"To Live Without"

Oh, wow!

Looming large

This is one end of my room. The door (that swag-bag is my laundry) and my 3ft clothes rail.

Now, here’s the oddity. Sometimes, when I sit at the other end of my room, ie here ~

~ like today, the clothes rail just looks normal to me, simply okay.

But other days, it looks MASSIVE – absolutely HUMUNGOUS – so that I feel overwhelmed by the sight of it. Then I’m surprised when a day like today comes along and it seems only normal.

And the same is true with my body. Sometimes when I am walking along, I feel really tall – as tall as an angel sometimes. Walking down the street getting taller and taller.

And sometimes I feel very stout and fat – not average at all, immense. Frighteningly large.

I am in fact rather big. My feet are UK size 9 – 10 (so, EU size 43/44, US size 12). My hands won’t go in women’s gloves mostly, and hats are generally too tight. And I wear a big clothes size. And my doctor and her practice nurse tend to suck their teeth and ask me what I plan to do about losing weight.

So I have the idea that I surge through the universe not so much like a mosquito or mouse as a fair-sized planet.  And my beautiful mama likes to tell me that she has always thought of me as really Big (in contrast to herself primarily). Why, thank you Mama.

When I sit in church (and the pew creaks) and I look down at my lap, I think Blimey! Plenty of you!

But then another time I’ll catch sight of myself and think – no; you’re just normal.

And sometimes my hands feel terrifyingly huge like bunches of bananas. I look down at them and they’re just hands.

Sometimes I feel so enormous it’s a relief when I get up in the morning and see myself in the mirror and I still look like an ordinary person.

Odd.

Does this happen to you, too?

What is it?

Brethren.

Plain and modest dress.

A couple of days ago, I went out early in the morning, about half-past seven, to get the household grocery shopping before the roads and stores got busy.

We intended to go down to the Old Town and the wholefood co-op, and get our water from the spring in what has become the usual way. But we needed a big bag of kale, some cartons of oat milk and almond milk, fair-trade bananas, frozen fruit for our kale shakes, and a variety of other things.

The mornings are cold now and, not long past sunrise, it took a minute or two to clear from the windscreen and other windows the condensation that will in due course be a layer of ice in the early morning. But the day was bright and clear, and I enjoyed driving along before the traffic turned into jam.

As I drove along past the bus stop, a woman waiting caught my eye. Once you get it, you never forget it. You can’t not see. She was doing her best to look Mainstream and Normal. Pencil skirt – but not too tight and just past the knee. Dark coloured top, fitted close to the figure; but a high neckline and a cardigan over the top. Long, long hair worn loose with just the merest Alice band doing duty for a covering. Clearly longing to look like Everyone Else.

“Oh; Brethren,” I thought, as I drove by.

Plain dress is a language that can never shake off its accent to pass as a native of the World.

Groceries and such

Friday is our main grocery shopping day, and I felt pleased with this week’s version.

First thing I went out to the farmer’s market. It’s got quite thin really – the lady who sells eggs and chickens is no longer there, nor the lady who sells her own lamb, nor the lady who sells raw milk.

The only meat stall sold game (so, wild, which is okay) and free range chickens – but she didn’t know the suppliers and had no idea under what conditions the animals were kept. “Free range” has a very broad interpretation.

The veggie man was there – and he will just put the things straight in my basket – no bags, be they paper or plastic. So that was good news.

On the way home, I stopped at the farm shop, augmented the veggies I’d got from the farmers’ market, and bought some cream, butter and milk from what I hope are local farmers.

There’s a better farm shop at no greater distance, and the farmers’ market was a bit meh, so I’ll go to the other one next week. Still, we did manage to stock up on packaging-free veggies, the butter was wrapped in paper (no foil), and though the cream and milk came in plastic cartons, their labels were small and plain – so no dye-heavy brightly-coloured big labels.

Then in the afternoon we went out to Penhurst to take our spare vacuum cleaner for Storm who was short of one. We mentioned that we intended going blackberrying along the lane, and she said we could take some apples from her orchard too – which we gladly did.

It was a beautiful day, and we found plenty of berries – the last chance before the devil stamps on them at Michaelmas!

On the way home we stopped at the wholefood co-op to pick up ingredients for our next batch of Deliciously Ella super-bread – which is soooo good; we eat it every day. We needed brown rice flour, pumpkin seeds and almonds – the flour came in a paper bag like flour usually does, the seeds and nuts in plain cellophane packs – again, little or no dyes involved and only the bare minimum of packaging.

When we got home, all the laundry had dried in the sunshine – so grateful, because we’d washed lots as the Badger has been away in America. He hasn’t been home for a fortnight and had lots of shirts and socks and so on, to wash.

Then we walked along to the woods to get a bottle of spring water for our new Berkey filter – which is brilliant.

This has been a good anti-packaging day, then. Veggies, apples, blackberries and spring water, all without the abundant plastic cartons and bags that usually go with them – and the fruit and water were organic and free, too.

The other anti-packaging measure we’ve taken has been with washing stuff.

We changed over from regular toothbrushes to compostable ones made from bamboo – which are very successful and do the job nicely.

