Ben Hewitt's Blog, page 56

Normal After All

Morning chores

By request, two days of meals in our home. I was going to wait and do three days, just to round it out a bit more, but I haven’t been writing any of this down, and a third day might be a bit much for my poor addled brain, particularly since we was out real late last night whooping it up.

Friday

Breakfast: Eggs and sausage. Rye’s on an egg strike, so he had applesauce and sausage

Lunch: Lamb rib roast, green beans, baked potatoes, and kimchi

Dinner: Kefir/blueberry/coconut oil/egg yolk smoothies and sourdough toast

Saturday

Breakfast: Omelette with green beans, bacon, garlic, and blue cheese

Lunch: Chicken/sausage gumbo

Dinner: Leftover chicken sausage gumbo

Looking at these two days, I can see that our “boughten” calories include a couple tablespoons of coconut oil, the wheat berries for the bread (which I made), and the precious handful of blue cheese crumbles. Non-calorically, there were a few spices (gumbo), and salt. And my usual coffee. The rest of it was ours, including all veggies, meats, butter, blah, blah, blah. These two days are very typical for us, with the exception of the toast, which as I mentioned last week is a once-per-month-or-so treat. In Friday’s comments, someone mentioned that they couldn’t live without cheese, and I have to say that if we felt more flush, we’d buy a LOT more cheese. Yeah, we could make it, but the truth is, we do plenty and we can do only so much. We have to prioritize, and holy jeepers but there’s a lot of good cheese floating ’round Vermont.

Finally, I gotta reiterate that our diet is simply an outgrowth of our life. It’s a logical extension of the way we chose to live, how we wish to pass our days. I couldn’t do all the stuff I do around here if all I cared about was stuffing face.

Also, I remembered something else we buy in with some regularity: Olive oil. Couple gallons per year, I’m guessing. Also again, please remember that just because I haven’t listed something in the “boughten” category doesn’t mean we never buy it. I’ve only included stuff that is habitual. Like I said before, there are occasional diversions. Ah, I just thought of one: Popcorn. We have that once a month or so during winter months, usually along with a cup of hot chocolate.

See? We’re normal, after all.

Then We Like to Eat It

I’ve been carving spoons in the evenings. Sometimes it hurts

A few days back, E asked what comprises the 10% (or thereabouts; I actually think it’s a good bit less) of the calories we buy in. I answered him in the comments, albeit briefly, but figured I’d share in more detail here. Besides, I’ve got a big ole day of book writing, firewood getting, and geetar playing planned, and therefore don’t want to burden myself with anything too terribly thoughtful.

Anyone who’s been paying attention for any length of time has probably ciphered our general dietary habits. Still and all, what follows is likely to reveal our personal nutritional philosophy in more detail than has been discussed on this site before. Let me make one thing perfectly clear: I would rather extract each and every one of my short n’ curlies with a pair of tweezers while sober and listening to Rod Stewart than argue diet over the Internets. That’s real graphic, and I’m awful sorry ’bout that, but I would very much like for there to be zero ambiguity. That said, please feel free to ask questions, or make comments pertaining to diet and even to your personal beliefs surrounding diet. Actually, come to think of it, you can even make argumentative and dissenting comments. But I reserve the right to not respond to ‘em.

Phew. So glad to have that out of the way. Here we go. The other 10%. Of course, there are occasional additions to this list, but these are the regulars.

Wheat berries. We bake bread approximately 1x/month, and probably have some other wheat-y thing once or twice per month. Everything we make with wheat is soaked or fermented to reduce phytic acid (except for the occasional birthday cake), but we still feel better when we keep it to a minimum.

Almonds. One of our big regular splurges. We buy raw almonds direct from an organic farm in CA and soak them before crisping them at low temperature (125 – 150) in the oven. We eat a good amount of almonds, maybe 50-75-lbs/year.

Coconut Oil. Our other big splurge. We buy it in 5-gallon tubs to save $.

Coffee. Penny doesn’t drink it, but I’m a user. Not caloric, but seems worth mentioning. Ditto salt and spices/herbs, though we increasingly grow our own spices/herbs. We now make all of our own herbal teas.

