Social Misfits

Minimalism?

As a lifestyle?

It is quite the inviting and novel idea … one that seems to be surrounded by a lot of attractive romanticism … one that is easy to initially embrace. It takes a lot of love to keep the love-fire hot after that first kiss.

We'll not be quick to say that we are minimalists in the strictest sense of the word. Close. But not yet. It would be truer to say that we are becoming minimalists. None of us go from living a grinding hamster wheel lifestyle to living a successful minimalist lifestyle in one leap. It's a process that involves a lot of careful, thought out, calculated steps interspersed with a few good jumps here and there.

It is also a lifestyle that is best approached with a diversified self-reliant skills-set and the basic tools to perform those skills day-in and day-out. Without the skills ... we are always relying on someone else. Without the tools … we are always borrowing from someone else. Investing the time to learn how to do things for ourselves, and procuring the tools to do those things for ourselves, is never an unwise investment of time and financial resources.

None of us, at least in my opinion, will ever be totally self-sufficient. All of us, however, can be continually becoming more and more self-reliant through the development of skills and the acquirement of the basic tools to accomplish those skills. Especially in the areas of basic home repair and in growing and preserving food crops.

We have, over the years of our lives, learned a lot about cutting back, getting by on less, and living within our means. We have also taken that other road … the one that the vast majority of folks are on … the one that involves the vicious debt-cycle that turns people into tired, quiet and desperate mules pulling wagons that never empty and become easily overloaded. The object of life, once tightly harnessed to the debt-cycle wagon, becomes little more than a debt-paying trudge to keep the creditors satisfied.

Creditors care not one iota that we hate trudging. Our trudging, though it exhausts us and wears us out prematurely, is what keeps their institutional systems alive. Too often the things we trudge for are worn out before the trudging is done, only to be replaced with more things that require our signature promises to continue trudging. Too late we discover the truth that “the cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, (Whatever it is.) immediately or in the long run.” Henry David Thoreau.

I do not remember when I read Walden the first time. I am, it seems only appropriate considering the stage we have entered into in our downsizing adventure, reading it again for what must be the fourth time.

This time, now that our library of cherished printed books has been seriously reduced in the downsizing, I am reading it as an E-Book. This is a major adjustment for a dinosaur that prefers a book in hand. I am adjusting. 

GRRRRRR! 

I can see us becoming frequent visitors at the public library again in the not so distant future.

There is a lot in that book by Thoreau. 

There is a lot of difficult to achieve life-philosophy stuff in it. 

There are only a couple of things people do with Walden once they've read it. (1) They begin striving toward a lifestyle that, as much as possible, emulates the philosophies and principles contained in it. Or, (2) they summarily dismiss it as the poppycock of a social misfit.

There's something about social misfits like Thoreau that believe(d) a simple and independent mind does not toil at the bidding of any prince. (Prince? Politician? Potentate?) We happen to feel comfortable around social misfits and honestly prefer their company.

Whittling and Chopping

We're close.

Really close.

And getting closer every week.

There's still a good bit left to finish up. 

Nothing nearly like when we first started.

It's a really good feeling.

12' by 28' isn't a lot of room. It is even less room when you consider that 4' of that 28' is the front porch. That whittles the inside cabin dimensions down to 12' X 24'. 288 square feet unless you subtract the space taken up by the walls. You may, for all practical purposes, consider the inside dimensions to be more on the lines of 11' X 23'. That whittles it down even more to about 253 square feet of living space.

Daunting?

Not really.

Challenging?

For sure. Especially for the modern mindset accustomed to cultural norms.

I'm not sure how many times I've done it over the past decade plus a few years … made trailer loads to the landfill … of stuff that I'd stick in the sheds thinking that one day I would use it for something. How many piles of trash have I burned? I hate to even venture a guess. My old friend, Willy, has also been here a couple of times with his trailer loading up scrap iron, and an aluminum boat and trailer, that I hung onto for who knows what good reason.

We started getting proactive about downsizing a couple of years ago and had our first huge yard sale in 2014. We've had several of them since the first one. Whatever was left after a yard sale, and there was a lot of leftovers, was loaded, hauled into town, and donated to the local Goodwill. We've given furniture, and a lot of other good usable stuff, away in an attempt to whittle and chop things down to bare but comfortable necessities.

