping bag. Then I wrapped the sleeping bag up all around the whole thing. The sleeping bag is nylon so I was careful to have only cotton blankets and towels actually touching the pot. Nylon would melt.

About three hours later my husband unwrapped the pot for me and brought it into the kitchen. It was still so hot that steam was coming out of it and the lentil soup inside was perfectly cooked. And when I say perfectly cooked, I really mean perfectly cooked. This particular recipe has flour in it which could otherwise have easily burned but didn’t at all from being cooked this way. The lentils were soft but still held their shape and yet everything else was tender. It was kind of amazing to me.

The soup cooked up so beautifully (and it was such a balm to my soul to cook something mostly off the grid…) that I have since cooked up a big Dutch Oven full of fava beans and right now have a pot of barley cooking away in there. I can’t say this arrangement adds much to the decor of the living room at this point but it surely feels great to only use about 15 minutes worth of electricity to cook meals that usually cook on the stove top for hours.

Meanwhile, this particular lentil soup recipe turns out to be a nice addition to my repertoire of lentil soups. It is a bit different and a keeper.

NEW YEAR’S EVE LENTIL SOUP
Author Denise Hansen, MS, RD explains that it is a Greek and Italian tradition to eat lentils on New Year’s Eve to “assure prosperity and good fortune.” I figure we can use that any time of year!

This is my adjusted version which does not include soy bacon bits or beef bouillon. I also made it a bit thicker and tripled the recipe. I doubt many readers will want a recipe quite that size so I will try to scale it back a little. You are welcome to scale it back further or freeze the extra from this for another day.

1 large chopped onion
3 carrots
about a cup’s worth of frozen greens or the equivalent in fresh greens (the recipe suggests Swiss chard including diced stalks - I used mustard greens because that is what I had on hand)
oil for sauteing
1.5 cups flour
7 quarts water
2 or 3 potatoes, diced
3 cups lentils rinsed (and soaked if possible!)
5 tsp. salt
4 bay leaves
2 tsp. thyme
about 1/2 tsp. freshly grated nutmeg

1. In a heavy bottomed stockpot, saute onion, greens and carrots in oil until soft.
2. Add the flour, stirring constantly to make a roux. Unbleached flour works best (she says notes this although I used Golden 86 for this kind of thing all the time).
3. Slowly add the water, stirring constantly. Then add the remaining ingredients.
4. Simmer for 2 - 3 hours. (Alternatively put boiling hot pot put into your insulated box and tuck it in for three hours or so.) The flavor improves with longer simmering. Just before serving, remove the bay leaves and add freshly ground pepper.

This soup is thick and saucy. It also makes great leftovers. We ate this soup for a couple of days plus over a week later we are still enthusiastically using our insulated box for long cooking. Try it - it is extremely easy and is just plain common sense once you start to think about it. Besides, if you happen to have a large family and just a regular smallish stove like I do, it frees up a burner. We are so taken with this recipe that I have added it to my menu plan and we are so taken with this form of cooking that we made a video about it to inspire you. Enjoy both!

From the beautiful mountains of southwest Virginia,
Leslie

In “Natural Was Always Natural” and Living Off the Grid” posted a couple of weeks ago, I mentioned making up a list of all the ways we rely upon the grid to power various activities here on the homestead. I figured that a written and heavily annotated list would help us keep track of the many changes and adaptations we still need to make in order to live successfully off the grid some day. I did make that list a few days later which I entitled “Merrily We Go Off the Grid.” Nothing like positive thinking in the privacy of your own Word documents, eh? Today as a homeschooling/Prepare and Pray exercise, I asked the children to go through the house and make up the same list on their own. Then we compared my list with theirs which was good because we each thought of a couple of things the other had not. I have my list in two columns with Current Arrangements on the left and Future Possibilities on the right. Unfortunately I have no idea how to replicate that formatting here so I guess I will just start with our combined list of Current Arrangements:

CURRENT ARRANGEMENTS

(Kitchen)
Coffee grinder for spices
Electric stove
Stick blender
Bosch for making bread
Grain grinder
Refrigerator
Freezer

