Doing it Yourself Changes You

This week I've been off work and have had more time to experiment with something I've wanted to try ever since I got a book for my birthday, Back to Basics. This is a "complete guide to traditional skills" and covers everything from buying ranch land, and building windmills, to canning, braiding rugs, and canoeing. The project that seemed most immediately within my grasp was cheese making. If you've been following my tweets this week, you've see the blow-by-blow. If not, you can check out the photos.

Anyway, messing around with the curds and whey has been a great experience. I like this kind of thing a lot. I find myself in the middle of something just beyond what I know, and yet I realize that only a generation or so ago, many women and men knew how to do this very thing. It was second nature, like operating a word-processing or spreadsheet program is to me, perhaps. And, almost always, something about an ordinary food or other part of my life, makes a new kind of sense. Now, for instance, I know that cheddaring is a process, and I know how much milk it takes to make a certain amount of cheese.

This sounds like a small thing, and I guess in one way it is. But I look at it also in this way: by following a practice from a time before everything came pre-packaged, I open myself up to all of this:

• understanding the steps built into the finished products I do buy;
• appreciating the labor of the people who perform those steps;
• joy in being able to perform new skills;
• delight in producing high quality, fresh products (when I'm lucky!); and
  
• gaining new information about the stuff of everyday life. 

In short, it changes me a little, which is cool.