Sugar. Our only use for sugar is to feed kombucha, so we don’t go through much of it.

Honey. We are wicked fortunate to have access to never-heated, never chemical-treated honey at ridiculously generous prices. Still, we don’t eat a lot. We bought a 5-gal bucket a couple years ago and are still working on it.

Rice. Very little. Without proper treatment to reduce phytic acid, rice – and particularly brown rice – isn’t all that healthy. And it’s a pain in the ass to treat it, so we generally avoid it. Maybe 2x/month. Nah, probably a bit more than that. But less and less.

Oats. Nasty little buggers better fed to livestock. Maybe 1x/month, and only if soaked in kefir for 24hrs prior to cooking

Beans. Ditto rice regarding treatment/cooking. I literally cannot remember the last time we had beans. Wait… I think we had chili last month. Or maybe it was the month before that.

Beer. Penny doesn’t drink at all; I like good beer. But I don’t like paying for it, which keeps me on the straight and narrow. Mostly.

Wine. Our friend Paul makes a wicked good bathtub wine. We trade for a couple bottles every few months, use it mostly for cooking.

Cheese. As a treat. Maybe a pound, pound-and-a-half per month.

Jeezum. I guess that’s ’bout it. We produce all our own meat, all our veggies, all our fruits, and all our diary (we do buy a few gallons of milk every year from friends when our cows are dry), and that’s pretty much what we eat. We just don’t consume a lot of the staples that many families eat on a regular and even daily basis. When’s the last time we had pasta? Couldn’t tell ya. How ’bout soy? Maybe 10 years ago. Maybe. Bread, obviously not that much. Our kids have literally never had boxed cereal, unless at a friend’s house. We’ve got our systems down real good, and despite the lack of “convenience” foods in our diet, we generally don’t feel burdened by our decision to eat essentially no packaged/heavily processed foods. Most of the time, we cook real simple meals. Lots of stews. Lots of eggs when we have ‘em, which is most of the time. We rarely eat out as a family; maybe twice per year, we go for pizza, but that’s about it. Because I sometimes travel for work, I eat out a bit more than that on my own, but not much.

We’re not actually as dogmatic as it might seem. At parties, or when we go to someone’s house for dinner, we eat what’s put in front of us, and do so quite happily. Ain’t no one died yet from a piece of apple pie. Least ways, not that I’ve heard of. Of course, we don’t tend to cavort with the sort of folks who put out bologna sandwiches for dinner, either.

Looking over this list, I’m almost tempted to amend my 90% claim. I bet it’s more like 95%, but since I haven’t actually done the math, I’d rather be conservative. And it’s somewhat beside the point, anyway. We’re not really interested in applying metrics to how we eat. You know, food miles and all that, or trying to hit some particular percentage of how much of our food we produce.

We just like growing food.

And then we like to eat it.

 

Actually, It’s Not

On the path

The past few days have had a spring-like feel. The ground is bare and soft, and yesterday, I swear I could actually feel the day lengthening, stretching into the corners of dawn and dusk.  It’s absurd, of course: It’s the middle of friggin’ January. We’ve got at least 10 more weeks of winter proper, plus whatever dismal, rain-tossed tussle between the seasons April brings.

Still, we sure can use the added daylight. It’s time to get serious about next year’s firewood – I generally like to have our logs pulled by the first of the year, and so far, I have only a handful, a nice fat black cherry that was starting to rot on the stem, and a bunch of little soft maples that’ll make good cook stove wood – but the days seem to be over before they’re hardly started. I often think that winter is too short, that it goes by too quickly. It’s the season when we’re supposed to be tackling all those pesky little projects that got put off all summer. “That’s a good winter project,” we proclaim, over and over and over again all summer long, until the list of good winter projects is longer than the season can possibly accommodate. Good thing we rarely specify which winter.