(General home)
Lights
Clocks
Telephone
Hot water heater
Water pump
Sewing machine
Keyboard
Computer
TV
CD/tape player
White noise makers
Doorbell
Dehumidifier
Salt lamp
Battery chargers for tools, video camera, small batteries

(Farm)
Heat lamp, heating pad which function as part of incubator
Outdoor lights - porch light, the Xmas lights that illuminate the barn, the light in the hen house
Woodburning tool which is used on rare occasions to good effect

So that is it. That is what electricity powers here inside and out. Alternatives for many of the things are easy to generate (like knocking on the door instead of using a doorbell!) but some require alternatives I know nothing about frankly. I haven’t really officially researched various aspects of off the grid living. Rather I have just focused on living as simply as possible from day to day which has kept me more than busy and occupied. There have always been new discoveries to expand upon just from that approach. But now with our handy dandy list, we can start to pointedly focus on certain areas and begin the process of adjusting ourselves.

I also note that there is a big difference between going off grid during times such as these in which the industrial system is still highly functioning and producing things like batteries or LED lights or solar panels or whatnot and possible future times in which the industrial system may be in a state of collapse and not producing or able to maintain such gizmos. It seems reasonable to me to plan for the former state at first, although I may be wrong about that. Perhaps we should take living well during the industrial collapse scenario as the goal but plan for living in the intermediate state of going off grid by choice during a time of continued industrial and economic functioning as a welcome in-between step?

Either way, I will explore my Future Possibilities list, i.e. alternatives to the usual electrical ways of carrying out our tasks of daily living, in future posts. Anyone with ideas, information or especially experiences, please do share! It is such a big project. It feels especially big to me at this moment when it is in the single digits outside, really cold inside and I can’t get the fire started for some reason. My fingers are so cold I can’t type any more. It turns out that a thorough knowledge of Shakespeare is not the only hole in my education. Boy, do I have a lot to learn about building and maintaining fires in our wood stove. Good grief.

From the beautiful mountains of southwest Virginia,
Leslie

As my husband notes in his video linked below, we have been going through a long period of contraction here on the homestead. There has been lots of selling off and going without and getting by for a while now. There has been lots of, “Where do we go from here?” and “How can we possibly do that?” (which could mean either How do we move forward? or How can we honestly allow ourselves to move backward? depending upon the context).

A small personal story from last week:
Last week, we enjoyed the delights of the Blue Ridge Parkway twice. The first time, we went to our usual spot at Rocky Knob and walked in our usual way on the trail down below along the creek. However events conspired to push us to go beyond our usual ways of exploring down there, luckily, so that we ended up walking much farther along the trail than we ever have before. As a result we discovered an entirely new area with new topography, new atmosphere, new kinds of trees and stone remains of old houses, a new creek so much larger and more babbling than the first and so on. It made such an impression on us - this alluring area full of hints of what seems better to us - that we drove back several days later to explore some more.

Now the second time some of us were a bit resistant to heading back out there because we were exhausted. We wanted to be there but the thought of getting there and back felt overwhelming (and I am not just referring to myself here with the exhaustion, by the way, but also to some of the children). I happened to have checked Best of the Blue Ridge Parkway out of the library, though, so I looked up Rocky Knob to get a more complete picture of the trail there. I discovered that the trailhead was in a different area altogether we have never visited before. We reasoned that the trailhead was probably not as mountainous as the other part of the trail we were on several days ago. It would probably be less tiring while still giving us a taste of that special outdoor atmosphere we were craving so we packed up food and water, tied on boots of various descriptions and headed out.

Oh my, oh my, oh my. This new area was heaven on earth. A big roaring creek. Waterfalls literally every ten yards. Huge boulders covered with moss and lichen. Small sparkling stones of many hues so attractive to young children. Wide, easy to follow trial. Rock foundations of past lives. Locusts and pines in abundance. We even discovered a large area where chives were already up which added just the right spice as we drink water and rested for a bit. It was the kind of place you never want to leave and obviously some people never did leave. Once upon a time, people lived there.

