what is wrong with this picture

I know a farm. Not personally, but I met a man some 30 years ago who owned the farm, and whose father had owned it before him. He was important to me and he also gave me my first Tom Robbins book. By his account, this family farm had been “organic” and “green” since Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. After being away from home, as in halfway around the world away from a home that he did not recognize as home until after his dad died, he came to the free place to live and cast about to find a livelihood. Not all that critical with the inheritance. And the land. Eventually he took to collecting grants to teach farmers who’d been farmers for generations how to farm. Once the grants ran out, however, well, then those immigrants were once again strangers in a strange land. Wanting to “retire”, because after all, someone else should do the work after awhile, old Joe of no relation has the farm attempting to wrest a living wage from growing small amounts of food. Living wages are not all they are cracked up to be anyway, and trying to get one out of growing a small amount of food isn't even in the realm of infinite possibilities anyway so his failure after failure is no surprise to me.

What is a surprise is this: “More flooding today washed away the topsoil that we imported.” If it has been an organic farm for nearly fifty years now, what sort of “organic” and “sustainable” processes and procedures led it to need imported topsoil? And what mismanagement led to it being washed away? (this paragraph in DayGlo)

I know what the place looks like . . . a field beside a creek. It is not a big surprise that a creek floods. It is what creeks and rivers and things like that do. Droughts are no surprise either. They happen. You live through them -- or you die. It is no secret that anything covering soil breaks the impact of rain . . . and that if you have naked soil (as it is so often in row cropping and mono-cropping and the like), just the impact of raindrops on the soil is a significant eroding factor. So you need something over the soil to break that impact (leaves, mulch, biomass) as well as roots to hold it in place. And organic material to act as a sponge. And generous riparian boarders on any flowing sort of place. It is how it works. All of it together. Nothing in isolation. It doesn’t care if you were counting on a crop. Or if you think the creek is pretty all cleaned out. It cares if you care correctly for it or not. “Correctly” is generally in close approximation of nature. And if you do not, it will bite your a**. It is not awful; it is reality.
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It is a really good thing that the earth is so good at healing herself. I have a neighbor here who is doing hideous things to his plot of land. Hideous. We ourselves have spent twenty years figuring out how to keep our road from washing away. We’re always improving. But where the old road was twenty years ago? You can’t even walk through that it has grown up so thickly. So the neighbor’s land will one day host blackberries, then brush, then a forest on its steep sides again.

We are eating salmon tonight. It is not a sustainable thing to eat. I expect it will collapse like the cod eventually. Like so many fisheries have. Lack of fish is one reason for so much piracy and famine in parts of Africa. But would it do any real good for me to forego salmon as a protest or example? I’m thinking not. It is the tragedy of the commons. I will eat it while I can. And although that is living high, I will also live low. I will seek out ways that I think are truly sustainable, and I will seek to live dreams too. That is my picture. It is not a balancing act: it is grounded in reality. Disillusionment is a good thing.

Sounds like life to me it ain’t no fantasy
It’s just a common case of everyday reality
Man I know it’s tough but you gotta suck it up
To hear you talk you’re caught up in some tragedy
It sounds like life to me
(Darryl Worley song)

The Road of Good Intentions

My Free Will Baptist preacher grandfather used to say, often, "The road to hell is paved with good intentions." Even though I'm pretty much a confirmed no-hell-er (or I guess I believe that people make their own little hells here that any larger hell would pale beside of), I agree.

I also believe that your intention in doing something or not doing something is hugely important. Doing the right thing for the wrong reason is . . . doing the right thing for the wrong reason: It is not doing the right thing. Oh, but I don't really mean to get into a discussion of what I believe and don't believe. "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

Still, I wanted to pile on and say, "What she said!" Geez, Louise. I've seen first hand too many examples myself. Got the big guns called in one time on another blog because I dared say that I didn't think letting your kid's teeth rot out was an example of exceptional parenting (I actually had the gall to call it neglectful).

The things we have valued in our journey have certainly included freedom, but with freedom comes responsibility -- freedom simply doesn't exist without responsibility. Choice doesn't exist without consequence. We've also valued politeness, kindness, thoughtfulness, and oh yes cleverness. Cleverness is highly valued here. Ok, and hard work too, and work on things that don't just benefit the doer -- one might consider it communality if it weren't that it is family. Expectations do exist but are always negotiable in their specifics.