Our motivation for the whittling and chopping, back when we first sharpened our blades and started working on it, was, except for a very few people, kept under the radar. There's a lot about this adventurous endeavor that most people can't and will never be able to wrap their minds around. It's too scary for most people, especially most people our age. And we'll admit, after years of studying on it … years of planning … years of taking steps, some small and some BIG, in the direction we're traveling … it's still a little scary for us.

Change is good, they say. Whoever it is that they are. What they don't emphasise well is that change is hard. It can be really hard. The older the dog, the harder it is for the dog to learn new tricks. Why? The old dog has some deeply embedded habits. The weather changes constantly. The times are constantly undergoing change. People? People can change but it's a pretty rare thing for people to change drastically. We're kinda like dogs in that regard … accustomed to our acquired habits.

The past few years do not take into account the prior decades of tuning and fine-tuning our own inner realities … the realization and understanding of who we are as individuals. Not only as individuals but also as a married couple. An adventure like this would be a terribly bumpy ride if one or the other of us was dragging our feet while kicking and screaming, or, if one or the other of us, was going along passively for the ride. Neither of those scenarios, where the two of us are concerned, is the case. Both of our necks are in the yoke equally encouraging the load toward our goal … one that is on the very near horizon!

This downsizing to a small cabin in the woods is not just a physical adjustment. It is every bit as much a psychological adjustment. It is every bit as much an emotional adjustment. These three dimensions cover a lot of ground. The whole human psyche is involved. Ancient Old Amos, back there sometime between 786 and 746 BC, asked the question, “Can two walk together except they be agreed?” They had best be to attempt something like this.

What we are doing in our life-adventure is more about preserving and cultivating the selves that have emerged in our interior processes than it is about striking out against the world and all that we see wrong with it. The latter is a good way to get bogged down. It's also a good way to spend valuable time, energy, and rubber off your tires furthering someone else's agenda. We've done that, did it until there wasn't much left of us. Our own necessity … our own agenda … our own cause … is what motivates us at this point in our oldering lives.

Whittling and chopping in order to go from a 3 bedroom, 2 bath, screened porch on the front, small porch on the back to a little cabin hardly any bigger than our living room?

It was hard at the outset.

Has it gotten easier at this stage of the game?

Some easier. It's still hard.

But not as hard as at first.

Making Pear Butter

There are a couple of things that come to mind when I think of the Augusts of my childhood and youth.

One is that the beginning of August marked the countdown to going back to school. The other is that it was the month when the pears were ready to be dealt with. Neither was something that I looked forward to.

It's kinda funny to think about. For as much as I hated school, I'm still a student … a perpetual student. Maybe not in the traditional sense but a student nonetheless. Particularly where old time self-reliance skills are concerned. And I'm still fooling with pears. Not in the volume that we did when I was a kid growing up on a hardscrabble farm growing and processing practically everything we ate.

We'd spend all morning peeling and slicing pears … for several days in a row … then spend the afternoon ... for said number of days ... packing pears in jars to can in a 55 gallon drum over a fire or sweating over an old smokey wood stove making pear butter. My job, after all the morning work, was to keep the fire just right under the drum or stoke the stove and stir those huge pans in a building that was already August hot without a wood stove going.

We canned about every fruit and vegetable imaginable in that drum. Ate well. And we all lived to tell about it.

These storms and wind this week knocked some pears off our little tree so it was time to do something with them … turn them into biscuit topping.

The 4-quart pot was heaped. I mean really rounded up to the point that slices were beginning to fall off.

One of the things you have to be careful of with cooking down pears is the heat. Keep it low or you're apt to scorch the bottom of the pot. When that happens you have a mess to deal with throughout the entire process. The scorched junk keeps scratching off and mixing with the butter. Those scorched spots also create hot spots that will keep on scorching regardless of your efforts to keep things stirred.

Stirred?

A lot of stirring. Forget about using a large spoon. It's best to use something flat that will work evenly against the bottom of the pot. We used what looked like miniature wooden flat tipped boat paddles that my dad made to stir those pans on the wood stove. Also avoid using any kind of pot that isn't flat on the bottom. You have to be able to get at everything to keep it from sticking and scorching.

