Today was a perfect combination of getting out of the house and getting some stuff done when we were home. Making Elderberry Syrup and some homemade Lemon Vinegar Cleaner started me thinking more consciously about our upcoming move into the camper. Not only will we not have a ton of storage space, but our fridge/freezer will be tiny. While we are staying on our friends' land, we will seriously have to pare down what we keep in each, and that's going to be really tough for me. I'm highly accustomed to paring down clothes, toys, books, and anything else, but not food. Not kitchen tools.
I spend most my time in the kitchen, and I have to admit I've been grieving space today. My freezer currently functions as the space holder for not having compost. Anything and everything I can think of to reuse as something else I freeze. I freeze all scraps of onions, carrots, celery, garlic, the occasional red pepper, and shallots, into a gallon freezer bag, and when that's full, I make homemade vegetable broth in a big batch. I've been keeping leftover juicing pulp to make into breakfast muffins. Apple peels in the past have been saved to be tossed into smoothies for extra fiber. And more recently I've been saving and freezing citrus peels for their many many uses.
But now that my freezer will literally be a 1/4 of the size I'm used to I'm starting to be mindful about what I'll truly need to keep in the freezer. I will still probably save scraps for vegetable broth as that is a precious staple in much of my cooking. But everything else is starting to feel like a luxury. In thinking of ways to unload some of that real estate, I'm working on using up my frozen lemons this week. So today I started a simple Lemon Vinegar Cleaning Solution, ready to use in 2 weeks. I only made 1 quart to test it out, so it only used up about 1/4 of my gallon bag of frozen juiced lemon rinds. With the rest I plan on canning up some lemon curd to put up.
I put together the Lemon Vinegar while some Elderberry Syrup cooked down on the stove. I made some to do some bartering with for some locally micro-roasted coffee from Davis Roasters (I'm excited to support some new folks that have moved to town while trying some delicious new coffee). I used my favorite recipe for Elderberry Syrup from another Asheville area local maker, Ashley English with Small Measure. In this recipe I usually start out with about 1/2 the honey in the recipe, and then add more to taste.
Our lives are a little split up these days. 95% of our "stuff" resides in a very full 10' x 10' storage unit, and the rest of it is here with us in this fully-furnished, oversized, but still cluttered rental (not our stuff). We're used to living out of boxes. David and I have been doing it all along the 7 years we've been together. I was thinking about it this morning. In those 7 years, David and I have moved a total of 9 times. 2 of them were large cross-country moves. Calla will have lived in 7 different places by the time she turns 4 this coming May. We are a well-oiled moving machine. Each time we get a little more efficient, pare down a lot more stuff then the last time, and each time we say "this is the last time we're going to do this." And each time we've been wrong. We became really good settlers along the way, accepting what we didn't really want mostly because it wasn't the right timing, both financially, and in a bigger picture, fate kind of way.
The journey to where we are today has certainly not been an easy one. Once we saw the Paw Paw property for the first time and both conceded we actually both loved it, it was a crazy roller coaster of emotions to finally agree to do it. There were many swinging moments of, "YES, let's do this crazy thing!" and "What the heck are we thinking? Can we really financially pull this off?" All along the way I asked us both aloud over and over, "Are we settling? Is this really where we could see ourselves spending the rest of our lives?" I didn't want to settle yet again. I didn't want to revisit this conversation in 10 or 15 years only to realize that one of us wasn't honest and didn't want this.
Prior to our land search we sat down and made a list together of our wants and needs in a piece of property; a checklist to keep us on target for not settling. It was so important to have this list to come back to again and again as we visited more properties to come to the table and say, "well this one didn't meet all our wants/needs." When you are looking it is so easy to get emotionally attached to a piece of land, and quickly. I remember walking through several barns, envisioning what the space could be used for. But none of them except Paw Paw was able to check all our boxes off. Even then we still questioned whether this was the right land.
Now that we have more control over building what we want in a home from scratch (within our financial restraints), I am smitten we can say we won't have to move again. I want to let our roots grow and intertwine deep, deep into this rich soil and actually use the compost I create in next year's garden, and have to rotate crops. To unpack all our boxes, carefully and consciously curating our sense of home, knowing we don't ever have to leave again.