Kids have parents because kids need parents. There are things that are simply inappropriate.

I suppose what we've tried to instill in the kids is an ability to internally validate themselves so that they aren't so easily swayed by fashion or external pressure. Discernment.

Happy Halloween!

Patchwork

The goat we sold.

The fish fry we had. (bluegill and bass, fried cabbage, rice)

A hickory horned devil I think. I love that name. There were a good number of luna moth caterpillars at this same time too, which was a couple of weeks ago.

The wooly worms this year have been totally cool but I haven't gotten a non-blurry photo of one yet. We have them all over the barn -- I think they come in the hay -- but they are also to be seen trying to cross the road and some other unlikely things like that. Anyway, I'm talking about the wooly black and brown ones. The way I always heard it was that the more black they had on them, the worse winter was going to be. Well, this year they are mostly brown with just small stripes of black at the ends. Some of them have even been all brown. So, according to the wooly worms, this shouldn't be a bad winter. I do hope we get a good freeze or two to kill the bugs.

Gosh but I do love October. Except that I know I'm getting old now because I also do think of winter in a way that I didn't when I was a kid and had electric heat that was paid for by my daddy. I remember my grandmother dreading winter and while I don't think I dread it quite like she did, it does cross my mind that things get harder in the winter, that daily chores can be more of a challenge. The husband put a load of shale on the worst part of the road today. Not being able to negotiate the road is one of the things that can make life a lot harder. Having the wood stove going is a thing that makes life easier in the winter though.

The quilt on the mountains in the autumn. My mountains. The mountains that shelter and nurture me and have my family for generations. The arms of the very earth that have endured to embrace me. I love these mountains.

Banking

Not as in bailouts, but rather the little day to day things we do that end up being banking, as in banking a fire to save it for the morning.

I think first of all the manure I bring home. We were talking with some chemical farming types lately and they would talk about how much nitrogen this or that amendment had and how manure doesn’t have that. They are right in a way, manure has a certain amount of free nitrogen and that is usually less than your other nitrogen amendments. But manure has more in there that it releases over time. And not just nitrogen, of course. No matter how clever people think they are, they are not so clever as nature, and if a garden (or pasture) is full of organic matter, it has a tendency to balance itself out and become more and more fertile.

Ah, but people are almost always sure that they are more clever than nature, and that something depends on them doing something that nature can’t do. Well, there is a place in the world for round-up, but there’s a place in the pasture for weeds too.

Back to banking. A couple of years ago I blogged about getting a pair of work boots. Well, they wore out, what are the odds, being worn every.single.workday and then standing in urine and manure and getting me around miles and miles of walking and getting torqued pretty good sometimes too. But cash money is scarce right now. Not as scarce as it has been, say, last winter, but still. When it became obvious that I was going to need new boots soon, I started a “jar”. That is just some sort of place to stash a little money as I come into it. We’ve had “jars” for all sorts of things . . . like for the Wii for the kids (that took a couple years to fully fund), like for the extra freezer, all sorts of things. So I started this jar, and when I got a little extra money for some extra horse job (like feeding at someone else’s farm), or when I had a few extra dollars that I could purloin from myself, it would go in there. And by the time I actually found boots that fit and felt good, I had almost as much money as they cost in that jar. It is a lot easier to come up with an extra $20 than an extra $120.

Today I’m selling a goat, and that money will go into a jar of its own. It is a long term thing for it. It might be needed for some farmstead milking expense (a new cow (which has its own jar actually) or a new billy goat, for example), or if we don’t end up needing it for that, it might be used to take the family out to eat or to the movies. But the goat has been a family endeavor and so the produce of it will go to the family, not to bills, and not to any one person, or not even divided up. It will be there to fund something that we don’t know quite what it is yet but it will be there.

We bank partly by not having many bills. This starts, I believe, with the security of owning our own land and house, and that is probably the one thing I would go into debt for. Instead of doing that, though, we spent a decade, and a lot of our time and energy, and most of our financial resources during those years, building it. It was hard but it was better than 30 years of debt or the possibility of being homeless in month's time.

