Backwoods Journal – Oh The Things We’ve Done For Money

Cupboard Ken built and sold

We cleaned the library, cleaned our church, produced the weekly bulletin for our church. Ken worked at the hospital maintenance department, and got several weekly private garden clients. We gardened for a local Inn. Ken managed a senior’s housing complex. We tried our hand at fern and salal picking, holly cutting and taking pictures and producing brochures for local businesses.

We sold the things we seldom used anymore at flea markets, emptying our attic over and over again when wonderful items we couldn’t resist buying showed up at thrift shops we frequented. We sold our excess garden produce at the Farmer’s Markets and made jams, jellies, grapevine wreaths, dried hydrangeas, woodwork plaques, bunches of lavender, herbs and flowers and my crocheted items there as well.

When we got our computer Ken did Webpages for local businesses and we tiptoed into running our Bed and Breakfast. Ken got into painting and when we had no more room on our walls for them we sold some of his pieces, won a few trips to exhibitions and produced cards with his art work and my poetry. I had several poems published in the local newspapers and national magazines, won a few contests too.

We got an eBay account and thoroughly enjoyed the experience of selling whatever we could find to people all over the world. We made several friends that we are still in touch with.

Living Simply is simply hard work sometimes. And it gets harder to keep one’s mind uncluttered when so many things are needing to be done. We have learned, after many years of running in the crazy circles of other people’s expectations, to say no to those things we really do not want to do. The sky did not fall and we only lost a few friends, but our time is more our own than it’s ever been and living the good life is much more satisfying.

©Sharron R. McMillan

My crocheted projects