LIFE AS A STATISTIC–Greg Webster

Forty hours in the Atlanta airport. That’s how long my daughter waited there while I was waiting here (see my previous post “Wait! Wait! Wait!”).

After six months working in Laos, the second and longest leg (14 hours) of her flight home landed in Atlanta the morning the Georgia capital’s Snowpocalypse 2014 began. She became an instant statistic—one of the thousands of travelers stranded later that day in the world’s busiest shut-down airport.

Now You Fly It, Now You Don’t

Tricked into thinking the afternoon flight on which she had been re-booked would actually leave Atlanta, her gullible family back home headed out for the 90-minute drive to the Nashville airport (although we track flights online, air travel time from Atlanta to Nashville is 30 minutes less than our drive to the airport, so we have to leave here before the plane leaves there). Ten minutes into our wait at the Nashville terminal, CANCELLED showed up next to her flight number on the Arriving Flights board. So Anna spent Tuesday night napping in Atlanta’s Concourse C, and we drove home, still with only four of our five daughters.

Not yet savvy about how the cancelled flights game is played, we again fell for the airlines’ this-one-will-make-it ploy on Wednesday afternoon and spent an hour touring parts of the Nashville airport we hadn’t seen before (happily, we discovered a Starbucks outside of the secured area) until CANCELLED showed up again.

Thanks to a network of people following Anna’s saga on facebook, we discovered that a long-time family friend from Atlanta was arriving at the airport from a business trip late Wednesday night. He and Anna found each other, braved the drive through abandoned vehicles along Atlanta’s highways, and Anna spent that night with friends.

As God-timing would have it, my Atlanta-resident niece had planned a business trip from Atlanta to Knoxville the next day (roads were clear by then), so she picked up Anna at the friends’ house. Since the route to Knoxville goes through Chattanooga, we drove there to meet them and bring Anna home. The last leg of her flight never happened. We found out later that even the Thursday afternoon flight she would have been on was cancelled.

Friday required one more roundtrip to Nashville International to retrieve Anna’s luggage which—we found out on Thursday night—had actually made it to Nashville on Wednesday in time for us to pick it up while waiting for Anna, had we known it was there.

The four-day saga of retrieving Anna and her luggage from Snowpocalypse is the first of a series of reasons there have been no updates to Creative Country Living in the past three weeks. The good side of CCL is that we’re real people with real lives (not just statistics), but that’s the bad news, too. Life happens here, and there’s only so much of us to go around. Something has to give. But three weeks?

Anna was just week one.

Daughter Checks In, Son Checks Out

Two days after Anna and her belongings made it home, son Philip arrived from the National Guard base in Alcoa, TN. He’s a statistic, too—one of 80 soldiers from the east Tennessee unit about to deploy to Afghanistan. Here for his last visit home before heading out, we naturally focused most waking hours “soaking him in.” But he cut short his Sunday through Saturday visit by one day to avoid prolonged contact with the stomach virus that took hold of us the Friday of his visit. Fortunately, we had already planned one later chance to see him.

The bug (norovirus—ironically, Nancy is writing about it for the upcoming Beeyoutiful.com nutritional products catalog) ran its course (through us) by end-of-day Monday. That should have left a stretch of two “normal” days before the next scheduled major event—our last chance to see Philip. However, day two (Wednesday 2/12) brought a longed-for snow day on the farm (see my post “Into Each Life a Little Snow Must Fall, Hopefully”), so normal went out the window.

For our big Thursday event, we drove the 200 miles east to Philip’s airbase (he’s a helicopter pilot) to join the official family send-off for troops. However, snow there caused a one-day postponement of the event, from Thursday to Friday afternoon. We’d planned an overnight stay anyway, so the change didn’t bother us.

The wondrous pride and mixed emotions of the send-off was bolstered by generous media coverage. Our unusually large family (7 of 8 children present) was an obvious target and garnered an appearance on the local (Knoxville, TN) news (see: http://www.local8now.com/home/headlines/Local-soldiers-spend-last-night-with-families-before-Saturdays-deployment-245606051.html).

Home by midnight Friday—so Anna could leave Saturday morning for a trip to help a friend in Florida (this time she got to fly over Atlanta). Sunday: Church as usual. And, voila, this week: Normal life again. Ha.

We’ve integrated these happenings into ongoing farm management—complicated by our Jersey cow giving birth and requiring extra attention to prevent mastitis as well as a terminally broken chainsaw which slowed the process of procuring firewood. (The chainsaw problem was handled, though, by a generous parting gift from our deploying son—a brand new Stihl!)

All of the above is why this one blog post will have to suffice as the current Creative Country Living update. Our roller coaster stats of these past three weeks set a new record for us.

If you happen to have come to Creative Country Views from somewhere other than the Creative Country Living website, please check out our FREE online magazine about rural and agrarian life at: http://creativecountryliving.com/

 Creative Country Views ©2014 Greg Webster. All rights reserved.

