The Flame: Response to Cold Antler Farm's "Flame Keepers"

*disclaimer* It is my usual practice to leave dramatic declarations and controversial, personal opinions off of the Heart of Home: Finding my Homestead. In this moment, I am stepping out of that practice to firmly put a foot down on what I consider to be an extreme hypocritical blog post. Again, this is my personal opinion and is no way, shape or form connected to any of the businesses I have highlighted here on the Heart of Home. 


Some of us grow up knowing responsibility, loving the act of honesty and dream of integrity.

Some of us grow into adulthood needing integrity, and pursue a life that is full of the practice of telling the truth, honoring our agreements, paying our debts, respecting our customers and committing to the work in our lives.

Some of us realize soon beyond our childhood that the world is full of charlatans. We weren't looking for a world made up completely of kind and honest people but we wanted a life where when a person did what they said they would. A world were they were bound by honor to their word. A connection lost to so much of our world it is hubris to attempt to quantify it.

We are children of the Earth

We are wearing our pride openly because we never shamed ourselves before our friends, fans and strangers alike. Bragging like the village idiot about the inconsequential items we bought online while we were drunk. How embarrassing for both author and fan base. "We do not wear paw print sweatshirts" indeed.

Maybe not paw print sweatshirts but border collie t-shirts are clearly held to a different standard.

We only asked for help when we had no other recourse. When the need was dire.

We did not create a seasonal cycle of fabricated farm disasters to garner sympathy and beg money from fans who extended their compassion and trust.

Cold Antler Farm: A lie wrapped in a pretty bow.

Sick Days

The last couple of days I have had my hands full with a miserably sick child. It has left me with little desire or drive to write but here I am, doing my level best. Rose is sitting orange tea with honey to sooth her little throat and has aloe wipes to ease the rawness of a runny nose.When you are three, a big snotty nose has somewhat of the equivalent of a world ending event. You are, however, mollified by the fact that by being sick, you are given the best blanket in the house. You are make cherry and rose hip tea, sweetened with liberal honey. You are given a host of storybook shows, which you love so very much and attend to with loyal diligence. You are comforted that because he knows you are no feeling your best, the cat comes to snuggle you. He stays with you for four hours straight, until it is time for your nap. My daughter knows that a house of six people fusses very much and lovingly upon a sick child. She might have a cough and a runny nose but she is as content as she can be.

Such where the days of my youth, my own mother sitting by my bedside while I was fighting off a sickness. When I had pneumonia at the age of six, I was so weak at one point my mother had to carry me like a newborn lamb, folded in a blanket. She boiled down a chicken to stock and hand pulled the meat, cutting up extra carrots to go in my favorite soup because they were my favorite vegetable. She safely ensconced me upon the couch in the living room where she could monitor me from the kitchen, putting on The Wizard of Oz or Where In The World Is Carmen San Diego? My favorite nightlight was a LiteBrite, of which she would help me design a rainbow. I would drift to sleep blanketed in a handmade quilt and a bath of rainbow light. I was as content as I could be.

While Rose plays, I go back to doing something that has become a ritual in our search for a homestead. I go to LandandFarm.com and take up the Search again. Looking for land, for a house and land, or for a farm where a home could be built. I search Granger County, TN, North Carolina, Colorado and other places in hopes I can find the perfect place. I just noticed one of the properties on my saved list is still on the market. I have contacted the Realtor to get more information on the house's status and whether I could come see it anytime soon.

So while it is a sick day here in the Clanhold, is also a day of discovery. Zoe Mulford's voice rings out while I type in the dinning room, thinking of love and reminding Briar Rose to go drink her tea. A cozy day of recovery spent near the heater and with our hands wrapped around warm mugs. Soon I will be fleshing our the rabbit furs and making a report on the pyment Colin and I bottled a week ago. It came out very good.

We will come out good.

Bread in my hands; Food for my soul

Love for you, as the world falls down

David Bowie: January 8th 1947 - January 10th 2016

The Clan, my friends both LARPer and SCAdian, and I mourn the death of glam rock star and pop icon, David Bowie. At sixty nine years old and only two days after the debut of his new album, Blackstar, David Bowie fell to the ravages of the cancer he had been battling for so very long. The Labyrinth itself seems to cry out for the loss of it's beautiful Goblin King. As if it touches me, I feel magic itself shudder. So many believed in him and so many still do. I take this day to raise a glass of my own pyment, bottled yesterday afternoon, to drink in honor of this courageous man who was both a riot of joy, boundless creation and a warrior of his time. 

Until the next turn of the wheel, Jareth.

Come away, a human child
To the waters and the wild

With a faerie hand in hand
For the world's more full of weeping
Than ye can understand...

