Girls Gone Hillbilly

Alecto is at my house! We stayed up and drank sake last night! We're going milking now!

all the best bloggers come here!

and then the stars align and the dam breaks

it being about movement

So in living on and “managing” a farm one knows, that is one is aware for the longest time before one takes any action at all, that the goat herd sire needs to be traded off, a new one procured, the cows need to be bred, and all the rest. And things accumulate – you get a phone number for someone who owns a Jersey bull locally and post it on your refrigerator, the person who you usually get the new herd sires from has one ready for you, things like that.

Then suddenly something totally unrelated happens. In this case it was the death of a friend. Now, remember, I said this death was totally unrelated, and it was. Totally. This guy was not a part of any of this, but the new herd sire came to his funeral with his old mom and came home with his new dad. At the same time the Jersey guy contacted us. Turns out he has some goats too and is interested in our old herd sire. Old billy exchanged for transportation and exposure to bull for three+ months for old cow. Also updated vaccinations on all bovines since old cow will be visiting that bull and his herd.

At the same time, the peaches are ripe and the very last of the blackberries are fermenting in the back of the fridge (alcoholic jelly is some of the best) and, well, more stuff that I can even think about in the garden that all needs to be eaten first and preserved second.

Which, one of the huge lessons of homesteading is never preserve first and eat second. Always eat first. Always always always. If you do not eat it fresh, it will not be valuable to you preserved. Plus there is that if you grew it, you deserve it at its very best, which is fresh. Eat first.

Another lesson is this: the monoculture agribusiness model is always inferior. The cow guy was amazed at how good our cows look, much better than his he said, and ours are just out there, cowing around. The baby goat (new herd sire) got here in pretty pitiful shape (pot bellied, shaggy coated, bad feet, small). The strongest, most direct evidence, however, is the paddocks of newly planted grass at the work barn. Plowed, disked, fertilized and seeded following exactly the agribusiness model, every speck of that planted grass is now dead and the only things growing there are spiny amaranth and jimson weed. The field next to it, however, is green. It doesn’t have much food value, true, but it does have some, and at least the ground is covered. I know why people plant agribusiness fescue but I pretty much never think it is a good idea. Meanwhile, on this farm, the baby goat is already looking better in less than a week, and he hasn’t even been turned loose yet which is when he will really thrive.

When new cow came here, she came from a small dairy where she had access to plenty of grass and was fed while being milked. And she was skinny. When we picked her up, my boss asked if she wasn’t thin but the truth is, that’s how dairy animals often look. And when she got here, she looked so much smaller than old cow. She doesn’t look smaller anymore. I think it has to do with the fact that here she has a broader choice of what to eat, and a less stressful, more cowful life. In other words, a real homestead, free, life is flat out better for animals, pastures, mankind. We look better, are healthier, happier, last longer.

Now, concerning movement. I follow, for years at a time, people who I find to be good examples as well as horrible warnings. The guy who died, for example, was a horrible warning of how not to turn out to be. The difference between the good examples and the horrible warnings is movement. The horrible warnings do the same things over and over. Oh, most times they think they are doing different things, but when you look at their lives it is like they burn supper on the stove one day and burn it in the oven the next day. It is the same thing with a different color hair. They have the same epiphanies over and over, essentially go around the same circle again and again.

The good examples have a direction. They move not randomly but with purpose. The movement may be somewhat butterfly-ish in that the purposefulness may not be immediately evident but monarchs do wind up on milkweed and cabbage moths do inevitably find some plant in the cole-ish family. People will say of the good examples, they are exactly the same people they were when I met them years ago and yet, a look at their lives reveals that they have moved, have refined, have advanced, are flat out further along. They don’t flounder a whole lot. They build. Good examples don’t hide, don’t bully, don’t perform for the audience.

They do, however, fry fresh peach pies, which is what I’m going off to do right now.

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.

Spring Auction

That's the scene when you walk up outside at the fairgrounds for the Draft Horse and Mule Auction, spring edition. Lots of trailers, lots of trucks, lots of people, lots of horses. Most but not all of the people have on hats. All of the "real" people have on appropriate footwear. It is your footwear that gives you away. Interesting.

