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Well, I did it. Finally. And, none too late. Okay, almost too late by the time I got up the nerve to make the call.
For about a year now, I have been researching chickens. Not to mean I knew NoThINg of chickens, my mom and aunt had chickens. As did my husband. I knew a little, okay, very little. I never bothered to ask and wasn’t around much between 17 and 27. I knew my mom had some mean Rhode Island Reds and that every time I came home she’d send me to get eggs and I swear they all hated me. I think they sensed my fear. Mom said I was being “silly”. Those pecks didn’t feel very silly.
Anyway, I digress.
Everything has been changing for us in the last two years. Our lives are in constant movement. The money situation as well. Each day is a challenge, one that I look forward to. I am constantly surprised when I realize the excess that our nation lives with and that our family lived with; where our paychecks went.
It is not that we are a stupid people and make these decision consciously. It is that in the last 60 years our nation has built itself on the idea that it’s all there for the taking, so why wait. If you want it, get it. Life, liberty and property. It’s our liberty to spend our property freely, even wantonly, to be able to live our lives to the fullest. We as a nation have been taught this.
Since WWII this is the overriding more’ that each generation has built upon and made easier for the next to live up to. Living “the dream”. Yes, that’s what our gratuitous lifestyles are called- “the dream”. Ironically the two thesaraus definitions for gratuitous are unwarranted and free.
Little did I understand what lack of pride and true ownership does that life hold until we started doing w/out. Doing without for two reason. One, because we wanted to.
Thank you, oh Gas Gods, for making it near impossible to go to my nephew’s birthday party 85 miles away in Spokane.
I must tell you that I really am wishing now, that we would have attended last year. I was sick, we didn’t go. Now, I don’t have that choice. It’s hard enough to travel the 60 miles to and from Sandpoint once every two-weeks to do the household shopping, much less travel to Spokane and back.
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Having recently come back to this site after 6 months and reading some of what I have put on here the previous year almost makes me somewhat melancholy, but then gives me perspective. All of my posts have given me strength in one form or another. However, from this point, I won’t be writing to heal, I’ll be writing to share my experiences and report on my epiphanies, as they are.
Yesterday was my first experience cooking my own local, free-range chicken. Oh, I’ve had them before, that’s why I have them now. What an experience. Freshly butchered, this bird was tender and full of flavor. And, as luck has it, we have 9 more sitting in our freezer w/ the opportunity for more.We add the chickens to our stock of local North Idaho ground beef, yak meat, turkeys, and our own butchered pig, along with fresh eggs we pick up weekly from the family of one of my daughters classmates.
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