Abby Quillen

Freelance Content Marketing Writer and Editor

Simple Living

And Then There Were Three

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For those of you who’ve followed my blog from the beginning, you know we got four fluffy backyard chicks in May of 2009. I chronicled our early days with them in The Hen Diaries. Raccoons, lost hens, a ransacked garden, that beautiful first egg … so much drama!

You can follow our adventures as fledgling chicken-keepers below if you missed it:

Weeks:

We lost one of those girls this week. Emily got suddenly ill last weekend and died on Tuesday. She was our first layer, and I always had a special fondness for her.

Rest in peace, Emily. We’ll miss you.

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Happy Earth Day!

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In honor of the holiday, I’m posting a column my dad wrote for the April 21, 2011 Denver Post. I have a cameo appearance, and I love my dad’s hilarious and true take on how we should celebrate the day.

Replace Earth Day with Binge Day

By Ed Quillen
The Denver Post

Earth Day is Friday, and as a loyal resident of Earth, I want to celebrate properly.

I may have already found the wrong way to celebrate. In 2003, I was invited to speak at an Earth Day rally in Alamosa. Being rather immodest, I accepted.

But my 170-mile round-trip drive must have damaged the ozone layer or accelerated global warming or otherwise worsened whatever we were worried about eight years ago. The gathering in Cole Park was pleasant, but there were generators growling and smoking to provide electricity for the amplifiers. This didn’t strike me as especially Earth-friendly.

And when my stage turn came, I followed Peggy Godfrey of Moffat, who’s a cowboy poet or cowgirl poetess. However you describe her, she’s a great performer. I felt like the local garage band that somehow ended up appearing after the Rolling Stones. Peggy is a hard act to follow.

This was clearly not an appropriate Earth Day commemoration for me. But what would be?

To find out, I called the greenest person I know, my daughter Abby in Eugene, Ore. She has a big garden and keeps chickens. She and her husband, Aaron, don’t own a car; Aaron bicycles 12 miles each way to his teaching job. Abby’s always on the lookout for local foods and gentler ways to run her household — for instance, she washes her long brown hair with vinegar instead of commercial shampoo.

(I should point out that we did not raise Abby to turn out this way, as we had a car but no chickens. It’s a choice she made after graduating with honors from the University of Colorado Denver with a degree in history.)

“So how do you plan to celebrate Earth Day?” I asked Abby, expecting to hear that she’d be at a big rally in a downtown Eugene park.

“I know some people who are driving clear up to Vancouver, B.C., for an Earth Day festival.” She laughed at that irony. “But for us, it will be pretty much the same as any other day. I’ll feed the chickens, gather eggs, tend the garden, take Ezra (their 3-year-old son) for a walk, hope he naps long enough for me to get some writing done — what I do most days.”

Abby’s got the right idea here: If you care about the environment, forget about Earth Day trips and celebrations, and live simply every day. When you think about it, focusing on the environment once a year doesn’t make much sense, especially when that celebration often involves burning a lot of fuel.

But there does seem to be a basic human need for annual celebrations, and to that end I propose a yearly Binge Day.

On the other 364 days of the year, we would live simple green lives with local food and drink. We would walk, bicycle or ride public transit to get around. We would eschew gaudy imported novelties, fad electronics destined for quick obsolescence and other trashy food, goods and geegaws.

In other words, we would live prudently and sensibly, following adages like “Waste not, want not.” The global economy might contract on that account, but it seems to be doing that anyway.

On Binge Day, though, we could pig out on champagne and corn-fed prime rib. We’d rent a Hummer or an Escalade to drive to the shopping mall for an orgy of conspicuous consumption. We’d ignore the recycling bins and just toss our abundant trash in a barrel. And after the once-a-year Binge Day blowout, we’d go back to living sensibly.

Add it up, and Binge Day should be about 364 times better for the environment than Earth Day.

I’m editing an anthology of my dad’s columns. To find out more about it, visit edquillen.com. How are you celebrating Earth Day? I’d love to hear about it in the comments!

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Pruning Season: Practical Tips for Simplifying Your Life

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It’s the time of year when we prune the rose bushes in our backyard down to a few stalks. For several weeks afterward, they look stark, straggly, and half-dead.