That’s ok. We forgive ourselves a lot. We have to, frankly, and I suspect that the older we get, the more we’ll have to forgive. Every year, there come at least a handful of occasions when I simply cannot fathom how we’ll get done what needs to get done. It’s not so much a feeling of being overwhelmed (although I’m certainly not immune to that) as a feeling of simple disbelief, a sort of dumbstruck sense at our own naiveté. We thought we could do that? And that? Hahahaha. But the funny thing is, we always do get it done. Maybe not precisely when we’d planned. Maybe not precisely as we’d planned. But done, nonetheless.

When I get to feeling like this, I often draw a certain quiet inspiration from our neighbors, for whom the list of daily tasks almost always stretches further than the day can accommodate. I think of Melvin, collecting firewood one tractor bucket load at a time to feed his big basement furnace. It takes a load per day or if it’s fairly warm, maybe a load every other day. I heckle him about it every so often, but all he does is grin. He sure didn’t get his firewood pulled by last January, and he’s doing just fine. Or on the other side of us, Jimmy and Sara, up at 4:30 every morning for milking, and now coming in to the sugaring season, when on some nights they’ll barely get to bed before it’s time to get up again.

It is our blessing to count as our friends and neighbors some of the most resourceful people I’ve met. I almost wrote “resilient,” but that’s a word that’s really starting to chafe me, for reasons that are perhaps too complex to go into right now. But resourceful? Definitely. Once when I was talking to Jimmy, I asked him if it ever bothers him that he wakes up every day – and I mean every freakin’ day of every freakin’ week – with something like 12 hours of work facing him. Milking, sugaring, plowing driveways, firewood, fixing something-or-other, and on and on. He just shrugged. “I figure it all has to be done, so I just do it,” is what he told me.

I figure it all has to be done, so I just do it. It could be argued, I suppose, that life is infinitely more complex than that. But I think it could also be argued that actually, it’s not.

She Was Right

Morning light in the barn

Every couple of weeks, Penny peruses this site. The woman is a stickler for accuracy, and furthermore has precisely zero tolerance for exaggeration. As I’ve told her a million times, I flat out do not exaggerate (That’s a joke, right? Because a “million times” is so obviously… oh, never mind. You got it).

In any event, her most recent perusing came just a couple days after my “Write, Post, Forget” post, in which I made some claims that, with the benefit of my wife’s benevolent guidance, for which I am eternally grateful and remain forever indebted, I now understand to be not entirely correct.

To wit, the absurd notion that most [of what I write here] is based on passing thoughts, and is not premeditated. “What the hell is that,” asked Penny, wagging her finger in the way she does when I’ve been bad. “Not premeditated?!? We talk about the things you write about all the time. We live them. That’s about as friggin’ premeditated as it gets.” By gum, the girl is right. As she was when she continued: “And what do you mean when you say you ‘forget’ about what you write? That sounds like you just don’t care about what you’ve written, and I know that’s not true.”

Per our pre-nuptial agreement, I passed two hours (one for each error) sitting in a straight back chair facing the dankest corner of the basement, wearing the special cap Penny makes me wear whenever she proves me wrong and scribbling “she was right” over and over and over on a piece of slate. Doing so helped me realize that of course I don’t forget about what I write here or anywhere else. Rather, my comment about forgetting was intended to convey my intention for this to not become a space where I become paralyzed by self-consciousness. Should I have said that? Should I have said it differently?  Is Eumaeus going to heckle me for posting yet another cow photo? Is Penny going to read this and make me sit in my ‘bad’ corner? That sort of stuff.

I’m not blind to the contradictive irony that one of the few posts I feel compelled to clarify is the very post in which I made the claim that I rarely view my work on this page through the lens of hindsight. What can I say? Oh yeah, of course: She was right.

