I have always been fascinated by stories of life on the American frontier, as described by Laura Ingalls Wilder in her Little House in the Big Woods children’s classics. The author mentions her mother making candles, soap, flour, butter, cheese, and bread, and even weaving the fabric to sew their clothing. Her father knew how to dig for fresh water, build a house out of prairie sod, plant crops, and shoot partridges and rabbits for the family’s meals. In contrast to these pioneers, if we landed in the prairie without our indoor plumbing, effortless heating, and supermarkets, most of us would be about as independent as newborn babies!
The denizens of the Old West were self-sufficient by necessity, but even today, some people choose to do things the old fashioned way – just because. Although they can buy vegetables in the supermarket and readymade clothes in the mall, they prefer to plant a garden and sew a wardrobe. Although they can hire a caterer and a cleaning lady, they prefer to cook for their own simchas and clean their own houses.
It seems paradoxical; why make extra work for ourselves? There are many reasons: For some of us, it is a way of life we learned from our parents. Or, it may stem from a desire to protect the environment, feel close to G-d, train children, or to acquire survival skills. Often, it is about saving money. And then there is the satisfaction of creating something, and the feeling that whatever I make or do myself will be far more meaningful than anything I could buy in a store.
As I Saw at Home
All of us reach adulthood with expectations of what life is supposed to be like, based on what we saw our parents do. For example, my mother never had cleaning help when I was growing up, so when I had my own household, it never entered my mind to hire someone to clean. After I had a few children, my downstairs neighbor thought I could use a cleaning lady and sent one up to my house. I was not accustomed to this, and felt very uncomfortable. Even though I do have cleaning help now, it is still difficult for me to tell someone what to do. I find myself thinking, “I could do that myself; why should I ask her to do it?”
Another thing my mother always did was give the male members of our family haircuts. I, too, purchased a hair cutting machine and gave my children haircuts. I assumed that was the way to do things, until my sons decided that my haircuts were not professional enough. The haircutting machine is now collecting dust in the closet.
“My father always assembled all our purchases and fixed things in the house,” says Leah*. “He once even installed air conditioning following the directions from a library book. It was because of my father’s influence that my husband decided to replace a leaking pipe under the sink. I was so proud of him. He never would have thought to do that before, but it saved us a lot of money.”
Food Comes from the Ground
The Ingalls family in the Little House series ate what they gathered wild or grew on their own. During the summer, they ate lots of vegetables, which they canned for the winter, when nothing grew. Today, I don’t know of anyone who relies completely on vegetables they grow themselves, but several Baltimoreans garden extensively, even in the city.
Last year, the Where What When ran a series of articles on gardening written by Avraham Cohen, a local artist. He explains his reasons for growing vegetables, even though he could go to the store and buy them: “Who doesn’t want to adorn their table with homegrown and fresh-picked produce from the garden? You just can’t compare the taste and quality of a homegrown tomato (or pepper, cucumber, lettuce, or squash) with that of those that come from the store. And shouldn’t your kids (or grandkids) know that vegetables come from seeds, and that the good earth is the ultimate source of the blessings Hashem has bestowed upon us? Every year, the child in me still wonders at the miracle of a seed sprouting from fresh soil.”
Aaron S, another member of our community, is an organic gardener and a wine maker. He has a greenhouse and a large garden, where he grows many kinds of vegetables, including tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, horseradish, kale, and mustard greens. He uses no chemical fertilizers or pesticides. Instead, he composts, using food waste from the kitchen, grass, and leaves. These waste materials decompose and make very rich fertilizer for the soil. Aaron grows lots of flowers as well.
Aaron makes both sweet and dry wine, using grapes imported from California. “The process starts with crushing the grapes,” he says. “The grapes are full of sugar, and the skin has natural yeast. The sugar and yeast start the fermentation process. Wines that are sweet have more sugar than alcohol, and dry wines have more alcohol than sugar.” All this takes place in Aaron’s shed. After six months, Aaron bottles his wine. He doesn’t sell the wine, rather drinks it himself and gives it to friends.
When I asked Aaron why he does all this, he said. “I feel a tremendous connection with the Creator of the world through His creations. I came to the belief in G-d through His works. Also, I believe we have lost touch with how to survive. If stores shut down, most of us would be lost. Our kids do not know that tomatoes do not grow on a green tray wrapped in cellophane. Gardening is also a way of staying active, instead of exercise just for exercise’s sake.
Shoshana*, another avid gardener, is growing sugar snap peas, tomatoes, jalapeno peppers, onions, green beans, and raspberries this year. She also composts, using two composters: a wire bin and a compost tumbler. She puts food scraps and shredded leaves into the closed compost tumbler, because animals can’t get into it. The wire bin has a green layer and a brown layer. The green layer is made of weeds and dead flowers, and the brown layer comprises dead leaves. It takes about two months to make humus, Shoshana explained. The humus is added to the soil and is a great fertilizer. “I hate throwing away kitchen scrapes,” she said. “It is so amazing how Hashem created the world so that the bacteria, worms, and fungi decompose waste, which is then used to bring new life to the world. I enjoy being part of that process.”