As we walked back to the car hours later, I found my eyes filled with tears. I was exhausted past managing but I couldn’t bear the thought of going back “home” to the usual way. No more stick built, four cornered, uncreative, industrial (even if a 1940 farm house, so called), questionably sited house on a road with suburban type houses on it that demands for itself utilities and cleaning out the gutters. As much as we may be “homesteading”, we are still a darn long way away from natural living. I don’t know for sure what all natural living truly means but I know that it means a lot more than this. I longed to stop and stay where we were and live an utterly stripped down, natural, yogic life with the sound of water ever in my ears and the example of unspoiled nature ever before my eyes to help bring me and my family back, back, back to the Original Design.

Even though I was almost too tired to walk and a natural life like that takes much effort.

The somewhat long ride home provided a transition and I was OK by the time we arrived at our stick built, four cornered, industrially built home. I was grateful to have a warm place to rest actually. It turns out, though, that the final movement of this small symphony wasn’t until the next morning.

The Life of a Prairie Mom is a blog I have been closely reading for a while now. Paula has a very calm way about her. No fireworks. No intellectual feats. No blistering analysis of current trends or groundbreaking ways of gardening. No extraordinary flow of words you can hardly keep up with in the busyness of your own day or noise of your own mind. Rather she quietly spells out certain aspects of her day and instructs along her way of thinking. She is very measured and I have found her writing peaceful and yet inspiring these last months. She writes of things I care very much about like raising and educating children in Him and relating respectfully and fruitfully with her “Beloved” (her husband) and how she organizes her sewing things and cooks real food and minimizes shopping or excess energy use and how determined they are to live off the grid. She has detailed some of the steps that she has been prudently and faithfully taking to prepare them for a new off-the-grid, simpler future and I have identified with all of it.

So next morning after this heart touching time spent out in Nature in the Blue Ridge Mountains, I opened her blog to read “Going Off-Grid.” She shares with her readers that they are going off grid as of tomorrow. It is sooner than expected but she is peaceful and faithful about it. She can only post further when and if she gets to a library which would be once a month at most. She will post again when she can. “May the Lord’s blessings be with you.”

It was the timing, I guess. I felt like I had been punched. She and her family were turning and disappearing into a simpler life, just like that, tomorrow. Wow.

With this story I am saying, and through his video my husband is saying, that we long for more. There is more than this. There is deeper to go. We have all along felt pushed to make the changes we have made so far. We have felt no choice but to go through the contractions my husband details in the video which has left us continually wondering about the future. What are we supposed to do next? We are clearly not at a balance point right now but rather at a point of movement.

I guess my question is this: does “contraction” imply muscles coiled and waiting to spring into the next level?

Please enjoy “Update Winter 2009.”

From the beautiful mountains of southwest Virginia,
Leslie

I have become vividly aware of the fact that the adage about slowly figuring out a baby’s needs and best schedule only to have the baby promptly change and require a whole new approach and schedule remains just as true for older children as it does for babies. Many parents perhaps are not as vividly aware of this during these time in history when children and parents spend most of their time apart. However when you are homeschooling, the greater intimacy demands that you be acutely aware of your children’s changes while the flexibility and goals of teaching them at home charge you with the responsibility of responding to those changes for the best. It surely can keep a mama/teacher hopping!

Kind of forgetting this, I thought I had certain structures nicely in place for something approaching forever. We used Ambleside Online (AO) and I was thrilled with it and so were the children. Aside from having to tweak a few books that were too slanted towards one religion or the general direction of the history selections that were a bit too “white male European” for my comfort, I figured we would use AO for “always and always and always” and come out at the other end wondrously educated, deeply thoughtful and exquisitely sensitive to beauty and duty. I had the older two of the children I am homeschooling doing their work together as they are a day less than a year apart in age with the older one being a boy and the younger one a girl. They went through Year 1 together and had been working through Year 2 in the same way. Then my next girl was working through Year 1 while my youngest, a boy, was working on the cusp of Year 0/Year 1. Aside from the fact that I found all of this pretty difficult to keep up with given my other (homesteading, writing, home business, endless real food making) duties, it was otherwise great.

