apple butter

There is an apple orchard here at the settlement, this spring when the trees were in bloom there was a week where temperatures stayed below freezing and all of their crop was lost. We were fortunate enough to have volunteers donate 28 bushels of apples for making apple butter. I don't think that I have ever eaten apple butter, let alone had a clue about how to make it. I will give a little overview with some pictures.

We begin with washing, quartering and slightly cooking the apples:

The mushy quarters are then run through a grinder/strainer leaving us with applesauce.

This was all done on Monday.

Early on Tuesday (7:30) we started cooking and stirring, we used a 40 gallon copper cauldron.

David (the farm manager) stirred, while Norm (volunteer and apple butter guru) added sauce.

Norm (guru), Danny and Dully (farm workers) stirred, I stirred too but there is no evidence.

We added 60 pounds of sugar, cinnamon oil and cinnamon candies.

At 2 pm it was time to can, lid and box it up.

We ended up with 309 pint jars. We will start at 7 am again tomorrow for another batch.

Amazing Find from the Opportunity Store

This is the first in what I hope will be an ongoing series. I think I mentioned earlier that the Opportunity Store is Henderson Settlement's thrift store. It sells second-hand clothing, housewares, and miscellany. Here is Amazing Find Number One.

artichoke candle

our first visitor!

Ok, so I'm a little behind in posting breaking news.

This past weekend, we had our first visitor--Abby! Hooray! Here's a small photoessay about our weekend together:

Saturday, after a nice omelet breakfast cooked by Eric, we visited the Opportunity Store (Henderson Settlement's thrift store). Eric was opposed to all three of us buying 50-cent matching jackets that said Voyageur. Oh well.

We then headed to town, had lunch at Sonic, where our server brought our food to the car on roller skates. Then we took off for Cumberland Gap National Park.

At the park, we hiked part of a trail and explored a cave,

found a giant millipede on the trail,

saw beautiful scenery,

crossed state lines,

drove to Pinnacle Overlook (because we didn't feel tough enough to hike there),

and learned a little history.

Then we went to Dairy Queen (ice cream is a necessity for occasions like this), shopped for groceries, and came home. In between hanging out and watching movies, we ate Mexican for supper, and Abby made us fun star-shaped brownies!

After church on Sunday, we gave Abby the grand tour of Henderson Settlement, which is decked out in its fall colors.

We didn't make it to the Knoxville Zoo or to mini-golf, but we can save those for next time! We were so excited to have Abby come and visit--it's a nice switch that she used to be among our friends who lived the farthest from us, but now she's the closest!

ministry

Last week, we mentioned about some young-ish work campers who were here, one of them being Jennifer. Jennifer is a hair dresser. Now some of you may remember that I got a haircut that I wasn't too fond of a couple of months ago. She trimmed it so that it'll grow back better AND so that I can see better, and I really appreciated that! She spent a good chunk of one afternoon between her work camp assignment and dinner giving trims to several of the ladies. Obviously, she's someone who's happy to share her talents.

There was one woman in particular, though, whom Jennifer helped to recover from a particularly bad haircut that she had received the week before. You should have seen this woman when Jennifer finished with her--she was BEAMING. She was so happy to have her hair fixed that it totally made her week.

Later, Jennifer's boyfriend Stuart said that she had her own ministry. I completely agree with him. Jennifer has the ability to help people look their best, which makes them feel good about themselves and give them confidence. This is an amazing gift! I hadn't thought to put hair dressers on the top of the list of people who minister to others, but now I've changed my mind. I have to be more careful to watch how people in all kinds of professions minister to the people around them.

And Stuart, Jennifer, and Seth--if you're reading this, thanks so much for hanging out with us. We really enjoyed your company.

dirt poor

Last weekend we went to take a look at a cemetery that is near the "lower farm" of Henderson Settlement. I was taken aback at what I found there. It was a small family cemetery and there were maybe a hundred headstones, half of which were like the ones above. I only saw one with the full name written out on it, there were some with initials and many more with no markings or markings that had been worn off. Poverty had followed these people to death.

one-month anniversary!

Tomorrow is my sister and her husband's one-month wedding anniversary. In honor of that, I've finished putting pictures from their wedding on our picture website. (Yes, it has taken me an entire month to do it. I have ADD, ok?)

