The Root Cellar and other Adventures

I had the privilege to be an at home mother for about 10 years. When I first quit my job (after much prayer and fear and excitement) I mistakenly thought that I would 1. be bored and 2. have a neat house. In 10 years, neither ever happened. Since I was "not working" I felt guilty saying no to helping with many volunteer "opportunities." I also felt guilty asking my husband for ANY help around the house unless I was extremely busy, like, actively in labor! After all he was making money and what was I doing? I did have the opportunity to actually teach my children how to do housekeeping chores--the first thing I remember is teaching Greg and Kris how to make a bed with "hospital corners." They actually learned and probably still know how. None of the other kids ever got that skill. Anyway, during that time we lived on less (a nice term for in poverty!) and really got back to nature. We had a pretty nice garden and Greg and Kris learned to plant and weed. I gave them each a little corner of the garden that they could plant one of everything in, and they had to weed one row a day. We started out with great intentions every year (does this sound familiar?) but come August, the garden would get the best of us and the weeds would take over. But there was still lots of produce. I canned and froze, and experimented with making things you usually buy at the store--like ketchup (so runny it won the ketchup race every time--but tasted just like ketchup) and mayonnaise (same basic recipe as pudding but with vinegar and salt and I think mustard for flavor instead of vanilla and sugar.) John was also into making do. He, of course loved the power stuff, tilling the garden, setting up stations outside to blanch huge quantities of vegetables for freezing, and once--talk about mission creep--a whole apple pie assembly line which started out with 2 bushels of apples, an apple peeler corer slicer and a huge bag of flour and went on and on into the night, producing (eventually) 33 apple pies for the freezer. We subscribed to Organic Gardening magazine, and got a lot of ideas from it. One year after reading an article on making your own root cellar, John and Floyd (my stepfather, and John's best friend) decided they would make a root cellar. Neither John or Floyd is around to flesh out the particulars any more, but I remember that after much digging they produced a walk-in hole in the ground which they topped with boards, and then shoveled dirt over the boards. We then put squash and potatoes and carrots in there to store. However, when winter came, the snow blew and drifted over the top so well and so deep we couldn't find it. In the spring, the snow melted and the whole thing sort of turned into a mud pit containing rotten squash, potatoes and carrots. Not at all like "Little House on the Prairie!" We did a lot of things one time. Once we made maple syrup. We tapped the huge tree behind our house, and got a couple of gallons of sap which we cooked on top of the stove for a couple of days. It never really got thick, but eventually we got tired of simmering it, and smelling the wonderful smell and bottled it. We got about a quart. The next day Mom and Floyd came over to visit and John told Greg to go get it from the refrigerator to show them. On the way back from the refrigerator with the bottle in his hand, Greg tripped and spilled it. :-( So we never even got to taste it.

Of course when you are living off the land you have to burn wood. There was plenty of wood around, and we got a used wood stove from a friend. It was very cozy to have wood heat, if you were near the fire. However, what I didn't know, but soon learned, was that the farther you got from the fire (and here I am talking distance and time!) the colder you got. You could stoke the fire up as much as you wanted to, and then turn the damper way down to help it burn slower, but in the morning someone had to run through the chilly house and get it going again. Different kinds of wood burn differently. Willow is just BAD--it never really dries out, and then it burns so hot and fast you have to keep adding more to the fire. But once John's dad insisted we take a load of willow he had cut down and split. (He said, and I quote, "Wood is wood. Take it!") There was a a big chunk of it that sat in our wood holder all winter. Everytime I would try to add it to the fire, it would actually put the fire out! So I'd pull it out, and put something else in. One day in the spring I looked at that piece of willow, and it had sprouted! Darn stuff! All winter, every day you had to carry in wood to keep by the stove. (Occasionally you would carry in a field mouse too!) Periodically you had to clean the ashes out of the bottom of the stove and take them out. These were all character building jobs for the kids (and an exercise in disappearing for Steve, who by now was big enough to have a job too!) But they left a trail of whatever they were carrying wherever they went, and let in a lot of cold air too. Cleaning the chimney is very important when you have a wood stove, since soot can build up inside of it, blocking the escaping smoke and causing it to drift around inside the house. Since John couldn't get up inside to clean the chimney, his solution was to start a really hot fire, getting some sparks up in the chimney and start a chimney fire. This is kind of like jumping off the roof to get downstairs quickly. It's quick and it works, but you are never quite sure you will survive the trip. Anyway we managed to never burn down the house, thank God! But when someone starts talking about how nice and cheap it is to have wood heat, I just smile and nod. I LOVE central heat and a thermostat!