But there was also the time when my mother thought we just needed TV. We got one channel at the time, and had videos, but she thought we just needed more than that. I cannot relate at all to *needing* TV. So anyway, my mother bought for us this expensive satellite system . . . and I took it back. Thanks but no thanks. It was the $40 per month bill for the minimum service. No thanks. Don’t need to worry about having to meet that, not for TV. I’d love to have Netflix even now but I’m not up for the monthly expense -- instead during the winter when it is dark in the evening and we have time to watch DVDs, we go rent the 5 for 5 for $5’s. Everything we see is a few years old. But we either have that extra $5 in our pocket or we don’t, and if we don’t, we don’t get them and that’s fine. A monthly bill is just totally something else again.

Another way we bank is that we don’t borrow. Not that we never have, or never would, just that it is something to avoid if at ALL possible. And if it wasn’t possible to avoid it, then it is something to pay off ASAP period. And doing that is just like having a jar for savings . . . when I was paying off my student loan, every time I had an extra $20 or $40, I put it toward that so that the load was paid off in about half the time allowed. And if we borrow, we have a plan as to how we’ll pay it off, and when, which is always early.

I knew a person once who borrowed money to take her family on a vacation to Scotland. She jokingly said that it would take 20 years or something to pay that off, which horrified me. So what she said to me was this (I’ll always remember): “I admire you not borrowing money, not being in debt, living the way you do. But you give up an awful lot to do that, like this trip to Scotland.” To which I say now, you do not give up anything except debt to be out of debt. If we wanted to go to Scotland, we’d have a jar for it, and when it was a fully funded trip, we’d go. Doing it that way tells you a lot more about what is really important to you. If you are borrowing from the future, a thousand here and a thousand there doesn’t seem so bad because it isn’t real. If the choice is, I could have this shot of single malt Scotch tonight or I could put that money in the jar, it becomes real clear what is important to you. I’ve found out that most people think that their debt will somehow magically disappear -- maybe they’ll die and not have to pay it, or win the lottery, or something. When they end up homeless and eating cat food, I find it very difficult to feel sorry for them. They made their choices.

We bank by filling up the freezers and canning shelves and having a few barrels of wheat and corn and caches of potatoes. What of that is boughten we buy when we are feeling a little flush. It gives us a thrill to put by: it gives us a thrill to eat from what we’ve put by.

If you don’t have debt or many bills, it doesn’t take much money to get by. If you have a place to live and food, then even if you don’t have money, your children aren’t cold and hungry.

How do I keep myself from wanting so much stuff? Well, not having the TV is a start. It is certainly possible to see through the manipulation of advertising, but it is still seductive to see so much. Another way is to simply not go shopping. When I stay home, I don’t spend much money, but what is more, I don’t see things that I then think I can’t live without. What ends up happening here is that we find that we actually need a new sifter, that the old one is kaput, and so we go and find out what is available in sifters. During that process I also see other things, things I might drool over but don’t truly need, like those nice bamboo spoons (I love kitchen stuff). Still, I find when I get home, my old wooden spoons work just fine, and the new sifter is all we bought. I know I need towels at some point, but if I don’t have the money for them, then no use deciding which of this year’s colors I would buy if I did have the money. In fact, it is worse than “no use” because it plants that seed of discontent with what you already have.

And perhaps most important, if you live this way, if you don’t borrow from the future, then hopefully you’re children will know not to borrow from the future too. Pouring money onto discontent does not really do anything about that discontent -- if you learn contentment, perhaps your children will have the chance to learn contentment also.

And then too, not to be forgotten, is the fact that every war that ever was, every exploitation of people and the environment was and is caused by money or the love and seeking thereof. So if you can control your own grasping, your own consumption, then and only then can you contribute to things like world peace and non-exploitation and environmental integrity. If it doesn’t actually inconvenience you in some way then it is all just gnashing teeth and sounding brass and tinkling cymbals -- and without love that is a verb.

flesh to flesh

Isn't it funny how at spring equinox, I can milk in the light both times, but at fall equinox, more often both milkings are in the dark? It is more like, when I milk early in the morning, it is still dark; and when I milk regular time in the evening, it is dark already.

Ah, but the moon was up tonight. And lately the glow worms have been magnificent, like stars fallen to earth.

I remember when we first moved up here. I'm not sure I'd ever seen glow worms before. But we had rabbits down at the garden. I was pregnant with the eldest child. I still worked full time. And every evening, husband and I would walk together through the dark with the stars filling the sky and the glow worms filling the earth, hand in hand, down then back up the hill.

