The other night I tried to light the kerosene lamp we have on the shelf above our wood stove. It wouldn’t light. I checked the wick: trimmed. Okay. I checked the kerosene: gone! Well, who knew. Kerosene evaporates. The last time I used the lamp was last winter. So the lesson is, use the lamp while you have it full.

So for fun the other night I filled the lamp, soaked the wick, re-threaded it up through the cheap Victorian-esque metal parts (I ended up wrestling it through with a pair of pliers), lit the lamp, and set it on the table. It worked pretty well. Jess has a candle in a baby-food jar to help illuminate Jacob, who’s on the floor next to her in his walk-around bin. Jacob (who’s nine months old this week) is a very aerobic eater; he likes to bounce up and down while looking around while holding his mouth open for Mama’s fork. So she needs a light. But with his own candle, it worked out pretty well. This is about a two-second exposure to let the dark scene light up, so some of the kids are looking rather posed. But we ate our whole meal thus. It’s good practice for when the power goes out: the generator does not power the dining room circuit.

I asked Jess how many of these emergency candles she had. “Oh, about 150,” she said. She found ‘em on sale at the dollar store. So as long as we don’t break the baby-food jars, we’re good for a long period without lights.

You can see our Western Family Spread and our milk jug are not of our own making. (On sale, store-bought milk is half the price of raw milk, and we’re always in the mood for a bargain. So our “butter” and sour cream are store-bought.) And I think the potatoes are from the store. But everything else on this table is from our garden or food storage. The quart jars you see here have been washed and are sitting in the pantry, awaiting their turn to be filled with apple cider next week.