I remember a particular day last summer where I had spent the entire day making bread and canning. My kitchen shelves were lined with raspberry jam, applesauce, bread and butter pickles and there were four loaves of bread cooling on the kitchen table. In the living room, the soft glow of an oil lamp provided a dim and comfortable light. A friend of mine stopped by in the evening for a visit and as we were in the kitchen pouring coffee, she said to me, “You’re like – a 19th century who is stuck out of his time. You don’t drive, you can all of this food, you bake everything under the sun from scratch no less, and you’re always out camping or doing something outdoorsy. And then there’s this whole simplicity things of yours….”
I got a chuckle out of that. I suppose it does strike some people as strange that a relatively young man would spend his Saturday making bread and jam. To many people, the concept of canning one’s own food or baking homemade bread is so foreign to them that they would never contemplate doing such things themselves. Maybe they just didn’t have the type of childhood that I did. Even though I spent many years as a young man caught up in the whirlwind of consumerism and working myself to death trying to make money, living a simple life was not anything new to me.
I was lucky enough to have grown up on a farm, a mile down a dirt road. I learned to can and bake from my mother. We always had a huge vegetable garden, as well as usually plush patches of strawberries, raspberries, and blueberries.
As blackberries grew wild on our farm, we would go out scouting for them, containers in hand, and hoping that we wouldn’t run into a bear who might be miffed that we were out there attempting to steal his favorite food. My mother spent a majority of her summer just trying to keep up with canning the abundant harvest from the farm. Her large canner filled with water was almost constantly boiling and the smell of fresh fruit and vegetables seasoned the kitchen.
Photo courtesy of JonF119
Additionally, there was either a freshly baked pie (apple or raspberry were my favorites) or an elaborately decorated cake on the counter – because you never knew when company might drop by.
We were allowed to watch only a minimal amount of television and things like Game Boy, Nintendo and Play Station didn’t exist yet (thank goodness!). So rather than waste our time on mindless pursuits such as those, we had to amuse ourselves in different ways. I got to help my mother put up jams and jellies and assist her with baking. We swam in the nearby lake, fished in the creeks that ran through our woods, biked to the neighbors, or camped along the lakeshore. During the winter in the evenings, our entire family would strap on snowshoes and venture out for a moonlight walk on our 180 acres.
I remember even as a kid the peaceful, serene feeling that would come over me as we walked together in the fresh air and moonlight, with the only sound one could hear for miles being our snowshoes as they crunched on top of the crusty snow. Upon arriving home, our faces would be rosy red from our chilly night excursion and we’d all sit around the kitchen table for a snack of freshly baked pie made with the previous summer’s frozen raspberries or blackberries and a glass of ice cold milk from our neighbor’s dairy farm.
But as I rapidly approached adolescence, I couldn’t wait to leave. I convinced myself that I hated living on the farm and was tired of being “backwards” and a “country hick.” I wanted to go to the city, lead an interesting life and make lots of money. I certainly didn’t want to spend my life canning vegetables and baking bread. So leave I did. Few of my friends knew that I was a farmboy and was embarrassed if anyone found out. After I left the farm, I took the typical American route and soon found myself to be overworked, overspent and downright exhausted. I guess the old adage is true – be careful what you wish for, you just might get it. It’s funny what we have to go through to realize that the grass, in fact, is not greener on the other side. It took me several years of living the American Nightmare to decide that it was time for me to simplify my life and get back to the basics. In other words, it was time for me to recapture those days of my youth.
I was lucky that I had such a rich, rewarding childhood. It was a way of life that was easy for me to go back to. But I worry about today’s kids. What kinds of memories will they have from their childhood? Will they remember mom and dad exhaustedly dragging themselves into the house at the end of the day, and throwing a bag of McDonald’s hamburgers down on the table? Or hastily tossing some box mix of processed food in a pot then piling it on their kid’s plates?
A former coworker of mine with a family once confessed to me that she NEVER cooks. “I just don’t have the time with working 40 plus hours a week, bringing the girls back and forth to volleyball practice, etc. Plus I’ve never really into the whole cooking thing.” I couldn’t help but wonder what on earth her kids eat if neither of their parents cook. Fast food every night? The mere thought of it makes me shudder.
Photo courtesy of Per Ola Wiberg (Powi)
I couldn’t imagine not having the simple childhood that I did. Childhood is suppose to be a time for fun – a time of simplicity – a time that we should be able to look back upon with nostalgia in our adulthood. My childhood taught me the values of simple living and how much more rewarding it is than living a lifestyle based on consumerism and making money. I may seem to some like “a 19th century man living in the 21st” but why? Are the ways of natural living and simplicity so lost for people that making homemade food is now considered eccentric or out of the ordinary?
When today’s youth gets to the point where they want to slow down and scale back, I just hope they have a point of reference at which to start. From being raised by parents whose whole lives revolved around simple living, it was easier for me to escape the insanity of today’s hustle and bustle world and slow down, than it might be for someone who didn’t have the fortunate childhood that I had – and doesn’t possess the nostalgic childhood memories of a time more simple.
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