Then a few things happened…

>>>>>>>>>>
To read the rest of this blog post plus see my brand new homeschooling blog, please come visit at The Lionsgate School. Also note that there is now a link to The Lionsgate School here on the right side bar at the end of the list of our various other sites and blogs (The Lionsgate School Blog would be #8) so that you can come visit over there any time you visit here! I would love to have your company. It is such a big and important project preparing our children for not only their individual futures but for the future that is waiting for us all here on Earth. Much to do, much to do. Please come share with me while I muse upon and work my way my share of all of this for them.

From the beautiful mountains of southwest Virginia,
Leslie

Our AI guy got back into town late yesterday and came racing over to check Phoebe out for us.

Nope. Phoebe isn’t pregnant.

Our whole family was out in the barn with him and Phoebe. All the children gazed at him quietly while he did his business and then made his announcement. He felt bad. Said usually “backyard cows” take easily and that he has never had this happen before where he inseminated three times only to end up with no results.

We discussed bulls a little bit. “One thing they have over AI is accurate heat detection,” he said. (This very nice man does AI - artificial insemination - for a living and travels up and down from here to Florida for his company doing it.) We suspect that there may be more to it than that but obviously even just accurate heat detection is an important factor. So is availability. So, perhaps, are other more subtle factors as is always the case with the natural process from our point of view.

He mentioned how this was bad news for a Valentine’s Day a few times.

I said as how at least we never dried her off completely. I was always unwilling to dry her off since I didn’t know for sure more milk would be forthcoming later so we just cut back to milking her once a day. We are getting about a gallon a day now which seems like a lot to folks who don’t milk cows or make butter or cheese or sell kefir grains or feed six children. But it isn’t a lot. It isn’t nearly enough. We will try to build her milk supply back up in the spring.

And lick our wounds. And come up with a new plan.

From the beautiful mountains of southwest Virginia,
Leslie

Perhaps we are just unwilling to let go of a cherished idea, or perhaps we have a cow who does things in a slow, drawn out way, but we are still hoping for a calf. The primary reason for this is probably that having Phoebe turn out to not be pregnant at all would be such a blow to us in so many ways that we choose to continue hoping that she is. We have no way to resolve this “reaching for hope” into “finding the fact” so we remain strongly in the “reaching for hope” camp.

Our AI guy said he would come over a couple of weeks ago and check her out for us but he never did and he is out of town a lot. My husband meanwhile found a number of useful web sites about internally checking cows because I am more than willing to put my hand in - well, arm in - to check her out. I did an internal check on her a couple of years ago (when she was overdue and was being given a shot to induce her) but that was with help. I tried once with her a few weeks ago already but couldn’t understand what I was feeling. After reading through various web pages, I learned that the baby drops out of reach in a cow anyway, and the other signs you would look for internally to confirm pregnancy were things I didn’t really understand and that were not recommended for students to do (these were vet school pages). So we are left with outward signs which are not necessarily easy to read on a cow. As our nine year old commented, “If only she could talk to us.”

My poor husband is going nuts with this. Even back when I was pregnant, we of course knew there was a baby coming at least but didn’t know when exactly. That not knowing when exactly was very stressful for him. I could at least busy myself with trying to cope with the end of pregnancy whereas all the husband really has to do is fret about when the birth will happen. Waiting is hard. Paul is at least getting quite an education about cows and pregnancy and heat and so on because he keeps researching hoping to find hints. I know that the information he is gleaning now will help us in the future as there is much to know about these matters. Especially for us - we had one cow calve unexpectedly when no one knew she was pregnant and none of the experts involved recognized her condition at all even when their attention was drawn to it and our other cow (Phoebe) whom we purchased just before her last calving went late and the dairy folks came over and gave her a shot to induce her. So we have unusual experiences with bovine birth - 2 - and normal experiences with bovine birth - 0.

