Extreme Frugality: This Grand Experiment is Working

I don’t even know where to start this week, I’m feeling so frugaled. Yes, that’s a word as of this very minute. I just made it up because embracing the concept of being frugal and gaining some ground in its practice has never been as necessary as it is today. My newfound conviction has become full-blown evangelical euphoria, and I feel that the time has come for a word that denotes its transformative power.

And why am I feeling so frugaled?

I almost can’t count the ways.

Except, of course, I can—20. That’s how many eggs I found in our hen house¹ this morning. After cleaning guano off the chickens’ waterer, something compelled me to get on my hands and knees to check under their laying boxes, where Nibbles the rabbit lives in what I thought was complete privacy. There was a pungent mix of moldy wood shavings and three weeks’ worth of manure on the floor of the coop, so dropping down on all fours was definitely not a rational decision. But still I found myself inexplicably squeezing my six-foot-one, 170-lb frame through the 15-inch-wide opening that leads under the laying boxes (all made from scrap and found wood). Although I couldn’t see a thing, I crawled forward anyway, drawn toward my destiny like Richard Dreyfuss’s character in Close Encounters, minus the funny music. Then I narrowly missed putting my right hand down on something warm. It was a freshly laid egg. Next to it was another. And another. Pretty soon, still cradling all 20 eggs, I was reporting my discovery to the kids by phone via the receptionist at the middle school, who not only promised to tell them but also offered a hearty “Congratulations!” as we hung up.

There have been even more frugal successes as of late. The weekend before last, I was sent down to the Broward County Library’s Book Feast in Ft. Lauderdale for four days to talk about my last book, and I only spent 18—yes, 18—dollars. My flight and hotel were paid for by the library, and I only ate at festival events. There was always something going on morning, noon, and night, so I never had to wait more than four hours to fill my stomach with delicious free food and wine that would otherwise have been beyond my budget.²

In fact, I timed things so well, I could have gotten by on the $3.55 I spent on doughnuts and coffee at the airport the first day, but I didn’t know Delta charged $15 for the first checked bag. Even so, in the past, I would have easily spent $418 on this kind of trip. So, I may be bragging right now, but why not? This new approach is finally working, and not only roosters can crow.

Even when I make colossal mistakes, we end up making lemonade out of lemons, or, in our case, maple butter out of ruined syrup. As I write this, I’m eating a mound of maple butter slathered on homemade bread. We had been trying to make syrup out of about five gallons³ of sap that Anabel collected while I was gone. It’s a fairly easy process (check out the explicit instructions in Storey’s Basic Country Skills if you’re interested).⁴

You just boil the sap to a desired thickness, pour it through a coffee filter to strain out the odd bit of bark, and soon enough it’s time to flip some flapjacks. Unless, that is, you leave the sugar shack (in our case, the woodstove) at the wrong time. In my defense, it was less than five minutes, and when I walked away it was still thin sap, not viscous syrup. It had been that same consistency for more than an hour. A friend had forewarned me about maple sap’s ability to go from perfect syrup to a disaster in a matter of seconds, but I thought he’d been exaggerating. I had plenty of time to … wait, what’s that stench? It smells like burning marshmallows but it’s coming from the woodstove. Oh, no. I sprinted through the house, tripping over our dog, Ginger, and then a computer cord, but I was too late. The stiff, gluelike substance was stuck to the pan like one of my many failed science experiments during childhood—until Lisa came home and tasted it. After adding a little water and a stick of butter, she turned it into this mouthwatering, smoky maple spread that I now can’t stop eating.

Of course, that’s what I, in my frugaled state, meant to do all along.

Footnotes:

¹ Yes, careful reader, there is a rooster living in there, so technically it’s not a hen house. But the rooster’s days are numbered. He scares the girls. He pecks at Angus. And he even dared to attack me the other day. In fact, we’re planning on having Southern Fried Rooster two Sundays from now. We originally had two roosters, but last week some friends visited with their black Lab, and in less than a minute, the testosterone-loaded adolescent canine had killed one testosterone-loaded fowl. Hours later, after Eliza figured out what had happened by following prints in the snow, and she and Angus had retrieved what was left of the rooster carcass, the kids demonstrated how far they’d come recently by asking, “Is there enough to still eat it?” Sadly, there wasn’t, but just the fact that doing so was a reasonable expectation for them fed my frugal, parental soul.

² All alcohol is beyond our budget, as I’ve mentioned before. The only alcohol we’ve had was at other people’s homes or wine brought to a rice-and-beans dinner party we threw a few weeks ago. My friend David Guenther and I distilled some hard alcohol from maize when we worked in Africa together, and so I’m thinking about giving it another go with some of the corn we grow this summer.

³ We have since collected another 37 gallons of sap and will soon have an entire gallon of dark, strong maple syrup, which is much better than that thin, weak Grade-A stuff that we’re usually forced to buy at $20 a quart. Not bad for about an hour of labor—30 minutes of drilling, tapping the trees, and hanging jugs and buckets to collect the sap, 15 minutes of toting the sap to the house, and 15 minutes of careful watching and stirring at the end. Later today, we will have $80 worth of our favorite sweetener. Even better, all six of us worked on the project together, and that small fact alone makes it all worthwhile.

⁴ If you ever decide to play at being 21st-century Nearings, who wrote extensively about their back-to-the-land life, then by all means, do not overlook this essential guide to basic living, written by 150 authors and edited by John and Martha Storey. It’s now daily reading.