Then an amazing thing happens. By May, they transform into vibrant, healthy bushes overflowing with blossoms.

It’s life-changing to witness this process time and again, because it exemplifies how powerful it is to get rid of what you don’t need.

So around this time of the year, I inevitably find myself taking inventory of all of the stuff in our lives — and feeling a tad buried.

For much of January, I feared I’d never see the floor in Ezra’s room again. I’m in a never-ending battle with the end table in our kitchen, which magnetically attracts loose toy parts, tools, and scraps of paper. And I avoid our garage altogether because I fear I won’t make it through the piles of detritus without spelunking gear.

But I also can’t help but peek back at where we’ve been and celebrate some successes in our quest to live better with less stuff.

Over the years, I’ve discovered a secret to simplifying. It’s not about having less. It’s about figuring out who you are and what you love. Then you can keep and celebrate the things that make you feel alive and happy — and donate or discard the rest.

  • Wardrobe

It’s tempting to think if you have the space to store extra clothes, there’s no harm in keeping them around. But rifling through the stuff littering our lives takes a daily toll. Last year I got rid of more than half of my clothes and all but five pairs of shoes, and every day I feel lighter and happier because of it. Less laundry. Less stress. More space.

Here are a few tips if you’re thinking of dramatically paring down your wardrobe:

1. Your motto is, “If in doubt, throw it out.” Repeat it often.

2. Take the time to figure out what kind of clothes and shoes you really like. You can learn more about what colors look good on you here. And you can explore what styles look good on you here (women) or here (men).

3. Get rid of anything that doesn’t fit right, isn’t flattering, or is damaged.

4. Be aware of emotional attachments to certain clothing items, which make it harder to part with them.

5. Never welcome new clothes into your wardrobe without saying goodbye to some first.

6. Be gracious but judicious about gifts. I’m thankful that my sister gifts me lots of slightly-used clothes. But I’ve had to learn to be a little bit picky about which ones I keep and which ones I pass on to somebody else.

  • Personal care items

Over the years, we’ve traded all of our costly, chemical-laden, heavily-packaged personal care items for simple, safe, inexpensive alternatives. In every single case, the alternatives work better. But the real pay off is how much lighter  our lives are without half-empty plastic bottles and tubes cluttering our bathroom drawers and counters.

If you’re on a mission to downsize your personal care items, here are a few of our favorite swaps:

1. Baking soda and vinegar for shampoo and conditioner.

2. Castile soap for face and bar soap.

3. Castile soap or homemade tooth powder for toothpaste. (Scared to give up commercial toothpaste? So was I. Then I did, and I was amazed. I have cleaner teeth, healthier gums, and no more tooth sensitivity.)

4. A mix of 50/50 baking soda and cornstarch for deodorant.

6. Salt water for mouthwash.

7. Coconut or olive oil for lotion.

Tip: If it feels drab to swap colorful sweet-smelling products for simple alternatives, consider packaging your homemade personal care items in jars, making beautiful labels, and using essential oils to jazz them up.

  • Toys and kids’ clothes

I’ve heard of four-year-olds who clean their rooms, but Ezra is allergic to cleanliness. He delights in transferring all of his toys and books from the tubs, drawers, and shelves I use to try to maintain order in his little corner of our house to the floor.

The other day as I was muttering about the disorder, Ezra diagnosed the problem. “I like it messy, Mom. Then I can find everything.” It was a huge breakthrough. I realized that I’m not going to keep his room clean no matter what I do. So I let it go.

Of course, we still need to get inside his little kingdom, so I decided to try an idea I’ve heard about. I packed up a couple of boxes of his toys and put them in the garage with plans to pull them out in a few weeks in exchange for different toys. The goal is to keep a revolving carousal of toys. That way even when every single toy in the room is on the floor, we can still open the door and move around. So far it’s working great.

We’ve also been purging clothes, books, and toys as Ira outgrows them, and I stumbled onto a brilliant idea to make that easier. An acquaintance of ours throws an annual children’s toy, book, and clothes swap. Parents bring what their kids have outgrown and trade them for things their kids can use now. It’s amazing! You can pare down, hang out with friends, and save money all at the same time. And they’re casual and informal affairs, so it would be easy to organize one yourself.