One day, Paul came in and made a list. I thought his list was interesting and useful. Here it is:

CONS (i.e. signs that she isn’t pregnant)
1. No clear indication of heat;
2. Not getting big enough;
3. We could not feel fetus by internal check(he wrote this before we learned that we couldn’t feel it anyway);
4. Fiona’s erratic mounting behaviors (that is our heifer);
5. Phoebe is well over due;
6. Phoebe mounted Fiona once which she never does pregnant or otherwise

PROS (i.e. signs that she may be pregnant)
1. Months ago she kicked at her belly frequently;
2. No visible signs of heat all these months;
3. A few weeks ago made maternal sounds and had maternal behaviors we have only seen in her back when she first had Fiona;
4. Her belly is much bigger than it used to be;
5. She has put on well over 100 pounds since we last weighed her using a weight tape;
6. Her posture is different than we have ever seen it - her spine isn’t as straight and she holds her tail differently much of the time;
7. She seems to be lying down more than usual;
8. When standing and chewing her cud, she shifts her weight a little here and there rather than standing stock still as she usually does;
9. We tried doing a “baby bump” which is sort of punching at the flank and feeling for a push back. I wasn’t strong enough to do it. Paul did it and knew he felt a push back but couldn’t quite make out if it were a fetus or just incredibly strong cow muscles. It apparently takes practice to perfect doing a baby bump.

Even though the PROS list is longer, the exercise is still totally inconclusive for us. Paul tried another on-line due date calculator and got a different date than the one I used earlier! Sigh. Apparently she is not as overdue as we thought. Not quite two weeks over yet which is well within normal limits.

So what does all of this add up to? Who knows. It is honing our observational skills which is a plus. It is adding considerable stress to our situation which is a minus. It is leaving us humble in the face of Nature which is as it should be. It leaves us pondering the complexities of trying to accomplish these things more simply in the future. None of this feels particularly natural or self-reliant. There has to be a better way but dairy bulls are supposed to be the meanest creatures on earth. The difficulty of this fact is apparently why artificial insemination (AI) was invented in the first place. Well, back to being humble and waiting, waiting, waiting.

I guess Phoebe will keep us all posted.

From the beautiful mountains of southwest Virginia,
Leslie

Honestly, we homestead because we feel like we are supposed to. We homeschool because we feel like we are supposed to. We meditate because we feel like we are supposed to. We strive every day to live more simply because we feel like we are supposed to. We work towards living in harmony with each other because we feel like we are supposed to. We share our up’s and down’s in blog posts and videos and books to the best of our ability because we feel like we are supposed to. We want to do all of these things and we are supposed to do all of these things and so we do them.

On what basis are we “supposed to”? Well, judging by our personal experiences and development, it is obvious that we are supposed to live this way because it is good for us as individuals. My husband and I have changed radically in the last few years purely through following what our hearts tell us we are supposed to do in this regard. We are very grateful every day for the opportunity to step outside of the typical modern, technology-based way of doing things because it is opening our eyes and strengthening our hands. It is deepening our spiritual understanding and melting away self-imposed, unnatural boundaries.

Judging by our observations and experiences with our children, it is obvious that we are supposed to live this way because it is plainly so good for them. They are growing sturdy and strong. They have retained their natural curiosity and empathy. They are building spiritual foundations and intellectual structures of beauty and resilience that will serve them well throughout their lives. And they have each other in full measure. Their relationships are not diluted or fractured by modern day amusements and obligations. From time to time, my husband and I step back and watch them and murmur to each other, “It must be amazing to be them.” Neither of us had anything even close growing up so watching their lives unfold creates a sense of wonder in us.

These two aspects of “supposed to” are obvious to us and very nice but they aren’t enough to fulfill the full obligation of “supposed to” as we experience it. There is much more to it than just us and our children. There are the many others - our brothers and sisters of the present and our brothers and sisters of the future. About them I am endlessly restless. I have a personal obsession with our brothers and sisters of the future for reasons completely unknown to me and my husband and I both feel very compelled to share what has been given to us with others in the present. We know that we humans have grown weak and unnatural. We know that the earth is headed full tilt towards a massive correction that will create much suffering. We also know - from many years of going through what has often felt like too much change at once - how hard it is to make many adjustments all at once and without warning. However, what we have gone through as a family pales in significance compared to what is waiting for humanity. We really feel that we all need to start now with making serious adjustments and with training our children towards a new way of life!