Like Sausage

Penny editing whilst the boys make noise

It was an uninspiring weekend, weather-wise, so we puttered about the house tending to the sort of homestead minutia that always seems to reside a few rungs down the hierarchy of priorities. I put away the four or five loads of clean laundry that had accumulated in the upstairs hallway, and then I cleaned out the cookstove real good; every so often you’ve gotta vacuum up the layer of ash that accumulates atop the oven box, ’cause if you don’t the oven won’t get hot enough to put that nice crackly crust on your sourdough bread and what is sourdough bread without that crackle? Pig food, that’s what. I spent a bunch of time in the basement, cleaning and organizing, and cursing myself for not having kept it cleaner and more organized the way I promised myself I would after the last round of cleaning and organizing. The basement is something of an albatross on our on-going attempts to create order around here. It’s an over-used space – we need a stand-alone workshop like a submarine needs waterproofing – and is particularly prone to disorder. And when something is “particularly prone to disorder” around here… whew. Watch out.

For much of the weekend, Penny’s and my conversations centered around credentials and qualifications. She’d recently had a long conversation with a dear friend of hers, someone who for various reasons is struggling with her work situation. Right now, Penny’s friend works at a university, and I know for a fact she’s real good at what she does. But she doesn’t love her job, and furthermore feels as if she lacks the credentials to move into a position that might feel more rewarding. “I don’t have any letters after my name,” she told Penny. “I’m not qualified.”

Compounding all this is the simple fact that Penny’s friend really just wants to be home. She wants to pull her children out of school, which she recognizes is not working for them (she had to ask her daughter’s art teacher if perhaps the class could do something a tad more creative than color between the lines). She wants establish a small farm and perhaps consult with young folks embarking on their own small farm dreams. She wants to just stop running all the time; with three kids in school, and both her and her husband working full time, she feels as if she has precious little time to slow down and do many of the things she feels most called to do. And the truth is, she could do any and all of those things; she’s smart as a whip, kind, socially nimble, a quick learner, a hard worker; basically, the polar opposite of me. She is qualified, and she doesn’t need any letters to make it so. But for various reasons – financial, mostly, but I wonder if there’s also an element of unacknowledged societal pressure at play  - she can’t quite step off the treadmill. She can’t stop running.

As many of you know, I did not finish high school; Penny made it a bit further along the presumed American middle class educational path, but she does not have a college diploma. Amazingly, the lack of letters after our names has somehow not kept us from living a meaningful life. Indeed, I rather strongly suspect this lack may have actually liberated us to live a meaningful life, but that’s a topic for another day.

I guess I feel the same about credentials and qualifications as I do about so many other aspects of life: You can give up a big ole chunk of your life to earn ‘em, and another big chunk paying for that privilege. And maybe, under certain circumstances, that’s exactly the right thing to do. But for anyone considering whether or not to walk that well-traveled path, I humbly offer following analogy: Credentials and qualifications are, in so many ways, just like sausages. It’s a lot of fun to make your own. It’s sure as heck cheaper. And you’ll know exactly what’s in ‘em.

Signed,

Benjamin Hewitt, PhD*

* Proud Highschool Dropout

The Basic Rule

Only six months to go!

The basic rule of surviving winter in style ’round these parts is real simple (actually, there are a ton of rules, but it’s Friday and I don’t want to burden you before the weekend): Half your wood and half your hay by Groundhog Day.

This year, we’re golden on the hay front, but unless someone cuts us a break and moves Groundhog Day up a few weeks, we’re pretty much hosed on firewood. (That’s a joke, right? Because even if Groundhog Day got moved up, it wouldn’t actually change the…. oh, never mind. You got it). As of 4:45 this morning, when I brought in a couple armloads, we’re at 50%. Maybe even 49.5. It’s embarrassing, really: Here I am, portraying myself as some sort of rusticated sage, and we’re gonna be short firewood?? Friggin’ A. I grew up in northern Vermont! I was raised by a pack of surly wolves in the dark recesses of a cave with absolutely no backup heat. I mean, sure, the past few winters have been feeble little half-baked things, which may or may not have lulled me into a stupor of complacency, but still…

Truth is, it’s not as bad as it sounds. One of the handful of things we did right when we built this place is situate it to maximize solar gain. And just about now is when the sun starts coming ‘round a bit more often. Like yesterday, which was actually a might nippy, but other than a morning fire in the big stove to take the night chill off, we pretty much coasted on the cook stove and the sweet, sweet sunshine. So we actually never burn half our firewood from Groundhog Day onward, and I suspect that this year, we’ll end up having almost exactly enough, rather than the extra 3/4 cord we usually carry into the following winter. Still and all, I’ve sort of gotten used to having that 3/4 cord. It’s like money in the bank. No, it’s better than money in the bank, because you can burn it. Well, I suppose you could burn your money, too, but it’d make a pretty small fire. Ours would, anyway.

