I bought the best butter I've ever eaten in my life today.
Yesterday I picked up a book at the library called The Self-Sufficient Life and How to Live it by John Seymour. I wasn’t going to check it out, but for whatever reason found myself fascinated by drawings of dry toilets, diagrams of five-acre farms, and step-by-step explanations of how to churn butter and make cheese, so I brought it home and stayed up well past mid-night reading.
I know myself pretty well. I know someday, with a bit of land, I’ll probably have a vegetable garden. I might even raise a few chickens. But considering that I have a large problem just remembering to water and pinch back my geraniums and taking into account that I stay up far too late reading books, I know I am never going to be living the entirely self-sufficient life—which is fine, according to John Seymour. We are not all cut out to be milking cows at 4am and 4pm or to be tying off pig rectums during the butchering process. The point is to start small, doing things you know you can do, whether it’s recycling a bit more conscientiously, walking instead of driving, buying local produce, or grinding your own flour and baking your own bread. Living Small. We know this. It’s all part of moving from the Age of Plunder to the Age of Healing, and though I tend to shy away from people who are self-righteously organic in thought, word, deed, dress and smell, I can love the idea of self-sufficiency as much as the next housewife.
So, today, motivated by love for an idea, I decided that it was time to be much more self-sufficient in my own home. To that end, I am taking back the chores of laundry and housecleaning. I do have some concern for the ladies who help me, but. . . it's just time, for me. (I'll give them hearty references.) I am also redoubling my efforts to cook with the best ingredients I can find and am renewing my love of carbohydrates in their whole, natural forms, despite whatever sort of idiotic low-carb craze the rest of America is suffering from.
This afternoon, out of curiosity, I piled Kipp and the dog into my station wagon and drove down to the Oak Center General Store, which is one of these self-sufficient places in action, with folk music to boot. I picked up some brochures on food co-ops and bought a few items—Alaskan salmon, organic butter, whole wheat bread, & green lentils, but couldn't spend a whole lot of time there as I started to sneeze--in addition to detesting the smell of patchouli, I must be allergic to it. Fortunately my $5 pound of Pastureland butter, (worth every penny spent and every pound gained), didn’t absorb any of the place’s strange odors. I don't mean to to wrinkle up my nose at the place, metaphorically. On the contrary, the proprietors have my admiration, because although I think a lot of people aspire to an "organic lifestyle" out of status anxiety ( succumbing to"organic" as marketing ploy), these folks are walking the talk. I saw books called How Wal-Mart Has Ruined the World and Spiritual Mid-Wifery on their newstand.
I did not see any copies of Organic Style.
11:20:12 PM 
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