Then – do you know the company “Lush”? They are such good news; really good quality products packed with wondrously fragrant ingredients sourced in ways that bless the Earth.

They work hard at reducing packaging, and things like body lotion that has to be in tubs, they’ll take the tubs back to re-use or recycle. But a lot of their things come with no packaging at all. Shampoo bars and conditioner bars, for example – they are solid blocks you rub on your hair: no containers at all. And their Toothy Tabs, solid toothpaste tablets that dissolve in your mouth. My favourite is the one called “Breath of God”.

They do some bath stuff called “Fun”, that you can use as soap or bubble bath or whatever you like really, and some of its fragrances are not too floral, so can be used instead of washing up liquid for doing the dishes. Again, it comes in a block so no packaging is involved beyond a minimal cellophane wrap. This is very good news as our regular washing up liquid, though Earth-friendly (Ecover) does come in a very stout plastic bottle. I’m thinking the “Fun” will do for laundry too, at least for hand washing.

Water and packaging

In my simplicity adventures, at the moment I am focusing on water and packaging.

It is my dearest hope and desire that our present UK government administration will be ousted before they manage to fulfill their ambitions to abandon clean green energy plans, frack through our countryside and drinking aquifers, and build a massive new nuclear power station. May their plans come to nothing.

Government plans are entirely driven by demand, of course, so it seems to me that my responsibilities as a citizen include moving purposefully towards a life as much off-grid and as little damaging to the Earth as I can manage.

We have a lot of rain in England. But because our islands are so densely populated, in the towns our watertable is polluted, and people are advised against drinking from springs. And since the pigeons sitting on our roofs carry exciting diseases like meningitis, one cannot simple drink harvested roofwater.

But.

There’s no reason at all why the harvested roofwater cannot fulfill all our other water requirements – washing ourselves and our utensils. We have about 600 litres worth of rain storage in our water butts, which should see us through all the stretches of time when rain falls. And in dry times, well we still do have mains supply.

Earth-closeting also reduces water use, not only saving gallons and gallons at home, but also saving the big nightmare of sewage treatment. Plus you get first-class free compost for the flowers and fruit trees. I mean, why wouldn’t you?

For drinking, we have several springs of lovely water in the woods near us. It tastes beautiful, but as we’re advised against drinking it, I’ve got one of these to run the water through first.

Until I got the Berkey filter, we were buying spring water to drink, and I feel bad about that – plastic bottles do not bless the Earth. And how can I ask God to bless the Earth if my own choices consistently undermine my prayers?

So that’s one regular packaging habit crossed off the list.

Our mail order packaging we either re-use for our own parcels (I never buy packaging for parcels I send out) or – in the case of cardboard and paper – use for kindling in the woodstove.

Food packaging is our worst thing. At present, we shop mostly in stores, but I’m planning to work on that. The wholefood co-op. The street market. The farmers’ market. They have paper bags.

I find the changing of habits – especially when not all of us in the household are following the same system – is the challenging part of all this. The strategies and solutions are easy-peasy, it’s the breaking old habits that’s hard.

Shipping Shopping

In our household most of us have very low incomes. We have enough to buy lovely things, but only if we shop with great care. One of our ruses is staying away from the high street – so we don’t get to see the things we live without perfectly happily until our gaze falls upon them in a shop and suddenly we know – gasp – life has been incomplete!!

Also, we want very particular things. Materials for safely hygenic earth closeting. Pure beeswax candles made with particular attention to the welfare of the bees. Live and unpasteurized sauerkraut. Body lotion with the medically active oleo-resins of frankincense in it, not just the essential oil. Modest dresses hand made in 100% natural fabric by people who work in their own homes not sweat shops. Shawls made from nettles. Ladies shoes in US size 12. That kind of thing. These, you do not find on the high street.

Hence, we do almost all our shopping online.

Also, some of us in our household work from home all the time and all of us some of the time. So there’s usually someone in. As we shop online, this is important because five of us live here, which means most days the postie brings us interesting parcels. It’s like Christmas all the time here – in fact more so than Christmas is because we don’t give Christmas present. All the delivery men and the posties know us and greet us like old friends. Some of our family work in office jobs, so get their parcels delivered to us because there’s always someone home here. We hardly ever go away (and never all of us at once) because who would feed the foxes and the crows if we weren’t here? Or the cats? So the delivery men bring the parcels for neighbours who are out to us, as well. “Do you mind if I – ” “No, go on – leave it in our porch.”

Something I love about this is when a parcel has a tracking facility. I love watching the thing I’m waiting for cross the world.

I’m waiting patiently right now for a dress from Kari Thorne. The last parcel I had from her, I looked up her address on the aerial satellite. Where she lives is all green  - trees and fields and a quiet road that stops at a small rectangle under the trees with Kari and her sewing machine in it. In Wisconsin.

I watched each day as the parcel went to Athens (Wisconsin), then left Athens for Oshkosh and went from there to Chicago, then left Chicago for Detroit, then – getting nearer now – to London.

That dress left London two days ago. London is two hours from where I live by train. I have visions of posties in the sorting office all trying on a modest dress …

Where? Where is it now? Soon …

Online shopping is fun.