I got distracted, because I actually meant to write about hay. I honestly don’t know what my life would be like without hay. In my forthcoming book (the one from Roost, about our experiences unschooling and our life with the land, not the one from Chelsea Green about how we actually make this life work [see, they're different, which means you're going to have buy ‘em both!]), there are not one, but two chapters that feature hay and/or the act of haying. At one point, my dear editor asked if hay really featured so prominently in our lives as to deserve attention in two of 10 or maybe 11 (12?) chapters. When I mentioned this to Penny, she chuckled. “It should be eight of the chapters,” is what she said, or something like that.

It’s true, you know. Hay is the shit around here, which funny enough is literally true because of course it’s what our animals use to make the manure that grows so much of the yummy stuff we eat. Hay is huge. It is sunlight, it is sweat, it is devotion, it is responsibility, it is friendship, it is exhaustion, it is craft. It is breaking open a bale in the middle of January and sticking your nose into it and inhaling because you’re aching for just a little piece of summer to get you over the hump. And there it is. In your hands. The act of haying influences our summers in vast disproportion to the number of hours we actually spend haying. That’s because we put up dry hay, and you can only put up dry hay when you have three and preferably four or five straight days of sun. Which means you spend the whole month of June on call to the weather Gods, waiting for the moment to roll out onto that great, green ocean of grass. Then comes second cut six weeks later, and it starts all over again.

(By-the-by, if you want to read more about our haying adventures, here you go. I might’ve linked to it before, but then again, I might not have. My apologies if it’s the former)

I’d actually meant to do a pretty straightforward post on hay, all the pragmatic things you need to know that took us a bunch of bumbling years to figure out because no one sat us down and told us. But as seems to be my wont, I’ve gotten distracted, so such will wait for another day.

In the meantime, half your wood and half your hay by Groundhog Day. Remember that, my friends, and you’ll be just fine.

Just What We Do

Snow. Pigs. Skis. The Hick.

I think I’ve mentioned this before, but occasionally it occurs to me how infrequently I write about food. I mean, crikey, we grow somewheres north of 90% of our food, and you can’t do that without having it be a pretty big ole part of your life. But I hardly ever write about it. Or maybe I do, just peripherally. I mean, chores are food, right? Both literally and metaphorically, I suppose.

Anyway, I was pawing thorough the freezer last night, resting my gut on the rim of its open maw to take some pressure off my poor back (it’s getting better, thanks for asking), and I had to chuckle. There was beef, and pork, and lamb, and chicken, and chicken broth. There was beef broth, and blueberries, and wild blackberries, and venison, and strawberries and jars of  butter. There were quart containers of chicken livers and a bunch of the maple sausage we like to make, and still a number of packages of bacon, thank goodness, though our current porcine companions are beginning to take on the sheen of succulence that has me looking at them with ill intent. There were bags of frozen peas and green beans from the garden, and a couple of muskrat hides the boys haven’t yet fleshed, and big bag of chicken feet for making into stock and… you get the idea. Behind me, across the basement, was the door to the root cellar, and in there sat kimchi and potatoes and carrots and lacto-fermented green beans and salsa and applesauce and probably a few jars of some long ago fermentation experiment gone bad. I really need to clean out the root cellar.