It takes a good measure of time to slowly cook the pears down. There's a lot of water in them that has to be evaporated out. Sometimes, if the pears are really hard like these from our tree, you have to add a little water a time or two to finish cooking them down in order to either mash the heck out of them with a potato masher or use a hand blender to reduce the chunks. The finished product doesn't have to be as smooth as apply butter. In fact, a little chunkiness gives the pear butter a nice texture … adds some chewability to it.

To this one gallon pot that started out super heaping full, I added 2 cups of sugar after the cooked down pears were given a good mashing. That 2 cups of sugar makes this sized batch sweet enough for our tastes.

Spices?

This is one of those areas that is also open to individual taste. We are partial to using Allspice and Cinnamon. How much of each?

That's a hard question to answer.

I never once saw my dad measure anything when he was making pear butter. He'd dump some of this … then taste it. If it needed more of this for his taste he'd add more. Then he'd work on the that after the same fashion. I pretty much follow the same process that I learned from my Czech dad … get it to taste good to me and go with it. The main thing is to go at it a little at a time, taste, and make whatever adjustments are needed.

It's easy to scorch the pears before adding the sugar. It's even easier after the sugar is added. Mainly because, at this point, you need to turn up the heat a good bit to caramelize the sugar, get the butter up to a good simmer, and hold it there for a while. Once the sugar is added and the heat is turned up there is no walking away from what you are doing. The entire world has to be put on hold while you constantly stir and keep slowly increasing the heat a tad bit at a time until you can't keep the boil stirred down.

Had I been putting this batch into quart sized jars I would not have bothered with the water bath as the final step. This stuff is seething hot when it goes into the prepared jars. I've never had a problem with quarts sealing.

Pints are half the volume and cool quicker so I wanted to make sure the product in the pint jars was hot enough to pull a seal on the lids when they cooled.

The water in the bath has to be at least as hot as the jars when you set them into it.

Colder and it may crack the hot jars.

Set the jars in, bring it up to a low boil, reduce the heat enough to keep things at a low boil, put the lid on and let it do it's thing for five minutes or so. Set it off the heat and let it set another five minutes or so before removing the jars and snugging the lids just a little. You want the lids snug but not wrenched down hard as you can turn them.

As the jars cool, they pull a vacuum on the lid producing that unmistakable tink. Once sealed and completely cooled down, the rings can be removed from the jars, given a good washing, and stored away.

Bucking The Standard

The interior of the cabin is coming along nicely.

All the paneling is now up in the main room. Except under the kitchen counter. That's an area yet to be addressed. I think I can use the cutoffs from the panels in the main room to cover the insulation under the counter before building some shelving underneath. That shelving will take a little creative thinking.

We figured ten sheets to do the paneling.

It's going to take eleven.

There's one sheet of paneling left of the ten and it is sitting safely in the loft over the bathroom and alcove. One up top waiting and one more to be bought will finish the alcove.

I made the up and back this morning to carry a small table up, finish that last corner in the main room, and move a nice futon into the cabin.

An electrical outlet had to be moved where it was tight against the corner and would have been a booger to finish around. My son-in-law helped me with that. We moved it Monday. By the time I got to that corner with the paneling, I was ready to dog it off and make the run back to the lower end of the county.

The first step today was to cut and install the insulation. Nasty stuff. I hate fooling with it. But it makes a world of difference in the heating and cooling of living space. That wall gets the most sun of any of the four outside walls so there was no fudging on the itchy stuff. Just get in there with it and get it done.

I've always used a utility knife to cut insulation in past projects. Taking along a utility knife wasn't an item floating around in my brain. So I made do with what I had on me.

I cut the insulation with the Mora that hangs around my neck. That Mora gets a lot of use. It does practically all of my day to day everyday knife chores. Even the slicing and dicing in the kitchen. Turns out that it is a smart tool for cutting insulation too. The blade is long enough that you aren't picking up fibers on your fingers that get transferred to other bodily parts that, in turn, go to itching.

Two corners need corner molding. Some type of molding needs to go at the bottom and tops of the paneling. I doubt I'll use the milled stuff from the store. Standard molding looks good in standard residential houses. This is a far cry from standard residential housing so we don't want to install something that will take away from the cozy non-standard ambiance we are creating in our KOA Camping Cabin on Steroids.

