I had some *deep* thoughts about our experience in the Old Order Mennonite communities this time around, and I want to share them with you, and I will...but today I'm going to talk about road tripping Christmas and barf? Because I need to maintain my status as an oversharing momblogger who keeps it realz.

In California we lived so far from our families that roadtrips with babies just didn't happen. We blissfully flew with a lap child (ha!). But now we live in Texas which is kind of closer to things, so we took the cheaper evil of the highway over navigating airports and flight times and rental cars. We did our big driving push - Texas to Tennessee - in one day. We packed up the day before and drove out at 4am. Both the kiddos transferred into their early morning car seats pretty seamlessly, and we had ourselves a sweet roadtrip sunrise with some truckstop coffee.

   

The kids woke up in Baton Rouge, and we ate cajun powdered sugar for breakfast. We were riding high. I think we even high-fived each other. Ironically of course. For lunch, we picnicked in the sketchiest of sketchy playgrounds somewhere in Alabama.

Things went pretty well till the last couple hours of dark driving in the rain. We finally made it to Chattanooga and were desperately trying to find a fast food restaurant with a playscape. In the haze of the city lights, their colors distorting on the wet windshield, for over an hour we navigated first to a Chic-Fil-A which ended up being in a food court and then another that was in a hospital and then to a "kid friendly" taco place that was closed and elicited some rather saucy verbiage from the husband. Finally we landed at this grungy, deserted fried chicken place where we literally let our overtired underexercised offspring walk around the whole restaurant. In general we're zealous "Sit Down And Eat Your Food" types, but at this point we were channeling a lot more zombie than parent, and watched pretty disinterestedly as Lucy Juney wandered into the bar and flirted with anyone who smiled at her.

The next morning we found out that Chattanooga was much more quaint and much less circle-of-hellish than our first impression led us to believe, and we had some hipster coffee before heading to the land of hot hot woodburning stoves and cold cold leaky outhouses.

We brought our own sniffles to the Mennonites this time, which was kind of nice since it made me less concerned about all the snotty noses in these vastly child-heavy communities. But two days in and Lucy June was looking greenish. We arrived at one of Jacob's cousins and for the first five minutes I tried to calm my super fussy baby and make excuses for her, but then she vomited all over the floor. The wife quickly got a bowl for me, and even though Lucy June threw up about four more times over the next few minutes, I caught none of it.

An hour later she was ripe and ready to eat again, so I fed her with all my fingers crossed, while Jake played with his cousins' pet raccoon and Jacob talked with the menfolk about trotlines, horses, and weather.

When we visit the Mennonites, we eat a lot. Virtually every meal is at a different relative's house and each one involves SO MUCH FOOD. Mennonite food is very Cracker Barrel - gravy on pancakes, creamed corn, mashed potatoes - plus semi-unrecognizable things with names like "Scrapple." And each meal has some kind of dessert. Many of Jacob's cousins asked me how I lost baby weight. I told them I didn't usually eat cheesecake after breakfast.

  

The last afternoon in the community, I was doubled over in Jacob's Aunt's house suffering through the stomach bug Lucy June bequeathed me. As I tossed my breakfast cheesecake into a chamber pot, I devised this little formula:

Mennonite In-Laws + Stomach Virus + Outhouse + Winter 

=  

How Much I Love My Husband

Soon with our sniffles and our stomach bug - and a trunk full of winter squash, canned soups, fresh milk, homemade bread and butter, and a gallon of muscadine juice -  we left Kentucky headed for my sister in law's house in St. Louis where we planned to Christmas. I didn't feel great about bringing all our diseases into her house, except her kids had Hand, Foot, and Mouth, so we just embraced our germy holiday.

I like to see Jacob around his family. I see parts of him that I don't see anywhere else, and I know it does his little extroverted heart so much good to spend time with them. We played a lot of Dominion and ate a lot of gourmet chocolate and drank lots of wine and martinis.

The stomach bug floated around the house and finally landed back with Lucy June on Christmas morning. The kids woke us up at 5:30 on Christmas morning, and shortly thereafter I found myself in the bathroom cleaning vomit (etc.) off me and my daughter and the floor - because we were covered in vomit (etc.) 

