Ben Hewitt's Blog, page 62

The Real Risk

Fin was ‘sposed to be helping me with the electric project. Instead, he was training the cows to eat apples from his mouth.

I was thinking last evening about my comments yesterday pertaining to saving money. Specifically, I was thinking of my poor uncles Kent and Bruce, devoted readers of this space, and how they probably spent the entirety of the night in sleepless agony, fretting over my family’s capacity to weather the proverbial rainy day. For instance, perhaps I am attacked by a piglet and whilst running from said piglet, I stumble into the bacon-smoking pig, and no one notices for days (why? Hell, I don’t know… this is all hypothetical) and by the time they’ve found me, I’m frostbitten and hypothermic and have forever lost feeling in the tips of my fingers. No longer can I type.

The thing is, you have to take my comment about saving money in context. For starters, we have no debt. None. No mortgage, no credit card, no car payment. Penny even paid off her note at the hair salon (man, those frosted perms… crazy expensive), and I finally whittled my bar tab down to nothin’. But in all seriousness, what’s it worth to not have a mortgage?  In other words, if we did have a mortgage on this place – 2,000 square feet and 40-acres – what would it cost us every month, every year? Twenty grand? Even more? So long as we muster our property tax bill, ain’t no one taking this place from us because I fell in with the bacons and can no longer toil in service to the bank.

Second, in this house right now, guarded by razor wire, security cameras, and two shotgun-wielding prepubescent boys, we have at minimum a year’s worth of food put up. And not just any old hash, but real friggin’ food of the sort you pretty much can’t buy at any price. But if you could, what would that cost you annually, for a family of four heavy eaters? Another twenty large? I bet so. Probably more. So as you can see, already we’re up to nearly $50k in savings.

Third, we have the skills and resources to replicate this food production year after year after year. We have breeding animals on the hoof. We have some of the most productive gardens I’ve seen anywhere. We have fruit trees and berry bushes and a barn full of hay and a woodlot full of firewood and saw logs. We know where to find woods nettles and wild mushrooms and chokecherries and blackberries and lord knows what else my boys are eating out there. We have neighbors and friends and family we care about and who care about us. What is all this worth? How much in savings does it equate to? I can’t even put a number on it.

Here’s the truth: If I could live my life in a way that was meaningful to me and have a wad o’ money in the bank, I would. I truly would. I’d like to think I’d do something purposeful with that money, and I’d like to think I wouldn’t allow it to creep into my thoughts and emotions. But even if I couldn’t muster the former, and even if I did fall under its thrall, I’d probably take it. I’m not an idiot; I only play one in this space.

But that is not my path, and I am unwilling to exchange the incredible privileges I am fortunate enough to claim – of doing work that matters to me, of rising every morning truly excited about what the day will bring, of spending the bulk of my waking hours in the company of the people I love most in this world – for the ability to amass money and material resources. Some people, I know, hold both these birds in hand – that feeling of purpose and those financial resources – and I salute them. I hope they know how good they’ve got it. But in my experience, limited and anecdotal as it is, too many people allow the pursuit of those resources to become an impediment to living the life they dream about.

Some people may view our choices around money as risky, perhaps even irresponsibly so. Perhaps my accounting above will go part of the way toward making them feel differently. Or perhaps not. Whatever the case, to me (and to Penny, whom I’m normally loathe to speak for, but I know well her feelings on this issue), the real risk isn’t whether or not we have enough money saved. It’s whether or not we’re living.

Whole Lotta Good Livin’

I’m gonna pull a Katz and do a couple of posts today, provoked in no small part by this comment from Joy:

… I’m curious what you teach your boys “officially” about money. You’ve definitely got views about money and as you’ve mention they have a lot less unnecessary, extravagant things that are just “givens” to other kids – candy, video games, iphones, ipads,etc. So, clearly they are learning that much of what you can spend your money on you really don’t need to spend it on. But, do they understand that their dad makes money from writing primarily? Do they get it (or care) about that yet? If they aren’t reading until 9, I’m guessing maybe also the writing is coming later. If so, in that regard, do they get that you make money through writing and why that would be so? And then that you and Penny save for very specific larger goals. Do they understand the things you and Penny choose to give up in order to save that, etc? Or are those topics you feel will come down the line a ways? Also, in terms of finance, time value of money and all that, have you/will you discuss that with them in terms of a structured learning “assignment” or find ways to bring it into a “real life” lesson?