For some reason, as I pawed for today’s lunch (lamb stew, yumilicious) I got to thinking about how once in a while I travel to an urban setting, usually for some book-related event or another, and how on some of these trips I end up in a Whole Foods looking for something food-ish. And how it’s actually happened that I’ve become so overwhelmed by the scene that I’ve turned tail and walked out the door empty-handed. I mean, there’s food there, to be sure, and some of it’s actually pretty good. Not most, not even a slim majority. But some. Still, the sensory overload: The swirl of colors, the intermingling smells, the disorienting rush of shoppers jabbering on their phones as they fill carts with free range organic toilet paper and certified humane pre-marinated soy cutlets (oy, that was kind of mean. But funny, you have to admit). Having shopped primarily out of our basement and fields for the past 15 years, it’s just too damn much, and so the poor overwhelmed country hick flees the scene.

I wonder if this is the origin of our current obsession with food. Too much choice. We’ve all got sensory overload, so we’re trying to make sense of it all, and in the process, we obsess. We eat like this, and then we eat like that, because eating like that is supposed to be healthier than eating like this. Until it’s not. Paleo. Raw. Vegan. Fruititarian. Zone. Organic. Whateverthehellisthecooldietnow. And we talk about it and we write about it and we all but fetishize it, and it’s like food is this thing we can’t quite pin down. We can’t control it and we can’t quite figure it out. Here, I’ll help: Yo, it’s food. You eat it. With any luck, it tastes good. It keeps you alive, and if you’re fortunate enough to have access to food (not just food), it actually keeps you well. 

Compounding all this, of course, is the simple fact that so many of us can’t afford real food, and even many of those that can, wouldn’t know it if it bit them in the ass. Or maybe just don’t care. Or maybe have never even known what real food is, what it looks like, what it tastes like. I mean, you got government agencies spending hundreds of millions of our tax dollars convincing folks they should be drinking skim milk and eating gobs of fortified whole grain cereals. Guess who profits from that advice? Well, yeah, the food industry, of course. But the pharmaceutical industry’s got their palm out, too, and it’s a pretty big palm. Biggest one you’ve seen in a good long while, I’m guessing.

Anyway. I suppose what I’m saying is that I don’t write about food that much (at least not directly) because I don’t think about food that much. It’s sort of like breathing or brushing our teeth, I guess, which you ought be thankful I don’t write about that much, either. It’s just what we do.

The Nature of Friendship

Pleased

When I was 16, my best friend was a fellow named Trevor. I guess he was a boy, really (as was I), but Trevor never seemed like a boy. He was the same age as me, but one of the most capable people I’ve ever known. He built his first “house” when he was 14, a little one-room thing with a loft, and it is still standing today. He built his second place when he was 16, though he might even have started it the year prior. He could fix cars, pretty much any car, with pretty much any problem. Trevor and I were constantly buying, fixing (he did most of the fixing), and selling vehicles. Over a two or three year span, I suspect that between the two of us, we bought and sold 30 cars. No joke. He had a penchant for old Volkswagens and, later, for old Cadillac’s, the big old boats with tail fins and huge V-8 motors. I had some VW’s, but never really got into the Caddy’s. But it sure was fun riding around in his. He also had a real nice ’57 Chevy pick up that he restored. Man, that was a sweet truck.

Anyway. My story is about a day in the winter after I got my driver’s license. At the time, Trevor was working on and living in his second house, which was perched deep in the woods on land his father owned (this being after his mother and father had split, which I’m sure had something to do with the fact that Trevor was building his own houses at 14). The land was situated at the top of an incredibly long and incredibly steep hill. The road accessing it was incredibly narrow. One-way, really, and it was not town maintained. But that was ok. It was just them up there, and David, a dude who lived even deeper in the woods and walked everywhere. I mean like he walked 10-miles to work every day and back again and if you stopped to offer a ride, he’d accept only part of the time. That kind of “everywhere.”

So it’s winter, and the roads are slicker’n snot, and I’m on my way over to Trevor’s in the VW Rabbit my mom sold me for $200 when I got my license because I guess $200 fooled her into believing I’d earned it. And I come to the hill. And the only way to make the hill in the winter in a two-wheel-drive car is to pin it from a ways out. You had to come into the hill real hot and just hold on and even then it was a crapshoot. But at that age, it was my kind of crapshoot. The only problem was, the road was real narrow like I said, and there was a blind corner about 1/3 of the way up, which I didn’t mention. But again, Trevor and his Dad and his Dad’s new wife and David who didn’t drive were the only living ones up there. I wasn’t worried. But at that age, I didn’t worry about much.