The little building where the rabbits were then, it is still there, now just a garden storage shed and home for wasps. It was the first thing we built on this land. We built it for chickens, and it was good but we didn't live here yet and, well, the end wasn't pretty for the chickens. Or the dogs that killed the chickens.

But before that, when there were maybe a dozen chickens in there, I would come sometimes after work to feed them before going home. One day I came and one was dead of natural causes. I didn't know then what to do exactly. I knew I needed to get her out but I thought I needed to bury her. So I tried. Something dug her up, of course. But what I didn't know then was that it was perfectly acceptable to just throw her over the side of the hill and life would take care of the rest of it, and fast. We had a goat die once in sight of my kitchen window and I watched and it was amazing. And in three days, it was gone except for some skin and the bones.

Day of Snakes

First I was at the barn. When I wheeled the big double wheeler wheelbarrow into the sawdust bin, I thought there were mushrooms or something growing what with all the recent rains. A closer look, however, revealed they were not puffballs or some other fungus but snake eggs. With snakes partway out of some, all the way out of others, and lots of them. The sight made me jump a bit first, and look way more closely. I hollered to my friend who was riding in the arena asking if she’d seen them earlier. No, she hadn’t. They were dead . . . but how had they gotten there? I tried to remember my snake physiology -- I was sure that copperheads were viviparous (born alive) and so fairly sure these were not poisonous dead snakes, which are not as dangerous as poisonous live snakes but still. Personally, I think all snakes are worthy to be handled with caution. And respect.

And so it was that a trip to the sawdust bin turned into a science class with the other people who were at the barn at the time. We looked and talked and poked and finally threw them over into the neighbor’s field to finish rotting. It turned out that they had been found buried down in the old sawdust the day before and left out for me to find. There was also a squished toad frog in the driveway entering into its maggot phase which by afternoon had entered into its dried up phase.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, err, farm . . . well, how I found out about it was when I got home and younger son ran to the vehicle to greet me as he always does, he said, “Nakes! Nakes! Cat’s killed a nakes and the chickens ate it!” He is very funny in that if you try to get him to say “Snakes” he will, but then he will say it like this: “The Scats Skilled a Snakes and the Schickens sate it!” But he’s also the kid who will turn to you and say, totally on his own and plain as day, “You know, my English is not so exact.” Anyway, what happened was that younger daughter found a baby copperhead and after she found it, the cats found it. They surrounded it and as fast as the snake was, the cats were faster. Then when the cats found it, the chickens found it too, and it went back and forth a few times. The snake did not manage to bite a cat but did get at least one chicken:
Looks like she's got a chaw of 'backer, don't it? Luckily, snake bites, even poisonous ones, don’t generally affect animals as severely as humans. You might remember the dog getting bit a couple years ago.

So that was our day of snakes.

On other fronts, well, we had a very decent spring garden, and the fall salad garden seems to be coming along, but in most respects the summer garden was wimpy. The hard corn was puny to begin with and then we’ve had to trap raccoons out of it or we wouldn’t have had any left. On the good side though, we’ve got plenty of good hard corn still from last year, and I think we still have some from the year before too. And we’ll probably get a years worth anyway out of this crop. So that ain’t shabby by the sufficiency standard. We also seem to have a more than decent potato crop, and a husband who has sworn that this year we’ll dig and cache it so that we can plow the rectangle garden in the winter and have it better prepared when planting time comes. A new crop for us this year that seems to have done well is Jerusalem artichokes, or sunchokes, so now the challenge will be learning to incorporate them into our regular diet.

We still haven’t gotten a new cow and the management plan is always a bit flexible. Like we could get a new cow and put the old one in the freezer. Or we could get a new cow and find a bull for the old cow to run with to see if she’d get pregnant if exposed more although that would almost certainly be a beef bull rather than a milking bull so we wouldn’t be passing her most excellent genes on to the next generation of homestead milk cows. Right now we’re still getting by on her production and, well, it just hasn’t gotten on the front burner. We’ve also had goat milk until this week. The girls milked her this year and did a fine management job and now she's obviously pregnant again. We’re putting the babies up at night still but mostly to protect them from the bear potential. How we’ll manage that probably depends mostly on how many nanny goats the mamma has in her next batch. Right now we’re thinking we'll keep the girls and may look toward a new billy come next year. I really like our current billy though. But I’d rather have nannies we’ve raised ourselves.

