Simon thinks that a "female" is a kind of bird. I was trying to explain that a "peahen" is a girl peacock, but what he took from that was that there was another kind of bird called a "female." When I tried to explain that Mommy was a female human, he told me that he was an owl-boy. So we've decided to let it go. I'll just hope he works this one out by high school or so.
My mother finally remember to send me a clipping she'd cut out a while back. My dissertation advisor wrote an article for the Boston Globe praising Phillip Pullman's "His Dark Materials" series, and incidentally dismissing JK Rowlings and the Harry Potter series. Check it out here: http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2004/06/13/childish_things/
I'm generally inclined to argue with Billy just for the fun of it (and probably for some bizarre Freudian reasons caused by generally feeling inadequate around someone that smart), but I admit, since I got it on Monday, I've been mulling over, not so much his praise of Pullman, who is a good writer, although I'm not passionate about it, but the need to critique the Harry Potter books, which seems like a general compulsion for people who talk about children's books. I think that part of this analysis is wrong, and it bears looking at. Particularly when you compare the visions of childhood and the transition towards adulthood that are presented by Pullman and Rowling. In the end, I think Rowling offers up the more radical possibilities, and perhaps a more powerful way for young readers to think about the transformation they are experiencing.
Let me say upfront that I liked both series, but also believe there is plenty to criticize in both. (On no level do I think that Pullman is the "most electrifying piece of literature in 20 years, although I do admire him.) How could I fail to adore a vindication of Milton, Blake, Gnosticism and the fortunate fall? Pullman does a truly astonishing and wonderful job of introducing a new theology, and an old new way of reading Bible to people who are unlikely to pick up Blake at random (if only because voluntarily reading something you were assigned in high school is so painful.)
On the other hand, Pullman is clearly more interested in plot than characters, and it shows. The fall is ultimately played out through the awakening and maturity of his two main child characters, Will and Lyra. But neither character really changes very much in the course of the book - or rather, Will, who begins tediously and ends that way, remains much the same. Lyra, however, changes in disturbing ways. Adolescence and the beginning of sexual awakening transform her into a clingy, whiny, passive figure, who allows Will to rescue her (finally, in a soap-operaesque moment, from a drug induced coma caused by her badly torn mother who resonates wildly and creatively from bad Mommy to good, and is much more fun than Lyra) whenever times become hard. In the first book, child Lyra is a powerful and creative actor in her own world. By the end, Will is the actor and Lyra merely clings admiringly to his shoulder a lot. I admit, as much as I'd like to be pleased that Pullman placed a girl at the center of his novels, I can't be, particularly since his vision of sexual awakening is so damned boring.
Pullman's books are often ponderous and sometimes pretentious - my cousin told me that she gave up on the third book half way through the extremely lengthy "does she or doesn't she fall" section, and I admit, I put the book down then too. And he does an extremely poor job of showing why characters care for one another - they simply do, there are no explanations. We are told that the polar-bear mercenary and other adults love Lyra, but never shown how the love developed between them. Another adult character is more than willing to die for her, and then serve her needs in hell, but the evolution of his feeling for her is hasty, awkward and often left out. If love matters, as Pullman claims it does, if passion matters, it would be nice to see some genuine love, and it creation and complexity as an actual human thing, rather than a convenient plot device.
But the reason I really like Rowling better than Pullman (besides the fact that Rowling is funny and Pullman is painfully never so), is that ultimately, Rowling believes in growing up as a fundamentally positive (although painful) process, whereas Pullman's vision is another tedious version of Wordsworth, where no one ever really gets over the loss of becoming an adult. Rowling is a radical in the field of children's literature in that she presents the process of becoming an adult as a potentially exciting adventure, fraught with terrible experiences, but ultimately a liberation from the powerlessness of childhood. It is true that her children have special powers, but their powers aren't ultimately what saves them - it is their maturity, in the best sense.
I will admit, the last book (#6) was not one of her better ones, particularly after the Fifth book, which was remarkable both for its story and for its terrific portrayal of adolescent misery. The funniest moment in _The Order of the Pheonix_ (to me, at least) involves the portrait of a former Hogwarts Headmaster berating Harry for acting like an adolescent, and for believing he is the center of the universe (which is precisely the case). The headmaster announces that this is exactly why he hates teenagers, a sentiment I can identify with both in retrospect and from the perspective of a teacher. And Harry doesn't particularly like being a miserable, enraged, bitter, grief stricken teenager. Perhaps because Will and Lyra have so many other things to do, they never actually are children or adolescents, while Rowling's characters get to experience late childhood and puberty with all its myriad joys.
Rowling's best characters are grownups, but they are grownups haunted by their own (mostly unhappy) childhoods, trying as best they can to be adults, even as watching the teenagers around them makes it a struggle. But the remarkable thing about all of the major "good" characters is that they *are* adults when it counts. Severus Snape, the malicious, troubled, troubling (and really cool) potions master who hates Harry with all his might based on an old grudge against his father, is also Harry's savior, teacher and ally on and off. I won't mention what happens at the end of Book 6, but it really is the only good thing about the most recent book - that Snape, again, has not been sanitized in his ambiguity. Compare Snape, or Sirius Black (Harry's troubled, angst riddent, tortured guardian) with Lyra's mother or father, both of whom are amusing, but who really have no reason, other than loathing for each other, for acting like such twits all the time. Lyra's parents eventually sacrifice themselves for her, on the theory that "good parenting involves doing this" but that makes no more sense than their original acts of evil. Voldemort at least fears death, something that makes a disturbing amount of sense to me, at least, and something that is fundamentally an adult, fear. Harry and his friends are learning to fear and accept it too.
The Harry Potter books present two generations of teenagers (one now grown and mentoring the next), both badly damaged by war, attempting to transform their world. They do it with full, visual knowledge of the consequences of their actions. They know they can die, they know they probably will, they are afraid, they are angry and resentful of the necessity, they do not dream of innocence, but rather of peace. Personally, I find that resonates far better in the present world than an account in which innocents save the world and lose only their true love for each other and their virginity. The former is a vision of the world in which honor and maturity are virtues to be claimed, rather than losses to be mourned, and I strongly prefer it.
Sharon
Friday, January 21, 2005
Friday, January 14, 2005
What's new here.
What am I reading: Ferenc Mate's _A Reasonable Life_: Love it, love it, love it!!! How have I not read this before? Its a rant against...well...modernity, and it is totally brilliant. I don't always like other people's rants (infringes on my territory, I guess ;-), but I love this one. Run out and get a copy. Be a better person than me and buy it new, if you can.
What am I listening to: "Best of Solomon Burke" - really good bass voices just make me want to weep with joy, or throw myself onto the person who has them. Seriously, ex-spouse Matt's attraction was in large part his amazing bass voice. So Solomon Burke makes me seriously happy.
What are we eating, and where did it come from?: Oh, you don't want to know. All the rain we've had flooded even the pop-up greenhouses that are supposed to mean winter greens. Forget it. It mostly came from the supermarket, its probably doused in poison.
Oh, we're still eating our own pickles, kimchi, jams and squash, but that' about it.
What's new?: Grandma comes back from 5 weeks in CA Sunday, I start seeds next week, we're starting to debate new critter acquisitions for the year - another dog? Goats? How many more chickens? More geese? Turkeys? Barn cats? Honeybees? Definitely no more ducks. Sheep? We're still waiting for Isaiah to walk - he's been on the verge forever. We think he's waiting for Grandma.
The big thing that's new, however, is that Eric and I are (vaguely, generally, sometime in the future) considering moving. Now that shouldn't shock anyone who knows me - I'm into change, the more radical the better. But anyone who has met Eric should be stunned into unconsciousness by the idea that *my husband* would contemplate moving. And I admit, I've been very happy here. This is entirely in the "maybe one of these days stage" - first of all, I doubt Grandma will go for it. Second, Eric would need to get a job at a small rural college in this area - or I would. Finally, the right house and land would have to be available, at the right price. It requires a confluence of factors that seems extremely unlikely - the job, the house, Grandma's consent.
So why are we even talking about it? Because the one thing we both despise about rural living is *CAR OWNERSHIP* and we're fantasizing about getting out of the car game. The other thing we both hate is debt and high taxes, and we've got a little of both (small mortgage on the property, and growing taxes). We'd like to live off grid, and on the cheap if possible. Right now, that's not really feasible.
But if Eric could get a job at one of the small SUNYs (or I could) or Community colleges in a small community with walkable/bikeable/horseandbuggiable resources available within four or five miles of farmland, we could give up the car entirely. We'd probably keep something old and semi-functional with no reg or insurance for racing children to the hospital in the most major of emergencies, but otherwise, no car. Oh, we'd probably rent once in a while to visit family, maybe even barter produce for carpools in nasty weather, but oh, what joy. Even walking to work in sleet and snow would be a considerable improvement over the fucking car. Less convenient? Sure. Happier, healthier, cheaper, less smelly, less dependent, better? Absolutely.
We'd love to be completely mortgage free, and frankly, I think after Grandma is gone I want a smaller house. The new addition gives us lots of space, but I'd rather live in a smaller house and be more crowded, and have less to keep clean. And I want a good barn, land that isn't as wet, and maybe more of it around me.
These things are just fantasy. I write them down because sometimes, if you are very lucky or you make things happen right, fantasies come true. We love our home, we love our life, I have a hard time thinking about walking away from this beautiful place and our wonderful neighbors, from the quiet and the trees beneath which are buried some of our beloved animals. I'd be grieved to lose it. But the dream, the one where we are never more dependent upon gas prices, never again in any kind of debt, and free to live on less, and thus earn little and live more, draws me in.
Sharon
What am I listening to: "Best of Solomon Burke" - really good bass voices just make me want to weep with joy, or throw myself onto the person who has them. Seriously, ex-spouse Matt's attraction was in large part his amazing bass voice. So Solomon Burke makes me seriously happy.
What are we eating, and where did it come from?: Oh, you don't want to know. All the rain we've had flooded even the pop-up greenhouses that are supposed to mean winter greens. Forget it. It mostly came from the supermarket, its probably doused in poison.
Oh, we're still eating our own pickles, kimchi, jams and squash, but that' about it.
What's new?: Grandma comes back from 5 weeks in CA Sunday, I start seeds next week, we're starting to debate new critter acquisitions for the year - another dog? Goats? How many more chickens? More geese? Turkeys? Barn cats? Honeybees? Definitely no more ducks. Sheep? We're still waiting for Isaiah to walk - he's been on the verge forever. We think he's waiting for Grandma.
The big thing that's new, however, is that Eric and I are (vaguely, generally, sometime in the future) considering moving. Now that shouldn't shock anyone who knows me - I'm into change, the more radical the better. But anyone who has met Eric should be stunned into unconsciousness by the idea that *my husband* would contemplate moving. And I admit, I've been very happy here. This is entirely in the "maybe one of these days stage" - first of all, I doubt Grandma will go for it. Second, Eric would need to get a job at a small rural college in this area - or I would. Finally, the right house and land would have to be available, at the right price. It requires a confluence of factors that seems extremely unlikely - the job, the house, Grandma's consent.
So why are we even talking about it? Because the one thing we both despise about rural living is *CAR OWNERSHIP* and we're fantasizing about getting out of the car game. The other thing we both hate is debt and high taxes, and we've got a little of both (small mortgage on the property, and growing taxes). We'd like to live off grid, and on the cheap if possible. Right now, that's not really feasible.
But if Eric could get a job at one of the small SUNYs (or I could) or Community colleges in a small community with walkable/bikeable/horseandbuggiable resources available within four or five miles of farmland, we could give up the car entirely. We'd probably keep something old and semi-functional with no reg or insurance for racing children to the hospital in the most major of emergencies, but otherwise, no car. Oh, we'd probably rent once in a while to visit family, maybe even barter produce for carpools in nasty weather, but oh, what joy. Even walking to work in sleet and snow would be a considerable improvement over the fucking car. Less convenient? Sure. Happier, healthier, cheaper, less smelly, less dependent, better? Absolutely.
We'd love to be completely mortgage free, and frankly, I think after Grandma is gone I want a smaller house. The new addition gives us lots of space, but I'd rather live in a smaller house and be more crowded, and have less to keep clean. And I want a good barn, land that isn't as wet, and maybe more of it around me.
These things are just fantasy. I write them down because sometimes, if you are very lucky or you make things happen right, fantasies come true. We love our home, we love our life, I have a hard time thinking about walking away from this beautiful place and our wonderful neighbors, from the quiet and the trees beneath which are buried some of our beloved animals. I'd be grieved to lose it. But the dream, the one where we are never more dependent upon gas prices, never again in any kind of debt, and free to live on less, and thus earn little and live more, draws me in.
Sharon
Childhood and "The Farm"
My children have the usual component of children's books and toys, and I cannot but notice how central to their world as these things present it is "The Farm." One of the first things my son, Eli, knew for sure was that a cow said, "moo," and Isaiah's first word was "quack." All of which simply suggests the centrality of this imagined farm in the world of small people. It is always the same farm, a kind of diversified small farm that barely exists any longer, one with a house cow, a small flock of sheep, a few pigs in a sty, a barnyard full of chickens and ducks, and a cat with kittens. In stories, in imaginative play, through their toys, even regularly on the otherwise urbanized Sesame Street, my children visited "The Farm" more often than anywhere else, and I do not think that they are in any way alone. Every child I know grows up with these images, and on some level, "The Farm" is the dream of our collective childhood. Whether or not you actually had a farm to visit or live on, at some gut level we know that this is how children are supposed to live, milking cows, collecting eggs, growing food, running through open pastures, playing with animals, being part of a productive life, doing the ordinary work of sustenence. We represent to our children the possibility of this kind of life, take them on field trips to farms to pet the animals and give them the experience of picking fruit because the nurturing of other lives and the production of food is the most basic and essential of human activities, and as far removed as our adult selves can be from this work, we recognize its necessity in childhood.
The farms in my sons' stories have not kept pace with modern agribusiness. None of our library's portrayals of chickens shows debeaked, manure soaked chickens crammed into tiny wire cages that mechanically collect eggs. Nor do they include in their farm word lists, "hog manure lagoon," "Round-up ready soybeans" or "soil erosion." One of my son's books claims to be about tractors, but even it cannot resist adding, "On the way to the field he passes a wooly sheep, a brown cow, a hungry pig and her piglets and a noisy goose." The gigantic tractor with enclosed cab that the book shows probably works on monocropped fields raising a few thousand acres of corn, but there is so little to write about the tractor itself that the book must return to the (almost certainly absent in real life) pleasures of animal noises and barnyard diversity to have something to say. The actual living farms that resembled those portrayed in my son's childhood are in a very real danger of disappearing altogether, and becoming an imaginary places, like Fairyland. It is frightening to realize that Dorothy's Kansas where she walked the boards of the pig's fence and helped her aunt with the farm labor, for all its black-and-while dustbowl sorrow, is now a place as imaginary and lamented as Oz itself.
I am just old enough to remember an older-style farm. My great-aunt and uncle were truck farmers in (then) rural Connecticut, and I remember picking and loading produce in summers, and chasing my cousin Amy in and out of the cool, dark chicken house, collecting eggs, petting hens and wreaking havoc as we dared each other to crawl into the more spidery recesses of the barn. My father took us to pick apples at a family farm in New Hampshire, where we visited pigs kept not for agri-tourism but for meat, and where I chased farm kittens in the hay loft and climbed old standard apple trees to find the nicest unpicked specimens. No pick-your-own orchard I know of now permits children to climb into haylofts or trees, if only for insurance reasons. Both those farms and their owners are gone, as are most diversified small farms in the United States. The ones that remain are far from land that might be seen as desirable, or even reachable by cities and suburbs, so the majority of American children will never see them. If they visit a farm at all, it will be a farm designed for tourism, with a petting zoo and animals who are pets rather than livestock. We have one such farm near us, which showcases 2 baby goats, a single pig, a pair of turkeys (both male) and half a dozen other single animals who are there because they draw families to the farm's stand and apple trees. The animals disappear (without any explicit acknowledgement of their final destination) each autumn, keeping children firmly apart from the realities of farm-animals-as-meat.
I do not deny the virtue of a place that connects children, however tenuously, to the real feel and smell and taste and value of livestock and a farm, but if we truly believe (and I suspect we do) that contact with our rural past and future is necessary for children (and adults!), and that children should live in both the actual and imaginary life of the farm, then we need to make certain that such farms are real and available to them, and that we as a community are fully connected to them. That is, we need to patronize those farms, support them, make them possible, encourage laws that support those farms and discourage industrial agriculture, which has nothing at all to do with farms. And those of us so inclined need to live on farms, or small homesteads that resemble them. Even those in the suburbs can make a little life with a few hens, rabbits and a garden.
Eric and I have taken it upon ourselves to remake the farm, not out of nostalgia, but simply because the farm makes sense. There is a logic to diversification that no industrial agriculture can match - sheep and cows and geese can share the same pasture, each eating a different part of the grass. Chickens root worms and fly eggs out of manure of larger animals. The garden provides waste and extra to supplement the feed of an animal, the animal provides manure for the garden. And the child enjoys the tomato never touched by a chemical, the brush of silky feathers against his cheek when the hen nestles in his arms, the dog to play with, the apple trees to climb, the cornfield to hide it, the kittens to pet, the goat's milk that feeds her young and him, and the lamb to love and nurture. The diversified small farm is the world of childhood. That does not mean it is wholly innocent, or wholly pure, but at times, it is as close to those things as anything we can conceive or create.
The farms in my sons' stories have not kept pace with modern agribusiness. None of our library's portrayals of chickens shows debeaked, manure soaked chickens crammed into tiny wire cages that mechanically collect eggs. Nor do they include in their farm word lists, "hog manure lagoon," "Round-up ready soybeans" or "soil erosion." One of my son's books claims to be about tractors, but even it cannot resist adding, "On the way to the field he passes a wooly sheep, a brown cow, a hungry pig and her piglets and a noisy goose." The gigantic tractor with enclosed cab that the book shows probably works on monocropped fields raising a few thousand acres of corn, but there is so little to write about the tractor itself that the book must return to the (almost certainly absent in real life) pleasures of animal noises and barnyard diversity to have something to say. The actual living farms that resembled those portrayed in my son's childhood are in a very real danger of disappearing altogether, and becoming an imaginary places, like Fairyland. It is frightening to realize that Dorothy's Kansas where she walked the boards of the pig's fence and helped her aunt with the farm labor, for all its black-and-while dustbowl sorrow, is now a place as imaginary and lamented as Oz itself.