You can see the pictures by clicking here, but here's a preview:

photos

Because a few of you have been not-so-subtly hinting that you'd like to see pictures, here are a few:

the bulls

cows (this one's mad 'cause her calf was weaned)

lots of mums!

Eric feeding the pigs

the library

children's room in the library

warning: bad jokes

I have settled into a routine, Monday mornings I help to get work groups set up with their tools and supplies. I will continue to do this until the work camp season slows down at the end of the month. The rest of the week first thing in the morning I usually go to feed grain to the calves and bulls and make sure they have water. After that I have been doing whatever has been needed, water mums, build fence, clear brush, split wood, etc. I am gaining blisters and a farmers tan. Starting this Friday I will begin looking for grants in search of at least one to write for. It will be nice to put some of my social work education to use.

This week I have worked with Ray, he is a local volunteer and we have built some fence and split a lot of wood. Ray has quit smoking, but when he says that he quit I assume he means cigarettes because he still smokes grape flavored swisher sweets, If I have to be a second hand smoker that is my smoke of choice. Ray is funny and has a heavy accent, sometimes hard to understand. He is inventive, he has build his own car from scratch, which he calls his "buggy". I will share two jokes he told me, I don't think I understand them but they are still funny(I give warning that the first one is a bit crude).

Q: What do you get when you cross an ass and an onion?
A: An ass that will make you cry!

Q: What do you call a farmer with a sheep under each arm?
A: A playboy!

And a News Update: Seth kept all the eggs down.

night life in Frakes

Today has been an interesting day.

Last week was pretty boring in the library--the kids were on fall break, so much of the staff in the Outreach Department was on vacation, so I was just doing some work with donations--dispersing and adding books to the collection. I was beginning to think that I was working out a system to start to get ahead and clean things up.

Boy, was I wrong.

This morning we unloaded a moving truck full of stuff. And when I say, "full of stuff," I mean that there were upwards of 500 boxes and bags full of things like clothes, VBS material, toys, blankets, Christmas gifts, baby items, fishing poles......and books. When all the boxes of books were unloaded, they filled an area in the hallway roughly four feet high, twelve feet long, and six feet deep. Needless to say, I was overwhelmed. About half of those books were gradeschool textbooks, and we are able to do NOTHING with them. Thanks to Better World Books, however, I'm hoping that they will end up serving some good! The rest I will have to deal with, though--leaving me right back where I started when I arrived. Oh, well--as one of the work campers put it today, it's good job security!

This week at work camp there are *gasp* a few young people! There are three people (Stewart, Jennifer, and Seth) that we kind of clicked with, and we hung out with them for a while tonight. Because Brenda is on vacation this week, we were without our Tuesday night homemade ice cream, so we decided to walk to the local gas station/convenient mart/pizza place to get a snack. As we were checking out, Seth noticed a jar of pickled eggs on the counter. "I love pickled eggs!" he said, and right away the guy behind the counter (Terry) said, "Then I have a deal for you."

Apparently, Terry's been issuing the Pickled Egg Challenge to work campers for two years, and nobody had taken him up on it. He bet that Seth couldn't eat more pickled eggs than he could, and right away Seth said that he'd try it. There were sixteen eggs in the jar. We couldn't believe it--keep in mind that Seth had just eaten an ice cream cone and had eaten meatloaf and green beans for supper. But he did it! Terry and Seth each downed eight pickled eggs--an amazing scene to watch. Terry offered to continue the contest by drinking the brine left in the jar, or by opening up a new gallon-sized jar of pickled eggs, but ultimately it was declared a tie.

We have found the best entertainment in Frakes.

Oh, and we'll make sure to report on whether or not Seth makes it through the night tonight without puking.

the long and winding road...

We decided that the best way to help you to understand the roads in this part of the country was to take a video of what it looks like to drive the roads.

A few things to keep in mind while watching this:

• This road is the quickest route between Frakes and Middlesboro (a town akin to Tunkhannock--maybe a little bigger--or Cortland--minus the university), and EVERYONE uses it.


• There are memorials on trees alongside the road.


• The scenery and the views are beautiful on this stretch of road, and it can be distracting.


• On one side of the road (where we were driving), you're up against the mountainside. On the other side, you're right next to a steep drop-off.


• There are no guard rails at any point on this road.


• This road is in good shape, and it's wider than many roads around here.

