Author Archives: Jenny Wren

Jenny is a nature Essayist and cozy mystery author living in the beautiful Pacific Northwest, between the mountains and the sea.

I Paint My Poverty In Beauty

By doing so, we become rich

I am grateful to love old things. Corners worn smooth through years of love and use. Patches and mending threads give proof of adoration to well-worn garments. Repairs and mending are nothing more nor less than a bandage on a loved one’s knee, a kiss and a promise that all will be well again soon.

Old things, like you and I, are perfect in their imperfection.

All I can do is imagine the dissatisfaction and unhappiness for those that depend on the new and shiny, the unobtainably trendy, to bring them joy. Especially when their income is as paltry as ours. It must be painful to covet clean lines, Pottery Barn dreams, and the plastic haberdashery of the finest modern design.

Loving old things lends us the privilege of genteel poverty. Castoffs from a century ago, sometimes less and sometimes more, feel luxurious compared to particle board knock-offs of modern designs.

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Let’s Return to Living, and Eating, With the Seasons

The Homespun Foodie’s week in review, Oct 19–25

Sometimes I wonder what it is like to live outside of the seasons. Flavorless tomatoes in December, short sleeves in January, cherries from half a world away in February.

I imagine that it must be a tedious, bleak sort of existence to be dependent upon climate controlled rooms and transport-hardy foods. Dare I say it? Perhaps it is a shallow, dissatisfying way to live, this life protected from the seasons. Perhaps this is why so many try to find happiness in the shops, instead of closer to home.

Sure, there are the commercial seasons. Pumpkin spice season, shopping season, tax sale season, vacation season, and back-to-school season. The true seasons — autumn, winter, spring, and summer — have been taken from us, like so many things, so that they can be repackaged and sold back to us.

Sold back in a less satisfying and life affirming way. Sold back so that the billionaires can profit off the seasons that were once our birthright as simple animals on this earth. 

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The Shutdown Is About to Get a Lot Worse for 41 Million People

And that includes my family

Last year, between the two of us, my partner and I earned $56,058. To put this in perspective, the median US income is around $80,000, and the median for my city is around $55,000. Granted, a large proportion of our local population are college students and retirees on fixed incomes. Further, our cost of living is higher than the national average, as well.

Our lower income is from a combination of factors. We are both middle aged neurodivergent women. We are both self employed, mostly, and patch together income from multiple sources. My income is primarily seasonal, and hers is very much tied to the vagaries of the national economy and political climate. LLMs (colloquially known as “AI”) have greatly reduced my income from its high of $60,000 a year in 2019. LLMs are now starting to encroach on my partner’s income, which is down from its high of $51,000 in 2023.

This means we are both in a low-earning period, and there may be no relief in sight.

We went on SNAP benefits last year (a.k.a. EBT or food stamps). It was a necessity, as we also partially support our 20 year old son and his girlfriend while they are navigating college. By support, I mean that they live with us and we cover the costs of housing and utilities. 

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True Beauty Is In the Small Details

The homespun foodie’s week in review, Oct 12–18

There’s a certain decor style, we all know it. Walk into a medical office, a corporate coffee shop, hell, any modern shop, and you can’t miss this look.

Bland and boring. Walls painted a color I call Millennial beige. It’s not always beige, of course. Regardless of the hue, the color makes one feel bland and beige inside.

On the walls rests a minimal amount of meaningless art. A closeup of coffee beans or a random swirl of colors in different shades of some bland hue. Inoffensive, unimaginative, without life.

What is missing are the details. Those small things that breathe life into our homes and the various spaces we carve out for ourselves. To pick one example of life without beauty, the corporate-owned coffee shop does the bare minimum of decorating, using the most offensively inoffensive design to minimize cost while doing its best not to encourage anyone to linger.

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Escaping the Tower She Built

My mother’s fears imprisoned me

The world, from my earliest memories, was made of forest paths that led to dark woods, full of wolves and witches. I knew that the glowing windows of the houses up the hill held ballrooms and gentlefolk being plagued by curses and intrigue. In the corner of every room lurked a Georgie Porgie ready to make me cry, or worse.

I was not yet five, but I had memorized nearly every nursery story my father read to me. Every damsel in distress, every rhyme, every Victorian moral that they contained. My impressionable young mind devoured each new tale as a guidebook to navigating the adulthood I was constantly reminded was my eventual lot.