Isn't that a pretty pair? They were a Percheron/Spotted Draft cross but neither came out spotted.

This is taken exactly at my eye level; my attempt to provide perspective as to how big these good ole boys were.

A mule for my daughter. There was also the cutest little yearling mule there with four white socks. But in the end, I always go for the classic mule look.

This is Betty Sue if anyone remembers her from her being here a few years ago. My neighbor had bred her, foaled her, her baby died, he sold her, the new owner foaled her, she didn't catch this year so she's at the auction for sale. I think she remembered me, I swear I do.

Now, this little mare is also in that first photo up there. She's a Percheron cross (it didn't say with what but something not too big, my first guess would be quarter horse) and she's in foal to a big Thoroughbred. I'm always a sucker for the pregnant mares, the two for one deal and if I were to pick one I wanted to buy before they went up for sale, she'd be it.

Not all the horses looked this good. A few were skinny. So many needed some work done on their feet. And since they won't sell horses until Saturday, most of the ones for sale aren't even there yet.

I had a mission this year. My horse has lost some weight as he's aged and I needed to get a smaller collar. I knew I only had enough money for a used bargain one but I was quite shocked at the rise in price of the new ones since I bought mine. Like double or triple. Leather has done this too, partly because environmental regulation has made it pretty impossible to tan leather on any scale anymore. I'm all for the environment but I think we should think about some of this stuff twice. And don't get me started on the stupidity of the slaughter legislation.

This is my friend Billy. I grew up with him. His horse's name back then was Rex, a big grey racker who could park out, hoo boy. Billy's girlfriend's horse was Teardrop. My best friend's horse was Honey. They were all such good horses and good times. Billy helped me critique the available collars of the appropriate size and I got a good deal without even having to bid. Man, you had to bid fast today if you were going to get in so I was glad to not have to do it although I did have my number.

Next we'll have to see how it fits.

Life Ain't Always Beautiful

Warren Buffet tells a story of a woman who survived the Nazis. She was the only one in her family to survive. She told Mr. Buffet that every time she met someone she asked herself whether or not this was a person who would hide her from the Nazis.

Now, being the practical, funny, sideways sort of person that I am, I don’t think about who would hide me, I think about what sort of person I’d want to hide me. Because I don’t want a weak idiot who’s going to tell the first storm trooper to knock on the door exactly where I am hiding to hide me. Or someone without, say, food. Etc. I’m sure there were people like that who tried to hide people during the Holocaust but I’m sure we don’t have those stories because those people didn’t actually survive.

Only the smart, clever, tough as nails ones did. And many of those didn’t.

I happen to think that what is now happening in this country and in the world could be devastating, and people could be dying from what will happen, and likely not only in third world countries. Our family lives in a sustainable way, which means that we are not so affected by those vagaries of the wider world. We might be people that other people would wish to hide with. In fact, lots of people joke that way; “Oh, I know where to go” in case of this or that.

What I have thought about is what sort of people I would welcome in. Living sustainable is quite rewarding but it does require a few things -- hard work, hardiness, cheerfulness in the face of hardship, and pretty well all other things that have “hard” in them.

It is not an easy life. It is a worthy life.

So, will you be looking for someone to hide you? Or deciding who is worth hiding? Because doing for others is partly a matter of willingness, of kindness, of generosity, of morality. But it isn’t possible to do for others when you can’t even do for your own.

The woman who was hidden from the Nazis and survived, the woman who asked herself whether or not she thought a person would hide her should she need hiding, observed that she found it very difficult to make friends. You think? Real friends don’t come by the dozens. Real friends don’t just say the easy things. Real friends, well, . . . .