As the weather warms, we’ll need to sharpen our clippers and tackle some areas desperately in need of pruning, like, ahem, the garage. It’s nice that we can arm ourselves with the glow of a few past successes.

Are you trying to live better with less stuff? Do you have tips, successes, and ideas to share? I’d love to read about it in the comments.

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The Empty Table

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mount pisgah fall day 081

My husband and I recently achieved the pinnacle of our domestic lives together. We cleared the counter in our laundry room. It was like jumping into a time machine back to the spring of 2008 just before we became parents. Apparently that’s when we last had time for organizing. Handouts from our birthing classes and congratulations-on-the-new-baby-cards mingled with mail, tools, broken toys, and bits of wayward debris. This tucked-away rubbish pile enabled the rest of the house to look relatively tidy and clutter-free. But occasionally one of us would have to suit up and traverse into this danger zone to try to find something. So finally we spent a morning sorting and shredding, recycling and organizing . . . and we unearthed a glistening, white counter.

As we gazed it, the inevitable question arose: what should we put on it? The bill file? The laundry detergent? Cleaning supplies?

Then, it occurred to us.

Nothing.

If we left the counter empty, we could actually use it for folding laundry, brewing beer, or making crafts. For activities, rather than stuff.

I’m in love with our empty counter. I feel happy every time I see it. So I’ve been on a mission lately to empty tables. My desk. The table in my office. The kitchen table and counters. They’re not always empty, of course. There’s nothing I love more than a table full of food or craftiness. But empty is their default state. And when they’re full, they are intentionally so, because someone’s using them.

I’ve taken this empty-table approach into my working life as well. Working at home means maneuvering around the clamor of family life, which is the best and hardest part of it. When I sit down to work, I have to focus regardless of what’s going on in the wider world of my household. I’ve found it immensely helpful to take a few moments to empty my table, so to speak, by focusing on my breath and clearing away any mental clutter before I dig into my work.

Now, if my husband and I can just tackle the garage.

Have you discovered any household tips or tricks that make you happier? Leave me a comment. I’d love to hear about them.

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What’s Your Favorite Blog?

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Lately I’ve been cleaning, and when I say cleaning, I mean emptying dressers, stripping closets, and purging file cabinets and hard drives. I feel agitated when the kitchen counter is not scrubbed clean. I eye the newspaper moments after bringing it in from the porch, eager to recycle it.

The other day, as I was uttering “Why are these (fill in the blank: trains, balls, cars, clothes) always on the floor?” while I zipped around the house tidying, it occurred to me that the intensity of all of this scouring, scrubbing, and sanitizing isn’t, um, exactly normal for me.

Then I remembered something my friend said during her first pregnancy. “I knew I was nesting when I finished vacuuming and then took the vacuum apart to clean it.”

Oh, right, nesting. Is that what I’ve been doing?

Here’s what Pregnancy Weekly says about it:

Nesting brings about some unique and seemingly irrational behaviors in pregnant women and all of them experience it differently. Women have reported throwing away perfectly good sheets and towels because they felt the strong need to have “brand new, clean” sheets and towels in their home. They have also reported doing things like taking apart the knobs on kitchen cupboards, just so they could disinfect the screws attached to the knobs. Women have discussed taking on cleaning their entire house, armed with a toothbrush.

Okay, so that does sound curiously like what I’ve been doing. But I’m still clinging to the idea that I rationally make decisions about my day-to-day activities.

In any case, I figured I’d put all of this organizing mojo to use and attack a few of the more messy, disheveled, bedraggled corners of my life.

Enter: my Google feed reader.

A minimalist blogger recommends regularly purging your feed reader entirely and adding back only the blogs you miss. Sounds like a great idea, right?

I opened my reader, resolved to click on “delete all”. Except first I had to browse through my list of blogs … and then read through a few recent posts … and then click on a few of the posts those posts mentioned.

Full confession: I added seven blogs to my feed reader and deleted maybe six. Oops. So much for purging. But I fully intend to return to said reader with a more discerning eye in the near future.

