The Berkey

I think my peace of mind has returned. Denial can be a very useful tool, if used judicially.

I am sitting in my easy chair, looking around me at the small and busy environment that is our home, Mist Cottage. The garden is wild and lush, full of life, food, and flowers. Birds and insects frequent our yard. The interior of the house is in a similar state, wild and full of the doings of day-to-day life. Personally, I feel far more connected to the sky, the trees, the plants, the birds, the insects, the living landscape, and our rustic doings, than I do to human superstructures.

The kitchen has been a whirlwind of activity for the last few days. Produce from the garden is coming in more frequently now, and what we do not immediately eat is preserved in some way.

Today’s kitchen projects will include making another batch of Cream of Broccoli Soup Base. I will also grind nuts and dates to add to yoghurt, for my breakfasts. The fresh loaf of bread, baked yesterday, will need to be sliced. A batch of Kombucha needs to be started. Lunch will be a zucchini based vegetable stir fry, a stew really, zucchini are so moist.

We use a Berkey water filter to produce our own filtered water. We do not purchase plastic wrapped water, although once or twice over the last fifteen years we have bought a bottle to drink while travelling. We also purchase distilled water in thin plastic containers for our humidifier, to use when the winter weather is below -29C, and the electric furnace takes over for the heat pump in heating the house. The electric furnace dries out the air in the house very quickly.

The Berkey only holds about a gallon of water, so it needs to be refilled with great frequency.

When first using the Berkey, I frequently ran out of filtered water. This was annoying. As a solution I use two glass liquor bottles to store filtered water in the kitchen, for those times I am waiting for the Berkey to filter the water.

One liquor bottle is a 1 ½ litre whisky bottle. We were gifted this bottle full of maple syrup, a thank you when we didn’t ask for remuneration, when the gentleman drained our oil tank and took away a large amount of furnace oil to be used in his own furnace. Emptying the oil tank would have cost us hundreds of dollars at the time, with no remuneration for the oil, so we didn’t mind gifting the furnace oil in exchange for having the tank emptied. The home-produced maple syrup was an appreciated goodwill bonus.

The other liquor bottle is a 1 litre Mexican tequila bottle, full when gifted to us by the Mexican foreign workers at the farms that Attila managed. It was a thank you gift, as they really appreciated all the efforts he made to make their stay in Canada as positive as was possible. He went above and beyond taking them shopping when and where they wanted to shop, keeping up with maintenance for the house they were staying in, and assisting with any issues they ran into. Attila worked many unpaid hours doing these things. Attila received many gifts from them, including items hand made by themselves. They frequently called him from Mexico, just to chat.

Both glass bottles work wonderfully well for storing filtered water, to use during those times when the Berkey is suddenly empty.

Many kitchen projects use filtered water, Kombucha for instance requires an entire gallon of filtered water per batch. Then there are things like soaking beans, peas, and lentils prior to cooking, and the fresh filtered water needed to cook them. Also, my daily drinking water is provided by the Berkey, two litres every day.

It occurs to me as I write this that our kitchen is full of symbolism. Many objects hold value beyond function in our home. We surround ourselves with the spoils of goodwill. Beauty truly is in the eye of the beholder.

Worldly

Weather

18°C
Date: 10:17 AM EDT Monday 3 August 2026
Condition: Light Rain shower
Pressure: 100.6 kPa
Tendency: Rising
Temperature: 18.1°C
Dew point: 17.7°C
Humidity: 98%
Wind: NNW 20 gusts 39 km/h

Quote

“To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth… is potentially to have everything…”
Joan Didion
1934 – 2021