I realized at some point I was living my parenting nightmare: those horror stories you read on blogs when the whole family is sick for a week. I was living it. On Christmas. And as awful awful awful as it had always sounded, it wasn't as bad as I'd expected. It was just...life. And time got us through it.

Now the long roadtrip is over and we're home again in Houston. We'd planned to get home a day sooner, but on our drive home from St Louis, we took a right in Texarkana so we could wish my family a Happy Christmas in Fredericksburg before finally landing in Houston.

Back in Fredericksburg, my brother has strep throat or something, and now my mother is texting me "Flu! Flu! Flu!" and I think have chills and according to our meat thermometer I'm running a temp of 108. So. . .

I think Tootie and Mr. Neely say it best:

I hope your Christmastide is merry and bright. (Illness aside) ours has been quite quite lovely.

How I Came to Love the Crunchy Simple Life (with a side of Mennonites)

Once upon a time I shampooed my hair daily and wore anti-perspirant and had never heard the term lacto-fermentation, and I probably was less annoying then, but let's be real, I was also a lot less cool.

Then enter one son of a hippymama named Jacob Rhodes.

In Los Angeles when Jacob and I were still engaged, my English teacher roommate was arguing with her architect boyfriend one evening about whether potatoes grew above ground or underground. Figuring that I was earthy enough to solve the dilemma, they came and found Jacob and me in the living room and poised the question. I stuttered that I was pretty sure they grew underground even though I wasn't speaking from any kind of experience and looked over at my farmerish fiance for back up. Jacob grinned huge and answered:

"Well the ones we grew always grew underground."

You see, the crunchy ways are not new to Jacob. Jacob was eating kale for breakfast while all other American children were feeling healthy while they snapped, crackled, and popped. But beyond his hippymama, his father had grown up as an old order Mennonite. Horse and buggy Mennonites are nothing if not simple livers, and it was there that I caught the bug.

Jacob lived in the Mennonite community for his junior year of high school and had found some of his dearest friends among his 80ish cousins.

Jacob and brothers and Jack the dog

I'm pretty sure I've posted that photo on the blog before, but there are so few pics from this time in Jacob's life - because of the whole no electricity/no graven image thing - that I'm recycling it. But can you blame me? That's how they dressed the whole year, hats and all!? (He said they would drive the buggy into town and get looks and he just wanted to shout: You've got it all wrong! I'm just like YOU!) (I think it's awesome that my mother in law did this to her teenagers.) (Her teenagers!)

I digress...

Anyhow, when we got engaged it was high time that I met all his paternal relatives in Kentucky. So I went to Goodwill and bought myself some monotone ankle skirts and longsleeve shirts and hopped on a plane to meet my soon to be in-laws.

We walked into his aunt's house late in the evening and the kitchen was lit with one oil lamp and on the table was a huge bowl of popcorn dusted with brewer's yeast that his grandmother had made us. A couple of his cousins came in with their patchy young beards and stared at the ground. Jacob and his brother made Mennonite small talk, and I ate popcorn.

My week visiting the Mennonites was a week of faux pas. One fourteen year old cousin (in the dearest way) treated me like I was nine, and rightly so because I was fumbling all over the place. I talked too much. I slept too late. I went through the men's only entrances. I didn't know anything about anything, and I wanted to know everything, and while my curiosity was kind of flattering to them it was also just awkward. You can't even say things like "darn." I don't know how Jacob turns it off, honestly. He just transitions into Mennonite-speak. I'm the opposite. I'm like a carbonated beverage all shook up in those situations. I trip on my skirt and I say "Shoot." Then "Darn," I realize what I've said. "Geez" I did it again. And it goes on like that for a very embarrassing amount of time. And all the while Jacob is looking at me with raised eyebrows and shaking his head in utter disbelief.

I've digressed again.

Well, it was on this first visit that I encountered the simple life.

I made soap. I hunted fresh eggs. I milked a cow. I witnessed cloth diapering and hand crank washing machines and hang dried clothes and canning and cheesecloths and printing presses and looms. I watched a chicken go from clucking in the yard to boneless skinless tenders in a matter of minutes. Far from being put off, I was thoroughly and royally hooked. The self-sufficiency was so attractive to me.

