My heart beats fast for Amish drygoods.

I have a secret love:

Lehman's.

It's a store in Ohio that originally was created to serve the Amish, providing simple tools for living that were becoming difficult to find elsewhere. But they also have a website, and it carries wonderful things.

A tabletop butter churner.
A wooden form to make seedling pots from newspaper.
A non-electric doorbell. (We actually need one of these.)
Composting toilets.
Amish-grown popcorn, dried on the cob in a corncrib. (Don't ask me why that's better, but doesn't the sound of it put poetry into your movie snack?)

Clotheslines, old fashioned toys, woodburning cookstoves, apple peelers: this stuff feeds my Inner Homesteader. I mean, really: how many online stores have a Home Butchering category, or sell German Fermenting Crocks for making your own sauerkraut? Where else could I browse and learn so much about home canning products or purchase a book titled "Anyone Can Build A Tub-Style Mechanical Chicken Plucker"?

My husband recently pointed out that I have a secret desire to build a cabin in the hills and live there squirreled away from the world, living off the grid and growing my own food and growing flowers to sell at the farmer's market. It's true, although I know enough to realize that it is not really going to happen. I think my yurt and tiny house fascinations tie into this, along with my irrational love of the idea of Urban Chickens and my much more rational love of Mel and the work of his Square Foot Gardening foundation.

I have two babies, each of which have more stuff and require more of my time than I ever imagined. I won't be fitting my and my husband's life into a 120 square foot cabin or learning to raise all my own food anytime soon. But in the meantime, I'll keep browsing at Lehman's, dreaming of simpler ways.