I am just old enough to remember an older-style farm. My great-aunt and uncle were truck farmers in (then) rural Connecticut, and I remember picking and loading produce in summers, and chasing my cousin Amy in and out of the cool, dark chicken house, collecting eggs, petting hens and wreaking havoc as we dared each other to crawl into the more spidery recesses of the barn. My father took us to pick apples at a family farm in New Hampshire, where we visited pigs kept not for agri-tourism but for meat, and where I chased farm kittens in the hay loft and climbed old standard apple trees to find the nicest unpicked specimens. No pick-your-own orchard I know of now permits children to climb into haylofts or trees, if only for insurance reasons. Both those farms and their owners are gone, as are most diversified small farms in the United States. The ones that remain are far from land that might be seen as desirable, or even reachable by cities and suburbs, so the majority of American children will never see them. If they visit a farm at all, it will be a farm designed for tourism, with a petting zoo and animals who are pets rather than livestock. We have one such farm near us, which showcases 2 baby goats, a single pig, a pair of turkeys (both male) and half a dozen other single animals who are there because they draw families to the farm's stand and apple trees. The animals disappear (without any explicit acknowledgement of their final destination) each autumn, keeping children firmly apart from the realities of farm-animals-as-meat.
I do not deny the virtue of a place that connects children, however tenuously, to the real feel and smell and taste and value of livestock and a farm, but if we truly believe (and I suspect we do) that contact with our rural past and future is necessary for children (and adults!), and that children should live in both the actual and imaginary life of the farm, then we need to make certain that such farms are real and available to them, and that we as a community are fully connected to them. That is, we need to patronize those farms, support them, make them possible, encourage laws that support those farms and discourage industrial agriculture, which has nothing at all to do with farms. And those of us so inclined need to live on farms, or small homesteads that resemble them. Even those in the suburbs can make a little life with a few hens, rabbits and a garden.
Eric and I have taken it upon ourselves to remake the farm, not out of nostalgia, but simply because the farm makes sense. There is a logic to diversification that no industrial agriculture can match - sheep and cows and geese can share the same pasture, each eating a different part of the grass. Chickens root worms and fly eggs out of manure of larger animals. The garden provides waste and extra to supplement the feed of an animal, the animal provides manure for the garden. And the child enjoys the tomato never touched by a chemical, the brush of silky feathers against his cheek when the hen nestles in his arms, the dog to play with, the apple trees to climb, the cornfield to hide it, the kittens to pet, the goat's milk that feeds her young and him, and the lamb to love and nurture. The diversified small farm is the world of childhood. That does not mean it is wholly innocent, or wholly pure, but at times, it is as close to those things as anything we can conceive or create.
Monday, January 03, 2005
Some plants and seeds I like
I started this list on the running on empty list on yahoo groups, but will continue it here, since I ran out of time for posting there. If you want to read the rest, you'll have to subscribe. It will likely be good for you ;-). Obviously, this is pegged to my climate (upstate NY) and my garden (clayey and rocky, with lots of chickens in it) so YMMV.
Sweet potatoes - mostly, I don't have to buy slips any more, since my original Georgia Jets and Porto Ricos usually last long enough to make more, but if I do, those are the two to get. Store sweet potatoes don't taste nearly as good as mine, and if I can grow them, pretty much anyone south of Montreal can. They store all year for me, and are an essential staple.
Peppers - I posted about peppers on the other list, but I wanted to ask here also - anyone know a good OP korean hot pepper? I can't live without my spicy korean noodles and kimchi, which require peppers. The only one I've found is a hybrid from Evergreen.
Also, anyone have a favorite habanero for the north? I like 'em fiery.
Eggplant - I love eggplant, and for some incomprehensible reason they grow really well in my cold, wet garden. Don't ask me. Ichiban has been most reliable for me, but is a hybrid. Pingtung long does ok - I had one strain that did much better, but I can't remember where I get it. Rosa Bianca didn't do well last year, but did the year before. And the Turkish Orange ones always go bananas, and no one but me likes them (kind of bitter). I find eggplant keeps best dried.
Huckleberries are amazing, and I don't know why everyone doesn't grow them. They grow just like tomatoes, are incredibly prolific, and you can have berries in one season. What's not to love? I get mine from Baker Creek, but I might try seed saver's wonderberry later.
Celeries and the like: The only celeriac I've ever tried is large Prague. Love it. The leaves make a good celery in soup. I mostly don't grow celery any more - too much work, too heavy a feeder, takes up a lot of space all season long, and what do you get? Celery. I do grow zwolsche krul cutting celery and lovage, both of which dried give that flavor to soups without all the bother.
Daylilies - Cold climate permaculturist's dreams. The petals are the best tasting flowers I've ever eaten - sweet and crisp. Mine bloom for a month or more. The buds are great dried in soup. The root is tasty, and the shoots are great in the early spring when not much is growing. And they are so pretty. Plant a lot.
Strawberries - for years I've been looking for "Fairfax" strawberries, and can't find them. Laura Simon, The Nearings, Ruth Stout, Gene Logsdon - every one of them say they are the best tasting strawberry out there, but they seem to be gone. Anyone know where to find them? I grow "Sparkle" their step-child, but it isn't as tasty or, I gather, as disease resistant. People are insane - they have a perfect strawberry, and they throw it away for something new and sparkly. May whoever is responsible have to eat supermarket strawberries for a long, hot, eternity, while the real things send their perfume from just out of reach. (Ok, maybe that's a little excessive. But I want that strawberry.)
Arugula - I'm excited to try seed savers astro, which supposedly has bigger leaves - I could eat arugula by the vat every day, and I can usually manage to keep it going from april to november, so I do ok that way. Ordinarily, I grow whatever, plus the sylvetta, which is a little pointier and, I think, a little spicier.
Chard - Customers like the five color silverbeet stuff - Seed savers has a great strain. But I admit, my two favorites are "Argentata" and "Fordhook" Chard is a wonderful plant and no one sings its praises enough. It will grow all through the hot of the summer and the cold of most of the winter. It is delicious, simple, nutritious and pretty. You can eat the ribs like celery, or put them in soup and dye it pink. As a baby green it makes one heck of a salad. And the more you pick it, the more there is.
Broccoli. I'm still working on a favorite OP broccoli - except that I really like "Romanesco", and Eric likes it because it is a fractal (and tastes good). Rosalind (Territorial) has done well for me, as has Purple Sprouting (I can't remember - maybe Baker Creek?). But I've been using hybrids for early crops, and they are more reliable. I've got to work on that. It isn't really a storage crop, despite its nutritional value, so it isn't a huge priority.
Squash - I love squash. I can't live without hubbards. I know they make small ones, but it seems so sad to grow a 5 lb squash when you can grow a 30lb one, and the chickens and ducks so love baked squash that if we actually leave some, they will. Plus you can put it in soup, bread, pasta... Butternuts are a main crop, and plain old Waltham is a proven winner. I love Futsu, which really does taste nutty - kind of of like beech nuts, and has a cool smell. Oh, and I love zucchini - all zucchini. That makes me weird, I know.
Borage - the blossoms really do taste like cucumber, are amazingly pretty, and fun. Plus, it will show up forever. Add salad burnet, and if your cuke crop fails (as mine mostly has two years in a row) you are set for that cuke taste. Tough to make pickles of, though ;-P.
Cucumbers and I have a hostile relationship - I've had dreadful crops the last few years. We are down to 1 jar of pickles - sigh. I love poona kheera, delicatesse, and national pickling, but they don't love my garden.
I'm sure I should post more, but I'm tired and lazy. My husband has promised me thai beef salad if I'll wind the skein of yarn for his next project, and I am a whore for anything in lime juice and fish sauce dressing. Sorry.
Sharon
Sharon
Sweet potatoes - mostly, I don't have to buy slips any more, since my original Georgia Jets and Porto Ricos usually last long enough to make more, but if I do, those are the two to get. Store sweet potatoes don't taste nearly as good as mine, and if I can grow them, pretty much anyone south of Montreal can. They store all year for me, and are an essential staple.
Peppers - I posted about peppers on the other list, but I wanted to ask here also - anyone know a good OP korean hot pepper? I can't live without my spicy korean noodles and kimchi, which require peppers. The only one I've found is a hybrid from Evergreen.
Also, anyone have a favorite habanero for the north? I like 'em fiery.
Eggplant - I love eggplant, and for some incomprehensible reason they grow really well in my cold, wet garden. Don't ask me. Ichiban has been most reliable for me, but is a hybrid. Pingtung long does ok - I had one strain that did much better, but I can't remember where I get it. Rosa Bianca didn't do well last year, but did the year before. And the Turkish Orange ones always go bananas, and no one but me likes them (kind of bitter). I find eggplant keeps best dried.
Huckleberries are amazing, and I don't know why everyone doesn't grow them. They grow just like tomatoes, are incredibly prolific, and you can have berries in one season. What's not to love? I get mine from Baker Creek, but I might try seed saver's wonderberry later.
Celeries and the like: The only celeriac I've ever tried is large Prague. Love it. The leaves make a good celery in soup. I mostly don't grow celery any more - too much work, too heavy a feeder, takes up a lot of space all season long, and what do you get? Celery. I do grow zwolsche krul cutting celery and lovage, both of which dried give that flavor to soups without all the bother.
Daylilies - Cold climate permaculturist's dreams. The petals are the best tasting flowers I've ever eaten - sweet and crisp. Mine bloom for a month or more. The buds are great dried in soup. The root is tasty, and the shoots are great in the early spring when not much is growing. And they are so pretty. Plant a lot.
Strawberries - for years I've been looking for "Fairfax" strawberries, and can't find them. Laura Simon, The Nearings, Ruth Stout, Gene Logsdon - every one of them say they are the best tasting strawberry out there, but they seem to be gone. Anyone know where to find them? I grow "Sparkle" their step-child, but it isn't as tasty or, I gather, as disease resistant. People are insane - they have a perfect strawberry, and they throw it away for something new and sparkly. May whoever is responsible have to eat supermarket strawberries for a long, hot, eternity, while the real things send their perfume from just out of reach. (Ok, maybe that's a little excessive. But I want that strawberry.)
Arugula - I'm excited to try seed savers astro, which supposedly has bigger leaves - I could eat arugula by the vat every day, and I can usually manage to keep it going from april to november, so I do ok that way. Ordinarily, I grow whatever, plus the sylvetta, which is a little pointier and, I think, a little spicier.
Chard - Customers like the five color silverbeet stuff - Seed savers has a great strain. But I admit, my two favorites are "Argentata" and "Fordhook" Chard is a wonderful plant and no one sings its praises enough. It will grow all through the hot of the summer and the cold of most of the winter. It is delicious, simple, nutritious and pretty. You can eat the ribs like celery, or put them in soup and dye it pink. As a baby green it makes one heck of a salad. And the more you pick it, the more there is.
Broccoli. I'm still working on a favorite OP broccoli - except that I really like "Romanesco", and Eric likes it because it is a fractal (and tastes good). Rosalind (Territorial) has done well for me, as has Purple Sprouting (I can't remember - maybe Baker Creek?). But I've been using hybrids for early crops, and they are more reliable. I've got to work on that. It isn't really a storage crop, despite its nutritional value, so it isn't a huge priority.
Squash - I love squash. I can't live without hubbards. I know they make small ones, but it seems so sad to grow a 5 lb squash when you can grow a 30lb one, and the chickens and ducks so love baked squash that if we actually leave some, they will. Plus you can put it in soup, bread, pasta... Butternuts are a main crop, and plain old Waltham is a proven winner. I love Futsu, which really does taste nutty - kind of of like beech nuts, and has a cool smell. Oh, and I love zucchini - all zucchini. That makes me weird, I know.
Borage - the blossoms really do taste like cucumber, are amazingly pretty, and fun. Plus, it will show up forever. Add salad burnet, and if your cuke crop fails (as mine mostly has two years in a row) you are set for that cuke taste. Tough to make pickles of, though ;-P.
Cucumbers and I have a hostile relationship - I've had dreadful crops the last few years. We are down to 1 jar of pickles - sigh. I love poona kheera, delicatesse, and national pickling, but they don't love my garden.
I'm sure I should post more, but I'm tired and lazy. My husband has promised me thai beef salad if I'll wind the skein of yarn for his next project, and I am a whore for anything in lime juice and fish sauce dressing. Sorry.
Sharon
Sharon
Prayer
Education and belief are often held to be incompatible. But for me, my education makes it possible for me to believe - the faith I was given as a child felt wrong, didn't accord with what I saw in the world. Only study, and knowledge, and conversion made it possible to accord my essential sense of immanence with the structure and discipline of a belief (not faith). I'm not sure that any of my college Professors would be especially proud to know that helped turn me into someone who believes profoundly in G-d, but I'm glad they did.
Unfortunately, a sense of immanence does damned little to make recent events comprehensible. Yes, I know that Jewish party line, but if you believe that G-d used to act in the world to make sure one couple got to have a baby, its hard to believe that G-d couldn't act to prevent the hideous deaths of hundreds of thousands. Ok, I can almost buy that G-d looks by sadly and can't stop the evil in the hearts of men all over the world, but no man orchestrated this (although a few did nothing to prevent it).
Believing in G-d doesn't really help that much, unless belief comes with some conviction of what in the name of Moses's left nipple G-d intends for the world. And in my case, that little bit was left blank. So I'm left with an earnest conviction that someone is running things, but He's either got an ineffable plan that involves drowning people for fun, wasn't paying much attention, or doesn't much care. Fortunately, Judaism steps in to reassure us that G-d does care, he just...oh yeah, no it really doesn't.
As I said before, the Jew's role in the world is to fix the mess that man and G-d combine to create. We do it with work, and we do it with prayer. My current prayer is "Hello? Anyone home?" My current best work - a little money and some blood donation. It doesn't feel like enough. And it isn't.
I am grateful that Eric's college buddy Prasath was on the other coast of Sri Lanka, and he and his family are fine. I'm grateful that my college friend who was supposed to be doing her peace corps work in coastal Thailand is actually in *central* thailand. And I guess I'm grateful that it wasn't an asteroid destroying all life on earth. But gratitude is a tough commodity today.
Shalom
Unfortunately, a sense of immanence does damned little to make recent events comprehensible. Yes, I know that Jewish party line, but if you believe that G-d used to act in the world to make sure one couple got to have a baby, its hard to believe that G-d couldn't act to prevent the hideous deaths of hundreds of thousands. Ok, I can almost buy that G-d looks by sadly and can't stop the evil in the hearts of men all over the world, but no man orchestrated this (although a few did nothing to prevent it).
Believing in G-d doesn't really help that much, unless belief comes with some conviction of what in the name of Moses's left nipple G-d intends for the world. And in my case, that little bit was left blank. So I'm left with an earnest conviction that someone is running things, but He's either got an ineffable plan that involves drowning people for fun, wasn't paying much attention, or doesn't much care. Fortunately, Judaism steps in to reassure us that G-d does care, he just...oh yeah, no it really doesn't.
As I said before, the Jew's role in the world is to fix the mess that man and G-d combine to create. We do it with work, and we do it with prayer. My current prayer is "Hello? Anyone home?" My current best work - a little money and some blood donation. It doesn't feel like enough. And it isn't.
I am grateful that Eric's college buddy Prasath was on the other coast of Sri Lanka, and he and his family are fine. I'm grateful that my college friend who was supposed to be doing her peace corps work in coastal Thailand is actually in *central* thailand. And I guess I'm grateful that it wasn't an asteroid destroying all life on earth. But gratitude is a tough commodity today.
Shalom
Saturday, December 25, 2004
Tikkun Olam - what really matters
Something to think about, whatever holiday you have celebrated, will celebrate or are at the moment recovering from...Perhaps there is someone out there who longs to hear their own life taken apart for its foulness, excess and banality, but I do not know them, and it would be a risky thing to write this blog hoping that there were thousands of such people. Most people (and I do include myself here) who decry the collapse of our culture into rampant consumerism, the environmental disaster that is modern life, and the sadness of our empty collective experience are extremely tedious, and they do so because they enjoy self-righteousness. Whether they do a great deal or nothing to resist and relieve these conditions, they enjoy the sensation that they care more than the rest of us, feel deeper outrage and are the better for it.
Outrage and compassion are good qualities, but in themselves, they take us nowhere - we may feel the better for experiencing them, but they alter nothing except our interior state, and when we imagine that what is important is our feelings, or our intentions, we glorify ourselves when we are most unworthy. There are two things better than self-righteousness, better than moral outrage, better than mere abstract compassion: courage and principle.
But I have a hard time fixing the problem of overconsumption, and the fact that our language does not really allow for an alternative way of thinking. I am the origin of the difficulty, abetted by corporations, by the notion that money and trade are what matter most, by the notion that being humane is too hard, by the sense that we cannot really make deep alterations in our state, that we are simply cogs in the wheel. But the bottom line is that I did not have to buy what they sold me. I did not have to buy the barbie dolls, the packaged mini-carrots, the notion that grandparents belong in a home because no one can be there to take care of them. And while I am skeptical, even ironic, about these notions, I also have given in at times, conceeded, kept my pleasures and polluted and enslaved and mistreated others.
The reality is that my wealth is borne on the backs of others who are less wealthy. I can have not only vaccinations and urgently needed medical treatment for my children, but they can have orthodontistry to the tune of many thousands of dollars for slightly crooked teeth. But other children cannot have vaccinations, can die from diarrhea or starvation. We all know this, we all believe in our hearts it is wrong, but there is something lost in the translation. Either we do not believe that the one depends on the other, that my wealth deprives another, or we want so badly to give the gift of everything to our families and children that we enjoy our wealth and close our eyes to the consequences. Or perhaps it is that we cannot see how depriving ourselves will help another.
But it is the simple truth that I am wealthy in goods because goods are cheap, and do not represent their ethical cost. I have cheap clothing because people who are effectively slaves sew it for me. I have cheap food because people who are effectively slaves fertilize and spray and pick it for me. I have cheap gas because it is extracted by oil companies who destroy wildlife, pollute seas and rivers, and prop up fascist governments so that I can take all the money I have saved and drive my kids to Disneyland. My wealth is built on slavery just as much as that of the plantation owners before me. And I'm not very wealthy. I struggle to pay my mortgage. I have credit card debt on which I pay the minimum. I am wealthy on paper, in calories and in objects, but my wealth does not translate to a sense of security or confidence, it does not bring me happiness (more people are depressed now than ever before), freedom from fear, or anything but more work to preserve my wealth and more stuff to fill my overflowing home.