April Fool

barn work day turns to
April fool's snake in rafters
and laughter abounds

maybe just this one more? I was told today that I was a slacker for only being able to write five words anymore. Hey lady! It is five syllables, then seven, then five again. Come on, try it! It's fun

From October Actually

Look what I found! The software to re-size these so I could upload them! Here is what else is funny: I recently exchanged e-mail with someone I took a class from way back in college. One of the things I most remember him doing was absolutely rasping us for taking "snapshots" instead of "photographs". We were hiking across the Grand Canyon -- and according to him we were not to take snapshots. Well, baloney. I am not above taking the artsy craftsy photograph, that's for sure, and there are images that will stick in my head that I want to take, but snapshots, those are the staff of life, really.

And all places are sacred. Just sayin'.

So like I said, these are from October.

Every October there is a draft horse auction. It happens to be my social event of the year, and there is a man I see there every year who I grew up with: Billy, and he was the cutest thing back then. When I left home, he was a coal truck driver. When I ran into him again, he was a horse logger. When I ran into him this year, he said he'd quit logging since it had become just trading dollars back and forth (that is, it isn't something that you can make money at right now with the price of logs being what it is). So at least one of the other things he's doing is making harness. This one was his, for sale at the auction. I can't say that his taste is my taste, honestly. His dimples are still cute though.


I just liked this shot of three young horses sharing a stall, waiting for the auction.

This is a billy goat. Quite a magnificent billy goat. I also like this image. It was raining that day.

And finally, a tree full of turkey buzzards. They make the most amazing sound when thirty of them take off from the same area at about the same time. Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh. Poachers had left a deer carcass to rot was why they were there. A little six point buck. My dog always brings the bones home.

Ok, photos on the blog again!

A Different Stripe

These are the things my life is taken up with: discussions about goat and chicken management, putting up food and making the staples and what’s for supper and washing dishes, keeping the fire going for the smores, lots of other similarly real and productive endeavors, and, today, bovine AI.

AI = Artificial Insemination

Now, years ago I did this, actually helping to collect, examine and insert the semen . . . but on a horse farm. And years ago, things were done via palpation and now ultrasound has taken over. Where they used to palpate for follicles and pregnancy checks, now it is ultrasound. And that was horses, not cattle, so my experience is worth even less.

Hey, did you know there were such things as traveling semen salesmen? And sexed semen? I mean, until about yesterday it hadn’t occurred to me to wonder about such things, but there are. There’s also this guy, on a farm a good ways from here, who is willing to come all the way here to inseminate my cow basically as a favor to me. And he doesn’t know me at all. I went to his place today to pick up prostaglandin in order to induce her cycle so as, hopefully, to be more ready to “catch” her. His place is HUGE, more than 400 Holsteins.

I got a paper that listed sexed semen from different bulls with all these numbers telling you how much milk fat, protein, mastitis cells, numbers of lactations, and a whole lot of other things that the bulls offspring have on average. I am like, boys, you all know way more about this than I do. They said, oh, then you are in trouble. Yes, the bulls are fascinating and the men are hilarious.

What I like the very best is the milieu, the culture, my culture. They are willing to do me a favor and to give me a hard time while they are doing it. A girl can appreciate that.

Maybe next time I’ll say yes to their invitation to join them for lunch.

The Last of the Blueberries

the field
Originally uploaded by Contrary Goddess.

It wasn’t because we actually needed the blueberries. We’d already gotten better than 15 gallons between the u-pick place and our own bushes. But last year was a complete blueberry failure and one just never knows. We are not likely to regret having plenty of blueberries preserved in various fashions. Besides, the proprietress of the blueberries and I had been discussing cheese the last time we were there and I wanted to take her a round. And there was the fish at the biker convenience store lunch counter, it being Friday.

So in early afternoon we saddled up the van, waited until the youngest child had killed the monster he was battling, and went picking just for an hour or two. Mrs. Grullo was mowing and I interrupted her to give her the cheese so she could put it in the fridge. “It’s just a mozzarella,” I said.

“Oh, I’ll have that for my supper,” she said. And then she told me about how someone who makes cheese down the Stony Creek way was supposed to bring her some milk so she could do it again. I love sharing cheese with someone else who has done it. I would love to taste hers -- she evidently didn’t use rennet and when it was finished she fried the cheese in butter. Sounds interesting.

