Boiling a Frog

Have you heard the story about how you can boil a frog? Supposedly if you put a frog in cool water and slowly raise the temperature to boiling the frog will just sit there. It's one of those shortcut phrases that describes how we make little changes, one at a time, and then a few years down the road our lives are transformed.

I bought my home 6 years ago. My husband had developed a variety of mental illness that doesn't show up until middle age. I knew I'd end up a single parent and I needed to lower my overhead and my stress level at the same time. I bought a little house that needed a LOT of work but it was cheap. About the price of a decent car.

I did what I could. I bought a clothes washer but not a dryer. We hung our clothes on the line for most of the year and over the floor furnace in the winter. I started the garden that became the Farm Share business. I bought some chickens.

Then I bought some more chickens and an incubator to hatch even more. We got turkeys (they were very tasty). I re-learned how to can and dehydrate my own foods. Then came pickling.

I slowly realized how much undesirable junk is in the stuff we buy from the store. I learned to make laundry soap, and vinegar, and shampoo, and toothpaste...you see where this is going. We don't go to town for groceries anymore, we go for supplies.

This year we tripled the garden space and acquired two goats. Next year I'm determined to finally get bees.

This morning I woke up and had that moment, the one where you see clearly how far you've come. It feels pretty good. My life doesn't look anything like it did 6 years ago. Except for the cats, I'll always have too many cats. lol.