WINTER REST: The Other Season of Thanksgiving–guest blog by Nancy Webster

When we sang “Come Ye Thankful People Come” last Thanksgiving, it was hard for me to sing the second line of the first verse: “All is safely gathered in, Ere [before] the winter storms begin,” because our family was still busy butchering and preserving venison.

Now in mid-January, however, deer season is past, the busy-ness of the holidays is over, and, except for a few vegetables growing in a cold frame, the garden is resting along with the grass.

There are still chores: eggs to gather, chickens to feed and water, a cow to milk, hay to supply, firewood to bring in. But those are quick unless someone leaves a gate unlocked and a round-up of escaped animals is necessary.

In some ways, January is my favorite month on our farm.  The wood stove keeps us dry and cozy inside. The children and I get some of our best homeschooling of the year accomplished without gardening, canning, assorted outdoor projects, and animals nagging for attention.

I finally feel like I can indulge in the pile of books I’ve considered myself too busy to read. Board games (especially our favorites, Dutch Blitz and Bananagrams) are regular entertainment. A mug of homemade hot chocolate or mocha coffee completes the luxury.

Meals are quick and easy. Thanks to our hard work earlier in the year, in twenty minutes we can have sumptuous soups from our canned bone broths, venison, and vegetables (dehydrated or canned) with a slice of buttered, sourdough bread and a dab of lacto-fermented sauerkraut on the side.

In Middle Tennessee, January also holds our best chance for snow.  With hopeful anticipation, we’ve cut a wide swath down the steep slope of the hillside pasture to help our sleds go faster when snow drops in for a visit—however brief it may be. And if the pond freezes over, there’s skating and the thrill of “walking on water.”

The crocus will be poking up in a few weeks. Seed packets will soon tempt us at the stores. And seed time and harvest will start again. For now though, the earth rests, and we rest—I can easily sing thanks to God for that.

Check out Dutch Blitz (Fast and Fun!) and Bananagrams (Very Appealing!) for yourself:

        

 

If you happen to have come to Creative Country Views from somewhere other than the Creative Country Living website, please check out our FREE online magazine about rural and agrarian life at: http://creativecountryliving.com/

 Creative Country Views ©2014 Greg Webster. All rights reserved.

Into Each Life a Little Snow Must Fall, Hopefully—Greg Webster

I’m a first generation Southerner and have been since day one. A resident of Virginia for my first six months of life, I’ve spent the rest of my days in North Carolina, Georgia, or Tennessee—except for a four-year stint in Southern California just after Nancy and I married. My Wisconsin-native parents shared their many stories of late-April blizzards and of school cancelled because the buildings wouldn’t get warm enough for kids when the temperature hit 20 below, but I’ve never experienced either for myself.

Pond awaiting the freeze.

As I write this on my Middle Tennessee farm, the temperature has dipped to 7 degrees outside, and by tomorrow morning the weather folks promise a low even closer to zero. And guess what: my kids and I can’t wait to see how cold it gets. Last night, in fact, while snow was still falling and wind chills still hovered up in the teens, we hiked to our pond, hoping it would freeze hard enough in the next few days to play on. That blessed event has happened only once before in our 15 years on the farm.

Southerners are supposed to feel apologetic about this strange enjoyment of cold. Maybe a bit embarrassed about welcoming snow and ice. Perhaps even shamed at the thought of considering single digit temperatures truly cold when this morning, it’s minus 27 in Duluth, Minnesota and wind chills screech to minus 54 (that certainly is cold). As my southern Facebook friends chatter (their teeth) about the arctic conditions outside, I notice that most of my northern friends have been politely silent. I guess they’re letting us enjoy our quixotic appreciation of this brief spate of what is “normal” for them. Still, there’s something to be said for this Southern delight in winter.

God in His wisdom has given the world winter for a purpose—or many purposes as His ways often allow. The land needs downtime to prepare for the next growing season, and perhaps He also wants to fascinate us with His creativity. Water you can walk on? The only faith it takes is the assurance you’ve correctly estimated the thickness of ice and its ability to support your weight. Naturally flocked pine trees? They’re an exquisitely mystical contrast with the stark, leafless vegetation around them. And besides all that, it’s simply a relief to savor the disparity between January and July—the 80 or 90 degree difference that in the heat and humidity of a Southern summer seems like it will never end. Finally, this weather also gives me reason to be deeply grateful for a fine wood stove and our heating fuel from the land.

My bedtime Bible reading last night brought me to Psalm 19 and, having relished a walk in the falling snow a few hours before, suggested a new application for verse 1: “the sky proclaims the work of His hands.” I know the psalmist meant stars and “the heavens,” but for one of the few winter nights when this Southerner will wander in a winter wonderland, I appreciate the white miracle that “pours forth” (verse 2) from the sky.

If you happen to have come to Creative Country Views from somewhere other than the Creative Country Living website, please check out our FREE online magazine about rural and agrarian life at: http://creativecountryliving.com/

Creative Country Views ©2014 Greg Webster. All rights reserved.