The real clincher came when I churned butter. Some of the girl cousins and I were walking out to the field where the boys were doing some clearing and one of them had brought a gallon jar of cream. She shook the jar as we walked. I finally got up the gumption to ask her what she was doing and she told me she was churning butter. I asked if I could give it a go and she obliged. So off I walked shaking this gallon jar and watching it. It got thicker as I shook and I made sure to comment on how much it was beginning to look like butter, and the girls just nodded politely. And then it happened. I was shaking this big jar of dense whipped cream when all of a sudden it started sloshing. In a matter of a couple shakes my cream separated, and there I was staring at butter and buttermilk.

The butter sloshing in that jar became a symbol of how far removed I was from the basic ingredients of the life I lived. I was so educated. So so educated. But I didn't even know how to make butter. When I peeked around the blogosphere and found that this whole simple living thing was all kinds of trendy, well I hopped on that wave like white on rice and we're still cruising.

Jacob isn't nearly as gungho about all this business as I am - I'm the overzealous convert -  but he humors me through my various adventures in pickled carrots and probiotic sodas and will probably draw the line somewhere around a self-composting toilet.

I don't want to dump on modern convenience: I like my hot water and slow cooker and refrigerator, but I also just like living in a way that remembers both that food doesn't originate in the grocery store and that the process of making that food is beautiful and rewarding. So I will continue to botch loaf after loaf of bread; I will occasionally find myself stretching mediocre mozzarella; my kitchen will always smell vaguely like bone broth; and every year will bring with it the grandest of gardening aspirations only partially realized.

Mennonite-ing

Sorry for the silence. I'm sure you were here everyday wondering what the Rhodes weren't logging...

I wish life could slow down for a second but somehow I managed to get back from holiday-ing a mere three days before I had to start teaching...so right now I should be writing a syllabus instead of a blog post, but I didn't want to wait to tell you about our most recent adventures. 

In the name of Christmas, we have spent the last three weeks traipsing around the country. We spent Jake's first Christmas in TX. We hung out with family and friends, revisited old running routes, drank too much alcohol, and were generally spoiled. I will send some photos your way soon. After time with my family we adventured with Jacob's.

These adventures were necessarily photo-less. But I will give you a hint that Google afforded me:

Yes, if the post title didn't tip you off, we spent the last part of the holiday with the relatives that don't celebrate holidays...or use electricity.

Since this isn't news to most of my grand followship, I will make a very long story very short: 

Jacob's father used to be an old order Mennonite, so we went to visit Jacob's grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins in Kentucky and Tennessee. Oh. All hundred or so.

Highlights of the trip.

1) Bathing once in ten days. And don't be fooled. By this I mean: washcloth + bucket.

2) Going to bed at 8:30 on New Year's Eve

3) Going to bed at 8:30 every other night.

4) Waking up at 5:30am on New Year's Day.

5) Waking up at 5:30am every other day. Unspeakably difficult for these Pacific Time Zoners.

6) Watching the slaughtering, plucking, and disemboweling of 35 chickens on Tuesday.

7) Eating chicken wings on Wednesday.

8) Not breaking a single oil lamp chimney. (First time I can boast this out of my three visits.)

9) Going for a run in a skirt that reached my ankles.

10) Avoiding flagrant cursing mostly successfully. (i. e. I only said "gosh" three times. This was a marked improvement over previous visits.)

11) Eating scrapple almost every day. (And no. This is in no way related to Snapple. Couldn't be more different actually...)

12) Successfully chopping firewood with a saw and an axe. (Jacob graciously reminds me that, no, I used a two-man crosscut and a splitting maul, but I figure you, my readers, won't be so semantically obsessive.)

Jacob and his mother and brothers and sister lived there for a year while he was a Junior in high school and for a few summers. I'm always thoroughly touched by how much the Mennonite relatives love Jacob and his family--a love that is richly extending to me and little Jake. I was touched by it more this visit...probably because I was able to stop wondering if my head covering was falling off every other minute.

 

I was overwhelmed by the sensitivity of a people whose austere facades can deceive you into thinking they lack emotion. Relatives recounted details of our previous visits to me as if they'd happened yesterday. Scraps of paper where I had doodled some young cousins' names three years ago were displayed to me memorialized in a baby book. On a walk, one of Jacob's cousins told us how sometimes she wished she'd never met Jacob because of how much it hurts when he leaves.

I must cut off abruptly. So much to say. So little time to say it. Or at least say it well.

Away to my schoolwork.