Most reasonably well educated and socially conscious people realize that there is something horribly wrong with the way that they live. You do not need me to tell you that on hot days, you can scarcely breath for all the exhaust hanging in the air of your suburb. You don't need me to point out that because you cannot afford housing near your job, you spend an hour a day commuting. You don't need me to tell you that more of our children have asthma and psychological difficulties than when we were young. You don't need me to tell you that by letting our kids watch hours of tv, they are being influenced by powers that you cannot compete with. You don't need me to point out that teenagers (and younger children) are murdering, robbing, raping, abusing at a rate far higher than anything you knew before. You don't need me to tell you that your mortgage and credit card bills are leaving you hanging on the edge of bankruptcy, while things keep accumulating in your house. You don't need me to tell you that the truth is that the oil that finances our economy, that pollutes our planet, that feeds our unending lust for gas, is eventually going to run out, and that some scary things are going to happen in the meantime. You don't need me to tell you that you work longer hours than your parents did, and now, both of you work, and you rarely have any time alone. You don't need me to tell you that an economy based upon consumer spending, all financed with imaginary, credit-card money, is eventually going to collapse inward. You don't need me to point out that it feels increasingly hard to make good choices, to find a way to feed and clothe your family without putting chemicals that you disapprove of into the atmosphere, and without using slave labor to pick or sew or make the things you depend upon. You don't need me to tell you that something is very, very wrong.
We all know all of these things. We know it in our guts and our bones, and we're afraid. And we try desperately to fix some of these things - to make sure that kids at risk have more counselors, to get more exercise, to eat more veggies. Maybe we've even tried some of the more radical approaches, like taking the train instead of driving or eating less meat. Maybe you recycle everything, are a vegetarian, only watch PBS and ride your bicycle to work. You have courage and conviction, a set of principles that say you want the world to be a better place, and you want to do your part to make it that way. But you only have limited time. You can't ride your bike every day, because that takes away time with your children. You can cut down on tv, but not cut it out altogether, because your kids like it, and because you don't have anything to fill the void with - you have to work. You cannot fix it yourself, because you do not have the time and energy and resources and you don’t understand the complicated system that needs to be worked to enact major change. How do you contact your congressman? What does that do if you do it? How do you get a question on the ballot? How do you find like-minded people? How do you make them care?
Even if you care, when you are tired, you buy the grapes coated in pesticides. Even if you care, in a hurry, you drive in just this once. The piecemeal solution depends upon private willpower, individual engagement, and the vagaries of your life permitting you
to make the right choices. Modern, corporate life offers no incentives for you to succeed, and every incentive for you to fail, to feel that you tried biking and it was too time-consuming, too hard, too slow, and it took time away from your family. You give it up because the benefits to you are purely abstract.
The only solution I have been able to come to is the most radical one of all, and because it is radical, it is easier and better than the piecemeal solution. It is to make your life what you want, and to build into that life a set of rules and techniques to do what you think is right. You receive the reward and the incentive simultaneously. You start over, find what you want, and figure out how to make that come about. It involves great sacrifices, for you will get off that other man's back once and for all. It is difficult. But the reward is that you get the thing you most desire - yourself, your family, your love, your life.
It is not easy, and I can't tell you how to do it. I have not yet wholly succeeded in doing it myself. But it seems to me the only goal worth working towards and the only thing worth praying for - that I can break my dependency on doing wrong, and begin, at this moment, to do right, to take up my true share of tikkun olam, the repair of the world.
More on this soon.
Shalom,
Sharon
Outrage and compassion are good qualities, but in themselves, they take us nowhere - we may feel the better for experiencing them, but they alter nothing except our interior state, and when we imagine that what is important is our feelings, or our intentions, we glorify ourselves when we are most unworthy. There are two things better than self-righteousness, better than moral outrage, better than mere abstract compassion: courage and principle.
But I have a hard time fixing the problem of overconsumption, and the fact that our language does not really allow for an alternative way of thinking. I am the origin of the difficulty, abetted by corporations, by the notion that money and trade are what matter most, by the notion that being humane is too hard, by the sense that we cannot really make deep alterations in our state, that we are simply cogs in the wheel. But the bottom line is that I did not have to buy what they sold me. I did not have to buy the barbie dolls, the packaged mini-carrots, the notion that grandparents belong in a home because no one can be there to take care of them. And while I am skeptical, even ironic, about these notions, I also have given in at times, conceeded, kept my pleasures and polluted and enslaved and mistreated others.
The reality is that my wealth is borne on the backs of others who are less wealthy. I can have not only vaccinations and urgently needed medical treatment for my children, but they can have orthodontistry to the tune of many thousands of dollars for slightly crooked teeth. But other children cannot have vaccinations, can die from diarrhea or starvation. We all know this, we all believe in our hearts it is wrong, but there is something lost in the translation. Either we do not believe that the one depends on the other, that my wealth deprives another, or we want so badly to give the gift of everything to our families and children that we enjoy our wealth and close our eyes to the consequences. Or perhaps it is that we cannot see how depriving ourselves will help another.
But it is the simple truth that I am wealthy in goods because goods are cheap, and do not represent their ethical cost. I have cheap clothing because people who are effectively slaves sew it for me. I have cheap food because people who are effectively slaves fertilize and spray and pick it for me. I have cheap gas because it is extracted by oil companies who destroy wildlife, pollute seas and rivers, and prop up fascist governments so that I can take all the money I have saved and drive my kids to Disneyland. My wealth is built on slavery just as much as that of the plantation owners before me. And I'm not very wealthy. I struggle to pay my mortgage. I have credit card debt on which I pay the minimum. I am wealthy on paper, in calories and in objects, but my wealth does not translate to a sense of security or confidence, it does not bring me happiness (more people are depressed now than ever before), freedom from fear, or anything but more work to preserve my wealth and more stuff to fill my overflowing home.
Most reasonably well educated and socially conscious people realize that there is something horribly wrong with the way that they live. You do not need me to tell you that on hot days, you can scarcely breath for all the exhaust hanging in the air of your suburb. You don't need me to point out that because you cannot afford housing near your job, you spend an hour a day commuting. You don't need me to tell you that more of our children have asthma and psychological difficulties than when we were young. You don't need me to tell you that by letting our kids watch hours of tv, they are being influenced by powers that you cannot compete with. You don't need me to point out that teenagers (and younger children) are murdering, robbing, raping, abusing at a rate far higher than anything you knew before. You don't need me to tell you that your mortgage and credit card bills are leaving you hanging on the edge of bankruptcy, while things keep accumulating in your house. You don't need me to tell you that the truth is that the oil that finances our economy, that pollutes our planet, that feeds our unending lust for gas, is eventually going to run out, and that some scary things are going to happen in the meantime. You don't need me to tell you that you work longer hours than your parents did, and now, both of you work, and you rarely have any time alone. You don't need me to tell you that an economy based upon consumer spending, all financed with imaginary, credit-card money, is eventually going to collapse inward. You don't need me to point out that it feels increasingly hard to make good choices, to find a way to feed and clothe your family without putting chemicals that you disapprove of into the atmosphere, and without using slave labor to pick or sew or make the things you depend upon. You don't need me to tell you that something is very, very wrong.
We all know all of these things. We know it in our guts and our bones, and we're afraid. And we try desperately to fix some of these things - to make sure that kids at risk have more counselors, to get more exercise, to eat more veggies. Maybe we've even tried some of the more radical approaches, like taking the train instead of driving or eating less meat. Maybe you recycle everything, are a vegetarian, only watch PBS and ride your bicycle to work. You have courage and conviction, a set of principles that say you want the world to be a better place, and you want to do your part to make it that way. But you only have limited time. You can't ride your bike every day, because that takes away time with your children. You can cut down on tv, but not cut it out altogether, because your kids like it, and because you don't have anything to fill the void with - you have to work. You cannot fix it yourself, because you do not have the time and energy and resources and you don’t understand the complicated system that needs to be worked to enact major change. How do you contact your congressman? What does that do if you do it? How do you get a question on the ballot? How do you find like-minded people? How do you make them care?
Even if you care, when you are tired, you buy the grapes coated in pesticides. Even if you care, in a hurry, you drive in just this once. The piecemeal solution depends upon private willpower, individual engagement, and the vagaries of your life permitting you
to make the right choices. Modern, corporate life offers no incentives for you to succeed, and every incentive for you to fail, to feel that you tried biking and it was too time-consuming, too hard, too slow, and it took time away from your family. You give it up because the benefits to you are purely abstract.
The only solution I have been able to come to is the most radical one of all, and because it is radical, it is easier and better than the piecemeal solution. It is to make your life what you want, and to build into that life a set of rules and techniques to do what you think is right. You receive the reward and the incentive simultaneously. You start over, find what you want, and figure out how to make that come about. It involves great sacrifices, for you will get off that other man's back once and for all. It is difficult. But the reward is that you get the thing you most desire - yourself, your family, your love, your life.
It is not easy, and I can't tell you how to do it. I have not yet wholly succeeded in doing it myself. But it seems to me the only goal worth working towards and the only thing worth praying for - that I can break my dependency on doing wrong, and begin, at this moment, to do right, to take up my true share of tikkun olam, the repair of the world.
Shalom,
Sharon
Friday, December 24, 2004
Harper's Index
Harper's Index for this month has two interesting statistics in it. Take a look:
"Percentage Change since 2002 in the average U.S. price of gasline: +35.2
Change since then in the amount of gasoline Americans consume per capita: 0"
Interesting conjunction, those statistics. Part of the issue, of course, is that prices simply haven't gotten high enough to make people conserve. Only about 14% of the American population reports having to choose between gas and something else that matters as yet. More will this winter, as heating oil prices rise.
But most people have enough leeway in their budgets that they haven't changed their habits all that much. But I would argue that that lack of change isn't because they don't want to - its because they don't know how, or worse, they *can't*.
While there are certainly places we could easily consume, one of the things most people don't seem to notice is just how hard it will be to alter our usage patterns on any large scale. People *have* to drive to their jobs, and as gas prices rise, and employers find their margins of profit dropping because they have to heat their buildings, transport their goods, etc... their ability to move or be flexible will drop as well. I anticipate during the early stages of peak oil, that a lot of people will pick up and move closer to their jobs.
But that's not a long term solution, and we won't be moving. Because as the cost of oil and gas rises even higher, and salaries are cut (again, as those profit margins drop), those jobs will fold altogether. No employer in the world can operate without lights, heat, transportation. When those things get costly, and the average worker can no longer afford their product anyhow (since they have all they can do to pay for food, which is also rising radically in price), the jobs will be gone.
The simple reality of peak oil is that we have built up our infrastructure around oil to such a degree that we are no longer able to back away from the cliff we have made. Oh, wise leadership and serious attention to this issue could make it better - but not good. We won't stop burning oil until we either stop affording it or the last drops are pulled up - we can't. We no longer have the means to live without it. Only those who find a way as individuals or communities to step off the treadmill will be able to escape the end result - when they have to choose between heat and food, spending most of your salary on transportation to a job or not having one at all.
"Percentage Change since 2002 in the average U.S. price of gasline: +35.2
Change since then in the amount of gasoline Americans consume per capita: 0"
Interesting conjunction, those statistics. Part of the issue, of course, is that prices simply haven't gotten high enough to make people conserve. Only about 14% of the American population reports having to choose between gas and something else that matters as yet. More will this winter, as heating oil prices rise.
But most people have enough leeway in their budgets that they haven't changed their habits all that much. But I would argue that that lack of change isn't because they don't want to - its because they don't know how, or worse, they *can't*.
While there are certainly places we could easily consume, one of the things most people don't seem to notice is just how hard it will be to alter our usage patterns on any large scale. People *have* to drive to their jobs, and as gas prices rise, and employers find their margins of profit dropping because they have to heat their buildings, transport their goods, etc... their ability to move or be flexible will drop as well. I anticipate during the early stages of peak oil, that a lot of people will pick up and move closer to their jobs.
But that's not a long term solution, and we won't be moving. Because as the cost of oil and gas rises even higher, and salaries are cut (again, as those profit margins drop), those jobs will fold altogether. No employer in the world can operate without lights, heat, transportation. When those things get costly, and the average worker can no longer afford their product anyhow (since they have all they can do to pay for food, which is also rising radically in price), the jobs will be gone.
The simple reality of peak oil is that we have built up our infrastructure around oil to such a degree that we are no longer able to back away from the cliff we have made. Oh, wise leadership and serious attention to this issue could make it better - but not good. We won't stop burning oil until we either stop affording it or the last drops are pulled up - we can't. We no longer have the means to live without it. Only those who find a way as individuals or communities to step off the treadmill will be able to escape the end result - when they have to choose between heat and food, spending most of your salary on transportation to a job or not having one at all.
Wednesday, December 22, 2004
Chanukah is mercifully over!!!
I don't know what I was thinking when I bore two children between the end of November and the middle of December. In a three week period this year, we had Simon's third birthday, 8 nights of wretched excess, and Isaiah's first birthday. My kids got, umm, many, many presents. Far too many.
Actually, I do know why I have two children in such a short period - birthin' by the agricultural calendar. We have our babies at the most convenient time of year, when the garden is done and the next one not yet started, after the CSA deliveries, the canning and preserving, and garden clean up are finished, but before seed-starting, the arrival of chicks and poults, etc...
We have some strange rules about presents, nearly all of which we've violated now and then, but which keep the insanity from getting too intolerable.
1. Nothing that sings, dances, has no volume control or otherwise drives Mommy and Daddy up the wall.
2. Nothing that can only be played with one way - if it has "directive" qualities, it goes to the synagogue yard sale, particularly if it gives you verbal instructions on how to play with it. The sole exceptions to this rule are board games.
3. No batteries - or nothing that can't be played with without them. Many battery operated basic toys (like our otherwise beloved Fisher-Price farm, which sings and makes noises when you put the animals in the "right" place - grrr!) work just fine without batteries. I make exceptions for a few things - we have some musical toys that use batteries, but generally, we're opposed.
4. Anything that says educational, but means "sings the alphabet really loudly while otherwise doing a lot of stupid crap."
5. Natural materials whenever possible. Partly to reduce the appalling quantity of brightly colored plastic in my house (there was a time when I thought about thinks like aesthetics - ie, before I had children), partly to reduce the amount of toxic chemicals and non-renewable garbage, but mostly, because real materials feel nicer. So wood, wool, metal, silk, etc...
6. Mostly no tv/movie tie ins. We have always excepted Sesame Street from this rule - DH has a cookie monster thing. I have come to tolerate a certain amount of Disney Winnie the Pooh crap, since Simon is Pooh obsessed (we're reading _The House at Pooh Corner_ with both boys right now) and it is disturbingly hard to find Shepherd Pooh related toys. We own Thomas trains, but my kids have never seen Thomas, and don't know that it is a tie in. We own a lot of Bob the builder trucks, but since they are primarily trucks, not characters, I tolerate them. I suspect I'll soften further on this subject at some point, but I'm trying to hold a line - no Disney toys, no Halloween character costumes, no Blue's Clues flashlights.
7. No violent toys. This doesn't mean what you probably think it does. The issue is not guns, which so far hasn't come up. For me, the issue is *superheroes* - our neighbor's sons are allowed to watch anything they want, and their three and five year olds are Batman obsessed. All they want to do is play Batman - which pretty much involves kicking and hitting my kids. That's not to say my kids are incapable of violence (hardly), but their kinds of play rarely involve karate kicks...yet. So we're holding the line hard against superheroes. We love our neighbors - this is the only complaint I've ever had about them - but I wanted to cry when I found out that my 2 year old knew who spiderman was already.
For the record, I actually am not opposed to all toy guns. I think trying to make water pistols look like anything other than guns is stupid, and I don't necessarily think that the wooden toy flintlock I had as a girl made me any more violent than I am anyhow. But I suspect most contemporary toy guns violate at least one of the above rules. I'm sure we'll have our own little "Christmas (Chanukah?) Story" moment with guns sooner or later, and again, as long as they are made of wood or wool, have no batteries, make no noise and you can do more than one things with them, they can have as many guns as they want.
8. No toys that Mommy and Daddy deem stupid, gross, unappealing, inappropriate or worthless. This is the rule under which all others are subsumed. No playdough MacDonalds, no Mexican jumping beans on racetracks, no green slime in a tube, no books with farting and vomiting, no pointless commercial tie ins, no hideous clown face puzzles, no toys that indicate on the boxes they are only for girls (I still have not been able to find a tea set for my kids that has children of both genders on the box), no throw-away crap meant to be played with for two minutes and sent to the landfill.
We get a disturbing number of these toys (with three kids and multiple holidays, we simply get a disturbing number of toys), and they are returned, regifted or donated. My kids don't seem to mind (yet) that Mommy scoops up some of their toys and says, "these are for tzedakah" after the kind people who gave them depart. I'm hoping if I keep doing it, it will get to be a routine.
Despite all of this, our house looks like a giant playroom, and while it troubles me some (I am not a fan of excess), I'm happy that there is a lot of good stuff - I'm not a believer in artificial shortages. Just in the last few weeks, my children have received:
1. Woolen dolls (in Simon and Isaiah's case) and a woolen stuffed horse with leather saddle (for Eli). They are beautiful, warm and soft.
2. A table and a train set. This might actually have been for Eric, who is at least as into it as the kids.
3. Many, many, many beautiful children's books.
4. A new top - we break one from overuse every couple of years.
5. A wooden abacus for math games.
6. A puppet theater
7. Assorted trucks for my truck obsessed 1 year old.
8. Assorted stuffed animals for my animal obsessed three year old.
9. A wooden xylophone for my music obsessed 4 1/2 year old.
10. An enormous set of wooden architectural blocks.
My kids are so not deprived it isn't funny - in fact, even my rules aren't keeping the toy level respectable. I feel fortunate not only that my children have wonderful toys to play with, but that many of these will outlast my children, and on to the grandchildren I so fervently hope to have.
I hope your holidays are wonderful, fruitful and over soon!
Shalom.
Sharon
Actually, I do know why I have two children in such a short period - birthin' by the agricultural calendar. We have our babies at the most convenient time of year, when the garden is done and the next one not yet started, after the CSA deliveries, the canning and preserving, and garden clean up are finished, but before seed-starting, the arrival of chicks and poults, etc...
We have some strange rules about presents, nearly all of which we've violated now and then, but which keep the insanity from getting too intolerable.
1. Nothing that sings, dances, has no volume control or otherwise drives Mommy and Daddy up the wall.
2. Nothing that can only be played with one way - if it has "directive" qualities, it goes to the synagogue yard sale, particularly if it gives you verbal instructions on how to play with it. The sole exceptions to this rule are board games.
3. No batteries - or nothing that can't be played with without them. Many battery operated basic toys (like our otherwise beloved Fisher-Price farm, which sings and makes noises when you put the animals in the "right" place - grrr!) work just fine without batteries. I make exceptions for a few things - we have some musical toys that use batteries, but generally, we're opposed.
4. Anything that says educational, but means "sings the alphabet really loudly while otherwise doing a lot of stupid crap."
5. Natural materials whenever possible. Partly to reduce the appalling quantity of brightly colored plastic in my house (there was a time when I thought about thinks like aesthetics - ie, before I had children), partly to reduce the amount of toxic chemicals and non-renewable garbage, but mostly, because real materials feel nicer. So wood, wool, metal, silk, etc...