A cold front had come through the day before and cooled and dehumidified the air, and for August it was a downright pleasant afternoon. The late berries are in the middle of the field, and their bushes are bigger than the others and grown together so getting to them involves pushing through the bushes, sometimes crawling under them to stand up surrounded by them. If you get in a really good spot, you can pick a half-gallon just by turning around. With so many berries already ripe, the bees and yellow jacket and bumble bees and japanese beetles and june bugs are out in force. I had to move once because I discovered that there, right beside my face, was a frond of berries just covered with honey bees. The slight buzz is about the only constant noise in the field. Occasionally a crow will call, or a cow across the street will low, or an engine down the road will grumble and complain.

The only other sound is that of berries hitting the bottom of the bucket, or later in the picking, berries hitting berries in the bucket. Although the field is in a magnificent high alluvial valley circled by mountains, in the midst of the late blueberries I can see only bushes and blueberries. There is only one other picker in the field but I end up close enough to him to hear his berries dropping. Of course, because it is only polite, I speak. He is from just over the mountain to the north instead of the west, which is where I am from. He has a large garden and has put up 52 quarts of green beans and just this morning broke 12 more quarts which he will put up tonight when he gets home with the berries. “The way the economy is going,” he says, “I figure we might be glad to have a quart of beans to eat.” I concur, although with the proviso that there is nothing better than home canned green beans anyway, with which he also agrees.

When we have gotten our four gallons, we settle up with Mrs. Grullo. She told me once that she’d lost her son, Malcolm, in a wreck and since then she’d had to keep herself extra busy. My guess is that this happened years ago but loss can be ever fresh. I give her my thanks for making this field available to all of us and tell her this will likely be our last trip over the mountain to pick. “Oh, maybe in the fall you can come back just to visit?” she asks.

“Maybe we’ll call you,” I say, “and ask you to join us for some fish down at the store.”

“Yes, I could maybe do that,” she smiles.

Tomorrow I shall make more cheese because I have a fridge full of milk. And butter and yogurt and sour cream. And bread. And a blueberry pie. I will cut up the rest of the peaches to dry. And make pizzas!

And I will look forward to eating fish with Mrs. Grullo.

Conversations

One of the lovely ladies I sometimes get to ride with has found my blog and came to the barn the other day exclaiming, “Wooowee, CG, you taught me how to butcher chickens! I just found out all that old stuff was on [the blog] and I said to my husband, come here and see CG cutting this chicken’s head off.” I asked her if she’d found the pig killing yet. She hadn’t, so as a shortcut, here and here and here’s how we lost a pig.

Someone I know less well asked me about homeschooling. We talked in general terms for awhile as she worked around to asking me what she wanted to ask me and I worked around to hearing what she was asking me. Sometimes this communication thing is tricky. Eventually she said this child in her life had just not figured out at all how to retain and recall information of any kind ever. I think, looking back on it that she meant to ask me how you can teach a child that but what she got from me was an immediate reaction response, “She doesn’t have any trouble retaining and recalling anything she’s interested in.”

She stopped. “You know, I couldn’t tell you what, if anything, she is interested in.” Wow. Isn't that just too true of too many of us? How did what the school deems important become more important than what the person himself deems important? So much so that we cannot even touch what it is we think is important? I just think this is so endemic. Even when a person has a really good sense of what her priorities are, what makes her heart sing, it is still difficult enough to navigate a track to that. No wonder people are entirely lost in their lives when they don’t even know what they themselves are interested in for themselves. Couple that with a desire to avoid meaningful work and no wonder spiritual malaise is epidemic.

Ok, so another conversation was with the farrier. I don’t get to see him very often but he is one of those truly interesting characters. He hunts with a long bow, for instance. Besides, it is probably pretty difficult to make your living shoeing horses and avoid being an interesting character. But what we were talking about was sort of survivalism, which he’s long been interested in, and he mentioned that people think he’s crazy because he stores food. I said, “Oh, really? We just put in several hundred pounds of wheat, rice, the like.” “Oh, I don’t have that much,” he said while looking at me sideways. Made me know how far out on the edge we are, and made me laugh.