This year has been a very good year of independent to the farm exploration. Our interests, individual and collective, have born sweet fruit. And the farm and a basic subsistence lifestyle has allowed us to be able to do that -- and sustained us in the doing.

What she said.

(actually posting this from Cielo's house! -- link in title)

(P.S. Cielo's husband told her to be careful and me to have fun!)

enter into thy closet

Really, I was thinking of a different post. And really, I hope someone doesn’t mind me using this real story but this is the deepest thing.

See, there is a psychologist I know, dignified, professional, credentialed, experienced, who is going to this mandatory week-long government training session. Who could blame the psychologists that a lot of them like to leave these “training sessions” a bit early to get on home (have you ever been to something so boring you’d rather go to get your wisdom teeth out? that’s what those things are like) . So this time they’ve all received a memo that the very last thing that they all have to stay for is a test! “There will be a quiz!”

Why the h*ll do people do this? Who would allow themselves to be treated like that? Degraded rabble? Evidently dignified, professional, credentialed, experienced psychologists would. Every day on facebook folks comment bluely, “oh gosh darn, another Monday”, or more cheerfully, “TGIF.” School starts teaching that in pre-school and so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that well-schooled psychologists have been trained to be that docile, that obedient, that subservient to the system which sucks them dry.

Maybe it’s a character fault in me but I never could do that. Try as I might, I could not put up with the slow death. In high school we got a new principal who decided that we needed a dress code to include no spaghetti strap tops. Me? I wore one, then called him a dirty old man to be so distracted by high school girls in spaghetti strap tops. I got sent home anyway but I still just have that you aren’t going to tell me what to do, not without some reason anyway, attitude. I learned the futility of trying to “change” the system. The system serves its real purposes quite well, despite what they say.

I learned to live largely outside the system. I touch the system in various places, I use it to my own ends often enough, but neither my well-being nor my self-image depends upon it. It is a really nice thing because I am not diminished by other people. I am, in fact, brightened by other people shining. A rising tide and all that.

The truth of the matter is, when you figure this out, it will be like praying in your closet instead of for show. What is for show ends with the show; what is real reverberates, grows, changes, effects for years and lifetimes and outside of time itself.

(thanks Matthew 6:5-6 -- the title should link you to this chapter)

A Year of Living Abundantly

Or

Every Year is Different

This year we’ve had abundant rain. One might even call it abundant weather because by gosh we’ve had a lot of it. These first photos are the results of weather (in this case meaning wind) that happened back in April but that I just got around to photographing: Trees down by the back creek and into our back pasture. The scale of it is impressive although I don’t believe I’ve got a speck of that Ansel Adams thing about capturing scale and grandeur and all that.

Do you see the mushroom? Turned sideways. That root ball is well over my head.

This sycamore tree I could easily walk across . . . but where would I go on the other side? Still, the kids have fun traipsing on all these.

A look at what might be called violence. Or it might be called something else. Like it might be called necessary. I do hate the modern “compassionate” view of everything always moving in some progression of unassailable growth without the necessary pruning/death/smiting, aka sh*t happens. Those trees that are snapped and twisted are as big around as my body . . . and yet others stand unbowed. I just have to love, admire, respect and emulate nature.

This is a pine fallen into the pasture and now a favorite scratching post. The dog provides some awesomeness scale.

And this one . . . follow it . . . there is a fence post in the bottom right corner . . . the clump of trees felled over the creek . . . but as the photo goes back you can see three more large trees or clumps of trees on the ground and what you don’t see is the murkwood because it is gone. This little patch of forest floor is now open to the sun and will be vastly different next year until it gradually grows itself back. Maybe this year the bears won’t think they can hide here as much.

And these are the inhabitants of the back pasture, missing the donkey and the baby goats who are no longer actually babies (does anyone have hearty milk goats to trade out?) I always love best photos of the animals.