6. Mostly no tv/movie tie ins. We have always excepted Sesame Street from this rule - DH has a cookie monster thing. I have come to tolerate a certain amount of Disney Winnie the Pooh crap, since Simon is Pooh obsessed (we're reading _The House at Pooh Corner_ with both boys right now) and it is disturbingly hard to find Shepherd Pooh related toys. We own Thomas trains, but my kids have never seen Thomas, and don't know that it is a tie in. We own a lot of Bob the builder trucks, but since they are primarily trucks, not characters, I tolerate them. I suspect I'll soften further on this subject at some point, but I'm trying to hold a line - no Disney toys, no Halloween character costumes, no Blue's Clues flashlights.
7. No violent toys. This doesn't mean what you probably think it does. The issue is not guns, which so far hasn't come up. For me, the issue is *superheroes* - our neighbor's sons are allowed to watch anything they want, and their three and five year olds are Batman obsessed. All they want to do is play Batman - which pretty much involves kicking and hitting my kids. That's not to say my kids are incapable of violence (hardly), but their kinds of play rarely involve karate kicks...yet. So we're holding the line hard against superheroes. We love our neighbors - this is the only complaint I've ever had about them - but I wanted to cry when I found out that my 2 year old knew who spiderman was already.
For the record, I actually am not opposed to all toy guns. I think trying to make water pistols look like anything other than guns is stupid, and I don't necessarily think that the wooden toy flintlock I had as a girl made me any more violent than I am anyhow. But I suspect most contemporary toy guns violate at least one of the above rules. I'm sure we'll have our own little "Christmas (Chanukah?) Story" moment with guns sooner or later, and again, as long as they are made of wood or wool, have no batteries, make no noise and you can do more than one things with them, they can have as many guns as they want.
8. No toys that Mommy and Daddy deem stupid, gross, unappealing, inappropriate or worthless. This is the rule under which all others are subsumed. No playdough MacDonalds, no Mexican jumping beans on racetracks, no green slime in a tube, no books with farting and vomiting, no pointless commercial tie ins, no hideous clown face puzzles, no toys that indicate on the boxes they are only for girls (I still have not been able to find a tea set for my kids that has children of both genders on the box), no throw-away crap meant to be played with for two minutes and sent to the landfill.
We get a disturbing number of these toys (with three kids and multiple holidays, we simply get a disturbing number of toys), and they are returned, regifted or donated. My kids don't seem to mind (yet) that Mommy scoops up some of their toys and says, "these are for tzedakah" after the kind people who gave them depart. I'm hoping if I keep doing it, it will get to be a routine.
Despite all of this, our house looks like a giant playroom, and while it troubles me some (I am not a fan of excess), I'm happy that there is a lot of good stuff - I'm not a believer in artificial shortages. Just in the last few weeks, my children have received:
1. Woolen dolls (in Simon and Isaiah's case) and a woolen stuffed horse with leather saddle (for Eli). They are beautiful, warm and soft.
2. A table and a train set. This might actually have been for Eric, who is at least as into it as the kids.
3. Many, many, many beautiful children's books.
4. A new top - we break one from overuse every couple of years.
5. A wooden abacus for math games.
6. A puppet theater
7. Assorted trucks for my truck obsessed 1 year old.
8. Assorted stuffed animals for my animal obsessed three year old.
9. A wooden xylophone for my music obsessed 4 1/2 year old.
10. An enormous set of wooden architectural blocks.
My kids are so not deprived it isn't funny - in fact, even my rules aren't keeping the toy level respectable. I feel fortunate not only that my children have wonderful toys to play with, but that many of these will outlast my children, and on to the grandchildren I so fervently hope to have.
I hope your holidays are wonderful, fruitful and over soon!
Shalom.
Sharon
Sunday, December 12, 2004
100 Things About Me
I'm feeling narcissistic today, and have been reading too much Proust, since it is way too hot to weed the garden. So, to up the banality of this blog, 100 random facts about yours truly, virtually none of them genuinely proustian or of any great interest.
1. I am exactly 6' tall, and share a birthday (60 years apart) with Julia Child, who was also 6' tall. This means nothing, but pleases me.
2. I did not immediately feel overwhelming love for my children when they were born. More like interest, and a certain degree of abstract concern. Love came later, but hard.
3. I will eat pretty much anything except aspic. That has included many things not classed as "food" in this country.
4. I grew up in a family where people made things and did things themselves. I remember helping my father smelt bullets for his target shooting in our home furnace, and watching my grandmother's hands as she knit, thinking that if only I could learn to mimic her movements, I could do that too. My step-mother pretty much singlehandedly turned our house when I was growing up, from a wrecked stable with no heat into a gorgeous period home.
5. I was given at birth, by my grandmother and great aunt, lifetime memberships in the DAR (Daughters of the American Revolution) and Eastern Star (women freemasons). For some strange reason, I have never pursued them, although my friend Steve and I have considered starting a Jewish chapter of the DAR for the fun of annoying them.
6. The Jewish thing isn't even the worst thing about me for the DAR - I'm part Cherokee, and my Mom was raised in a trailer park. I think I get my taste for country music from there. Oh, and Native American may not be the worst shadow on my racial purity, as Grandma took pains to deny strenuously. Terrible, ain't it?
7. I cannot follow any kind of diagram, no matter how obvious. I was 25 before I could read a map. Visual imagery in general doesn't make a lot of sense to me, and I don't think in images.
8. My family has a Groucho Marx thing, and I grew up watching his movies obsessively. Simon's middle name is "Julius" for Groucho.
9. I have been truly, deeply in love three times. Only one of them requited. Fortunately, the requited one I'm married to.
10. I am a real pain in the ass to live with - I have this on excellent authority and with plenty of external corroboration by multiple sources.
11. I never really liked Middlemarch all that much, despite the name of this blog. I prefer _Daniel Deronda_ or even _Silas Marner_. Although, really, I'd just rather read Fielding.
12. I always claimed to hate Melville, but during my last pregnancy was seized with a sudden, desperate desire to read about whales. I didn't hate it, although I haven't changed my dissertation topic or anything.
13. I am a mean Mommy - I have a "only two repetitions of any story in one day" rule. And only one reading per day of _Green Eggs and Ham_.
14. I like cats better than dogs, but only slightly. Cats are less needy, and I already have children if I want needy things.
15. I remember my father heckling Ronald Reagan at a rally in 1980. He called him "Turkey," I think because he knew we were watching and did not want to curse. I was very impressed by this.
16. I really liked LSD the couple of times I tried it. I was fond of pot, too. I have not yet prepared my anti-drug speech for my children, although it will probably have to be a variation of, "Well, I did drugs. Your grandparents did drugs. Great-Grandma smoked pot a couple of times. Maybe you should think of a more original way to rebel, no?"
17. Despite the fact that I have 30+ hours labors, I love being in labor - it gets me the hell out of pregnancy. Pain, schmain, as long as I'm not pregnant any more.
18. I could eat sushi 3 meals a day for the rest of my life and never get tired of it. This would probably not be good for me, nor for my budget.
19. When in doubt, I cook twice as much food as anyone could realistically need. I am nearly always in doubt. It is a compulsion, passed down through several generations, from at least my great grandmother. No one ever runs out of food at my house, although I am perpetually anxious that they will.
20. I am oddly flexible for someone not thin or athletic. I can still do a split and come up without using my hands. Given that I have had three children and am in my 30s, I am proud of this.
21. I made Eric promise to stay married to me at least 75 years. After that (he'll be 103, I'll be 101) we can date whoever we like.
22. I am bisexual. Since I am also monogamous, this is mostly irrelevant, but it makes it fun to go out girl watching with my husband.
23. My mother and step-mother (better known as Susie) got legally married last May in their hometown, Beverly, the first lesbian couple to do so in their community. I am so proud of them, and so pleased that I'm from the state of Massachusetts.
24. In all my years, it would never have occurred (until I read about it recently) to me that there was such a thing as a support group for children of gay parents. A support group for children of narcissistic baby boomers might have been a good thing, however.
25. My father thinks I'm his clone. There is some truth there, enough to be scary, but not quite as much as he imagines. Still, it is always sobering to know that your career choice is pretty much what your father would have picked for you.
26. I like red wine more than white. Last time we went to France, Eric picked Alsace for our wine tour. He owes me a week in Burgundy, maybe for our tenth anniversary.
27. I have had cats named: Gustave Mahler, Entropy, Turnip, Mr. Myxyzptlk, Mnemosyne, Alas Poor Yorick, Tycho Brahe and Angus Og. The dog is named Rufus T. Firefly (points to the first person who gets the reference.)
28. Although I despise virtually everything about pregnancy, I really like babies. This surprised me, because I expected to prefer older children who I could talk to. I like kids a lot too, but there's something about really little babies that I adore.
29. I have four different books in progress, and the worst case of publishing anxiety you could imagine. Expect them in print in 2092.
30. The smell of cabbage makes my happy and nostalgic for my Paternal great-grandmother. I suspect it is a genetic affection, on the polish side.
31. The smell of pipe smoke is pretty much an aphrodisiac for me, but I consider it unethical to press Eric to affect a pipe.
32. I have a fairly impressive vocal range, but a totally mediocre voice. But I can sing tenor, which makes up for a lot, since tenors are always in short supply. In my dreams, I can really sing, and sound a lot like Etta James.
33. The only things I miss about Christianity since becoming a Jew are the smell of pine trees in my house at Christmas (although not the pinetree dog barf on the rug ;-), not having to edit the words to "Chicken Soup with Rice" when reading to my sons, and the concept of poverty as a positive aesthetic virtue.
34. Even though it no longer bears any resemblance to the place I spent my adolescence wandering 15 years ago, I have a certain nostalgia for Harvard Square.
35. The older I get the less I like to read James Joyce (who I once loved) and the less impressed I am by Molly Bloom.
36. I like to organize things. As opposed to cleaning them. I especially like to organize books and yarn.
37. I own enough yarn to open my own shop. I'm gonna have warm socks at the apocalypse, dammit.
38. I like winding skeins into balls as much as knitting - I find it very soothing.
39. I have never read the ending of some of my favorite novels - I just couldn't stand to have them be finished. I still don't know what happens at the end of Nabokov's _Pale Fire_ although I can guess. And I won't tell you (lest someone who might hire me reads this) which one, but there's a Shakespeare play I've never read - I'm saving it as something to look forward to on my 100th birthday.
40. I have never read the end of Fanny Burney's _Cecelia_, but not because I liked it. I'm sure this matters to none of you, but it is a book I'm supposed to have read.
41. I mostly think American Literature before 1900 was a waste of time, with three exceptions -Twain, Dickinson and Whitman. They are the obvious and trite choices, but the only ones. Ok, I've softened a little on Melville, but he still wrote too much, too often.
42. I have two sisters. Rachael and I are 1 year and six days apart. We hated each other for most of our childhoods, but are finally mostly over it. I used to call her "Wurm" - with an odd degree of affection.
43. My other sister, Vicki, is very cool, and to top off her coolness, produced my perfect niece, Abigail. I like this aunt thing very much.
44. My husband's childhood has made me realize that I would not rather have been an only child, although it took quite a while to get there.
45. I was so terrified of motherhood (of the possibility that I might not love my child) that I almost didn't care that I was two weeks past due when Eli was born.
46. I had my third baby at the exact stroke of midnight on December 16. I did not realize, until I did so, that midnight between 12/16 and 12/17 is still 12/16 - it isn't the next day until 12:01. Had I thought about it, I might have been able to figure it out.
47. I am very good at taking other people's ideas to their logical conclusion. I'm not so good at coming up with new ones on my own. But people find the former impressive at times.
48. I don't really care that much for chocolate - except mixed with peanut butter or fruit. The more adulterated, the better.
49. I am not at all afraid of heights, and love to hang off the edge of high things. This scares the heck out of my husband, so I (mostly) try not to do it in front of him.
50. I had cooler taste in music (Punk vs. the ubiquitous boy music, Led Zepplin) that Eric in high school. It is quite a remarkable thing that I was cooler than anyone about anything - ever.
51. I am freaked out by horror movies, fake blood and guts, gross jokes on tv. I am totally unsqueamish about all those things in real life, and have had ample contact with them back when I was doing EMS. I don't understand this about myself at all.
52. I wrote forty pages this past week - and deleted 24 of them.
53. I hate driving - I will do almost anything to get someone else to drive instead of me. I would be delighted never to have to get in a car again.
54. I like to win. This can be very annoying, whether I win or not.
55. If you are sick, I am the nicest person in the world, even if I am sick myself.
56. I believe that the right kind of tea fixes any problem or illness. I own nearly every kind on earth.
57. My husband has been known to refer to me as his "beloved vagina dentata." This is more appropriate than I like.
58. I talk to myself, particularly when I am working out ideas. I particularly like to walk and talk to myself. I cannot chew gum at the same time, and do not try.
59. I have an extremely poor memory for fiction - I can read most mysteries at least twice before the ending isn't a surprise. I read extremely quickly, but I have to read twice to really retain things.
60. I wanted to be Joan Jett when I was 12. Secretly, I'd still like to be her.
61. I actually like doing Latin declensions and complex math problems.
62. If I had my way, we'd live much further from civilization than we do. I like quiet, space and no one remotely in sight.
63. I am wildly shy, and mostly hide it by being kind of obnoxious and talking too much. I hate meeting new people. Mostly, people do not like me that much when we first meet. I am an acquired taste.
64. My first memory is of my parents bringing my sister home from the hospital. We lived on the fourth floor of an apartment with very long, low windows, and I recall looking down with someone (my grandmother, maybe?) as my father helped my mother and the new baby out of the car.
65. I have a "save the world" complex. I used to run off and try and actually do it, now I write about it. This is, perhaps, why one shouldn't trust anyone over 30.
66. I have been pregnant or nursing for almost six consecutive years now. I anticipate at least another few months of nursing Isaiah (Simon stopped at 2, Eli at 3).
67. I have been sleep deprived for five out of the last six years. There is a connection between this statement and the previous one.
68. I am a semi-skeptic, in that I tend to doubt things but do them anyway. I am presently taking homeopathy for carpal tunnel syndrome, and, psychosomatically or not, I think it helps. That does not mean I believe in homeopathy.
69. I am torn between admiration for Romanticism and the wish that there would be a great movement of adult, rather than adolescent ardor. I mostly love Percy Shelley, have come to terms with parts of Wordsworth, and like Coleridge and Byron very much. _Wuthering Heights_, is, however, the most overrated book of all time, and Wordsworth the most overrated poet save Jory Graham.
70. I don't like most contemporary fiction I read, for much the same reason I don't like a lot of movies. You have to surprise me to get me paying attention.
71. I don't like to own first editions of books - I like books I can write in, turn down a page on, etc... The sole exception is the first editiion of US Grant's Memoirs my Dad sent me for my birthday. It was my great-great-great uncle's, I believe.
72. I probably should have gone into advertising. I'd be really, really good at it. Of course, I'd miss my soul. Eric particularly admires my campaign for "FauxFu" a meat-based tofu substitute for lapsed vegetarians.
73. In part, I homestead because no one seems to really believe it is possible to reduce one's consumption to a fair share of the earth's resources. I have not yet fully succeeded, but I believe it is possible, and that someone has to do it.
74. I hate it when people say "yuck" about food, or call something disgusting that they don't like. My children already know better. I've seen enough hungry people to find only that disgusting.
75. I love to teach. I can never believe they pay me for something that's so enjoyable. And I love to teach writing particularly. Lit people are supposed to hate it, to think it isn't very important. But ultimately, teaching people to write well is teaching them to think clearly, and there's nothing that matters more.
1. I am exactly 6' tall, and share a birthday (60 years apart) with Julia Child, who was also 6' tall. This means nothing, but pleases me.
2. I did not immediately feel overwhelming love for my children when they were born. More like interest, and a certain degree of abstract concern. Love came later, but hard.
3. I will eat pretty much anything except aspic. That has included many things not classed as "food" in this country.
4. I grew up in a family where people made things and did things themselves. I remember helping my father smelt bullets for his target shooting in our home furnace, and watching my grandmother's hands as she knit, thinking that if only I could learn to mimic her movements, I could do that too. My step-mother pretty much singlehandedly turned our house when I was growing up, from a wrecked stable with no heat into a gorgeous period home.
5. I was given at birth, by my grandmother and great aunt, lifetime memberships in the DAR (Daughters of the American Revolution) and Eastern Star (women freemasons). For some strange reason, I have never pursued them, although my friend Steve and I have considered starting a Jewish chapter of the DAR for the fun of annoying them.
6. The Jewish thing isn't even the worst thing about me for the DAR - I'm part Cherokee, and my Mom was raised in a trailer park. I think I get my taste for country music from there. Oh, and Native American may not be the worst shadow on my racial purity, as Grandma took pains to deny strenuously. Terrible, ain't it?
7. I cannot follow any kind of diagram, no matter how obvious. I was 25 before I could read a map. Visual imagery in general doesn't make a lot of sense to me, and I don't think in images.
8. My family has a Groucho Marx thing, and I grew up watching his movies obsessively. Simon's middle name is "Julius" for Groucho.
9. I have been truly, deeply in love three times. Only one of them requited. Fortunately, the requited one I'm married to.
10. I am a real pain in the ass to live with - I have this on excellent authority and with plenty of external corroboration by multiple sources.
11. I never really liked Middlemarch all that much, despite the name of this blog. I prefer _Daniel Deronda_ or even _Silas Marner_. Although, really, I'd just rather read Fielding.
12. I always claimed to hate Melville, but during my last pregnancy was seized with a sudden, desperate desire to read about whales. I didn't hate it, although I haven't changed my dissertation topic or anything.
13. I am a mean Mommy - I have a "only two repetitions of any story in one day" rule. And only one reading per day of _Green Eggs and Ham_.
14. I like cats better than dogs, but only slightly. Cats are less needy, and I already have children if I want needy things.
15. I remember my father heckling Ronald Reagan at a rally in 1980. He called him "Turkey," I think because he knew we were watching and did not want to curse. I was very impressed by this.
16. I really liked LSD the couple of times I tried it. I was fond of pot, too. I have not yet prepared my anti-drug speech for my children, although it will probably have to be a variation of, "Well, I did drugs. Your grandparents did drugs. Great-Grandma smoked pot a couple of times. Maybe you should think of a more original way to rebel, no?"
17. Despite the fact that I have 30+ hours labors, I love being in labor - it gets me the hell out of pregnancy. Pain, schmain, as long as I'm not pregnant any more.
18. I could eat sushi 3 meals a day for the rest of my life and never get tired of it. This would probably not be good for me, nor for my budget.
19. When in doubt, I cook twice as much food as anyone could realistically need. I am nearly always in doubt. It is a compulsion, passed down through several generations, from at least my great grandmother. No one ever runs out of food at my house, although I am perpetually anxious that they will.