Edit: Ooooh, and I almost forgot an important one, with La at a homeschoolers hanging out in the park day. A more than amply fleshed woman was there with far fewer than too few clothes on. As she passed us, La simply said, “I’m not that sexy anymore.” Yes, that is it. I’m sexy -- I’m just not that sexy. Makes me laugh.

Thunderdome or Eden?

Wendy over at Home is asks “What would you be willing to give up.” While I applaud what she’s doing, I think the question itself is telling. What would you be willing to give up? I’d ask, what are you willing to give up, today? and what have you given up already? That’s why I applaud the 90% folks in so far as they really reduce stuff, which can pretty much broadly be lumped into consumption. I prefer that the question be out of the hypothetical and about what you are willing to do right now to meet the challenges as you see them. Because for sure, we also see the challenges differently.

One thing I don’t see how people can not see is that there is a crash and it is going on now. So this isn’t going to remain an intellectual exercise even for people who think themselves very well off indeed.

What would I be willing to give up? In the hypothetical the thing I would most LIKE to give up would be cars. How would this happen? A Kunstler type crash, maybe. If there is no gas, there are no cars. But also, as prices rise, public transportation (private businesses that transport the public, not government boondoggles) should become feasible. I should be able to walk about three miles and catch a bus which would be totally cool by me. Also, there could be bulk delivery services for those of us in the boonies like this -- most probably someone who lives out here who goes to town every so often and brings back everything everyone needs for a little cut of it. Another favorite of mine is horses of course. I think with our geography, saddle and pack horses make more sense than buggies by and large. I am ready to be wrangler there. Trains could provide efficient transportation for places like Lowe's, Wal-Mart, and Southern States (feed store), all of which happen to be directly on railroad spurs already. Of course, just in time marketing wouldn't work anymore. And Wal-Mart might become a mom-&-pop again and storekeepers would live in their shops. Whatever it is, it certainly won’t be what it is now. But my point is there wouldn't have to be no gasoline for no personal passenger vehicles on the road to be a reality. As it is now, however, we must maintain a vehicle, and occasionally fuel it.

What I have given up, the one thing that I think makes absolutely the most difference in the most dimensions is personal income. Last year our income, for a family of six, was about $6K. That is very little, let me tell you, and hopefully this year it will be a bit more than that. At that level there simply isn’t even the temptation to consume. Still I’ve maintained a stockpile of food, and we’ve increased substantially our every day eating off the place. Money has had an artificially high value for far too long and in its devaluation we find that real skills really are valuable, far more valuable than cash.

There are, of course, tons of other things we’ve “given up” -- but the truth of it is that it is embracing a positive way of life rather than giving up a negative one.

Maybe I’m just the Klingon on board the ship that is disintegrating, saying, “Invigorating, isn‘t it?” Yes, that’s it, CG is a Klingon. It is like the Olympic games, except for real. The tsunami, the cyclone, is coming and what you choose right now will make a difference in how you make it through. Or don’t. If you are going to trust the government to look after you, you are going to end up in the Superdome. But for those who got themselves back to the garden, it could be a post-industrial utopia. Or something quite like it.

Doctor My Eyes

Oh but I had the best day at work. My boss came through the barn with one of her Friesian mares on long lines and said, hey, if you want to, come out to the arena and play with me. And then she explained what she was working on with this horse and why and how and then let me long line her too. I always feel like I screw up, like I kept saying GO! which sounds too much like whoa and I wasn’t real good keeping up with the lines as I changed directions . . . but at the same time I can see what is going on and I know with some practice and some thought I could do it better.

So there was that. And I rode and despite some resistance to the bit, I got one really good transition from trot to walk and a couple of passable transitions from halt to trot which I don’t believe this pony has been asked for before. And I got a helper to work with me for a couple of hours each day I’m there so that I’ll have the time to ride.

