A Little Bit of Clean in a (very) Dirty World

I live and work with dirt, in one form or another, all day long. It is in the air that we breathe on this dry, dusty road. It is our cohort in food production and is often present under my fingernails long after I’ve come in from the garden this time of year. It is the very thing I battle daily at the kitchen sink, in the laundry tub, and on those little faces and hands I love to kiss and hold.

It is a very real part of a very real life in which you work with the land, sometimes as a happy little dance and other times as a very real struggle.

Which is why soap making is definitely on the top of my "must do" list. Of course I’m not doing it yet because of the thousand other things that seem more urgent and the fact that without our own pigs, lard is a precious commodity reserved for cooking.

So I am happy to use handmade soaps like those from Nourishing Days’ latest sponsor, Third Day Naturals.While many of the "soaps" you can buy commercially are a weird hodge-podge of chemicals, detergents, and petroleum products; this real soap is made simply with real ingredients like fat, lye, and essential oils.

I don’t wear makeup. I don’t buy cleansers. I don’t have a "beauty routine". But the basic daily routine of wash and moisturize (during the colder months) is made all the more lovely when that soap is handmade and has the lovely scent of many of my favorite plants.

Oh, and the lip balms – a product that I do actually use regularly- are lovely as well. And while I told my four-year-old "No, you can’t eat it." I kind of wanted to take a bite of the chocolate lip balm too.