20. I am oddly flexible for someone not thin or athletic. I can still do a split and come up without using my hands. Given that I have had three children and am in my 30s, I am proud of this.
21. I made Eric promise to stay married to me at least 75 years. After that (he'll be 103, I'll be 101) we can date whoever we like.
22. I am bisexual. Since I am also monogamous, this is mostly irrelevant, but it makes it fun to go out girl watching with my husband.
23. My mother and step-mother (better known as Susie) got legally married last May in their hometown, Beverly, the first lesbian couple to do so in their community. I am so proud of them, and so pleased that I'm from the state of Massachusetts.
24. In all my years, it would never have occurred (until I read about it recently) to me that there was such a thing as a support group for children of gay parents. A support group for children of narcissistic baby boomers might have been a good thing, however.
25. My father thinks I'm his clone. There is some truth there, enough to be scary, but not quite as much as he imagines. Still, it is always sobering to know that your career choice is pretty much what your father would have picked for you.
26. I like red wine more than white. Last time we went to France, Eric picked Alsace for our wine tour. He owes me a week in Burgundy, maybe for our tenth anniversary.
27. I have had cats named: Gustave Mahler, Entropy, Turnip, Mr. Myxyzptlk, Mnemosyne, Alas Poor Yorick, Tycho Brahe and Angus Og. The dog is named Rufus T. Firefly (points to the first person who gets the reference.)
28. Although I despise virtually everything about pregnancy, I really like babies. This surprised me, because I expected to prefer older children who I could talk to. I like kids a lot too, but there's something about really little babies that I adore.
29. I have four different books in progress, and the worst case of publishing anxiety you could imagine. Expect them in print in 2092.
30. The smell of cabbage makes my happy and nostalgic for my Paternal great-grandmother. I suspect it is a genetic affection, on the polish side.
31. The smell of pipe smoke is pretty much an aphrodisiac for me, but I consider it unethical to press Eric to affect a pipe.
32. I have a fairly impressive vocal range, but a totally mediocre voice. But I can sing tenor, which makes up for a lot, since tenors are always in short supply. In my dreams, I can really sing, and sound a lot like Etta James.
33. The only things I miss about Christianity since becoming a Jew are the smell of pine trees in my house at Christmas (although not the pinetree dog barf on the rug ;-), not having to edit the words to "Chicken Soup with Rice" when reading to my sons, and the concept of poverty as a positive aesthetic virtue.
34. Even though it no longer bears any resemblance to the place I spent my adolescence wandering 15 years ago, I have a certain nostalgia for Harvard Square.
35. The older I get the less I like to read James Joyce (who I once loved) and the less impressed I am by Molly Bloom.
36. I like to organize things. As opposed to cleaning them. I especially like to organize books and yarn.
37. I own enough yarn to open my own shop. I'm gonna have warm socks at the apocalypse, dammit.
38. I like winding skeins into balls as much as knitting - I find it very soothing.
39. I have never read the ending of some of my favorite novels - I just couldn't stand to have them be finished. I still don't know what happens at the end of Nabokov's _Pale Fire_ although I can guess. And I won't tell you (lest someone who might hire me reads this) which one, but there's a Shakespeare play I've never read - I'm saving it as something to look forward to on my 100th birthday.
40. I have never read the end of Fanny Burney's _Cecelia_, but not because I liked it. I'm sure this matters to none of you, but it is a book I'm supposed to have read.
41. I mostly think American Literature before 1900 was a waste of time, with three exceptions -Twain, Dickinson and Whitman. They are the obvious and trite choices, but the only ones. Ok, I've softened a little on Melville, but he still wrote too much, too often.
42. I have two sisters. Rachael and I are 1 year and six days apart. We hated each other for most of our childhoods, but are finally mostly over it. I used to call her "Wurm" - with an odd degree of affection.
43. My other sister, Vicki, is very cool, and to top off her coolness, produced my perfect niece, Abigail. I like this aunt thing very much.
44. My husband's childhood has made me realize that I would not rather have been an only child, although it took quite a while to get there.
45. I was so terrified of motherhood (of the possibility that I might not love my child) that I almost didn't care that I was two weeks past due when Eli was born.
46. I had my third baby at the exact stroke of midnight on December 16. I did not realize, until I did so, that midnight between 12/16 and 12/17 is still 12/16 - it isn't the next day until 12:01. Had I thought about it, I might have been able to figure it out.
47. I am very good at taking other people's ideas to their logical conclusion. I'm not so good at coming up with new ones on my own. But people find the former impressive at times.
48. I don't really care that much for chocolate - except mixed with peanut butter or fruit. The more adulterated, the better.
49. I am not at all afraid of heights, and love to hang off the edge of high things. This scares the heck out of my husband, so I (mostly) try not to do it in front of him.
50. I had cooler taste in music (Punk vs. the ubiquitous boy music, Led Zepplin) that Eric in high school. It is quite a remarkable thing that I was cooler than anyone about anything - ever.
51. I am freaked out by horror movies, fake blood and guts, gross jokes on tv. I am totally unsqueamish about all those things in real life, and have had ample contact with them back when I was doing EMS. I don't understand this about myself at all.
52. I wrote forty pages this past week - and deleted 24 of them.
53. I hate driving - I will do almost anything to get someone else to drive instead of me. I would be delighted never to have to get in a car again.
54. I like to win. This can be very annoying, whether I win or not.
55. If you are sick, I am the nicest person in the world, even if I am sick myself.
56. I believe that the right kind of tea fixes any problem or illness. I own nearly every kind on earth.
57. My husband has been known to refer to me as his "beloved vagina dentata." This is more appropriate than I like.
58. I talk to myself, particularly when I am working out ideas. I particularly like to walk and talk to myself. I cannot chew gum at the same time, and do not try.
59. I have an extremely poor memory for fiction - I can read most mysteries at least twice before the ending isn't a surprise. I read extremely quickly, but I have to read twice to really retain things.
60. I wanted to be Joan Jett when I was 12. Secretly, I'd still like to be her.
61. I actually like doing Latin declensions and complex math problems.
62. If I had my way, we'd live much further from civilization than we do. I like quiet, space and no one remotely in sight.
63. I am wildly shy, and mostly hide it by being kind of obnoxious and talking too much. I hate meeting new people. Mostly, people do not like me that much when we first meet. I am an acquired taste.
64. My first memory is of my parents bringing my sister home from the hospital. We lived on the fourth floor of an apartment with very long, low windows, and I recall looking down with someone (my grandmother, maybe?) as my father helped my mother and the new baby out of the car.
65. I have a "save the world" complex. I used to run off and try and actually do it, now I write about it. This is, perhaps, why one shouldn't trust anyone over 30.
66. I have been pregnant or nursing for almost six consecutive years now. I anticipate at least another few months of nursing Isaiah (Simon stopped at 2, Eli at 3).
67. I have been sleep deprived for five out of the last six years. There is a connection between this statement and the previous one.
68. I am a semi-skeptic, in that I tend to doubt things but do them anyway. I am presently taking homeopathy for carpal tunnel syndrome, and, psychosomatically or not, I think it helps. That does not mean I believe in homeopathy.
69. I am torn between admiration for Romanticism and the wish that there would be a great movement of adult, rather than adolescent ardor. I mostly love Percy Shelley, have come to terms with parts of Wordsworth, and like Coleridge and Byron very much. _Wuthering Heights_, is, however, the most overrated book of all time, and Wordsworth the most overrated poet save Jory Graham.
70. I don't like most contemporary fiction I read, for much the same reason I don't like a lot of movies. You have to surprise me to get me paying attention.
71. I don't like to own first editions of books - I like books I can write in, turn down a page on, etc... The sole exception is the first editiion of US Grant's Memoirs my Dad sent me for my birthday. It was my great-great-great uncle's, I believe.
72. I probably should have gone into advertising. I'd be really, really good at it. Of course, I'd miss my soul. Eric particularly admires my campaign for "FauxFu" a meat-based tofu substitute for lapsed vegetarians.
73. In part, I homestead because no one seems to really believe it is possible to reduce one's consumption to a fair share of the earth's resources. I have not yet fully succeeded, but I believe it is possible, and that someone has to do it.
74. I hate it when people say "yuck" about food, or call something disgusting that they don't like. My children already know better. I've seen enough hungry people to find only that disgusting.
75. I love to teach. I can never believe they pay me for something that's so enjoyable. And I love to teach writing particularly. Lit people are supposed to hate it, to think it isn't very important. But ultimately, teaching people to write well is teaching them to think clearly, and there's nothing that matters more.
94 Years ago today
Grandpa died a week ago. It was a good death - he died with his family around him, and had a period of lucidity and energy greater than he'd had in a while. His wife and I were holding his hands, he had just eaten chocolate with almonds (his favorite food) and he was excited that his son and daughter in law were present.
Today would have been his 94th birthday. I feel most grieved for Grandma, who was his wife for 62 years, since she was 17. She was on the kindertransport at 12, and there were so many things she missed as a servant in England during her teens. So he was nearly everything to her - husband, teacher, protector, father figure. In the last years she devoted herself to caring for him, and I've never seen two people love each other more. It will be very hard for her.
Their daughter, Eric's aunt, was in transit from California when he died, and when she, her daughter and grandson went home from the funeral last night, they took Grandma with them for a month. Its a good thing for her to have a break, and I think a very good thing for us as well. I checked - until Saturday, except to attend the funeral, I hadn't left the house for 2 weeks, since Grandpa and then Grandma required so much care.
I planned the funeral. No one else wanted to do it, and I'm not a weepy sort of person. I'm good for about five minutes of hugging and crying, and then I get to work trying to fix what's broken, and get ready for what's coming. So it was easier for me to make the phone calls and speak all the harsh details, and better for me to have something practical to do.
So I made all the arrangements, and told everyone what to do and say, packed Grandma's suitcase, arranged her plane tickets, got the body sent to the cemetary, arranged the funeral lunch, babysat the kids during the hard parts of the funeral, cooked dinner for the relatives, explained death to Simon, Eli and nephew Jake, made everyone eat and sleep when they didn't want to, even arranged to remove and hide the birthday presents and cards from Grandma. And all because I've never yet been able to shake my basic degree of detachment in any crisis. Its a useful quality - everyone always comments on how calm I am when the chips are down, and I've used it at times in some scary situations. But it comes with a down side - others perceive me as cold, and I'm not sure they are wrong. There's a sense that even the strongest and most passionate moments of my life are always something I perceive simultaneously as though they were happening to me and as though they were occurring to someone else - I am always a little disconnected.
I think it was Emerson (John Burt, one of my wisest and best Profs told me this) who said something along the same lines about the death of his son. Now I've never experienced a death quite like that, and I don't begin to imply that the death of a 94 year old man who I'd known and cared about only 8 years bore any resemblance (God forbid!!!) to what it would be like to lose a child. But I have this evil sneaky feeling that I'd be the kind of person that even in the face of the ugliest of personal tragedies, who could to some degree watch herself mourning, and doubt my own sincerity.
Ok, enough about what a dreadful person I can be.
Sharon
Today would have been his 94th birthday. I feel most grieved for Grandma, who was his wife for 62 years, since she was 17. She was on the kindertransport at 12, and there were so many things she missed as a servant in England during her teens. So he was nearly everything to her - husband, teacher, protector, father figure. In the last years she devoted herself to caring for him, and I've never seen two people love each other more. It will be very hard for her.
Their daughter, Eric's aunt, was in transit from California when he died, and when she, her daughter and grandson went home from the funeral last night, they took Grandma with them for a month. Its a good thing for her to have a break, and I think a very good thing for us as well. I checked - until Saturday, except to attend the funeral, I hadn't left the house for 2 weeks, since Grandpa and then Grandma required so much care.
I planned the funeral. No one else wanted to do it, and I'm not a weepy sort of person. I'm good for about five minutes of hugging and crying, and then I get to work trying to fix what's broken, and get ready for what's coming. So it was easier for me to make the phone calls and speak all the harsh details, and better for me to have something practical to do.
So I made all the arrangements, and told everyone what to do and say, packed Grandma's suitcase, arranged her plane tickets, got the body sent to the cemetary, arranged the funeral lunch, babysat the kids during the hard parts of the funeral, cooked dinner for the relatives, explained death to Simon, Eli and nephew Jake, made everyone eat and sleep when they didn't want to, even arranged to remove and hide the birthday presents and cards from Grandma. And all because I've never yet been able to shake my basic degree of detachment in any crisis. Its a useful quality - everyone always comments on how calm I am when the chips are down, and I've used it at times in some scary situations. But it comes with a down side - others perceive me as cold, and I'm not sure they are wrong. There's a sense that even the strongest and most passionate moments of my life are always something I perceive simultaneously as though they were happening to me and as though they were occurring to someone else - I am always a little disconnected.
I think it was Emerson (John Burt, one of my wisest and best Profs told me this) who said something along the same lines about the death of his son. Now I've never experienced a death quite like that, and I don't begin to imply that the death of a 94 year old man who I'd known and cared about only 8 years bore any resemblance (God forbid!!!) to what it would be like to lose a child. But I have this evil sneaky feeling that I'd be the kind of person that even in the face of the ugliest of personal tragedies, who could to some degree watch herself mourning, and doubt my own sincerity.
Ok, enough about what a dreadful person I can be.
Sharon
Tuesday, November 30, 2004
Winding Down
My husband's grandparents came to live with us this past spring. We bought the house planning to have them with us a few years ago, but they resisted leaving familiar surroundings (they've lived in the same part of NJ since they came to the US as refugees after WWII). When Grandpa started to seriously decline, we built an apartment onto the house, and they moved in this spring. And now, Grandpa, whose 94th birthday is coming up on December 12, seems to be coming to the end of his life. It is so terribly hard to watch.
I've worked in hospices and nursing homes, and done EMS for years, so I'm intimately familiar with the details death in a professional sense, but I had forgotten, somehow, how badly one longs for the mercy of death at the end. I am normally (more than normally?) afraid of dying - much more so since I had children who need me so desperately. I do not look on death as a friend or ally for myself. And yet I did not remember how I used to pray, really and truly beg God with all my heart, that a particular patient, reduced to suffering and endurance, would die, and be granted a little peace. I had forgotten how angry I used to get at the universe for allowing this kind of pointless misery. I am reminded.
And here I am again. Grandpa is in a moderate amount of pain, which no medication seems to relieve. He cannot enjoy his great-grandchildren, food, music or companionship. Life has been reduced to the hideous misery of having to move from one place to another, to endure another bathing, another meal, another toileting. Grandma, who is 14 years younger, is no longer his companion or friend, just his increasingly overwhelmed and exhausted nurse while Eric and I try to take what of the burden we can from her.
Suffering does not always, or even usually, have a purpose. I've seen little children, parents of small ones, people desperately loved and needed dying slowly and agonizingly sufficient times that I have long since made myself recognize that there is no meaning in pain. And yet I cannot reconcile myself to that absence of meaning. I still want God to relieve him of his suffering, to end 94 good - at times even heroic- years with dignity and peace. I find it nearly unbearable to watch him, confused, hurting and querelous, attempting to understand why it is that we are hurting him by forcing him to move, or eat again. And he tries desperately to be kind and dignified, thanking us for our kindness even when we are making things worse.
This is not a life tragically cut short - he had a good run. And while we will be sorry to see him go, that's not the point. The point is that we have no right or way to make his end anything other than a misery and a kind of tiny, personal tragedy, when it might have had grace.
I don't know if he'll live days or weeks or a couple of months. I doubt longer. I know I will pray (pointlessly, I suspect) as hard as I can that tonight, or tomorrow, or soon he sleeps and doesn't wake up. If God is real, he doesn't take requests. But I will keep praying, because it is better than any alternative that accepts this misery and indignity as inevitable or meaningful.
Shalom,
Sharon
I've worked in hospices and nursing homes, and done EMS for years, so I'm intimately familiar with the details death in a professional sense, but I had forgotten, somehow, how badly one longs for the mercy of death at the end. I am normally (more than normally?) afraid of dying - much more so since I had children who need me so desperately. I do not look on death as a friend or ally for myself. And yet I did not remember how I used to pray, really and truly beg God with all my heart, that a particular patient, reduced to suffering and endurance, would die, and be granted a little peace. I had forgotten how angry I used to get at the universe for allowing this kind of pointless misery. I am reminded.
And here I am again. Grandpa is in a moderate amount of pain, which no medication seems to relieve. He cannot enjoy his great-grandchildren, food, music or companionship. Life has been reduced to the hideous misery of having to move from one place to another, to endure another bathing, another meal, another toileting. Grandma, who is 14 years younger, is no longer his companion or friend, just his increasingly overwhelmed and exhausted nurse while Eric and I try to take what of the burden we can from her.
Suffering does not always, or even usually, have a purpose. I've seen little children, parents of small ones, people desperately loved and needed dying slowly and agonizingly sufficient times that I have long since made myself recognize that there is no meaning in pain. And yet I cannot reconcile myself to that absence of meaning. I still want God to relieve him of his suffering, to end 94 good - at times even heroic- years with dignity and peace. I find it nearly unbearable to watch him, confused, hurting and querelous, attempting to understand why it is that we are hurting him by forcing him to move, or eat again. And he tries desperately to be kind and dignified, thanking us for our kindness even when we are making things worse.
This is not a life tragically cut short - he had a good run. And while we will be sorry to see him go, that's not the point. The point is that we have no right or way to make his end anything other than a misery and a kind of tiny, personal tragedy, when it might have had grace.
I don't know if he'll live days or weeks or a couple of months. I doubt longer. I know I will pray (pointlessly, I suspect) as hard as I can that tonight, or tomorrow, or soon he sleeps and doesn't wake up. If God is real, he doesn't take requests. But I will keep praying, because it is better than any alternative that accepts this misery and indignity as inevitable or meaningful.
Shalom,
Sharon
Wednesday, November 24, 2004
Thanksgiving and Seed Saving
At the moment I'm baking a gigantic Hubbard Squash that began its live in a paper cup in my garden. I'm more than a little ambivalent about Thanksgiving, given the Native thing, but I admit, I like it because I love to cook, love to feed people, and believe with all my heart that festivals are going to be more, not less important in the future. To fully appreciate the value of a meal like Thanksgiving, with its many dishes, emphasis on the sweet, meaty and rich, you have to imagine yourself as an ordinary person in a pre-industrial world (or an ordinary person in much of the world right now).
You work hard all day. You never, ever get enough to eat. Oh, you get enough to get along, but you would always eat more if you could, and hunger is a constant companion. There is very little sweetness in your life (we eat 20 times the sugar of most pre-industrial peoples), and never enough protein or fat. Your meals are mostly monotonous - you eat cornbread and beans, biscuits and gravy, potatoes and eggs, rice and tofu every single day, for several meals, and only at the peak of the growing season do you eat much fresh food.