And this is the toughest bit for us. How to really make contact? How to share in the most meaningful ways? We seem unable to make much contact with our own spiritual community. That is the most bewildering to us. We make some contact with other people at large through our blogs and videos and so on which is good but it doesn’t seem like enough yet. We are struggling with how to bridge so many gaps. How do you bridge the gap between “start adjusting right now today for the radically different tomorrow that is gearing up for you” and “naw, that is never going to happen and besides I am protected by (fill in the blank).” How do you bridge the gap between living for the future and the impositions of the still skewed present day system? How do you bridge the gap between “passionately deconstructing modern life back into some semblance of the Original Design” and “sucking up every last bit of unnatural pleasure and comfort for as long as it lasts”? We have no idea.

This winter has seemed a bit long to me this year. Many cares and confusions. It is four degrees out right now (plus whatever wind chill from the brisk breeze that is hitting the house) and my adrenal fatigue gets the better of me more often when it is cold, I think. It is harder to stay simple in the face of complexity and harder to maintain even emotions and perspective. These questions and mysteries (see, I said in my last post I would switch over to “mysteries” and so here I am!) have been weighing me down lately, I guess. What to do? How to proceed? Where is everybody???

I provide all of this longwinded context to try to convey how much two bits of mail that came in the last couple of weeks meant to me, to us. After a visit from a couple who feel like family to us (Will, the Gentleman Blacksmith who is training our young Will in the ways of both blacksmithing and gentlemanly deportment and his lovely, vivacious wife), they sent us the following:

Dear Paul and Leslie,
We admire your pioneering spirit and appreciate your generous sharing of knowledge and skills.
Love to all. Will and JoAnna

Enclosed was a check. Will also sent our Will a letter he will surely keep and re-read and the first book for his blacksmithing book shelf. All of these were stunning surprises that created much delight and warmth of heart here in the mountain cold.

Last week another envelope arrived from two dear sisters in our spiritual community. In it was a check silently proffered with full and caring hearts.

Both pieces of mail brought tears to my eyes and, in fact, bring tears to my eyes now as I write about them. We are very grateful for the donations and especially grateful for the supportive thoughts and sense of community and fellowship these two pieces of goodwill gave us. There are donations of money or goods or services and there are donations of goodwill and prayers and supportive thoughts. Both parties gave to us all of these and it means so much to us. Thank you all.

I am grateful that our personal “supposed to’s” happened to have engendered such generosity in others and I look forward to a deepened, broadened fellowship of the heart that keeps us altogether beyond distances or time - a garden of hearts as some say that will ever be in bloom.

From the beautiful mountains of southwest Virginia,
Leslie

I recently came across the following very interesting comment. I can say for a fact that he didn’t have homesteading in mind when he said it, but homesteading is certainly teaching me some of the truth of his sentiment.

[He] always felt that the secrets of Nature are always shrouded in mystery. Birth is not for science according to him. Birth is a mystery. And the moment that mystery is opened and made a subject of science, in a very certain sense, when a mystery is exploded, it is made profane, it is without dignity, it becomes something as [He] used to say, ‘a market topic’ for conversation – a topic reduced to the roads, to the streets for discussion, for conversation, and for condemnation.
He, the Hookah and I p. 260

With us humans, you generally know when the ladies are pregnant and it has definitely become something profane these days. Some feel the sacredness at the moment of birth itself but, other than that, pregnancy and birth are definitely ‘a market topic’ for conversation and there is all sorts of intrusion all along the way.

Now you take goats - you cannot tell when goats are pregnant no matter how expert you are. You basically have to know when they have been bred and then go from there with your planning and expectations. Goats keep their pregnancies to themselves.

It turns out, to my surprise, that cows can do this too. Our first cow, the inestimable red and white Dutch Belted Pezra, was a perfect example. We bought her from friends (husband was a rancher from way back) with whom she had had a calf and who were milking her for some time. They got tired of having to be home for milking time twice a day and sold her to us, whereupon we milked her for quite a long time. Suddenly in the middle of that summer, she basically went dry. No one knew why. Crazy red headed behavior maybe? A couple of months later, her udder suddenly ballooned up in size. Yikes. The rancher-from-way-back previous owner came and looked at her. The dairy managers from whom the rancher had bought her came over and looked at her. They all shook their heads and scratched their chins but had no idea what was going on. We then attempted to treat her for mastitis in a dry cow which is bad news. Meanwhile, being desperate for more milk and having fallen in love with cows. we went and bought Pezra’s older sister who was bred and due to calve three weeks hence.