I was doing a little looking on the internet to get some idea of the average price of used sticks and bricks housing in this county. One of the sources that I looked at indicated that the average price of used houses is 264K. That same source indicated that the Median Monthly Housing Cost (with a mortgage) is $1,225.00. I can't swear that those numbers are accurate. I wasn't the one doing the numbers on the calculator.

The simple truth of the matter is that it costs a lot to live the median lifestyle in this county. It costs a lot to live a median lifestyle anywhere for that matter. The truth of the simple matter though is that there are alternatives. There are workarounds to the problematic median lifestyle thing. There are ways to work around the median lifestyle issue once the median lifestyle is dismissed as a goal … a goal that far too many strive for but never honestly realize … or dismissed as a symbol of status and a reason for occupying the planet.

This is not intended to be a railing accusation. Far from it. It's merely pointing out what it costs to buy into this fast growing county. You can find stuff at the extreme ends of the standard if (1) you have the resources to afford the upper end, or (2) your resources are such that you have to buy into neighborhoods where your hubcaps go missing. Personally, we (1) don't have the resources to buy into the upper end, and (2) we prefer to keep our hubcaps.

We don't have a problem with people having what they have. What we do have a problem with is a codified system telling us what we have to have to fit in and what we can or cannot do with it once we have it.

Success and Happiness

It's kind of funny. It is to us anyway. One or the other of us is regularly saying to the other of us … We're really doing this aren't we?

Yes we are!

And, from the looks of it, one more good day of working on the interior and The Cabin On Huckleberry Hill will be ready for an overnight stay! It'll not be completely finished but the necessary amenities will be in place. Nor will we be moved in. That's still part of the process. But, rather than doing up and backs that eat up hours and gasoline, we'll have the option to just lay up at the end of the day then spend the next morning or day piddling at this and that or whatever.

Shoot. We might just sit there and listen to the birds and squirrels and the subdued sound of the trains rumbling on the track and have conversations.

1942.

That is when WE TOOK TO THE WOODS was first copyrighted.

It's one of those true stories … chronicling an adventure … written from a woman's perspective … something of a nature study … the story of a dream that awakens and becomes real life … set in the Maine woods. It's also one of the books that made the cut in our downsizing efforts as the bones of our own dream take on sinew and muscle.

“We get our water from the river and from a spring up back in the woods. We do our bathing in wash-tubs in front of the kitchen stove, and for other uses of the bathroom, we resort to the out-houses. This is no great hardship in the summer, but in winter, with the snow knee deep, the wind howling like a maniac up the river, and the thermometer crawling down to ten below zero, it is a supreme test of fortitude to leave the warmth of the fire and go plunging out into the cold, no matter how great the necessity. We like to think, however, that it builds character.” Louise Dickinson Rich

Crude?

Maybe according to modern standards.

We forget that people lived … and lived well … for centuries without the conveniences prescribed by standards that insist that bigger is better and more is best.

Departing from a bigger and more mentality defies all the cultural norms dictated by modern society … norms that supposedly indicate success and promise happiness. Departing from these norms is a sure way to get the boot from modern clubs and social circles. That's been our lived experience with departing from the norms. People, for some reason or another, get the impression that the departure is some kind of personal rejection of their way of life.

Well? Maybe it is. Maybe it isn't. Maybe it's bigger than that. Maybe it's more of a rejection of the system and the thriving mania that it propagates.

These woods aren't the Maine woods.

We don't have to worry about ten below zero here in this part of the world. Not in these Lower Alabama woods. Freezing to death … or getting frost bite on your buttocks from a freezing outhouse seat … are extremely remote possibilities.

We do, having sorted through the pile of propaganda suggesting success and promising happiness, have a few standards where modern conveniences are concerned. Cooling the air during the summer months is one of them. Hot and cold running water is another of them. An indoor apparatus that tends to human necessity is on our list of conveniences. Ordinary everyday stuff that makes daily life in a thoroughly modern world a lot easier. We have these.