Funny thing. About the same time I decided to head over to Trevor’s place to visit him, he must’ve decided to head over to my place to visit me. We had no idea of each other’s plans; he didn’t even have a phone up there. So anyway, I’m careening around the blind corner on my way up the one-way hill, and who should I meet as I round the apex of the curve and can see the remainder of the pitch rising before me? Why, it was Trevor, barreling down the hill on his way to my place.

Let’s just say we met in the middle. And that it was loud.

Neither one of us was hurt, but both cars suffered extensive damage. I can’t remember if we ever got his going again or not, but we did get mine back on the road, though it was forever deformed and for some reason never ran right again. It was sort of mysterious. It would start and move just fine, and I drove it many, many more miles, but it was awfully slow. It had no power. I think it would maybe hit 60 on the highway if you gave it an hour or so to get there. No one could figure it out, and I had no money to take it to a proper mechanic, so I just drove it. Given my predilections at the time, it probably saved my life many times over.

I don’t know what made me think of this story. Partly, I’m in a story-telling mood. And partly, I’m sure it’s because I recently heard through the grapevine that Trevor’s dad isn’t well. I haven’t talked to Trevor in a long time. We didn’t have a falling out so much as a drifting apart, and I don’t know a whole lot about his life. I know where he lives, and I know he has a wife and a child, but I’ve never met them. I sent him a couple notes way back when the boys were born, just touching base, inquiring about his life, telling him a little of mine, but I never heard back. It’s possible he never got them. And he called me right after a mutual fried died nearly three years ago, and we talked of getting together next time he came to Vermont (he still has family here), and he said he’d let me know when he was in town. But you know how that goes.

I suspect (though I can’t be certain) that Trevor’s not all that interested in corresponding with me, and while I’d love to hear a bit about his life, I’m ok with that. I don’t take it personally. I think that all friendships have a lifespan. In some instances, that lifespan is a life, or nearly so, and for those of you who are fortunate enough to be part of a lifelong friendship, do not take it for granted. That is a fine thing, right there.

But in a strange way, even my friendship with Trevor is life long. Because I sure haven’t forgotten that crash. I haven’t forgotten riding around in his Caddy, listing to Van Halen’s “Panama” over and over on the tape deck, those ridiculous tail fins slicing through the air in our wake. I haven’t forgotten all the little tricks he taught me about building houses and fixing cars, many of which I employ to this day.

There you have it. I set out to tell a simple story about my first car crash (I’d tell you about my second, but you’d never believe me about that one. Besides, I might get arrested), and I ended up talking about the nature of friendship.

Funny how life is, huh?

Write, Post, Forget

Unschool’s in session

The temperature dropped fast last night, as if something had been knocked out from underneath it. Down through the 40′s, 30′s, 20′s, teens, single digits, and all the while a hard wind building from an indeterminate direction. North, I think, but everything so blustery, it’s hard saying. I was awakened in the predawn hours by the staccato whir of our windmill, and I lay there for a few minutes thinking about the animals, which I knew were just fine, but still. I could feel the cold stealing into the house, and not just through the window over Penny’s head, but through all the small cracks and gaps where the boards have dried and contracted over time. I know our house could be tighter, but I’ve never really liked the idea of a tight house, and I’ve always been a bit amused by those super efficient structures that depend on fancy air exchange systems just so the place doesn’t start rotting and its inhabitants don’t turn blue trying to breathe. Hey genius, maybe ya shouldn’t’ve built it quite so tight in the first place, eh?