So now, imagine yourself celebrating. There are many, many dishes. Many of them are meaty or sweet, and involve special flavors and foods you miss the rest of the year. You are encouraged not only to eat as much as you like, but more, until you feel completely full. Then, instead of returning to your work, you sing, and talk and play with the children, before eating a bit more again.
That's what Thanksgiving (or any other feast day) is supposed to be - not a gorge of salt and sweet and fat on top of our daily gorge of those things. It is also, to me, special because it is one of the rare times when others eat the foods that I eat during the cold weather. The traditional foods of the holiday make sense - they are the foods that can be produced in cold climate New England or the northeast, and are widely available. They are what you produced in the garden all summer and fall, and what you have in your cellar. They are what I eat most of the winter - squash, potatoes, beets, carrots, parnsips, onions, apples, cranberries - and what most of the population only tastes at Thanksgiving time.
If we return to eating seasonally and sustainably, we're all going to eat a whole lot more of those foods - and they are so delicious I can't imagine why anyone would eat butternut squash soup or pumpkin pie or brussels sprouts or creamed onions only at Thanksgiving - but they do. 80% of all the parsnips eaten in the US are eaten in New England, in the months of November and December - despite the fact that parsnips are nutritious, sustainable, reasonably easy to grow, and delicious. They are also at their best in January and February, when comparatively little other food is - but no one eats them but me. Too bad - glazed with maple in march, or with celery root in soup in February, they are wonderful. (Is anyone reading this? Should I post recipes? I will if anyone is interested.)
The production of those foods begins in our gardens. And if we're concerned about the long term future and sustainability, it has to start with the sustainability of our gardens - with seed saving, growing our own fertility, choosing varieties that suit our climate, storage needs and that produce a whole lot of food.
Mostly growing open pollinated vegetables is no big deal - just choose the right varieties (ie,non-hybrids) from a catalog that has plenty, and grow them. Growing out seed is not that hard either, although it takes some practice. I'd strongly recommend reading Suzanne Ashworth's _Seed to Seed_if you are planning on living on food from your saved seed garden, and if you want to expand your knowledge into backyard breeding, definitely read and acquire Carolyn Depp's _Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties_ - which is surprisingly fun to read, btw.
Some plants have issues, of course. In my cold climate (borderline zone 4/5, fairly high up), it has been hard to find an entirely satisfactory sweet pepper that ripens to color in time. Since I'm fond of sun-dried peppers, that's a pain, although I've had some luck with _King of the North_ and _Staddon's Select_ both from Fedco, and _Albino Bullnose_ from Baker Creek. They can't match the hybrids, sadly. But since peppers are not a major crop (major in the sense of lasting through much of the year and providing a lot of basic food value), I take what I can get gratefully. Hot peppers, which *are* a major part of our diet, we do much better with. You can still grow hybrids, as long as you use reasonable care seperating the varieties - you don't have to choose between them right now. But if you are planning on sustainability, they should be a supplement, not a priority.
Sweet corn is always a problem. For those of you in hot climates, apparently there's such a thing as an OP supersweet (pretty amazing) offered by someone in Hawaii through seed saver's exchange (you have to be a member, but you should be anyway - they are noble. www.seedsavers.org). For the rest of us, "Howling Mob" (Shumways) and "Ashworth's" (Fedco) are very nice, although without the sweetness and holding power of the hybrids. But again, sweet corn is a nice touch in our diet (we dry it for succotash, corn chowder and adding to chili), but dry and pop are much more important to a sustainable diet, and there are a number of dent and flour corns that seem to do well here. My favorite, although not a high yielder, is "Northstine Dent"
Corn is a seed saving problem for people with small gardens (which does not include me) or people with field corn down the road (me). We've had pretty good luck saving seed from our early sweets, but the fields have tended to hybridize on at least the outside rows. I gave up altogether this year when our neighbor planted a whole cornfield worth across the road. Remember, you need at least 200 plants and seed from 100 ears to have reasonable genetic diversity.
I still haven't worked out the squash thing to my satisfaction. There are four families of squash, and you can have one of each, if you don't want to hand pollinate. For me, the pepos are the problem - acorns, pumpkins and summer squash are all pepos. I think I'm just going to give up zucchini in favor of pumpkins, but I haven't decided yet. So far I've had pollinated, but I don't want to count on that. The maximas are also a bit sad - they are the best tasting, and I can never decide between them, but I can rotate - butternut this year, pink banana the next. The only mixta I've ever grown that I liked and got to maturity was Tennessee sweet potato.
I'm a huge fan of West India Gherkins, which are not quite cucumbers, but almost indistinguishable. They are wonderful picklers, very crisp and tasty, and allow me to grow both gherkins and a slicer or pickler and have a bit more variety.
Saving seeds from biennials varies from easy to hard. Kale and leeks reliably overwinter here, as do parsnips (important, since you need fresh seed every year). Cabbages do ok packed in the garage over the winter. Potatoes are not a problem most years, but I doubt that with the flooding we had any of our sad little potato crop is going to make it to seed - which is why I keep a supply of potato seed, harvested both from my own and bought from pinetree garden seeds (Gilroy - discontinued after this year, and the only "true from seed" variety I know of, so buy lots for your storage). Potatoes don't come true from seed, but some potatoes are better than none, and you can store seed for some years, but not potatoes. Since they are such a staple crop, definitely store the seed.
Beets do fine for me, and I just keep the parsley in a sunny window, but I have much less luck with brussels sprouts and other brassicas. I just keep trying to winter them over. Sometimes I've had luck persuading them to go to seed the first year by starting them very early. It works well with parsley and kale as well.
Start thinking about next year's festival meals. Even if you can't grow all your own food, you can grow the food for your feasts, and harvest the next year's seed to practice for the day when you may need to, and long for the change from your corn and beans.
A Happy Thanksgiving and a peaceful Day of Mourning to you all.
Shalom,
Sharon
You work hard all day. You never, ever get enough to eat. Oh, you get enough to get along, but you would always eat more if you could, and hunger is a constant companion. There is very little sweetness in your life (we eat 20 times the sugar of most pre-industrial peoples), and never enough protein or fat. Your meals are mostly monotonous - you eat cornbread and beans, biscuits and gravy, potatoes and eggs, rice and tofu every single day, for several meals, and only at the peak of the growing season do you eat much fresh food.
So now, imagine yourself celebrating. There are many, many dishes. Many of them are meaty or sweet, and involve special flavors and foods you miss the rest of the year. You are encouraged not only to eat as much as you like, but more, until you feel completely full. Then, instead of returning to your work, you sing, and talk and play with the children, before eating a bit more again.
That's what Thanksgiving (or any other feast day) is supposed to be - not a gorge of salt and sweet and fat on top of our daily gorge of those things. It is also, to me, special because it is one of the rare times when others eat the foods that I eat during the cold weather. The traditional foods of the holiday make sense - they are the foods that can be produced in cold climate New England or the northeast, and are widely available. They are what you produced in the garden all summer and fall, and what you have in your cellar. They are what I eat most of the winter - squash, potatoes, beets, carrots, parnsips, onions, apples, cranberries - and what most of the population only tastes at Thanksgiving time.
If we return to eating seasonally and sustainably, we're all going to eat a whole lot more of those foods - and they are so delicious I can't imagine why anyone would eat butternut squash soup or pumpkin pie or brussels sprouts or creamed onions only at Thanksgiving - but they do. 80% of all the parsnips eaten in the US are eaten in New England, in the months of November and December - despite the fact that parsnips are nutritious, sustainable, reasonably easy to grow, and delicious. They are also at their best in January and February, when comparatively little other food is - but no one eats them but me. Too bad - glazed with maple in march, or with celery root in soup in February, they are wonderful. (Is anyone reading this? Should I post recipes? I will if anyone is interested.)
The production of those foods begins in our gardens. And if we're concerned about the long term future and sustainability, it has to start with the sustainability of our gardens - with seed saving, growing our own fertility, choosing varieties that suit our climate, storage needs and that produce a whole lot of food.
Mostly growing open pollinated vegetables is no big deal - just choose the right varieties (ie,non-hybrids) from a catalog that has plenty, and grow them. Growing out seed is not that hard either, although it takes some practice. I'd strongly recommend reading Suzanne Ashworth's _Seed to Seed_if you are planning on living on food from your saved seed garden, and if you want to expand your knowledge into backyard breeding, definitely read and acquire Carolyn Depp's _Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties_ - which is surprisingly fun to read, btw.
Some plants have issues, of course. In my cold climate (borderline zone 4/5, fairly high up), it has been hard to find an entirely satisfactory sweet pepper that ripens to color in time. Since I'm fond of sun-dried peppers, that's a pain, although I've had some luck with _King of the North_ and _Staddon's Select_ both from Fedco, and _Albino Bullnose_ from Baker Creek. They can't match the hybrids, sadly. But since peppers are not a major crop (major in the sense of lasting through much of the year and providing a lot of basic food value), I take what I can get gratefully. Hot peppers, which *are* a major part of our diet, we do much better with. You can still grow hybrids, as long as you use reasonable care seperating the varieties - you don't have to choose between them right now. But if you are planning on sustainability, they should be a supplement, not a priority.
Sweet corn is always a problem. For those of you in hot climates, apparently there's such a thing as an OP supersweet (pretty amazing) offered by someone in Hawaii through seed saver's exchange (you have to be a member, but you should be anyway - they are noble. www.seedsavers.org). For the rest of us, "Howling Mob" (Shumways) and "Ashworth's" (Fedco) are very nice, although without the sweetness and holding power of the hybrids. But again, sweet corn is a nice touch in our diet (we dry it for succotash, corn chowder and adding to chili), but dry and pop are much more important to a sustainable diet, and there are a number of dent and flour corns that seem to do well here. My favorite, although not a high yielder, is "Northstine Dent"
Corn is a seed saving problem for people with small gardens (which does not include me) or people with field corn down the road (me). We've had pretty good luck saving seed from our early sweets, but the fields have tended to hybridize on at least the outside rows. I gave up altogether this year when our neighbor planted a whole cornfield worth across the road. Remember, you need at least 200 plants and seed from 100 ears to have reasonable genetic diversity.
I still haven't worked out the squash thing to my satisfaction. There are four families of squash, and you can have one of each, if you don't want to hand pollinate. For me, the pepos are the problem - acorns, pumpkins and summer squash are all pepos. I think I'm just going to give up zucchini in favor of pumpkins, but I haven't decided yet. So far I've had pollinated, but I don't want to count on that. The maximas are also a bit sad - they are the best tasting, and I can never decide between them, but I can rotate - butternut this year, pink banana the next. The only mixta I've ever grown that I liked and got to maturity was Tennessee sweet potato.
I'm a huge fan of West India Gherkins, which are not quite cucumbers, but almost indistinguishable. They are wonderful picklers, very crisp and tasty, and allow me to grow both gherkins and a slicer or pickler and have a bit more variety.
Saving seeds from biennials varies from easy to hard. Kale and leeks reliably overwinter here, as do parsnips (important, since you need fresh seed every year). Cabbages do ok packed in the garage over the winter. Potatoes are not a problem most years, but I doubt that with the flooding we had any of our sad little potato crop is going to make it to seed - which is why I keep a supply of potato seed, harvested both from my own and bought from pinetree garden seeds (Gilroy - discontinued after this year, and the only "true from seed" variety I know of, so buy lots for your storage). Potatoes don't come true from seed, but some potatoes are better than none, and you can store seed for some years, but not potatoes. Since they are such a staple crop, definitely store the seed.
Beets do fine for me, and I just keep the parsley in a sunny window, but I have much less luck with brussels sprouts and other brassicas. I just keep trying to winter them over. Sometimes I've had luck persuading them to go to seed the first year by starting them very early. It works well with parsley and kale as well.
Start thinking about next year's festival meals. Even if you can't grow all your own food, you can grow the food for your feasts, and harvest the next year's seed to practice for the day when you may need to, and long for the change from your corn and beans.
A Happy Thanksgiving and a peaceful Day of Mourning to you all.
Shalom,
Sharon
Monday, November 22, 2004
Its been way too long...
What Am I reading? _This Organic Life_ Joan Dye Gussow - for the third time. Fabulous read! _Plague_ Edward Marriot - a bit NY Times best sellerish, but a good history. And Phillip Roth's new futuristic opus, which is ok, but overblown.
What Am I Listening To? Schoolhouse Rock - Gen X nostalgia, nominally purchased for Simon's birthday. Most of it ages pretty well, but the song "Elbow Room" on the _America Rock_ CD is a hideous monstrosity, which actually sings happily about manifest destiny...ugh.
What are we eating, and where did it come from? Baked Potatoes (local, our potato crop drowned), with broccoli (ours, pretty much done for the season) and horseradish (ours) cheese sauce (NY cheddar, local organic milk, home grown, locally ground wheat flour, salt from who knows where). Salad (our lettuce, our carrots, local tomatoes!!!! (amazing in November, but cool) and the leftovers of the chocolate banana bread pudding (homemade challah, our eggs, local honey, local wheat home ground, tropical vanilla, bananas, sugar, and chocolate). Sounds fairly ethical at the moment, but don't ask me about the way less local menu for Simon's birthday party. Just don't.
What are we picking? Cabbage, kale, chinese broccoli, mizuna, lettuce, leeks, brussels sprouts, napa, parsnips, spinach, mint, parsley. Mmmmmm.
Can it have been two weeks? We were felled by the one-two punch of a miserable, long virus (made longer by everyone getting it in sequence) and the descent of the relatives for Simon's third birthday. Sorry I haven't posted. I've decided to list off the above info at each post, since I'm not up to posting everything in my library. Still, I've got some more book recommendations.
First, the birthday summary. Many, many, many presents. Overwhelmed three year old. Chaos. We try so hard to keep my kids from having an insane amount of stuff, and try equally hard to keep what they do have appropriate. We have rules - no battery operated things (there are a few exceptions here, but very few). Nothing that sings and dances (for Mommy and Daddy's sanity). Nothing that can only be played with one way. Wood over plastic, high quality over low. Books whenever possible. But we still get dozens of gifts, some of them junk, many of wonderful quality, but total excess. I can't tell the aunts and uncles, grandparents (my kids have *8* grandparents) and etc... not to give them gifts. We re-gift the least appropriate, but with 3 kids, times 1 birthday each, times 1 Chanukah, times... excess.
Now, we prepare for Turkey Day (The "Manifest Destiny" song playing cheerfully in the background - did I mention I'm 1/3 Cherokee?). Local, organic kosher turkey is coming - rather less local and organic peking duck (our buddy Joe is Chinese Jewish and hates turkey) is coming. Our Israeli buddies will bring booze. No one will watch football. We will sing the brucha over the cornbread. The mashed potatoes will have horseradish, the sweet potatoes will only have little marshmallows on them over my dead body. They will be carribbean style with lime juice. It will be good, if historically troubling, and pleasantly multi-ethnic.
Wanna eat greens all winter? Make absolutely sure you read the following:
_Solviva_ (can't remember her name - Anna something) and _The Four Season Harvest_ by Eliot Coleman.
Shalom and Happy Thanksgiving, Folks.
Sharon
What Am I Listening To? Schoolhouse Rock - Gen X nostalgia, nominally purchased for Simon's birthday. Most of it ages pretty well, but the song "Elbow Room" on the _America Rock_ CD is a hideous monstrosity, which actually sings happily about manifest destiny...ugh.
What are we eating, and where did it come from? Baked Potatoes (local, our potato crop drowned), with broccoli (ours, pretty much done for the season) and horseradish (ours) cheese sauce (NY cheddar, local organic milk, home grown, locally ground wheat flour, salt from who knows where). Salad (our lettuce, our carrots, local tomatoes!!!! (amazing in November, but cool) and the leftovers of the chocolate banana bread pudding (homemade challah, our eggs, local honey, local wheat home ground, tropical vanilla, bananas, sugar, and chocolate). Sounds fairly ethical at the moment, but don't ask me about the way less local menu for Simon's birthday party. Just don't.
What are we picking? Cabbage, kale, chinese broccoli, mizuna, lettuce, leeks, brussels sprouts, napa, parsnips, spinach, mint, parsley. Mmmmmm.
Can it have been two weeks? We were felled by the one-two punch of a miserable, long virus (made longer by everyone getting it in sequence) and the descent of the relatives for Simon's third birthday. Sorry I haven't posted. I've decided to list off the above info at each post, since I'm not up to posting everything in my library. Still, I've got some more book recommendations.
First, the birthday summary. Many, many, many presents. Overwhelmed three year old. Chaos. We try so hard to keep my kids from having an insane amount of stuff, and try equally hard to keep what they do have appropriate. We have rules - no battery operated things (there are a few exceptions here, but very few). Nothing that sings and dances (for Mommy and Daddy's sanity). Nothing that can only be played with one way. Wood over plastic, high quality over low. Books whenever possible. But we still get dozens of gifts, some of them junk, many of wonderful quality, but total excess. I can't tell the aunts and uncles, grandparents (my kids have *8* grandparents) and etc... not to give them gifts. We re-gift the least appropriate, but with 3 kids, times 1 birthday each, times 1 Chanukah, times... excess.
Now, we prepare for Turkey Day (The "Manifest Destiny" song playing cheerfully in the background - did I mention I'm 1/3 Cherokee?). Local, organic kosher turkey is coming - rather less local and organic peking duck (our buddy Joe is Chinese Jewish and hates turkey) is coming. Our Israeli buddies will bring booze. No one will watch football. We will sing the brucha over the cornbread. The mashed potatoes will have horseradish, the sweet potatoes will only have little marshmallows on them over my dead body. They will be carribbean style with lime juice. It will be good, if historically troubling, and pleasantly multi-ethnic.
Wanna eat greens all winter? Make absolutely sure you read the following:
_Solviva_ (can't remember her name - Anna something) and _The Four Season Harvest_ by Eliot Coleman.
Shalom and Happy Thanksgiving, Folks.
Sharon
Tuesday, November 09, 2004
Hallelujah and The book list
Thank you, G-d! I don't have to make the afghans - John Ashcroft has resigned. I do not necessarily believe his replacement will be a vast improvement, but still, we all need good news now and then. Let us all say schecheyanu!!
Deb asked me to list what's on my homesteading/self-sufficiency/gardening/etc...bookcase, lest anyone else wants to make the transition from academic urbanite to rural farmer (ie, in case some of the rest of you are totally nuts). Since I'm always grateful for any excuse to skip out on my current dissertation chapter (Donne and Shakespeare aren't getting along, and they are drawing me into it. Oh, and its just possible I've written something stupid - like 80 pages or so), here I go.
Basic Homesteading Books: My top six, the ones I couldn't go on without, complement each other nicely.