Lovely Morning Luck

Thanks to a good friend in the Barony, I now have a in-home estimate scheduled for Tuesday up in Fountain City, TN. I am pleased as punch for the opportunity and blessing that is work. Another lady in Thor's Mountain tells me she might need my help next week in Knoxville. I contacted the vending coordinator for Many Path's Beltaine 2016 and fully plan to register as a food vendor, taking Indigo Pastry ice cream and other treats to the festivals.

Seamus is going to run by Kinkos and print me out the YMCA application. If I can get that part time job, it will fit beautifully around my other work. I took action. got pen, pad plus my phone, and set to work this morning to gather work.

It was successful!

You cannot wait for things to just fall into your lap or hope that someone will give you a handout. Destiny, at least for me, is something you grab with two hands and your jaws if you have to. Work means sweat, means relying on yourself to get to were you need to go. My Clan provides emotional and financial support in lean times but if I wasn't self motivated, the moral of this Clanhold would be wrecked. Everyone puts their shoulders in the yoke of work here.

We work and celebrate together. My Clan smiles and nods approvingly as I tell them of the work I have potentially amassed. I'm looking forward to it all, especially bringing home the bacon.

The First Day

The sun rose pale behind a veil of chilly, pewter cloud in a quicksilver sky. There was a bite in the air when I let Pai out to relieve herself and I shook out another cup full of cat food for Durellen. My phone tells me its 39F but feels like 36 with an 8mph wind due north of us. The first chill I have felt since mid November 2015 when we had that temporary cold spell.

Winter has never been my favorite season, disliking the cold and the physical discomfort it brings to my left leg, but I am glad to deep the temperature and the humidity drop. I was up early for multiple reasons. My daughter is an early riser, the pets have needs and, on this particular morning, I had a supper to put on the table. We of the Clan celebrated New Year's Day more like Yule, sitting around our decorate tree and exchanging gifts.

Now, I don't like to talk much about what I buy for myself; it seems too much like bragging and that don't sit well with me. Gifts, however, are a different matter.

Colin gifted me with a fine set of crochet hooks and 100% Peruvian Highland wool yarn. My niece painted me a unicorn constellation on canvas and Rhiannon gave me a lovely analog watch. Seamus gifted me an adult coloring book. I am thankful for the gifts and on my knees grateful for my loving family. We are not your typical family but the Clan is love, through fog and fen, flesh and bone.

I roasted a turkey for our special day, rubbed down with salt, pepper and cumin. I made oatmeal health rolls from scratch, stuffing, and turkey gravy rounded out with five ounces of white moscato. I also add my guilty pleasure. Gods forgive me, I know how to make cranberry jelly from fruit but I just plain like the stuff in the can. It just reminds me of being home with my sister and my parents, which always makes me smile.

We eat, laugh and joke. The table is covered with plates of food, cups of wine, bourbon, beer, and sweet tea. We eat until our stomachs bulge and our grins have gone crooked with the wine. Everyone is home and everyone is happy, warm, safe and enjoying our time together. Not always an easy feat in a big family, with the ages running from 3 to 4. Everyone in my Clan is well read or well read to in Briar Rose's case. We take learning for learning's sake very serious and everyone here is proactive in their own self education. It makes for five people with very good vocabulary, keen minds and sharp tongues. For now, the family is at peace which makes it easy to put aside little annoyance and be content.

I hope this first day of the new year has treated you, dear reader, with grace and the warm love of family and friends. Keep your people close to you because, my darlings, it all goes by too fast. Love now, so you do not know regret in the twilight of your life. 

This year and the next

On this last day of 2015, I sit on my bed and contemplate the year flown by and the year showing on the horizon. I began January 2015 with tears in my eyes and a shaking voice in my throat. I was standing on the threshold of forgiveness and stepped through. Winter gave way to spring, which saw the ripening of my Japanese pumpkins and a flourish of mint, sage, basil and thyme and I ended a friendship that had become parasitic in nature. Summer came snapping on the heels of spring and a left the clutches of a poisonous work place environment, battled a fungal infection in my pumpkin crop and mourned the sudden death of my Clan sister, Angela.

Autumn saw me drop into depression and rise, like a struggling salmon, out of it's sucking murk. I redoubled my efforts to write (on my novel and on this blog), and began working as an independent contractor. All the yard work and house cleaning put money in my hand that was sorely needed after leaving the Maids, though I had the Clan's support in leaving that horrible place. I discovered more farm blogs and began reaching out to other farm writers; I pruned the unworthy and cast them back into the realms of fiction. Winter has just begun and with the year soon at it's end, my mind turns to 2016.

If my plans work out, I should be cleaning houses regularly in addition to working for the YMCA providing after school child watch. If April's Beltaine festival has a big turn out, my vending there might encourage me to go to other Gatherings and provide confections. I am also going to take my clay and fashion horns for Beltaine. With luck, I will be able to sell the four or five sets I will make. I might also take some jewelry down there in hopes someone will buy it. I know I say it often, Lady bless me.