Never mind. I’ve got my curmudgeon on, having sprung something in my back on Saturday, doing nothing more strenuous that picking up an empty feed bucket. It’s pretty bad, actually, and I’m not one to complain. Ok, so I am, but still… it’s pretty bad. I had it coming, to be honest. I know my back doesn’t do well when it’s not getting it’s accustomed haul-water-chop-wood regimen, which it hasn’t been, what with book deadlines and whatnot. Oh, sure, chores morning and evening, and then there were those dozen or so spruce I dropped and limbed, but still… it’s a greedy thing, my back. It wants more. I’m usually pretty good about feeding it crunches and stretches and so forth, but like most humans, I’m not above sabotaging myself from time-to-time, and have fallen off the wagon of late. So now I must sit with my self-recriminations, watching Penny scurry to compensate for my infirmity, promising myself that once it loosens, I’ll get back on the path to six-pack abs and a doctrine of daily stretching. (For the record, I already have six-pack abs. They’re just… protected)

Tarnation but there’s been some great comments on this site of late, and I sure do appreciate it. I don’t often reply to comments, even the ones that really strike me, mostly because I’m wary of this space commanding too much of my time and attention. My general policy is to write, post, and forget. Write, post, and forget. I do not wish to hold onto to anything I post here; most of it is based on passing thoughts, and is not premeditated. Only infrequently do I view it through the lens of hindsight. Once in a great while, I’ll re-read something I’ve posted, and change a word or two. Still, I think that’s happened maybe six or seven times out of what is approaching 300 posts. It’s not what I want for this space, and if I explain myself so poorly in my first draft efforts (which I know has happened more than once), so be it. You’ll forgive me. The world will forgive me. Hell, even I’ll forgive me.

Anyway. That’s a long way of saying thanks for all the great comments and for all the support in general. Just because I write, post, and forget doesn’t mean I don’t often think about what ya’ll have to say, so please keep saying it.

Our Gains For Ourselves

Working a deer hide

It’s ten below and blowing pretty good, but the boys had to check their beaver sets, so they bundled up real good, shouldered their pack baskets, and headed out the door. Their sets are a few miles away, so every morning Penny drives them, and every morning she follows them on their rounds. It’s been over two months of this routine, not every day, but close enough to it, and I know she’s getting a little tired of it. One of these days soon, I’ll fill in, though perhaps I’ll hold out ’til it warms up a bit.

Frankly, I am surprised at the boys’ persistence. I had expected their enthusiasm to wane by now, but if anything, it has only blossomed. They did not complain about or even comment on the cold this morning, and I had to work at not remarking on how bitter it is, how the wind slapped my face as I went about morning chores, how it sure was nice to come back indoors and stand by the fire, boot-snow melting into little pools around my feet.

This is not to suggest my sons are not complainers; indeed, they’ll grouse and gripe with the best of them at slights both real and perceived. But in their exploits on land and water, they have found something worth laying claim to. It was not forced up on them. No one told them they must or even should take it up. It is theirs in full, and they understand this, and so they accept the associated responsibilities without protest.

I wrote this post almost half a year ago, which ended with a vague promise to revisit these questions: How have we come to have such an unfavorable view of labor? And how we might shift that view? As is becoming common ’round these parts, my children have unwittingly led me to the answer I was not astute enough to divine on my own (which I suppose suggests that either my sons particularly wise, or I’m particularly not. Please don’t tell me which you think it is): We’ve come to have such an unfavorable view of labor because so few of us are blessed with the opportunity to labor of our own volition, toward our own end. In other words, how common is it in our culture to be presented the chance to labor by choice, and furthermore to reap the fruits of that choice? How often does it happen that the end is something more than numbers, and the accompanying sense that a portion of our life has been leased to the profit of another? How often does it happen that we can carry something of our own making, can know the small aches of muscle, streaking sweat, and nicked knuckles as not merely pain and toil, but the connective sinew that holds our lives together?

Let’s not romanticize the virtues of labor. I do that sometimes, I know. It might well be my weakness. It might be the weakness that brings me down, when I am 70 or maybe even younger, and have not sufficiently provisioned for a body that is no longer so willing as it is now. But equally, let’s not worship liberation from labor. Let’s not assume there is nothing worth laying claim to, even if the price of that claim must be borne, at least in part, by muscle and blood. Let’s not assume that just because what is reaped cannot be claimed as profit in the conventional sense, it is not profitable.

Let’s do something truly radical, and define our gains for ourselves.