Later my boss and I talked about the price of gas. I said, we have to use less. And she said, I already use as little as possible -- I only drive to work, I do all my errands on one day just like you do, I can’t use any less. And a light bulb went off in my head, that that’s what people think, that they can’t use any less. And I looked with those eyes at my life and wondered at the changes that could be wrought. When would it be not worth it for me to drive to work? And if it isn’t worth it for me to drive to work, that means even less money. Which we could live with almost no money. Almost. But is there a point at which we collapse back onto this farm and don’t leave again, hardly ever? And if that’s what happens to us, what happens to everyone else?

Because in order to use less gas, people’s lives have to change dramatically. It just made me see it more starkly. I took that job knowing that that barn is not a sustainable venture. I love it, I am grateful for it, but there is nothing about it that is sustainable. But I may be the only person there who knows that.

Of course, we are all just guessing at what it will look like. I think there will be more room for horses in the future, not less, but they won’t be stall kept horses doing nothing. My goodness, it was just my grandfather’s generation that grew up with horses and trains being the only transportation. It is still within living memory -- the fellow at the produce stand told us just the other day, there were twelve of us growing up and my brother and I used to ride seven miles to the mill every other week with a sixty pound sack, one time of corn, the next of wheat, that’s how much it took to feed our family. But mills existed back then. As did the knowledge to grow enough caloric food to survive. And the patience to wait at the foot of a hill for enough wagons to back up to have enough teams to take them all, one at a time, to the top.

I swear I still can’t for the life of me imagine what it will look like. But I swear just as strongly that it is happening. Now.

But I worry about a society that already thinks it is using as little energy as possible. Because a society convinced of that won’t see any other way of being -- and too many people even now who, if they do imagine anything different, think it is a bad to be avoided rather than a good to be embraced.

Yes, we have no bananas today

At the beginning of hay season, which was earlier than usual and harder than usual since no one had much hay or basically any pasture because of the drought (a word that does not conjure to mind the absolute horror that it was), I had husband call my usual hay supplier to inquire, would there be hay available from him. He assured me, through husband (this being Appalachian culture where man to man is a better way of dealing with some things -- man to man in this case being better because I would have cut this man’s balls off years ago although I don’t exactly dislike him) that as long as he had hay, I would have hay.

He operates on a totally industrial paradigm, raising cattle for the feedlots by the hundreds, and growing his own hay and corn for it. His hay business is a little side, almost like moonshine, because it is all small scale and in cash. I estimated that we could get by well on six bales. He thought they’d have that.

We got one. One. He asked us to be conservative with that and we were. I imagine that other people were not. At any rate, by the time we called to go get our second bale, which had my original estimate been correct should have been our fourth bale (that’s just how conservative we’d been), he wasn’t selling any at any price. Oh, hay is available. I can get for only $140 a smaller bale of worse hay than I got for $35 last year. Someone is selling square bales for $8 a bale. That should be $2.50. That’s gouging. That’s capitalism I guess. It certainly isn’t caring for one’s neighbor. Then again, I have had a lot of kindness shown toward me already and that is one reason I was just now calling him for my second bale.

To his credit, my hay guy, who didn’t gouge me but just ran out of hay, has his own cattle on half rations. That’s how tight it is. And my animals won’t starve. They may get skinnier. We’ve got to fence some more. We managed to open the January field back up again today. We’ll cut a pine tree down each day for the goats. The cow, being a Jersey, will eat some of that too.

To his debit, my hay guy had a hilariously pathetic tale of woe about his ex-girlfriend. As bummed as I am about the hay, as much as I was really counting on him to supply me, I’d rather be in my hay shoes than to be in his relationship shoes.

On Diversity & Community

In the mid-70s, when I was a teenager, I traveled a couple times a year from my mountain home to my cousin’s home near Atlanta. Being a year older than she, I could drive when she couldn’t. What I remember is driving all around and never knowing where I was. Everything looked the same. Big intersections, big roads, lots of traffic, this shopping area and that one. It didn’t seem to matter to my normally good sense of direction that a Bennigan’s was on this corner and something else on that one, I’d still end up at the Big Chicken suddenly not knowing quite how I got us there.