1. The Encyclopedia of Country Living, by Carla Emery. Its huge. Its comprehensive. She's wonderful (I did some editing for her, and she's been to my house). If you could only have one book, this would be the one. That said, it has flaws (some of which I have helped fix for the tenth edition, coming out one of these years), and in some places insufficient depth. But the breadth is astounding. Wanna grow spelt? Melons? Butcher a turkey? Milk a cow? Can sauerkraut? And the book is full of recipes, some terrific some flawed, but designed to be made by people who are really and truly producing their own food. Don't live without it. And consider buying it directly from her website www.carlaemery.com - she's a sweet lady and can use the money.
2.Permaculture: A Design Manual, by Bill Mollison. Mollison is a genius - he created something genuinely different and brilliant when he invented permaculture. It will change your way of thinking about homesteading design, energy usage, sustainability and everything else. There are cheaper books, but if you are going to buy one, spend the money and get this - its too good to miss, too smart, too creative. I'm not a permaculturist per se, but he's influenced my thinking a lot, and discovering Mollison was definitely one of those "oh, wow!" moments.
3. Another such moment was reading Nathan Griffith's _Husbandry_ - precisely because while I suspect he never read Mollison, he seems to have created his own local variety of sustainability that uses some similar techniques and ways of thinking - but also some very different stuff. His politics are appalling to me, but he's very smart, and fun to read. He also writes articles in Countryside Magazine.
4. 50 years ago, the Robinsons' _Have More Plan_ was on the cutting edge of homestead design - it still is. You should definitely ignore the gender roles, the suggestions that you spray with DDT, etc... but that doesn't invalidate its essential wisdom. If I were building a house (and G-d willing, I never will), I'd use their homestead plan, at least in part. And when I finally have the money to renovate the kitchen, I *will* use their homestead plan.
5. I'm going to pick _The Contrary Farmer_ as the best basic book by Gene Logsdon, although that's tough - his old _Homesteading_ book, and his _Two Acre Eden_ (Deb, make sure you look at that last one - it would be really relevant to small scale homesteading) are so terrific - he can really write. He's creative, and funny and smart. You should read everything he writes, and I'll probably recommend some more books by him later in this process.
6. Finally, The first 10 Backwoods Home Anthologies. Ok, their politics are even more appalling, and their taste for lots and lots of guns sucks. But there is lots of information here duplicated no where else. They are worth the money, and the older ones spend less time on ways of passing concealed weapons and more on homesteading techniques. Jackie Clay alone is worth her weight in gold. Try www.backwoodshome.com and search for "Hardcore Homesteading" - its the perfect post peak oil article.
Ok, much more on this topic, but I'm too tired to stay conscious, and I've got some serious thanksgiving to do.
Cheers,
Sharon
Deb asked me to list what's on my homesteading/self-sufficiency/gardening/etc...bookcase, lest anyone else wants to make the transition from academic urbanite to rural farmer (ie, in case some of the rest of you are totally nuts). Since I'm always grateful for any excuse to skip out on my current dissertation chapter (Donne and Shakespeare aren't getting along, and they are drawing me into it. Oh, and its just possible I've written something stupid - like 80 pages or so), here I go.
Basic Homesteading Books: My top six, the ones I couldn't go on without, complement each other nicely.
1. The Encyclopedia of Country Living, by Carla Emery. Its huge. Its comprehensive. She's wonderful (I did some editing for her, and she's been to my house). If you could only have one book, this would be the one. That said, it has flaws (some of which I have helped fix for the tenth edition, coming out one of these years), and in some places insufficient depth. But the breadth is astounding. Wanna grow spelt? Melons? Butcher a turkey? Milk a cow? Can sauerkraut? And the book is full of recipes, some terrific some flawed, but designed to be made by people who are really and truly producing their own food. Don't live without it. And consider buying it directly from her website www.carlaemery.com - she's a sweet lady and can use the money.
2.Permaculture: A Design Manual, by Bill Mollison. Mollison is a genius - he created something genuinely different and brilliant when he invented permaculture. It will change your way of thinking about homesteading design, energy usage, sustainability and everything else. There are cheaper books, but if you are going to buy one, spend the money and get this - its too good to miss, too smart, too creative. I'm not a permaculturist per se, but he's influenced my thinking a lot, and discovering Mollison was definitely one of those "oh, wow!" moments.
3. Another such moment was reading Nathan Griffith's _Husbandry_ - precisely because while I suspect he never read Mollison, he seems to have created his own local variety of sustainability that uses some similar techniques and ways of thinking - but also some very different stuff. His politics are appalling to me, but he's very smart, and fun to read. He also writes articles in Countryside Magazine.
4. 50 years ago, the Robinsons' _Have More Plan_ was on the cutting edge of homestead design - it still is. You should definitely ignore the gender roles, the suggestions that you spray with DDT, etc... but that doesn't invalidate its essential wisdom. If I were building a house (and G-d willing, I never will), I'd use their homestead plan, at least in part. And when I finally have the money to renovate the kitchen, I *will* use their homestead plan.
5. I'm going to pick _The Contrary Farmer_ as the best basic book by Gene Logsdon, although that's tough - his old _Homesteading_ book, and his _Two Acre Eden_ (Deb, make sure you look at that last one - it would be really relevant to small scale homesteading) are so terrific - he can really write. He's creative, and funny and smart. You should read everything he writes, and I'll probably recommend some more books by him later in this process.
6. Finally, The first 10 Backwoods Home Anthologies. Ok, their politics are even more appalling, and their taste for lots and lots of guns sucks. But there is lots of information here duplicated no where else. They are worth the money, and the older ones spend less time on ways of passing concealed weapons and more on homesteading techniques. Jackie Clay alone is worth her weight in gold. Try www.backwoodshome.com and search for "Hardcore Homesteading" - its the perfect post peak oil article.
Ok, much more on this topic, but I'm too tired to stay conscious, and I've got some serious thanksgiving to do.
Cheers,
Sharon
Monday, November 08, 2004
I'm over it...really
Yup, I'm completely ok with the fact that Chippy the Wonder Chipmunk and My Lord Vader from Wyoming are in charge again - and that the fucking morons of our nation clearly wanted them. Its all good - I'm hoping we invade Australia this time. I'm pretty sure they have WMDs.
Ok, I have to sublimate somehow, and so I'm back to talking about knitting. I'm starting a shawl made out of this really, really pretty, very soft, totally inorganic fuzzy stuff that looks like mohair, only much snugglier. If you know anything about my taste in knitting, you know this is not my usual wont - I am pretty much entirely a natural fiber woman. Oh, I've crocheted a few afghans in the nicer artificials, mostly for my Mom, who is allergic to nearly all natural fibers, but for the most part I like my yarn to come from an animal or vegetable, rather than an oil well.
But this stuff was really, really soft. And so pretty - a slightly variegated burgundy. It won't keep me warm the way wool or alpaca will - and in fact, I swear my next shawl is going to be the aran pocketed one (I am not generally a cable person, but I like this one) from _Folk Shawls_ (amazing book, btw) in Artful Yarns's Jazz, which is a wool/alpaca mix. It will keep me terrifically warm, I suspect, and very happy. The current shawl project, umm, will probably not warm me too much.
I knit for many reasons (to keep from eating too much, to do something productive while I watch tv, because I like to spin and you have to do *something* with the yarn, because I'm in preparation for full-time sheep ownership), but mostly because I like people to be warm even in the cold, and because I believe in using as little heating energy as possible. Thus, warm sweaters, socks, hats, blankets, shawls, made of natural fibers that are warm, water resistant, and snuggly, so that you want to wear them. I am not the person to make a fun-fur scarf, or a metallic-polyester poncho. My philosophy of knitting is that the garments should be simple, serve their purpose (to cover one's back or ass or whatever, and to keep it comfortable in whatever temperature it is designed for), and show off the beauty of the yarn and simple stitch work - period. That's all there is to knitting.
Which is why I don't do artificial yarns, picture knitting (except for small kids - although I admit I have considered making political afghans. Do you think people would pay me to knit blankets that say, "Kiss my ass John Ashcroft?"), or anything remotely fashionable (see all previous comments on ponchos). Except that I'm knitting this shawl, which will not be warm, is not made of natural fibers, and which I'm doing entirely because it is pretty, at a time when I have dozens of holiday gifts to knit.
I can't be sure, but I blame this on the Bush presidency. I believe that not only have the Republicans done near infinite damage to people (like 100,000 Iraqi civilians, not to mention our own soldiers - check out www.fromthewilderness.com), governance, freedom, the environment, the national discourse and my children's future (not to mention a whole lot of children's present), but they have also started to ooze into our collective consciousness and destroy useful brain cells. I'm pretty sure had Kerry been elected (no great joy to me, truly, but at least a relief from the pure hell of this administration), I'd be spinning organically raised yarn dyed with natural goldenrod to make my shawl. Instead, I'm making this oil based monstrosity.
It is soft, though. And really pretty. Is this how it starts?
Ok, I have to sublimate somehow, and so I'm back to talking about knitting. I'm starting a shawl made out of this really, really pretty, very soft, totally inorganic fuzzy stuff that looks like mohair, only much snugglier. If you know anything about my taste in knitting, you know this is not my usual wont - I am pretty much entirely a natural fiber woman. Oh, I've crocheted a few afghans in the nicer artificials, mostly for my Mom, who is allergic to nearly all natural fibers, but for the most part I like my yarn to come from an animal or vegetable, rather than an oil well.
But this stuff was really, really soft. And so pretty - a slightly variegated burgundy. It won't keep me warm the way wool or alpaca will - and in fact, I swear my next shawl is going to be the aran pocketed one (I am not generally a cable person, but I like this one) from _Folk Shawls_ (amazing book, btw) in Artful Yarns's Jazz, which is a wool/alpaca mix. It will keep me terrifically warm, I suspect, and very happy. The current shawl project, umm, will probably not warm me too much.
I knit for many reasons (to keep from eating too much, to do something productive while I watch tv, because I like to spin and you have to do *something* with the yarn, because I'm in preparation for full-time sheep ownership), but mostly because I like people to be warm even in the cold, and because I believe in using as little heating energy as possible. Thus, warm sweaters, socks, hats, blankets, shawls, made of natural fibers that are warm, water resistant, and snuggly, so that you want to wear them. I am not the person to make a fun-fur scarf, or a metallic-polyester poncho. My philosophy of knitting is that the garments should be simple, serve their purpose (to cover one's back or ass or whatever, and to keep it comfortable in whatever temperature it is designed for), and show off the beauty of the yarn and simple stitch work - period. That's all there is to knitting.
Which is why I don't do artificial yarns, picture knitting (except for small kids - although I admit I have considered making political afghans. Do you think people would pay me to knit blankets that say, "Kiss my ass John Ashcroft?"), or anything remotely fashionable (see all previous comments on ponchos). Except that I'm knitting this shawl, which will not be warm, is not made of natural fibers, and which I'm doing entirely because it is pretty, at a time when I have dozens of holiday gifts to knit.
I can't be sure, but I blame this on the Bush presidency. I believe that not only have the Republicans done near infinite damage to people (like 100,000 Iraqi civilians, not to mention our own soldiers - check out www.fromthewilderness.com), governance, freedom, the environment, the national discourse and my children's future (not to mention a whole lot of children's present), but they have also started to ooze into our collective consciousness and destroy useful brain cells. I'm pretty sure had Kerry been elected (no great joy to me, truly, but at least a relief from the pure hell of this administration), I'd be spinning organically raised yarn dyed with natural goldenrod to make my shawl. Instead, I'm making this oil based monstrosity.
It is soft, though. And really pretty. Is this how it starts?
Wednesday, November 03, 2004
The Day After...my children and their futures
It wasn't like I haven't been predicting it, or that I'd allowed my hopes to rise, but... well, I had the faint hope that the lesser of two evils (which is looking pretty good right now) might have won. It does not look that way. I know that the blogosphere is filled by thousands of people writing their opinion on this. Let me just say... I don't want to talk about it.
Eli went horseback riding again today - he is the simple embodiment of joy on a horse. Although kind people have told me how to post pictures, I haven't yet done so. So I doubt you will believe me when I say that my oldest child is transcendently beautiful. But so many people have told me so spontaneously that I almost believe my own natural inclination to think this. It helps that I do not believe that of my other two children, who are very cute (yea, I know, I'm their Mom - I would say that). Simon looks *exactly* like is Dad, who I happen to think is very handsome, and Isaiah is very round and Gerber babyish. But Eli is luminous - huge brown eyes, long lashes, the sweetest smile, tousled hair, very tall and lanky.
And he's a luminous personality as well - that doesn't mean he's not an ordinary child - he misbehaves, he pushes and hits, he complains when he doesn't get his way. But when is happy, it is whole body happiness. His sorrow is total as well. He loves completely, no matter how you behave (he forgives me my quick temper and failures instantly, to my shame), and wants nothing more than to play, cuddle, tickle, laugh, be with you. He has a sense of humor, and a devilish one, and a boundless capacity for fun. He is the most physically affectionate and loving child you can imagine. Eric and I have often felt that if someone came to us and told us that Eli was the reincarnation of some Lama or other great soul (even though we don't believe in reincarnation particularly) we'd be inclined to accept it. A number of people who had heard about Eli and pitied us, on meeting him, tell us how wonderful he is, and that they wouldn't necessarily want him to change. I feel precisely that way sometimes - although I want for my son all the ordinary joys of life that are not necessarily compatible with autism (I hope I'm wrong about that last), and particularly so today.
So watching Eli on a horse, his total delight and pleasure, has a way of moving me from the uglier thoughts in my head about this election. I will say, I believe with all my heart that we are laying the ground now for a longer term war, potentially a world war, in the middle east. I won't be surprised at all if my sons grow to manhood in an era of drafts and wars. Although daughters don't necessarily spare you the draft these days, I admit, today I feel particularly vulnerable because I have sons that I love so dearly, and history has not always been gentle to those sons. It is perhaps stupid, and predicated on way too many anticipations and guesses, but this morning I found myself feeling dually grateful to have Eli - because he is such a wonderful child in himself, and because his condition means that I will never have to send him to war.
I wish the same was true of Isaiah and Simon. I think I talk more about Eli than the other two boys, and thus give the impression that Eli's needs are at the center of our world. But that's not the case at all. Simon is sweet, sensitive, gentle, very, very high strung (everything is a crisis), hyperverbal and imaginative. We spend a lot of time making up stories with him, and he always (at not quite 3) knows exactly how they should go. Right at the moment, he's being eaten by a stuffed shark (for the fourth or fifth time this morning), and he wants to know if winnie the pooh is a mammal.
Isaiah is a baby, and it is always hard to tell what of his character will last. He definitely has a prediliction for doing things the hard way - if he can insert an obstacle in his way, he does. If he can climb over something, or hurl himself off a piece of furniture, well, all to the better. I spend much of my day trying to mitigate the damage to a child with excellent gross motor skills, absolutely no fear of anything, and a tendency to greet the world face-first.
I'm rambling a bit, but all I can say is that I'm grateful as hell to have my perfect boys, and it scares the heck out of me that what we do now will shape their futures in ways I cannot control.
Sharon
Eli went horseback riding again today - he is the simple embodiment of joy on a horse. Although kind people have told me how to post pictures, I haven't yet done so. So I doubt you will believe me when I say that my oldest child is transcendently beautiful. But so many people have told me so spontaneously that I almost believe my own natural inclination to think this. It helps that I do not believe that of my other two children, who are very cute (yea, I know, I'm their Mom - I would say that). Simon looks *exactly* like is Dad, who I happen to think is very handsome, and Isaiah is very round and Gerber babyish. But Eli is luminous - huge brown eyes, long lashes, the sweetest smile, tousled hair, very tall and lanky.
And he's a luminous personality as well - that doesn't mean he's not an ordinary child - he misbehaves, he pushes and hits, he complains when he doesn't get his way. But when is happy, it is whole body happiness. His sorrow is total as well. He loves completely, no matter how you behave (he forgives me my quick temper and failures instantly, to my shame), and wants nothing more than to play, cuddle, tickle, laugh, be with you. He has a sense of humor, and a devilish one, and a boundless capacity for fun. He is the most physically affectionate and loving child you can imagine. Eric and I have often felt that if someone came to us and told us that Eli was the reincarnation of some Lama or other great soul (even though we don't believe in reincarnation particularly) we'd be inclined to accept it. A number of people who had heard about Eli and pitied us, on meeting him, tell us how wonderful he is, and that they wouldn't necessarily want him to change. I feel precisely that way sometimes - although I want for my son all the ordinary joys of life that are not necessarily compatible with autism (I hope I'm wrong about that last), and particularly so today.
So watching Eli on a horse, his total delight and pleasure, has a way of moving me from the uglier thoughts in my head about this election. I will say, I believe with all my heart that we are laying the ground now for a longer term war, potentially a world war, in the middle east. I won't be surprised at all if my sons grow to manhood in an era of drafts and wars. Although daughters don't necessarily spare you the draft these days, I admit, today I feel particularly vulnerable because I have sons that I love so dearly, and history has not always been gentle to those sons. It is perhaps stupid, and predicated on way too many anticipations and guesses, but this morning I found myself feeling dually grateful to have Eli - because he is such a wonderful child in himself, and because his condition means that I will never have to send him to war.
I wish the same was true of Isaiah and Simon. I think I talk more about Eli than the other two boys, and thus give the impression that Eli's needs are at the center of our world. But that's not the case at all. Simon is sweet, sensitive, gentle, very, very high strung (everything is a crisis), hyperverbal and imaginative. We spend a lot of time making up stories with him, and he always (at not quite 3) knows exactly how they should go. Right at the moment, he's being eaten by a stuffed shark (for the fourth or fifth time this morning), and he wants to know if winnie the pooh is a mammal.
Isaiah is a baby, and it is always hard to tell what of his character will last. He definitely has a prediliction for doing things the hard way - if he can insert an obstacle in his way, he does. If he can climb over something, or hurl himself off a piece of furniture, well, all to the better. I spend much of my day trying to mitigate the damage to a child with excellent gross motor skills, absolutely no fear of anything, and a tendency to greet the world face-first.
I'm rambling a bit, but all I can say is that I'm grateful as hell to have my perfect boys, and it scares the heck out of me that what we do now will shape their futures in ways I cannot control.