The song you're hearing the back ground is "Henry Lee" by Dick Justice. I apologize for the poor quality of the video--if I can figure out how to make it better, I'll fix it.

"It's a southern thang, y'all wouldn't understand"

I observed this quote and the confederate flag on a shirt at the local fall festival this past weekend. I'm not sure what to do when confronted with the symbol, which is very prevalent in the area and just today observed on an employee vehicle. I want to yell at people and tell them to stop being racist, but I know that this would be fruitless. A southerner may argue that it is a symbol of southern pride, I would counter that It would be difficult to find a proud black southerner who would raise it. To me this still makes it a symbol of southern white pride.

At the same fall festival I observed at least three interracial couples in attendance. I was pleasantly surprised by this and wondered if I had not given enough credit to the progression of the south.

I would be interested in your thoughts for a Yankee that just doesn't understand.

On a lighter note, more cultural observations:

• There are an abundance of bright fake plastic flowers at the cemeteries.
• If you go to Knoxville Tennessee on game day there are 100,000 people wearing volunteer orange.
• There are many old trucks, in various stages of repair and disrepair.

the library

As my Aunt Barb mentioned in her comment on my previous post, it turns out that I have become THE librarian for the Henderson Settlement Library.

This. Is. AWESOME.

The librarian (Elizabeth) who was running the library up until she left about a month ago did an amazing job of getting the library into shape. This is not a public library, mind you, nor is it part of any public library system. It is a two-room, backwoods library, but because of Elizabeth's expertise and some funding for the after-school program, this library is fully functional, complete with barcoded books, and OPAC, a special collection, and connections with the public school.

In the four days that I've been here, I've done the following:

• visited the elementary school to give away books for the RIF program to kids from preschool through eighth grade
• supervised volunteers (workcampers here for the week) in sorting through a massive pile of donated books
• connected with librarians from three schools within the school district so they can look through donated books to see if there are any that they can use
• figured out how to take care of Henderson's portion of the payment for the RIF books
• pawed through donations to see what would and would not be appropriate for inclusion in the collection
• downloaded MARC records and put them into the computer system
• processed books and put them into the collection

In the next few weeks, I think I'll start planning the story times that one of the staff members does for the Raising a Reader program, and eventually, I might get to do storytimes myself. This is really exciting to me! The one thing I have to work on, though, is paying attention to what sorts of materials I should include in the adult portion of the library--I've been spending so much time with children's literature, and I haven't paid any attention to what adults like.

One of the unique problems of this particular library is that the collection size is limited by weight. See, the building that holds the Community Center (part of which is the library) is very old, and the floor is not that strong. In fact, it's wavy.

Another interesting problem is donations. When I arrived at the Community Center on Monday morning, the hallway outside of the library was littered with boxes upon boxes of books that had been brought by workgroups. When I went into the library, there were about ten bins full of children's books and three tables stacked with books that had been donated to Henderson Settlement. Some of it's good--some of it's terrible. I'm learning, though, that the give-away shelf out in the hall does get picked through on a regular basis, and the school librarians are happy to come and look through the children's books because their book budgets are tiny.

Have I typed too much? I'm just so excited about this!

hills are awesome.

I am feeling a small burn in my legs from walking up so many hills. Maybe I'll stop growing out of my pants this year!

first impressions

Today was our first day of work, I worked on the farm watering mums, feeding bulls and working in the garden. We spoke with the director Sunday night and this morning he gave us a tour and introduced to us more people than we will remember. I may not be working solely on the farm, I will work a few different places and see where I am most useful. The director is interested in the possibility of "cleaning house" and getting rid of junk everywhere, I may also do some development work or other social work type duties, it seems up in the air right now and that is ok. Oh, and I may get to coach a youth basketball team, I remember playing one season of youth basketball and I was rather poor...check that, very poor, but in the haymow I was akin to Michael Jordan.

Here are some cultural observations that I have noticed since we got here on Saturday.

• There are many four-wheelers on the road used as transportation.
• Sometimes there are gunshots to be heard.
• The road signs have bullet holes in them. (good to know what they are aiming at)
• Everyone waves while driving...everyone.
• Everyone is related, not stereotypical related, just related.
• 3 of 12 stations on basic cable are continually preaching the word of God.

There will be more cultural observations in the future I'm sure.