tending to simplicity

I've been having a hard time fitting into New York.  Going to bed at 10:30 and rising before sunrise isn't what people typically do here.  It's quite the opposite.  People seem to look at me cross eyed when they find out I'm married, let along married at 26. (36 seems to be the average age to be getting married here.)  I get stares when I confess I cannot wait to start a family with my sweet husband, and that I'd be ecstatic if I was blessed with a lot of babes.  One seems to be the 'perfect' amount of kids people have here.  Two is pushing it.

I was reading the short story 'A Jonquil for Mary Penn' in Fidelity: Five Stories by Wendell Berry yesterday.  I came across part of the story that really resonated with me:

She loved her jars of vegetables and preserves on the cellar shelves, and the potato bin beneath, the cured hams and shoulders and bacons hanging in the smokehouse, the two hens already brooding their clutches of marked eggs, the egg basket and the cream bucket slowly filling, week after week.' p.75

I love simplicity. I love tending to something. I love the richness of life it brings.  It's hard to find simplicity in the New York City-fast paced-selfish ambition'd culture that sits so heavy in this city.  If you come out sharing how wonderful simplicity is with people, you tend to get stared at and asked 'why?'  I know those people who cherish the G-d given treasure of simplicity is out there.  I've just yet to find them.  So in light of Mary Penn, and in light of being homesick for my sweet Kentucky and the sweet community I miss so much, I wrote about the things I love.  I hope you are able to see the depth, love and passion i have that is tied into living such a way.

She loved her pole beans growing up the back deck, the honey flow that will someday be harvested from the hive out back and the mint that was overtaking the rest of the weeds.  She loved her yellow kitchen with the red and light blue curtains she had made one winter morning, and looking out them, proudly watching her husband chop wood on the large tree trunk, his breath seen in the cool air.  She loved waking on those cold early mornings to put wood in the cast iron wood stove, or in the summer waking early to spend some time with the tomatoes and lettuce before the Kentucky humidity arrived for the day.  She loved how the piano was touched by all who visited, how the smell of the bread in the oven warmed the house.  She loved the retired window panes that now hung as picture frames, and the small cold bathroom that received so much sunlight.  She loved swinging on the front porch swing, sitting next to her beloved husband on those early summer mornings and at sunset in autumn, brew in hand.  She loves the richness of her Kentucky life.