Never mind that the forest paths that terrified and tempted me were little more than wooded verges separating tract homes from strip malls.

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Forget the Grind, Hustle Culture, and the Great Lock-In

It’s time for an Industrious Revolution

Whether you call it grinding, hustle culture, or the newest moniker to hit the internets, the “great lock-in,” it all boils down to the same thing — trading away your life energy for things you have been to told to want and need for the benefit of billionaires and shareholders who, frankly, don’t give a damn if you live or die.

Since the dawn of the industrial revolution, the general masses have been trained to grind away as many waking moments as possible to “earn a living.”

I have a secret to tell you. That’s right, lean in and I shall whisper it: No one needs to “earn” a living — it was granted to you the moment you emerged from the womb. Living, that is, not all the detritus and stuff that comes with it.

As animals, living isn’t something we are meant to earn, but to take. We take the air we breathe as we need. We should be able to take shelter where we can find it, although certain greedy human animals have done what they can to take more shelter than they need so they can fool the rest of us into thinking we need to earn it.

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Without Effort, There Is No Contentment

The homespun foodie’s week in review, Oct 5–11

Nothing in life should come without effort, with the exceptions of sleep and love.

I know that I harp on the same ol’ themes over and over —

  • There is enough for all of our need, but not all of our greed.
  • The simple things are the best things.
  • Waste not, want not, and be fulfilled.
  • We are not main characters in the tableau of life.
  • Good food, good people, and hope is what makes the world go around.

These themes may be simple, perhaps even a bit old fashioned, but I shall take them any day over the current world themes of greed, consumption, hate, and destruction. Call me a curmudgeon, but those viral videos of destroying things for “ASMR” or unboxing things to engender envious consumption or behaving badly simply to encourage engagement really upsets me. They aren’t just a symptom of the hatefulness of the billionaire class that has destroyed modern culture, they are also direct cause of it.

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Taking the Time to Live a Longer Life

Musings from the bus stop.

The journey begins pleasantly enough. I walk down the lane, leaves crunching underfoot. First I crunch through a collection of maple leaves which are satisfyingly crispy even after yesterday’s drizzle.

Next, my feet wade into a sea of yellow heart-shaped leaves. It is the cottonwoods, whose pleasant fragrance reaches me before I see the first impossibly tall trunk. Looking up, I realize our lane winds through a copse of these giant grandmother cottonwoods. Large and wise they tower above. I have driven this lane a thousand times and never noticed them dancing alongside the pavement, ensconced as I was in an aluminum, plastic, and steel cage.

I am disappointed in myself, but also thrilled to have finally made their discovery.

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Let’s Defund the Billionaires

I’m robbing them of my life energy, and you can, too!

You have heard it said before: if you don’t know what they are selling, then the product is you. Your attention, your custom, your life energy.

Does the Zuck care if you are there for pictures of your nephew or to find out about community happenings? No. The point is to get your eyes on the screen, your fingers scrolling, your brain reeling with things to buy or to believe or to fund.

Angry, sad, dissatisfied? Good, the easier it is to sell you and sell your wallet to the highest bidder.

Does Walmart and Kroger care that you simply want to feed your family a wholesome meal? No, they want your life energy to come to them via impulse buys, in store or in app, and they will tempt you with corn syrup, sugar, and bright colors so that you buy, buy, buy until you die, die, die.

As far as I can tell, we only get this one life. I want it to be my own, to live and to share with those that love me back. Not to sell, unknowing and unwilling, to a billionaire class that can never have enough until they learn what it is like to have too little.

Greed is nothing more than addiction under a different name, and none are greedier than a would-be oligarch that is rarely told no.

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On Wings of Death, Comes Life

The promise of the owl

It is not the sound that draws my eyes heavenward, for there is no sound.

It is not movement, for in the gloaming, movement is almost as invisible as the silence.

No, it is something more primal, more visceral, more animal in nature. It is the caution of prey that draws my eyes upward, bred deeply into my human animal psyche from a time when our rodent-like ancestors cowered in burrows, hiding from that which would destroy.

Dark wings blot out the pale moon-lit sky, all the more terrifying for the soundless silence screaming out.

Predator. Harbinger. Guide.

The barred owl alights on a nearby post, eyes like all-seeing saucers reading into my soul. 

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