Sharon
Saturday, October 23, 2004
Assorted Rants:Politics, Derrida,
Did you see the hideous obit of Jacques Derrida in the NY Times? Check it out here: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F10B11FB385F0C738DDDA90994DC404482
What idiot wrote this? (I don't expect anyone to actually pay them for this crap, and indeed, I discourage you from doing so!) I discovered deconstruction late, and it never resonated for me as I suspect it must have for those who found it as it was developing, but Derrida is not the caricature that he has been reduced to, nor is his thought the dim account that we get. You'd think that you could count on one single popular media to get Derrida, at least enough to write a half-decent bio. Further proof that the world is going to hell. (Did I mention that ponchos are back in fashion? If I were a Christian I'd say it was a sign of the end times. Instead, I'm guessing it means that
God, if real, has gotten bored with making fun of the upright monkeys and departed for warmer (or smarter) climes )
All of this is simply a deferral of the thing that is making me craziest of all - the election. I still believe we are going to lose, although Pat Robinson (someone who has not been notable for bringing me joy in the past) did please me. But I don't dare allow the flare of hope - because I know we're going to lose, and lose for the simple reason that people want their president to speak the language of right and wrong, moral and amoral. We on the left used to know how to do that, now we don't seem to. And so we allow the deeply amoral to take the language of faith, and right and truth away from us, and without a fight. There is no reason for that - in fact, there is every reason to believe that we have the right to the language of principle. But that battle is lost, and I think it would take a more eloquent man than Kerry (tell me there aren't more eloquent men, for cripes sake - the only duller guy is Holy Joe) to take it back now. We'll see.
Final proof that God may have taken a little break from us? My cousin is joining the army, so that he can go to college. Is it not possible in this world that one could get a decent education without having a limb blown off in Iraq? Can you imagine a more bleak trade off?
What idiot wrote this? (I don't expect anyone to actually pay them for this crap, and indeed, I discourage you from doing so!) I discovered deconstruction late, and it never resonated for me as I suspect it must have for those who found it as it was developing, but Derrida is not the caricature that he has been reduced to, nor is his thought the dim account that we get. You'd think that you could count on one single popular media to get Derrida, at least enough to write a half-decent bio. Further proof that the world is going to hell. (Did I mention that ponchos are back in fashion? If I were a Christian I'd say it was a sign of the end times. Instead, I'm guessing it means that
God, if real, has gotten bored with making fun of the upright monkeys and departed for warmer (or smarter) climes )
All of this is simply a deferral of the thing that is making me craziest of all - the election. I still believe we are going to lose, although Pat Robinson (someone who has not been notable for bringing me joy in the past) did please me. But I don't dare allow the flare of hope - because I know we're going to lose, and lose for the simple reason that people want their president to speak the language of right and wrong, moral and amoral. We on the left used to know how to do that, now we don't seem to. And so we allow the deeply amoral to take the language of faith, and right and truth away from us, and without a fight. There is no reason for that - in fact, there is every reason to believe that we have the right to the language of principle. But that battle is lost, and I think it would take a more eloquent man than Kerry (tell me there aren't more eloquent men, for cripes sake - the only duller guy is Holy Joe) to take it back now. We'll see.
Final proof that God may have taken a little break from us? My cousin is joining the army, so that he can go to college. Is it not possible in this world that one could get a decent education without having a limb blown off in Iraq? Can you imagine a more bleak trade off?
Friday, October 22, 2004
Update and food storage tour
I know, I know, it has been a long time since I posted. Things have been much as usual, except that I had three days of food poisoning (ugh). Eric thankfully saved me by taking care of the kids, the house, the skunked dog (ugh), the disabled grandparents and his job with a grace that is completely normal to him and unbelievably admirable to me. I don't want to sound like the post-feminist wife here, but *no one* can run our life alone - *NO ONE* - it is simply too complex. And he did - beautifully. I love him so much.
This is proof positive that academic life unfits women for domestic work - literally. I got food poisoning at a talk I attended on Macbeth, one of my rare forays back into the world of scholarship from the world of motherhood/farming/writing/etc... I spend an evening thinking of high minded things and neglecting my other work, and then spend three miserable days heaving, neglecting my life as vague commercial jingles and ugly images of childhood screw ups floated through my nauseated and exhausted brain.
In other news, Eli is horseback riding!!! Isn't that the coolest thing (if I ever learn to post pics, I will - he is so cute). A program for autistic children to ride has accepted him in late, and he was so excited. He's very good with animals (he and Rufus, our collie, have a special bond, and even the chickens like him), and he was so relaxed, comfortable and happy up there on a horse - no fear or anxiety at all. Even the helmet didn't bother him.
Anyway, here's part one of an ongoing (ie, when I get around to it) tour of my home food storage.
Cheers!
I don't know if this will be useful to anyone, but I recently had occasion to start writing up a description of the ways we're preparing for Peak Oil, and I thought I'd post it. I'd love to hear comments/suggestions/critiques, and I thought this might be useful to those who are just starting to acquire materials or store items. I'm including the ways that we've found to pay for these thing/make them cheaper, since for us, at least, money is the biggest obstacle to preparation.
I'd like to emphasize that there are two layers to our preps, and both of them are equally important. First, there are stored items designed to ease a difficult transitional period, but that are unsustainable in the longer term. Then, there are the preps that are designed to allow us to replace lost items, to be fundamentally sustainable. We make choices between the two regularly, and some of the choices weve made might not work for someone else.
I also think it is worth noting that not everything we do has a dire inevitability around it - most of my preps work great even if nothing bad ever happens. My food storage cuts down the number of trips to the store, my yarn and fabric stash drops gift and clothing costs, the grain grinder means we eat healthier, etc... The thing is that none of this should be perceived as a miserable necessity, but as a useful plan with positive immediate consequences. And lord knows, don't go into debt for it.
Finally, ours is a particular family in a particular situation. We are 7 people, 3 small children, 2 elders, 2 healthy adults. We have a large amount of land (27 acres) and a large house (4000 square foot farmhouse) and a number of outbuildings. The size of our house, for example, shapes our preps in several ways - we certainly have the luxury of storage space, but we also are not trying to heat the whole house, so warm blankets and winter clothes figure more than in a much smaller space. Because we have children and elders, some of our preps are specific to them.
Ok, caveats done. I'll start with food/toiletries, since that's one of the most urgent things.
Our food storage covers several rooms in our house. First, is the kitchen. We have an old, ratty kitchen, and we havent done much to make it decorative - but we've enhanced its usefulness by putting in a wood cookstove, and filling the (fairly large) room with cheap metal shop shelving - the kind you buy for $20 at home depot. We have four of them. We also have made additional counter space by building into the walls (we are bad carpenters, so this is not an aesthetic enhancement, although my step-mom did a nice job with some counters), and we have some cabinets as well. We store beans, some grains, whole spices, etc... in the canning jars and storage containers that are not suitable for actual canning. The grains we use a lot of - brown and white rice, whole wheat, rolled oats, are stored in those decorative metal popcorn tins. One will hold 25 lbs, and they cost less than 50 cents. The kitchen is where we keep all the food ready for immanent use. There is somewhere between two weeks and a month worth of food there at any given time, along with the same amount of food for dog and cats. In addition, we store some of our food preservation equipment there - the pressure and water bath canners, the food mill, dehydrator, etc...
We also have our grain grinder there - there's no piece of equipment I'd recommend buying more. Whole wheat stores forever, is cheap and bread is infinitely various. I actually have several - I picked up a couple of cheap corona mills (the cheapest model, mostly made for grinding corn) one of which I use for rice dehulling, another for grinding nut butters and coarse cornmeal. But the one we use every day is Lehman's Best, and is terrific. I've never seen one at a yard sale, although occasionally a good deal shows up on ebay. But they are worth paying full ($150-200) price for, or asking for it for a gift (very kind MIL gave it to me for my 30th birthday, although I don't think she quite appreciated how glad I was to have it - she thinks we're nuts.) We grind wheat for our bread, and for the bread of our 20 customer families by hand. It is great exercise, and the bread tastes so good. We also malt barley and grind that, which adds a sweetness and lightness. If you haven't read Sally Fallons Nourishing Traditions definitely do so - sprouted grain breads, lactofermentation, etc... are a big part of our diet.
We try very hard to eat from our storage - in part because I believe it is a healthy way to eat, in part because we like it, in part because it is cheaper, and also because it will make the transition less painful. Thats not to say that we don't eat citrus and spices, etc... but we do try to mostly eat locally and a sustainable diet. So the food in our storage is only slightly different than the food in our kitchen for dinner. We eat a lot of beans, a little home-raised meat (mostly chicken, although we trade eggs for milk and beef as well), sweeten mostly with honey, make grains primary in our diet, and eat a lot of meals in the asian style. So we have on our shelves lots of grains, lots of beans, lots of sauces and spices, very little meat and fish, and lots of vegetables. If that doesn't sound appetizing, all I can say is that no one every turns down an invitation to dinner at my house.
The next part of our food storage is the downstairs guest room closet. Grandma is none to pleased with this, since she thinks guests should have more than 6 inches of room to hang their clothes, but she deals. That closet is devoted to storing two categories of things - diapering materials and canning materials. My extra canners (I have two pressure and two water bath - all acquired at yard sales for less than $5), canning jars (I have about 600 - and I never pay more than $3 per box), along with lots of lids, parafin (yeah, I know it isnt recommended), rings, and pickling salt. Canning isn't necessarily the least energy intensive or most sustainable method, but it is an essential element of our food storage now and through the transitional period, when having complete foods with all their water intact may be essential if we ever have a real emergency. The investment in canning materials has been small, compared to the return - I'm not sure I'd recommend it if you had to buy everything new, but if you check out yard sales, canners and canning jars are generally in good supply. This means that most of the canned soups, broths, pickles, jams. vegetables, beans, etc... come from our garden, without pesticides, and are processed fresh.
Also in that closet are diapers. My oldest son is autistic, and at 4 1/2 not entirely potty trained. My middle son, at 2 1/2 is also not fully trained, and my youngest is only 10 months old. We cloth diaper, but we make a point of storing several hundred plastic diapers for each child, in case we are unable to wash, or have water restrictions. Since our well is electrically powered, although we have non-electric backups, we'll probably begrudge every drop of water we have to haul - so they'll be well worth the landfill costs.
Under the guest room bed (thankfully Grandma hasn't noticed yet) is space for 14 5 gallon buckets of beans and grains. We have the same under our bed. All told (in various locations), we have at present 500lbs of wheat, 500 lbs whole rice, 200lbs white rice, 50lbs brown rice, 500 lbs beans of various sort (we grew about 1/2 of them), 100lbs lentils, 200 lbs soybeans, 150 lbs barley, 600 lbs oatmeal, and various smaller amounts of grains and beans. We buy them cheaply in bulk from a food coop, and move them into containers in the kitchen as needed. All are stored with easy removal lids and oxygen removers. Fortunately our house has strong floors. The nice thing is that it keeps mess out from under the beds - theres no room.
Going upstairs, we've converted one of the closets in our bedroom to food storage. In there are most of the canned goods, tinned and home-canned meats and soups, the pasta, extra beans and rice, sauces and seasonings (I buy spices in bulk from penzeys.com), 150 lbs of sugar (should be more), 100 lbs of salt (ibid) (all bought in bulk), as well as things we just happen to like. We store vegetarian oyster sauce, sambal olek, korean pepper paste, hot bean paste, etc... for asian cooking. We store Tang and Vit. C koolaid for vitamin C for the kids, pickles (for appetite enhancement), shortening (disgusting, but lasts forever), Canned and dehydrated tomatoes (from our garden), hot sauce (by the gallon), and lots more, which I'll pick up next time.
This is proof positive that academic life unfits women for domestic work - literally. I got food poisoning at a talk I attended on Macbeth, one of my rare forays back into the world of scholarship from the world of motherhood/farming/writing/etc... I spend an evening thinking of high minded things and neglecting my other work, and then spend three miserable days heaving, neglecting my life as vague commercial jingles and ugly images of childhood screw ups floated through my nauseated and exhausted brain.
In other news, Eli is horseback riding!!! Isn't that the coolest thing (if I ever learn to post pics, I will - he is so cute). A program for autistic children to ride has accepted him in late, and he was so excited. He's very good with animals (he and Rufus, our collie, have a special bond, and even the chickens like him), and he was so relaxed, comfortable and happy up there on a horse - no fear or anxiety at all. Even the helmet didn't bother him.
Anyway, here's part one of an ongoing (ie, when I get around to it) tour of my home food storage.
Cheers!
I don't know if this will be useful to anyone, but I recently had occasion to start writing up a description of the ways we're preparing for Peak Oil, and I thought I'd post it. I'd love to hear comments/suggestions/critiques, and I thought this might be useful to those who are just starting to acquire materials or store items. I'm including the ways that we've found to pay for these thing/make them cheaper, since for us, at least, money is the biggest obstacle to preparation.
I'd like to emphasize that there are two layers to our preps, and both of them are equally important. First, there are stored items designed to ease a difficult transitional period, but that are unsustainable in the longer term. Then, there are the preps that are designed to allow us to replace lost items, to be fundamentally sustainable. We make choices between the two regularly, and some of the choices weve made might not work for someone else.
I also think it is worth noting that not everything we do has a dire inevitability around it - most of my preps work great even if nothing bad ever happens. My food storage cuts down the number of trips to the store, my yarn and fabric stash drops gift and clothing costs, the grain grinder means we eat healthier, etc... The thing is that none of this should be perceived as a miserable necessity, but as a useful plan with positive immediate consequences. And lord knows, don't go into debt for it.
Finally, ours is a particular family in a particular situation. We are 7 people, 3 small children, 2 elders, 2 healthy adults. We have a large amount of land (27 acres) and a large house (4000 square foot farmhouse) and a number of outbuildings. The size of our house, for example, shapes our preps in several ways - we certainly have the luxury of storage space, but we also are not trying to heat the whole house, so warm blankets and winter clothes figure more than in a much smaller space. Because we have children and elders, some of our preps are specific to them.
Ok, caveats done. I'll start with food/toiletries, since that's one of the most urgent things.
Our food storage covers several rooms in our house. First, is the kitchen. We have an old, ratty kitchen, and we havent done much to make it decorative - but we've enhanced its usefulness by putting in a wood cookstove, and filling the (fairly large) room with cheap metal shop shelving - the kind you buy for $20 at home depot. We have four of them. We also have made additional counter space by building into the walls (we are bad carpenters, so this is not an aesthetic enhancement, although my step-mom did a nice job with some counters), and we have some cabinets as well. We store beans, some grains, whole spices, etc... in the canning jars and storage containers that are not suitable for actual canning. The grains we use a lot of - brown and white rice, whole wheat, rolled oats, are stored in those decorative metal popcorn tins. One will hold 25 lbs, and they cost less than 50 cents. The kitchen is where we keep all the food ready for immanent use. There is somewhere between two weeks and a month worth of food there at any given time, along with the same amount of food for dog and cats. In addition, we store some of our food preservation equipment there - the pressure and water bath canners, the food mill, dehydrator, etc...
We also have our grain grinder there - there's no piece of equipment I'd recommend buying more. Whole wheat stores forever, is cheap and bread is infinitely various. I actually have several - I picked up a couple of cheap corona mills (the cheapest model, mostly made for grinding corn) one of which I use for rice dehulling, another for grinding nut butters and coarse cornmeal. But the one we use every day is Lehman's Best, and is terrific. I've never seen one at a yard sale, although occasionally a good deal shows up on ebay. But they are worth paying full ($150-200) price for, or asking for it for a gift (very kind MIL gave it to me for my 30th birthday, although I don't think she quite appreciated how glad I was to have it - she thinks we're nuts.) We grind wheat for our bread, and for the bread of our 20 customer families by hand. It is great exercise, and the bread tastes so good. We also malt barley and grind that, which adds a sweetness and lightness. If you haven't read Sally Fallons Nourishing Traditions definitely do so - sprouted grain breads, lactofermentation, etc... are a big part of our diet.
We try very hard to eat from our storage - in part because I believe it is a healthy way to eat, in part because we like it, in part because it is cheaper, and also because it will make the transition less painful. Thats not to say that we don't eat citrus and spices, etc... but we do try to mostly eat locally and a sustainable diet. So the food in our storage is only slightly different than the food in our kitchen for dinner. We eat a lot of beans, a little home-raised meat (mostly chicken, although we trade eggs for milk and beef as well), sweeten mostly with honey, make grains primary in our diet, and eat a lot of meals in the asian style. So we have on our shelves lots of grains, lots of beans, lots of sauces and spices, very little meat and fish, and lots of vegetables. If that doesn't sound appetizing, all I can say is that no one every turns down an invitation to dinner at my house.
The next part of our food storage is the downstairs guest room closet. Grandma is none to pleased with this, since she thinks guests should have more than 6 inches of room to hang their clothes, but she deals. That closet is devoted to storing two categories of things - diapering materials and canning materials. My extra canners (I have two pressure and two water bath - all acquired at yard sales for less than $5), canning jars (I have about 600 - and I never pay more than $3 per box), along with lots of lids, parafin (yeah, I know it isnt recommended), rings, and pickling salt. Canning isn't necessarily the least energy intensive or most sustainable method, but it is an essential element of our food storage now and through the transitional period, when having complete foods with all their water intact may be essential if we ever have a real emergency. The investment in canning materials has been small, compared to the return - I'm not sure I'd recommend it if you had to buy everything new, but if you check out yard sales, canners and canning jars are generally in good supply. This means that most of the canned soups, broths, pickles, jams. vegetables, beans, etc... come from our garden, without pesticides, and are processed fresh.
Also in that closet are diapers. My oldest son is autistic, and at 4 1/2 not entirely potty trained. My middle son, at 2 1/2 is also not fully trained, and my youngest is only 10 months old. We cloth diaper, but we make a point of storing several hundred plastic diapers for each child, in case we are unable to wash, or have water restrictions. Since our well is electrically powered, although we have non-electric backups, we'll probably begrudge every drop of water we have to haul - so they'll be well worth the landfill costs.
Under the guest room bed (thankfully Grandma hasn't noticed yet) is space for 14 5 gallon buckets of beans and grains. We have the same under our bed. All told (in various locations), we have at present 500lbs of wheat, 500 lbs whole rice, 200lbs white rice, 50lbs brown rice, 500 lbs beans of various sort (we grew about 1/2 of them), 100lbs lentils, 200 lbs soybeans, 150 lbs barley, 600 lbs oatmeal, and various smaller amounts of grains and beans. We buy them cheaply in bulk from a food coop, and move them into containers in the kitchen as needed. All are stored with easy removal lids and oxygen removers. Fortunately our house has strong floors. The nice thing is that it keeps mess out from under the beds - theres no room.
Going upstairs, we've converted one of the closets in our bedroom to food storage. In there are most of the canned goods, tinned and home-canned meats and soups, the pasta, extra beans and rice, sauces and seasonings (I buy spices in bulk from penzeys.com), 150 lbs of sugar (should be more), 100 lbs of salt (ibid) (all bought in bulk), as well as things we just happen to like. We store vegetarian oyster sauce, sambal olek, korean pepper paste, hot bean paste, etc... for asian cooking. We store Tang and Vit. C koolaid for vitamin C for the kids, pickles (for appetite enhancement), shortening (disgusting, but lasts forever), Canned and dehydrated tomatoes (from our garden), hot sauce (by the gallon), and lots more, which I'll pick up next time.
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