This is such a huge and important subject, it’s almost hard to know where to begin. So maybe I’ll just take Joy’s questions one-by-one and see what happens.

Do they understand that their dad makes money from writing primarily?

Absolutely they understand this. There is no ambiguity regarding where the bulk of our income originates.

Do they get it (or care) about that yet?

I’m not entirely sure how to answer this. Or maybe I don’t understand the question. They certain “get” it, insomuch as they clearly understand the relationship between my writing and the income it provides and what that income means to us. Do they care? I think so. I mean, I think they’d rather we had money, than not, because having money means ammo for their guns, music lessons, and Fin’s wilderness skills classes. It means we can afford to see live music from time-to-time, and go out for pizza at least once each year. Maybe, if we’re feeling really flush, twice a year. They certainly don’t care about having any more money than is necessary to provide these small luxuries, and because their expectations have been set so low in regards to material belongings, it’s not as if they associate money with stuff, beyond the few items mentioned above. We simply don’t buy toys or other gadgets, and I literally cannot even tell you how long it’s been since we’ve spent more than a dollar or two on an item of clothing. Fin and Rye don’t care about these things because they’ve never really been given reason to believe these things should be cared about. If that makes any sense.

If they aren’t reading until 9, I’m guessing maybe also the writing is coming later. If so, in that regard, do they get that you make money through writing and why that would be so?

They both actually write fairly well, although Rye needs more coaching. But to the core of the question: They understand because we talk about it. It’s that simple.

And then that you and Penny save for very specific larger goals. Do they understand the things you and Penny choose to give up in order to save that, etc? Or are those topics you feel will come down the line a ways?

Absolutely they understand this. We talk all the time about the trade-offs of choosing to subsist on a relatively modest income so that we have the freedom to do the things that truly matter to us. We talk about how so many other parents have to go off to work each morning, and about how we have the tremendous privilege of not doing so. We talk about the fact that we simply cannot do everything we’d like to do, because the money’s just not there. But the truth is, we mostly talk about how friggin’ lucky we are to be able to live so well on so little.

Also, in terms of finance, time value of money and all that, have you/will you discuss that with them in terms of a structured learning “assignment” or find ways to bring it into a “real life” lesson?

Pretty much all of their learning – including about money/wealth/time/value – happens in the context of real life. These discussions are on-going in our household; Penny and I frequently discuss the trade-offs mentioned above, often in the context of whether or not I should accept an assignment, or whether or not we should make a particular purchase. The boys are almost always party to these discussions, or at the very least, on the periphery of them.

In addition to the questions Joy asked, here is what I want to teach my children about money:

1)  Money is only one of many tools that can be used to get the goods and services they need. Other ways include providing for oneself via skills, labor, and knowledge of the natural world (i.e., foraging/hunting/wild crafting), barter, and the giving and receiving of gifts.

2)  Money is not inherently evil, but it is very powerful and should be used with care, intent, and a very clear understanding of the damage it can do.

3)  Money should always be considered a means to an end, and not an end unto itself.

4)  Because money is almost always at its core a claim on natural resources, and because the price of these resources rises in relation to demand for them, the accumulation of money and consumption of resources beyond what one needs to provide a basic standard of living (this is admittedly open to interpretation) means others will be forced to do without.

5)  Some of the least-satisfied people we know are those with the most money. This is not ubiquitously true, but it is a very obvious trend.

6)  Some of the most-satisfied people we know are those with the least money. Again, not ubiquitously true, but also a clear correlation.

7)  There are many ways to invest in one’s future. Saving money toward an unknown outcome is only one of these ways. It is not the way we have chosen. We do save money, but generally only for specific, tangible goals and projects that further the “investments” that feel most secure and valuable to us. These are generally in the realm of skills, infrastructure/food production, and simple time to enjoy one another’s company and do the things that matter to us.

8)  The notion that money should beget money (i.e., that it should bear interest) and the fact that money is created via debt is why we are caught in an economy that must always grow and is destroying the natural world in the process. It is also why we have such massive inequality.

9)  Money creates artificial scarcity and destroys gift economies as the foundational aspects of human wellbeing are commoditized. Money makes people feel as if they cannot “afford” to do the things they truly want to do. It erodes generosity.

I could go on, probably for quite awhile. In short, I want for my children to understand and respect the power of money, and to be subservient to it only so much as is absolutely necessary in 21st century America. Because they will need to be subservient to it. Just as I am. Just as you are. There is no moneyless utopia, or if there is, I haven’t stumbled across it.  But between that unfound utopia and forfeiting the bulk of your waking hours to a meaningless job in order to pay for a bunch of shit you really don’t need and that ironically only makes you feel poorer, there’s a whole lot of good living to do.