Before I leave the pasture, I want to tell you something. Someone showed up here the other day. Someone I didn’t know. I think it was good that I was at the barn instead of home. Husband said if he hadn’t had a banjo thrown over his shoulder he would probably have run him off but he did have a banjo and he seemed ok to husband and so he visited awhile. He’s been a reader of this blog. From having read this blog, he also read about Eustace Conway and is currently working over at his place and somehow found his way here ostensibly to visit me. That’s a little creepy. Perhaps I should be more careful. Don’t anyone else get any ideas. I don’t like being on display. And yet, I’m touched and flattered that someone wanted to actually see what I’ve tried to describe.

What our visitor found was a messy house and a messy farm and a messy garden, no doubt. He found a husband willing to play some music with him and to pull a carrot as if by magic out of the weeds -- weeds that are so thick this year as to make the garden an impenetrable jungle to any who do not know where it hides its secret vegetables. He found a corn field that isn’t really very big, and that this year is even quite puny, but that will still likely produce all the table corn we’ll need for the year. He did not find a Contrary Goddess because she’d gone for the day to the barn where she is spending more time. He found some children who have not actually said much about his visit. He found a house that was without bread made at that moment, a rarity but . . . in the end we are not purists by any stretch of the imagination. One of the whole points of living like this, maybe even the main point, is joy . . . is to be able to do what it is we really want to do . . . is to have time to play and to find our work to be play.

I don’t know what he thought of it all, how he experienced it. As far as I know, he’s never left a comment on this blog or written me an e-mail or linked me to a blog of his. He has, however, turned an acre or so of his parents’ property into garden, which is so cool, and come to work with Eustace for awhile, which is also cool. I think I would like to know what he thought and how he experienced it, but it is also uncomfortable. Will the sodas on the table or the jeans hanging on the flue take precedence in his mind?

Visitor, know this: I admire you. You are pursuing stuff, not finding reasons why you cannot or making excuses for what doesn’t work. As should be obvious, there is no one way to do this, any of it. And every year is different.

The weaver of the web:

Hither world, thither world, all worlds are One.

Sunflower serving as food and as table for some critter or the other:
(while the corn might be puny this year, the sunflowers are not)

When zucchinis and crooknecks go bad:

bean blossoms

Eggplants. Notice the flea beetle eaten leaves.

Female.

Male.

The first color change of fall. I think I first noticed this little tree in a neighbor’s yard last year too. Also, I’m not able to milk late without a flashlight anymore. I’ll miss the light.

Another form of abundance this year. One had fallen off in the road and I took it to the horse show with me and gave it to an overgrown pony named Tullamore who I happen to like a lot and who boss says I like because she is just exactly like me.

Nourished by the abundance of this sort of life:

I do want to say, I am thankful to all and for so much. I think this farm and this family have taught me over these years how to be happy, and how to take the chance, and that there is indeed a place in the world for a gambler -- albeit a place that she must needs make for herself. With a lot of help.

P.S. this is post #570 and I just passed my five year blogoversary! woohoo & hahahehehoho

studies in cultural juxtapositions

We got up and had a leisurely breakfast and went to pick blueberries but it was closed for ripening but being who we are (that is, always leery of rules for rules sakes although respectful of those with sound reasoning behind them) we stopped anyway and husband went to see if there were enough berries ripe to pick or not. Being as there were eight people milling around, we attracted the attention of a person who was working cutting the briars out of the berry field. He came out to see what we were doing and to run us off. When he came out, I asked him if there were any berries. He said no. Behind him was husband, fresh from walking around the field. “What about you?” I said, “Do you think there are any blueberries ready to pick?”

“Oh, there are plenty of blueberries ripe for the picking,” he said.

And you could see that fellow’s face grimace. He was irritated. If he'd a had hackles, they would have been raised. We weren’t going to be easy to run off. How dare we? Dead, awkward silence. I looked at him again. “What do you think? Would she kill us if we picked anyway?” I asked.

He looked up at me, his eyes flashed electric brown, and he said, “That’s my mama!”

“Oh,” I said, “so she would kill us then?” Pause. “We think the world of Mrs. Grullo.” Smile.

And everyone relaxed and we started to take our leave. I don’t know quite what started the next part of it. Some offhand remark, no doubt. I think he mentioned that he’d like to have a cow to milk and I of course said that I’ve milked a cow every day now for six years, and goats before that, and my daughters (who were talking to his daughter who had brought with her a ring neck snake) milk the goat now and that’s when things really loosened up! And it turned into this free flowing conversation telling tales and jokes and stories and family history and now he’s keeping his eyes open for a milk cow for me, and mine can run with his bull after I dry her off (instead of become a beef). We must have stood there for over an hour, with name introductions coming only at our departure along with hearty shaking of hands and an agreement to meet up later in the week.