Another member of our community produces a natural food product. Kathy Harris is a beekeeper. Kathy first builds her hives, which are wooden boxes with frames inside them. Once the frames are filled with honey, they weigh about 45 pounds each.
Kathy starts the hive by buying a starter kit consisting of worker bees and a queen bee. After a couple of months, every bee in the hive is related to the queen bee. Speaking with Kathy, I was amazed to hear about the wondrous lives of bees. Bees’ reproduction is vastly different from that of most other creatures. Only the queen bee lays eggs; this is her only job in the hive. Unfertilized eggs create male bees, or drones. Fertilized eggs produce the worker bees. Worker bees are infertile females; they are the ones that collect nectar and make honey. The queen bee is fertilized by male bees, which die immediately afterwards. She is only fertilized once and then has the capacity to continue laying about 2,000 eggs a day for a very long time.
This year, Kathy has no functioning hives, because the bees did not last through the winter. Although it’s not unusual for bees to die over the winter, Kathy is very concerned, because bees have been dying all over the country, and whole colonies have disappeared. People speculate that this may be caused by pesticides that are in the seeds of plants that are being sold. Bees are necessary to help with the pollination of plants, and their loss can cause a decrease in the amount of food that we can grow.
Beekeeping is a hobby for Kathy: “I love honey, gardening, and insects,” she says. “They bring the wonders of G-d’s world into focus.”
Saving Money, Being Independent
Today, we walk into the supermarket and buy ingredients like flour, raw vegetables, and meats to cook our meals “from scratch.” We forget that people used to make their own ingredients. The mother in the Little House in the Big Woods ground her flour, grew and canned her vegetables, and processed her meat before she could even start to cook a meal.
Recently, I prepared the Shabbos lunch at shul for my grandson’s bar mitzva. Just for the fun of it, I decided to keep a strict accounting of all the money I spent. I wanted to see if I saved money. I wasn’t sure if cooking myself would really be economical, because a lot is spent on the ingredients and you keep on running out of items and returning to the store again and again. After adding up all the receipts, however, I saw that I actually saved a lot. Of course, I was the bubby of the bar mitzva boy, so I did not have to worry about any other aspects of the simcha. For me, cooking was stress free.
Some people take great pride in preparing for a simcha themselves. Recently, Chani* prepared the whole bar mitzva for her son: all the Shabbos meals and the bo bayom. She even baked the cakes for the kiddush. I was amazed at how much work she had undertaken. “Did you do this to save money,” I asked her.
“I guess my basic thought was to save money,” Chani said. “I did not keep track of my expenses, but I am sure it was a lot cheaper than having everything catered. I think the real reason, though, is that cooking for my own simcha is something that comes naturally to me. I come from a small town where there are no kosher caterers and people just naturally cooked themselves. My sisters all came to the bar mitzva expecting to help set up and clean up, and I do the same when I go to their simchas. I also am a good delegator, so I was able to accept offers of help from friends and neighbors. My fifth-grade daughter and her friends had a great time helping to make cookies. I saved jobs for them that I knew they would enjoy.”
Although cooking for a simcha may save a lot of money, it also is a lot of work. It involves not only cooking the food but presenting it nicely, serving it, and cleaning up. A person has to weigh the amount of work involved with the money saved. A young mother of three boys said, “For our first two brisim, we bought all the food but set up everything ourselves. That involved having family come before the bris to set the tables and stay afterwards to clean and pack up. I felt bad having my parents work so hard, so for my third bris I had the whole thing catered. It did not cost much more and I felt much better not having to ask the family to help.”
Mr. & Mrs. Klein*, of Baltimore, also pride themselves on doing as much as they can on their own to save money. They tiled their own basement and bathroom. “We learned how to lay ceramic tile by watching You Tube videos, and we bought the tile on Craig’s List, so it cost next to nothing,” says Mrs. Klein. Mr. Klein also cleans his own gutters, and the Kleins own a wood-burning stove, which saves them quite a bit of money on gas during the winter. A few years ago, a huge tree fell on their house; they are still busy burning the wood from that tree. They built the hearth pad that the stove rests on by themselves, as well.
Skills for Life
At least one member of our community would know what to do if she suddenly landed in the Little House in the Big Woods. Karen Beleck has a business called Magical Mysteries, where she teaches classes in skills that are almost extinct, like making butter, cheese, and soap. She also blends her own teas and spices. Like many women, she knits, crochets, and does needlepoint, but she also raises the sheep and alpacas to get the wool, shears them, sends the sheared wool to a mill to be cleaned and prepared, after which she dyes it and spins it into the wool yarn she then knits. Karen is a certified energy kinesiology practitioner and blends various herbs to create products that help women with pregnancy, nursing, and fertility issues.
Mrs. Brown* raises her own chickens in her backyard right here in Park Heights. “This project serves two purposes,” says Mrs. Brown. “I wanted to eat eggs from free-range chickens, because I feel uncomfortable using eggs from chickens that are treated cruelly. I know that, on a typical egg farm, the chickens are crowded together in cages and do not live a natural life. I also enjoy my chickens as a hobby. I designed their hen house by myself and chose different species of chickens that are interesting to watch. Some of my chickens I raised by myself since they hatched from the egg.