We made the preparations for two cows. We brought Phoebe, the older sister, over and the two cows got reacquainted and settled in. We settled in too to wait for Phoebe to calve and get milk for the family once again. On a memorable Saturday morning about two weeks before Phoebe was due, my husband went out to the ladies their morning hay. He came tearing back into the house shouting that a calf’s leg was sticking out of the back of Pezra. Yup. She was calving. Yup. She had been pregnant all that time and none of the experts involved had any idea even though they had been examining her abdomen and udder closely. (I, on the other hand, had often gazed at her going into the shed to be milked in previous months and had thought, “Wouldn’t it be a kicker if she turned out to be pregnant?” I guess ‘market conversations’ and intuition are two very different things!)

So we helped Pezra birth her breech calf and then two weeks later Phoebe calved pretty much on her own at which point we drowned in about 8 gallons a day of unplanned for milk. Let’s just say that I made a LOT of cheese and fast forward to the present.

Phoebe is a practically perfect cow in all ways except that she has “silent heats.” You can’t tell when she is in heat so it is tough to get her bred. Our AI (artificial insemination) guy bred her three times and thought that finally with the third attempt that it took. We thought so too.

We waited patiently through gestation. We recently found a due date calculator for cows and ascertained that her due date was January 23. About a week before that, her heifer went into heat (now this gal has nothing silent about her heats - she turns this place upside down sometimes) and Phoebe seemed to respond. I mean she responded more than we have ever seen her do. And we panicked. What? Is Phoebe not pregnant after all? Is she in HEAT? Now that we are so close to the due date will there be no calf and no milk? You see, it just isn’t perfectly obvious whether or not she is pregnant. It seems incredible really because pregnancy is such a huge thing for us but there you have it. For cows (as well as goats and perhaps all other mammals for all I know), pregnancy is still sacred in some mysterious, natural, inscrutable way. If you are just a friendly kind of human companion to the cow (as opposed to a super duper professional/industrial human to the cow), you can easily have no idea about something as essential and basic as pregnancy in them.

The next day, Phoebe suddenly acted very maternal with her now 2 year old heifer. It would paint a more accurate picture to say that she was suddenly psychotically maternal. Chased our dog all over the pasture. Made that sound that cows only make to their young. Flipped out when she didn’t know exactly where her heifer was at all times. Milking time was … well, wow. Wild. We have only seen her that way once (as she is otherwise the most serene and placid cow you could ever meet) and that was when she had her heifer two years ago. She was also overdue for that heifer so … maybe there was hope. Maybe she really was pregnant after all? What a roller coaster. What crazy, crazy cow times. And then a couple of days later that behavior vanished and Phoebe was back to her old serene self and has remained so ever since.

So here we are on February 3rd. She is 11 days past her due date - if in fact she is pregnant at all. You see, we aren’t just waiting for her to calve. We are waiting to find out if she is pregnant! That is a lot of waiting to be doing all at once, I can tell you.

I think this is why people can be so quick to move what is naturally sacred and mysterious over to the profane, measure it, talk about it, control it category of things. Waiting is not easy. Accepting natural consequences and phenomena isn’t easy. Wondering how you are going to feed your children if the cow isn’t going to calve isn’t easy. In fact uncertainty in a faithless, ritual-less, community-starved, unnatural world is not only not easy, it is really, really hard.

And that is where we are. We are waiting. We are waiting on the mystery whichever way it goes. And how we will move forward after that particular mystery resolves itself is also a mystery in more ways than I can even count or would want to mention.

There are mysteries everywhere in our lives together here when I stop to think about it and such has been the case for a long, long time. I have tended to experience them as excruciating uncertainties but I think now as I am writing this that I should redefine these uncertainties for what they objectively, naturally, spiritually are -mysteries.

Furthermore, instead of thinking of the mystery of our lives as nothing but conundrums both exhausting and bewildering, I think I must now choose to think of them devotedly as sacred. What will emerge? Only He knows.

Meanwhile, I am keeping my eye on Phoebe.

From the beautiful mountains of southwest Virginia,
Leslie