Then we decided to go catch part of the Virginia Highlands Festival in Abingdon. Now, this thing is big and popular and old -- shoot, I remember coming to it with my mother when I was a child and everything was held on the Barter Green and Martha Washington Inn lawn. Now I usually avoid it, trying not to go to or through Abingdon at all for anything during the three weekends and two weeks that it runs because it totally and entirely gears itself to being a more-money-than-you-have-sense, come-in-from-out-of-town-and-immediately-be-an-expert-on-the-local-arts sort of crowd. Except I do like to catch the photo and art exhibits, and sometimes the arts and crafts booths.

Walking around the arts and crafts area, I admired one painter in particular, and one raku stoneware person who had this copper glaze she’d developed, and there was a leather dress for $500 and some wooden bowls that I told my husband I wanted some wooden bowls and utensils myself, except actually had done, not like those at the fair and done by machine. Then there was this turned wooden bowl booth. That’s all the guy had; perfectly round, perfectly turned wooden bowls and pepper grinders. And, as we’d done with the other wood booths, husband started talking to him about the wood and how they keep it from checking as it dries and the like. The wood turner immediately starts in on how this is all local wood “from right here in Abingdon” but it is obvious that he himself is not. Finally he admits he’s grew up in Pennsylvania. Which is fine. But he has this edge to him. It is like he is trying to be nice but he just doesn’t know how. When he starts telling us how he gets his wood, husband reciprocates by telling him about some trees we have here that were downed by those huge winds in April. I realize that husband is offering this guy to come and get some of this wood. It is the very type and condition that he has just told us he uses. And there I am, watching this interaction, and when we left his booth I said to husband, “That guy didn’t even know you were offering him that wood.”

That’s cultural -- those two men, the one of the blueberries and the one of the wood turning -- being so different. It is like one speaks the language and one does not. And the thing that gets me is that it is not a language that cannot be learned -- it is just that most people who come to live here don’t believe it is a language worthy to be learned.

We both shook our heads and took our leave of the wood turner without introductions or shaking hands or arrangements to meet up later. We moved on to the photography exhibit which was manned by old hometown folks I’d known all my life, who remember being young children themselves and going to see my grandfather preach. Roots are not grown in one generation and the truth is that without real roots, there are no wings either. There were only two ridiculously pretentious entries into the photography contest; most of the entries were actually quite good. One pictorial piece in particular called “Ma done sold the farm” was excellent. And a portrait called “Kenny” I particularly liked. What the judges had awarded “best in show” probably really was and that is nice.

But it was already time for the exhibit to be locked up and so we voted for our favorites and walked back across the viaduct . . . under which a train was passing at just exactly that moment. It was switching some cars out on a side rail and we stood there and watched the whole thing, including getting to see the brakeman switch the tracks and getting to see the tracks actually move, and we talked about the guy who invented the coupling system that saved so many lives and what it might be like to work on the railroad and how big those cars really are and how scary and not like Polar Express it is like when you can’t see the engine or the caboose and the cars start moving right beside you.

And then we came back home.

looking for the mustard seed amongst the blackberries

I don’t have photos, but it was 24 pints of blackberry jam, then the picking of eight gallons of blueberries. There will be more in the coming week. Plus the laying in of some hay.

While husband was picking the blackberries, there were canes that grew high, way over his head. Someone had been in this berry field before him and had not bent those canes down in order to pick the ripe berries but had bent them down and BROKEN them in order to pick the ripe ones. This leaves the unripe ones to rot, not ripen for the next person (or for the birds).

This is why I have so little faith in humanity.

Instead of asking ourselves how we’d live if we died tomorrow, it would be useful to ask ourselves how we’d live if we lived forever. Because we do. Through our children. It makes no sense to buy into artificial constraints (like those of schooling), but it makes even less sense to pretend there are no constraints at all.

This is the time of year for fruit. It is also the time of year to plant the fall/winter garden, to can, to preserve, to lay in, to provide for that time of constraint that is coming.