I’ve been reminded of this every time I’ve been out lately by the ultra-sameness of everything, the overriding consuming restless sameness. Of everything. The endless cars after cars after cars, ceaselessly moving to nowhere. It isn’t just metro-Atlanta, or metro-Knoxville, or metro-Richmond. It isn’t just college-town Blacksburg, or college-town Boone, or college-town Asheville. It is everywhere. College town Wise for the Gods’ sakes. Metro-Bristol for the Gods’ sakes. No matter where you are going, the road goes around, avoiding any possible place of interest for the easy-on, easy-off safe sameness. The Mexican restaurants are all the same, and you can’t find a bowl of beans outside a Cracker Barrel. The hardware stores don’t actually have hardware anymore, few nails or brads or bearings and barely any saw blades -- they have flooring and appliances and guaranteed installers.

I’m always glad to get back to my little holler where every little house, every little curve in the road, every little holler, has its own story to tell. And every person who lives here too. My little holler, where a septuagenarian half-blind gay man can live on one corner, a racist homophobe on the next, with a Baptist Chapel and a moonshiner in between them. All peaceably. Where the two chicken breeders, one Mexican and one not, both raise fighting cocks, and where that sport bridges the racial divides that otherwise are not broached, just as in Chicken George’s time. Where the slightly retarded twins up the road can live their lives pretty much as they see fit, along with all us other misfits either born to this place, or come to adopt it.

It seems easy for people not from around here to label us hillbillies as closed-minded. They seem to think diversity is people of all different colors and different religions and different socio-economic levels who all believe exactly the same things, who all have exactly the same values. What passes as diversity with those people is exactly what passes as diversity in the urban sprawl -- differences that are without distinctions.

Yep, when I look around this holler, I don’t really have a thing in common with anyone. Except of course, me and Noad can talk horses from daylight to dark. And Theron has always read the latest book that I’m always interested in. And Cal knows the latest goings on. And Tim and Sarah are great to do business with. And about 5 families go in together on the pig killing every year with Dwayne’s extended clan. And if you need a tree down, call Garnett. Or a part for your car, call Stewart and see if he has it. There’s Doug and Bessie who are just the finest people. And Clay who has a fine jack and a fine garden too.

I don’t go to the same church, or hold the same political beliefs, or raise my children the same way, or live the same way, or think the same things are important, as any of these people. Except that it is important to all of us to live together in this holler in peace, to work together when we can, to help each other out, to find our differences amusing or confusing rather than infuriating or threatening. Not to create an artificial atmosphere of tolerance, but to create, by actions and in reality, a common community.

Who Says You Can't Go Home

Deliver Me!
Originally uploaded by Cielo Music Mom.

Can you hear the banjo music? This is a friend I met when I was nine years old and who I hadn't seen in 32 years at a little church we ran in to as we explored our hometown all these many years later. I suppose we were finding out who we were, who we are, and who we want to be.

Where she had lived is just a grown up lot. Where I had lived, well, there's a house in my backyard! That was totally jarring to me. And not a flower in sight and our house always had flowers. We went up and down the streets and remembered who had lived where. We didn't see a soul we knew, except for Harold who also has some photos of the weekend up. My friend took all these photos because I didn't take my camera so additional thanks to her for letting me blog them.


The Trees on Front Street
Originally uploaded by Cielo Music Mom.

My hometown. If I'm not mistaken, those bridges were my mom's vision back in the 1960s. They used to be arched more picturesquely but I guess ADA got ahold of them. There are so many things, in some sense all my life, here.


fighting cock bracelet
Originally uploaded by Contrary Goddess.

This is my $1 find at the Rally -- a cock fighting bracelet! Is that not even better than the "Redneck Rebel" cap? More subtle anyway.



The Valley
Originally uploaded by Cielo Music Mom.

This is the most beautiful place in the world, Powell Valley, which, if you aren't from here, it sounds like "Pow Valley" when we say it although we can hear the semi-silent "L".

We even went to Benje's Rock, which was crucial to my high school party years but evidently none of the photos of the saddle came out well enough. I'll have to go back.