There are just so many great blogs out there. Recently a reader recommended Drawing America by Bike, where Eric Clausen documents his 14-month round-the-country bike tour with ink drawings. It’s very cool, and it made me wonder what else I don’t know about.

I know it’s the opposite of purging, but in the interest of making my feed reader more interesting (albeit a little cluttered) will you help me by answering a few questions:

What’s your favorite blog? What blog(s) deserves to be on my feed reader? If you have time, I’m also curious, approximately how many blogs do you read? How do you keep up with them? Do you use a feed reader or some other method? Do you read blogs every day, once a week, or less often?

Thanks for your feedback! I’ll check out all of your recommendations and report back next week on my favorite new finds.

(To reach me, you can leave a comment below, email newurbanhabitat at gmail dot com, or tweet @newurbanhabitat.)

The Magic of Storytelling

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“Mama, will you tell me a story?” my three-year-old son Ezra asks as I tuck him in at night.

Who could refuse, right? Of course, the moment I utter, “The end”, the follow-up request comes: “Another story, Mama? About a turtle.” We usually negotiate the number of stories to three.

Inventing three stories a night and often a couple at nap time can be daunting. Fortunately Ezra likes to hear about the same characters over and over again: a little boy named Henry, a lion he named Anagoa, Horatio the hippo, Fiona the crocodile, and an elderly turtle couple who live by the ocean. He also likes true stories, especially about the rainy June day when he was born three years ago and the sunny September afternoon when I met his dad 12 years ago.

Like most things to do with parenting, storytelling could feel like a chore, especially at bedtime – a time of the day that recently inspired one dad to write a bestseller called Go the F**k to Sleep. But I’m enjoying our daily stories as much as my son for a few reasons:

  • It gives my imagination a workout.

Hanging out with a three-year-old is great for your creativity. They are master pretenders and can jump into the imaginary world instantly. Just as when writing, I try to include sensory details, setting, conflict, twists, and dialogue in my stories. Those devices make for more entertaining stories for my son, and using them is great practice for all kinds of writing.

  • It forces me to turn off my inner editor.

At the keyboard, I can go over the same sentence five hundred times moving commas around. But when I’m telling my son stories, I have to improvise and let the characters lead me forward. It’s great practice for writing first drafts.

  • I have a captive (and honest) audience

It’s fun to tell stories to someone who’s enraptured with your every word. When Ezra is still talking about a character or story days after I told it, I know I successfully created a world for him. On the contrary, when I ask him, “Was that a good story?” he occasionally replies, “Not really.” For a writer, honesty really is the best policy; it’s the only thing that makes you better.

The Magic of Storytelling #narrative #parenting

If telling stories sounds boring or more pressure-packed than taking the bar exam, you might be surprised at how much you enjoy it. As Lisa Lipkin writes in Bringing the Story Home, “Since the time we enter this world, we live in stories, inhaling and exhaling them.”

As a society, we pay lots of money and spend hours having people tell us stories on television, in books, at the movies, and on podcasts. We can also do it for free at home, and tap into the magic of live entertainment and human connection at the same time.

If inventing yarns holds no appeal, don’t let that deter you. Fictional stories can help us understand human emotions and relationships and take us to faraway places, but telling true stories to your kids probably serves an even broader purpose: it helps them connect with their parents and understand who they are.

“Our children need a sense of somebodiness,” Roland Barksdale writes In The African American Family’s Guide to Tracing Our Roots. “Giving them a connectedness to the past can help, which comes through story telling.”

When I was a kid, I loved the stories my dad made up for me and my sister, memorably nightly installments of the adventures of a pica. But I was even more captivated by my parents’ true stories about where they grew up, how they met, and about those mysterious years they spent together before my sister and I were born. Those stories placed me in a family, connected me with relatives I’d never met, and helped me to understand who I am. Most importantly they helped me get to know my parents and set up a family culture of openness, conversing, and enjoying one another’s company.

So if you don’t already tell stories as a family, consider carving out some time to do it. Once you start, you might be amazed at how entertaining you can be – and by how much your family loves this simple, free, and ancient pastime.

If there's one universal thread that binds all people together, it's their need for stories. - Lisa Lipkin #storytelling #narrative #parenting

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