30 Days of Thankfulness – Day 3

Today I’m so thankful for rainy autumn days. Michigan is always pleasant and lovely, but in autumn, the land is wildly, strikingly beautiful. Everywhere I go I see soft brown and crimson hills sloping into mist, crowned with feathery woods of burnt orange and bright gold. The colors stand out even more richly on grey, overcast days of steady autumn rain.



I’m also thankful for fresh eggs. We ordered chicks in May and have been raising a little flock of 30 assorted laying hens all summer. Just last week they started laying and it has been so much fun to hunt around for a hidden brown egg or two each day when we move their pen to fresh grass. Today, however, we were excited to find six eggs, including a sea green one courtesy of one of our Ameraucana ladies.





But most of all, I’m so thankful for a quiet evening with my best friend, eating black bean chipotle chili and Cornish pasties for dinner on this cold, rainy evening, and then snuggling up to watch The Emperor’s New Groove. (Grown-ups do that, right?).

30 Days of Thankfulness – Day 2

Today I’m thankful for the bountiful supply of Michigan apples which Will and I have been enjoying this year. I’ve never really had a taste for apples before, even when my family lived in Washington state and they were readily available – I didn’t have a wild dislike for them really, but I usually got bored halfway through eating one. I’ve never really understood why that tempting forbidden fruit that Eve tasted was always depicted as an apple, or why you’d call a loved one the “apple of your eye,” or why Hera wanted Hercules to steal the apples of the Hesperides. Okay, well... I guess that last one I can understand, the apples in question being all golden and mysterious and guarded by a dragon and what-not. Still, a golden pineapple would have been much more impressive. In short, my relationship with apples has always been apathetic at best. However, living within a few miles of more family-run apple orchards than I could shake a stick at (however many that mythical number may be), I’ve begun to see the appeal. I never knew there were so many unique varieties, or how crisp and refreshingly tart-sweet a newly-picked apple can be.

Will and I have been enjoying munching on Crispins and Ginger Golds, but I’ve also been enjoying finding other uses for them. I made a few pies with our Ida Golds, and tried my hand at apple butter for the first time today. We had an overabundance of Cortlands, so I tried this recipe. It was super convenient in that it practically cooked itself all day while I worked around the house and ran errands with Will – all I had to do at the end of the day was heat up the canner, spoon the finished apple butter into jars, and process them for 10 minutes before I went to bed. The best part was how the delicious scent of simmering apples and spices filled up the kitchen all day. It made our home feel like such a cozy oasis, especially with the bright gold and orange of the leaves outside the kitchen window and the patter of cold rain on the panes.

Photo via allrecipes.com

All Day Apple Butter
Adapted from allrecipes.com
Prep Time: 30-90 minutes*
Cook time: 11 hours
Ready in: 11 hours 30 minutes
Servings: 128 (fills about 3-4 pint jars)

Ingredients

• 5 1/2 pounds apples (peeled, cored, and finely chopped)
• 3 1/2 cups white sugar
• 2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
• 1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
• 1/4 teaspoon salt

Directions

1. Place the chopped apples in your crock pot. In a medium bowl, mix the sugar, cinnamon, cloves, and salt. Pour the mixture over the apples in the slow cooker and mix well.
2. Cover and cook on high for 1 hour.
3. Reduce heat to low and cook for 9 hours (longer if necessary), stirring occasionally, until the mixture is thickened and dark brown.
4. Uncover and continue cooking on low for 1 hour. Stir with a whisk, if desired, to increase smoothness.
5. Spoon the mixture into sterile containers, cover, and refrigerate or freeze. I spooned mine into warm, sterile canning jars and processed them for 10 minutes in the canner so I could store them in the pantry.

*Note: The original recipe stated that prep time should take about 30 minutes. It's very possible that it might go that quickly if you are using large apples, or wrangle up a group of friends to help you, or are simply an apple chopping maniac, but it took me quite a bit longer to peel, core, and finely chop 30 apples or so. Plan accordingly. :)

30 Days of Thankfulness – Day 1

Every time I sit down to write a post, I can’t decide where to start, so I thought this might be a good exercise to get myself posting again. After all, there is always something to be thankful for. :)

I am so thankful for William. Life with him gets sweeter every day, and I am so grateful to have such a cheerful, kind, funny, thoughtful, generous, hard-working, faithful, Godly man as my best friend and beloved. I’m thankful that he is so encouraging and cheers me on in even the smallest of successes, and that he is firm in his leadership and willing to confront me in love when I am stubborn. I am thankful for the way he treats every outing as a date, even if it’s just grocery shopping. I’m thankful for Will’s spontaneity and joy of life. I’m thankful for the hilarious things he says in his sleep at 2 am. I’m thankful for his special talent at making the most delicious fried chicken hearts you’ve ever tasted. I’m thankful that he’s never embarrassed to be caught belting out snatches of country songs I’ve never heard of. And most of all, I’m so thankful for all his tenderness, care, and love, and for the way he portrays Christ to me every day.