But truth is, every little bit helps.

Tomorrow, I am holding out New Year's Day feast. Seeing as both halves of the Clan took to different parts of Georgia to spend Christmas with the families of their birth, me with my parents and Colin with his own folks, we are celebrating a late Yule as a Clan tomorrow. Here is what is on my menu for tomorrow...

*Oven Roasted Turkey
*Mashed Potatoes
*Gravy
*Cornbread Dressing
*Hearth Bread
*Honey Butter
*Sauteed Peas
*Buttered Corn
*Cranberry Sauce
*Brown Sugar Cranberry Cookies
*Sweet Tea
My mouth waters just to think about it and I had a good breakfast this morning.

Beyond Fear

If farming organic produce has taught me anything, it is that a farmer must force themselves to look beyond fear. Fear of pests, fear of weather, fear of failure-personal or crop related, and fear of the ever changing unknown. Fear is present in our lives, it has been a driving force to our species since we were living in caves and wearing fur wraps.

Acknowledgement is not the same as dominance.  I have learned that you cannot allow fear to dominate your actions if you intention is to derive a living from the earth. Nature is both gentle and harsh, both fruitful and full of decay. She strikes a balance and we must learned to lean into the wind of that balance, to face it in hard time as well as bountiful ones and above all, and know no fear. It is easier said than done but one thing I have always demanded of myself was to strive toward a greater self. So when the fear rises to gnaw at my heart, I push it back down with teeth bared. The strong make sacrifices, the weak make excuses.

I make my plans for the following year in the last few days of the previous one. 2016 will be my year of enterprise, where I set up to spring forth, capturing new opportunities for myself and my Clan. I am negotiating a large house cleaning, hoping to set up monthly service for a previous client, applying for a part time job with the local YMCA and hoping to go to a festival in April 2016 as a food vendor offering confections from Indigo Pastry. More money coming into the Clan means we get closer to being able to affording our homestead.

Every little bit helps. So hears to letting go of fear and embracing tomorrow, bright with possibilities.

The song that strikes the heart cord

If I could kill a word and watch it die

I'd poison never, shoot goodbye
Beat regret when I felt I had the nerve
Yeah, I'd pound fear to a pile of sand
Choke lonely out with my bare hands
I'd hang hate so that it can't be heard
If I could only kill a word

I'd take brokenness out back
And break heartbreak, stand there and laugh
Right in its face while shootin' it the bird
I'd put upset down in its place
I'd squeeze the life out of disgrace
Lay over under six cold feet of dirt
If I could only kill a word

Give me sticks, give stones
Bend my body, break my bones
Use staff and rod to turn me black and blue
'Cause you can't unhear, you can't unsay
But if were up to me to change
I'd turn lies and hate to love and truth
If I could only kill a word

I'd knock out temptation's teeth
I'd sever evil, let it bleed
Then light up wicked, stand and watch it burn
I'd take vice and I'd take vile
And tie 'em up there with hostile
Hang 'em high and leave 'em for the birds
If I could only kill a word

Christmas tree, O Christmas tree

Oh Christmas tree, Oh Christmas tree!
Thy leaves are so unchanging
Oh Christmas tree, Oh Christmas tree,
Thy leaves are so unchanging

Not only green when summer's here,
But also when it's cold and drear.
Oh Christmas tree, Oh Christmas tree,
Thy leaves are so unchanging!

Christmas Eve Day dawns being heralded by lightning and tornado warnings this morning. Here in Dallas, Georgia and seated at the dinning table I ate upon since the tender age of seven, I can see my Momma's Christmas tree in the reflection of the sliding glass doors that leads to the sun room. Momma is at work in the kitchen, whipping up pancakes and bacon as we listen to George Straight's "Christmas Cookies'. 

This is the first time in four years I have been able to come home for Christmas, though this is the third house my parent's have come to call home in Georgia. Situations arose that caused my childhood home to be sold as my father took a job in Tucker. The split level colonial at 3450 Aaron Trail was sold. They moved to Winder, were we were all just starting to fall in love with the house on Berkshire Lane when my father got a job offer back in Powder Springs. Again, my parents were forced to pack up and move. Now my parents live in Dallas, Georgia but as I sit here I feel a familiar warmth start to gather and coalesce in the far corners. It is the love of a family that make a house a home; this place is already brimming with it. Soon enough, it will be just like the old colonial on Aaron Trail but better, being bedecked in the coloring of my parent's five grandchildren and ringing with the peels of their laughter. 

As you gather with your families to share the light of Christmas Eve, remember in your thoughts and prayers those who have no one to be with this holiday season. Spare a smile, share a laugh and spread the warmth of joy to others.

"For to love another person is to touch the face of God." Les Mis