The Word of the Year is No

I’ve made 41 quarts of salsa. I am tempted to stop there, but one of the freezers still contains about 20 gallon zip bags of tomatoes. Christmas is breathing down my neck, however. DD#2 arrives Monday night and I need to have her room cleaned before she gets here. That means folding up the cutting table and moving it to one of the other rooms. Anything I need to cut has to be done before she gets here. The kitchen is a disaster area—it always gets that way when I’m canning—and also needs a thorough cleaning. I’ve got a worship team meeting tomorrow morning, a serger class tomorrow afternoon, and church on Sunday morning. I am skipping Christmas caroling this year, which is scheduled for Sunday afternoon. As much as I enjoy caroling, I could not shoehorn one more thing in this weekend. I’ve also got to practice for the Christmas Eve service, and put the order of worship with the songs into a notebook so I don’t have to keep switching books at the piano.

Our homesteading chat group has a tradition of picking a “word of the year,” inspired by Nicole Sauce at the Living Free in Tennessee podcast. We were discussing everyone’s choices last week and I said that I thought my word of the year for 2023 was going to be NO. That was only partially a tongue-in-cheek comment. I plan to be very clear about what I am and am not willing to commit to in 2023. My schedule and my activities are going to get priority.

This has been an ongoing struggle for 20 years now. People assume that if you don’t have a “real job,” you must be sitting around doing nothing. Ha. I get more done before lunchtime than most people do all day. And I do have a “real job.” It just happens to be located at my house. Not only am I canning up a year’s supply of salsa, I grew all the ingredients, too. That didn’t happen magically.

[Amy Dingmann of a Farmish Kind of Life had a wonderful podcast episode about this on Tuesday. It’s about 30 minutes long and definitely worth a listen.]

I’m also aware that mission creep is a real thing when it comes to volunteer activities. Four of us at church were asked to be on the committee to find an interim pastor. That was our mandate: find and recommend an interim pastor to serve for 12-18 months after our current pastor’s retirement. As time went on, we found ourselves being referred to as the “transition team,” and the next thing I knew, everyone assumed that we were also going to be managing the period of time between our pastor’s retirement and the start of the interim pastor’s term. (It was unclear how long that period of time would be, and, depending on which candidate we hired, it could have been as long as four months.) I pointed out that we had not signed up for that job. I watch carefully for situations where others assume that if I am doing this, then I must also be willing to be responsible for that, because that is related to this.

And some things are just going to stop happening. Those of us around a certain age (get off my lawn) talk about this all the time. Younger people do not seem to have the commitment to volunteer activities that most of us were raised to have. Everyone wants the benefits with none of the work. Our fire chief has served tirelessly for close to four decades, and none of that came with a paycheck. That’s simply what you do when you belong to a community. If no one is going to step up, though, to replace those who are getting older, some things just won’t happen anymore.

Here endeth my sermon. I’ve got serger classes on the schedule for at least the first half of 2023 and other activities will be fit in as I have time.

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This is one of my favorite seasons of the year. I love the hush in the late afternoon when I go out to do the chicken chores. The light is much more subdued. Some people call it gloomy. I call it restful.

The mountains were gorgeous the other afternoon. This is the view from our front porch.

I’m off to finish the salsa project.