I could never have imagined the way in which we met, so I am also extraordinarily thankful that God brought us together in the first place. After I graduated from New Saint Andrews college, the one friend I stayed especially close with was the lovely Karyn. I even flew up to visit her in Michigan during September 2011, to celebrate her 21st birthday. While I was there, one of the adventures she had planned for us was to go bowling in Grand Rapids with some friends of hers who had been home-schooled and went to a sister church. She said she thought I might hit it off with the oldest girls especially, so I was curious to meet them. At the bowling alley we met the four oldest siblings: Beck, Will, Grace, and Joe. We had fun chatting and bowling for a few hours, then decided to go get some dinner. We walked around and popped our heads into various places before stopping at an Indian restaurant which turned out to be a little overpriced and had a gigantic tv playing distracting Indian melodramas right next to our table. Still, we had a nice time chatting over dinner. I sat near Beck and Grace and mostly directed my attention to them, since they were the ones I was apparently supposed to be meeting. I also decided that this would be a perfect opportunity for Karyn to meet a nice, local, Christian guy, (after all, their birthdays were one day apart! What else does one need for marital felicity?), so I craftily attempted to give Will and Karyn plenty of time to talk to one another. When we went home after dinner, Karyn asked me what I thought of the family, and Will in particular.

“Karyn, I thought you said there weren’t any nice reformed guys around here for you to meet! What about Will? He’s like-minded, interesting… kind of cute….” I gave her an encouraging smile.

Karyn quickly assured me that Will was not her type and that she didn’t really see herself marrying a homeschooled farmer, but didn’t I think he was nice? I did think Will and his family had seemed rather nice, and that we all might have been friends if we hadn’t grown up in completely different states, but I airily dismissed the whole thing, reminding her that there was no way I would probably ever see them again. I had no idea that, a month earlier, Karyn had told Will at a church picnic that I was coming for a visit and that she would like him to meet me. We both were interested in animals and farming, and we were both homeschooled, reformed, and (strangely enough) receptionists, so she thought we might hit it off. They planned the whole bowling trip and Will brought his siblings along to keep things comfortable. I never suspected, and (perhaps partly because I managed to foil the whole plan by closeting myself with Will's sisters) neither of us came away from our encounter with any definite impressions about the other.

About six months later, in March 2012, I found out that it was possible to keep chickens in our neighborhood, and knew exactly what to ask for my birthday. As my Dad and I built a chicken coop in the backyard and I researched chicken varieties, Karyn teased me that I should really ask William about my endeavor. The things I mostly remembered about Will from our brief encounter were:

1. He raised chicken and sheep on his family’s farm and sold the meat.
2. He was working as a receptionist at Holiday Inn Express at the time.
3. He did not like Taylor Swift music.

The last one, I am afraid to report, made me nervous as I may or may not own several of her cds. I was also still oblivious to the hidden agenda of the failed bowling scheme. In any case, when Karyn and my brother joined forces in encouraging me to ask Will’s advice, I finally gave in and sent him a message on Facebook, which he had just recently joined. Will was very helpful and after we exchanged email addresses I submitted several quandaries about the care and keeping of chickens, to which Will courteously replied. We didn’t write for about a month, but when Will finally checked back in with me on the status of my chickens in late May, our emails puttered back into existence with a few polite questions about our families’ health and the habits of chickens. A few weeks passed and Will told me the story of how his family got into farming, and asked why I had chosen to study nursing. I wrote and explained how I was interested in biology, liked caring for people, and thought a four-year degree might come in handy if I ever got the chance to homeschool my own kids one day. Will promptly asked what class size I would prefer to be blessed with. (so subtle… I love that guy). I was a little taken aback to receive such a personal question, so I told my parents, who knew I was writing Will about chickens, that the emails seemed inexplicably to be drifting off the subject of chickens. About a week later as Dad sat down to breakfast, he informed me that Will had written and asked if he could court me. I nearly choked in astonishment (the good kind of astonishment).

Will courted me for the next few months by email and three-hour-long phone calls, and somehow between Will’s busy work schedule and my first semester of nursing school we managed to visit four times. On December 12th I flew up to visit Karyn as we celebrated the end of the semester. The next evening Will picked me up and drove me back over to the west side of the state, where we had a very delicious dinner at a beautiful Italian restaurant before returning to his family’s house. I spent the night in their pole barn (fitted out as guest quarters), where a crackling fire in the stove and a very sweet letter on my pillow awaited me. I scrambled out of bed before sunrise on December 14th (because of my nursing school schedule, we got up every morning between 4 and 5am to read the Bible and pray together over the phone) and got dressed, and at 5am Will entered bearing a tray of beautifully displayed coffee, grits, and dried fruit. He built a cozy fire and we had a little coffee “tea party” and had a wonderful time laughing over breakfast and exchanging Christmas gifts. After breakfast Will took out his Bible to start devotions, but instead of our usual Proverb, he began reading specially chosen verses alternated with certain meaningful emails he had written to my Dad about me. By the time he got to Proverbs 31 and a last note written just for me, he was tearing up (and so was I), and out of nowhere a beautiful diamond ring appeared from the pages of his Bible and he was on one knee asking if I would be his wife.

I said yes.

Sometimes I wonder… what if my family hadn’t started going to the CREC church-plant in NC where one of the couples recommended that I look into NSA during the very year I was applying to college? What if I hadn’t gotten a scholarship which allowed me to return to NSA my sophomore year and become good friends with Karyn? (We hardly spent any time together at all during my first year). What if we hadn’t kept in touch after we graduated? What if Karyn hadn’t met Will once or twice through church, decided we had a lot in common, and suggested that he meet me? What if I hadn’t realized I could keep chickens the very next year? What if I hadn’t written Will to ask about them? In theory, I was always one easy circumstance away from never meeting Will at all, and that is why I am overwhelmingly, joyfully thankful for him, and for how God works in mysterious ways His wonders to perform, and we can do nothing in our own strength to bring about one jot of it.