Some activities combine independence, saving money, and fulfilling strongly-held beliefs. Mrs. Stock* believes in cleaning her own house. “I wanted my children to know how to clean,” she said. “I didn’t want them to be like a girl I know who got married, and since she never in her life had cleaned a bathroom or even seen one being cleaned (the cleaning lady came when she was in school), didn’t know that a bathroom needs to be cleaned. How surprised she was when the bathroom in her new home became more and more dirty.” Mrs. Stock never had any cleaning help when her children were growing up. All her children had cleaning chores and kept the house in good shape, and they were well prepared for marriage and homemaking. Mrs. Stock and her husband also build and fix things in the house. “Even if we can afford to have someone else do the job, we do as much as we can on our own in order to save the money and use it for more important things,” she concluded.
Sew Important
Sewing is one of those skills most girls used to learn how to do as children. A friend of mine in her nineties told me that she spent her entire girlhood in Czechoslovakia embroidering sheets, towels, and tablecloths for her trousseau. Certainly, the Ingalls girls spent a lot of time sewing their wardrobes and items for their future homes. They never bought clothing fully made but were excited about the “store-bought” fabric they used to make their own dresses.
Although sewing has become more and more rare, there are those who still sew for themselves and their families. Rivka*, taught all her daughters how to sew, and now they sew for their children and are teaching them how to sew. When Rivka’s daughter Shifra got married, more than 20 years ago, she had five little sisters. Rivka bought material for $200 and sewed all five of them gowns. Those gowns were used for many more chasanas and were passed down for grandchildren to wear. “I bought a pack n’ play at a yard sale,” says Rivka. “It was a little bigger than the usual ones, so no sheet would fit it. I quickly sewed a sheet that fit. I also made the tablecloths for the tables in our shul. I used a serger, which finishes off the edges for a very professional look.”
Leah, a young woman in our community, is studying fashion design. Her goal is to be a fashion designer and design her own line of high quality ladies clothing that is tzniusdik and beautiful. She is learning from a fashion designer in Baltimore how to create patterns for skirts and tops. “You have to be both creative and very technical,” she says. “You have to be able to visualize what you are creating, because a pattern is just a flat piece of paper.”
“So, why do you sew?” I asked Rivka. “It can save a lot of money,” she replied, “especially if you have daughters. Even if you are not making whole garments from scratch, it is a great skill to have. Knowing how to lengthen and shorten things and make simple repairs and adjustments means you are not spending a lot of money running to the seamstress.”
A Gift of Love
Sometimes people do things on their own just because it is more meaningful to use their own hands to create something for someone they love. My son trained to be a sofer, although he does not practice safrus for a parnassa. His son Nachum will soon be bar mitzva, and my son is in the process of writing the tefilin for him. I asked him why he is taking the time to write the tefilin, a project of 15 to 20 hours. He thought about it and said, “Well, first of all, Nachum thinks it’s special to have his father write his tefilin. I am also finding it inspiring to write my son’s tefilin, and it has made me more aware of what is actually inside the tefilin. As with most mitzvas, it is hard to be inspired by something we do every day. Also, writing the tefilin myself saves a lot of money. Since I know how complicated the halachos of writing tefilin are, I would not be comfortable buying a cheaper pair, and the most mehudar tefilin cost a lot of money.”
My friend Chava Esther took great pride in designing and embroidering the wimpel for her son to donate to the shul when he was three years old. She is now working on the wimpel for her grandson. In German kehilos, there is a custom to donate a long piece of cloth, decorated with the name of the young boy and the words, “Torah, Chupa, u’Maasim Tovim.” It is used to wrap the sefer Torah. Chava Esther says, “There is great satisfaction in designing something with your own hands as a representation of the thanks I felt to G-d for my wonderful son.”
Another friend, Miriam, has been working for about two years on a tefilin bag for her son. She is creating it using a process called felting. First she knit a bag and then she washed it. The agitation in the washing process makes the fibers bind together and turns it into felt. The washing also shrinks the bag, so the original knit bag had to be much bigger than the finished product. Miriam is using a process called “needle felting” to decorate the bag. She uses loose wool fibers that have been washed and carded but not yet spun to incorporate colorful designs. “I enjoy the process,” says Miriam, “but I would be unlikely to spend the time and effort to make this for someone whom I did not love.”
It is hard to articulate exactly how the feeling of love becomes embedded in an object, but no one would dispute that tefilin written by your father or a tefilin bag created by your mother is unique and so much more precious than one made by an unknown stranger or mass produced by machine.
Although we no longer live in the wilderness, and technology is available to make our lives simpler, people don’t always want to take the easy way out. Just because it is quicker to buy something or hire somebody to do the work for you, some people still take the longer, more satisfying route of doing it on their own. There can be value and purpose in doing things the old-fashioned way.
* pseudonym