Success and happiness are individual matters and can only be determined by the real needs of each individual person. The onus is on the individual to sort through all the chaff ... all the impressed standards set by society and its popular culture ... figure out what it is that success is for them … what it is that honestly and truly makes them happy in life … then damn the torpedoes and go for it.

I was out the door early this morning headed to the cabin. Detour on the way. I had to go by Lowe's for some paneling and a roll of insulation. Half of the paneling made its way from the saw horses to the walls. Tomorrow is another day.

Practical Sustainability

Something practical and sustainable.

That’s what we are working on.

Something that is tailored to meet our needs.

It’s not been an overnight project. To the contrary. It’s taken years … years … years after finally growing weary of the gnawing in our interior fibers … that yearning for a simpler way … that yearning for less harriedness … that yearning for freedom from the status quo that enslaves people within a taxing debt-system that is never satisfied … that yearning to be able to live life more fully within our means according to our terms rather than according to the terms imposed on us by said system with its Powerful Potentates and Passive Followers.

I said us.

This is about us.

We are not promoting or pushing an agenda of any sort. We aren’t trying to set ourselves up as gurus with a toga clad following. We aren’t trying to convince anyone of anything. No. Not at all. We are simply looking our reality in the face, being true to ourselves, and doing what we have to do to be who we are ... peacefully enjoying life as we interpret it.

Folks can decide for themselves. Folks that want to decide for themselves will decide for themselves. Folks that decide for themselves will find a way to do what they have decided.

What we are doing really isn’t such a contrary thing. There is quite an encouraging small movement going on where the tiny houses and alternative housing thing is concerned.

Practical Sustainability, in our minds, is the bottom line of the deal. Just how practical and sustainable is something where the long haul is concerned? How much will it cost to get into it? How much will it cost to maintain it? How much of ourselves are we willing to forfeit to sustain a residential box of one sort or another? These are all parts of the garden of questions that we’ve had to hoe our way through. The results of the hoeing is the establishment of something that is practical and sustainable and doing it in a way that allows a generous margin of space for spontaneity and creativity while we yet have quantities of quality of life left to live.

Sure.

Practical sustainability involves a lot of pioneering and homesteading skills … building and repairing stuff, growing and processing food, knowing when and how to tend to seasonal things, and having the tools to do these things among other things … common skills that aren’t so common anymore. This business of spontaneity and creativity figures in equally as well. Spontaneity and creativity are the elements that give life an art form. A life devoid of spontaneity and creativity is a life replete with the drudgery of running pillar to post doing chore after chore ad infinitum.

There has to be a better way to live than the ad infinitum that we’ve known all these years!

There is. For us there is.

And we simply refuse to live a life of ad infinitum any longer regardless of what or who generates the ad infinitum. There’s no time left for it. There’s no will left to struggle with it or its sources.

The cabin?

It’s kind of interesting how it came about. Interesting in a fortuitous sort of way. Some may even say Providential.

Our original plan was to build a small cabin that first involved doing some axe and chainsaw work and site preparation. I’m not the best axe and saw man in the country but I am a pretty fair hand with the tools. I can, unless a tree has a bad contrary lean, put one on the ground where I want it to hit. We got the axe and saw work done early last summer.  I drove some stakes and pulled a string where the back of the cabin would be. Then the sure enough summer heat and humidity set it. Tending to the ad infinitum at this end of the county ran some serious interference where working on building a cabin at the other end of the county was concerned.

We gave some thought to an option that was sitting here in the yard.

Why not haul the Dutchmen up and live in it while we build the cabin?

Not a bad idea. It was just sitting here in the yard. A little additional site work. It would be an easy set up and hook up.

We also looked at buying a readymade portable building that could be hauled into the original cabin site and finished inside to suit our needs. You can find some pretty good deals on these buildings, especially on slightly used repossessed ones. We looked at buying a new one and dismissed that idea pretty quick. The thing we wanted to avoid at all cost was financing anything. No more payment schedules! No more indentured servitude!

Slightly used. Slightly lived in. Mostly finished on the inside. The seller needed to sell it. We needed it and bought it. Seller and buyers happily smiling.

An ideal deal … one that came about in the perfect window of opportunity where our necessity time frame was concerned … one requiring a minimal amount of T.L.C. and personalization to turn it into a comfortable little cabin with all the necessary amenities.