Who Can Say

Chokecherry harvest

Two of the past three mornings have delivered frost to the hollows and folds of our pastures. It’s so slight, you might not notice it if you didn’t feel it underfoot. It crunches and rustles a bit when you step on it, a million or more ice crystals shattering under your boots. Or maybe you catch it out of the corner of your eye, the way the early light glints off it, making it seem whiter than it really is. Or maybe it really is that white. Because who can say where perception and reality diverge? Not I. Certainly not I.

The weekend was good, full of honest labor and the small rewards of animals under our care. Two piglets were procured, replacements for the pair whose days are growing short in inverse proportion to the expansion of their haunches. The pigs eat voraciously of milk and wild apple drops, and I receive an inordinate, almost irrational amount of pleasure in watching them slurp and chew. Eat, my darlings, eat, I urge, pouring breakfast into their bowl as they dip their insatiable snouts. Every day, I walk past the bacon smoking pit at least a half dozen times, situated as it is along one of the primary chore corridors on our small holding, and damned if it seems like I can already smell the smoke rising off the wet apple wood. Or maybe I can smell it. Because who can say where perception and reality diverge? Not I. Certainly not I.

Last night for dinner, we ate a chokecherries and apple crisp, piled high with cream skimmed and whipped off that mornings milking, and sweetened by a slug of syrup distilled from the sap I pulled and grunted by sled and wagon across Melvin’s hayfield, one step lost for every two gained. For lunch, we’d eaten steak and tomatoes and potatoes and green beans, the latter two slathered with butter churned the day before. For breakfast, it had been eggs scrambled with beet greens and soft cheese and chanterelles and sausage, and it seemed to me as if I could taste something in these meals that was more than what I understood these foods to taste like. Not love, please, spare me, that’s too simple and trite. But perhaps effort. Perhaps purpose. Perhaps the moment I almost got trammeled by a runaway garden cart carrying 200-pounds of maple sap. Perhaps the three hours Penny spent with the boys, gathering chokecherries and apples. Perhaps the moment our steer Cinco crumpled to the ground and we’d swooped in with buckets to catch the arterial blood gushing from his neck. Or maybe I really could taste these things. Because who can say where perception and reality diverge? Not I. Certainly not I.

I lit a fire the other day, the first of the season and it felt good, like something turning over and expanding inside me. Settling into me. Not in an uncomfortable way, but in a way that’s like seeing an old friend you haven’t seen for years, or like hearing a song you used to listen to every day. And as I fed the fire with wood we’d split the winter before, I thought about the thousands of fires I’ve lit in a lifetime of heating with wood, and about the tens of thousands of swings with the splitting maul, that limber rhythm you get into when you’re warmed up and the wood is straight and true and it’s 12-degrees but you’re sweating, anyway, and damned if it didn’t feel like what I was actually burning was a little piece of myself.

Or maybe I actually was.

Just Fine, Too

The boys have been pounding ash for pack baskets

Yesterday afternoon I fled my desk around 3:00 and bee-lined for the sawmill. I’ve had my eye on the mill for the past couple of weeks; it’d been at least a month since I’d sawn any lumber, and we’d ‘bout polished off our stash. This place has an insatiable thirst for lumber: For fences, for outbuildings, for the boys to make some ridiculous contraption having to do with some ridiculous game. I stumble across these contraptions all the time – most recently, a pretend guillotine for a fantasy in which Rye had captured Fin’s alter-ego, Dubbins, and was threatening to behead him if he didn’t behave – and while part of me chafes at the sheer volume of these devices, at all the nails and screws and boards that are sacrificed to my sons’ play, a greater part of me is merely grateful that I’m not tripping over the ubiquitous plastic shit that fills most children’s lives these days. Wow, that sounded curmudgeonly. I’m gonna have to try that more often.

Anyway. The mill. And the woodshed, which has a roof (arguably the most important part of a woodshed, I grant you that) but no siding. I have a nice pile of balsam logs from last winter’s exploits, some of which, I knew, would net me 12-inch boards or better. Have you ever lifted a fresh sawn 1 x 12 board off the top of a log you pulled from the forest yourself? Maybe, but my guess is not, and while it’s different strokes for different folks, I’m betting most of ya’ll would feel the same thing I feel when such a thing happens to me. Which, if it were expressed in words, would be hell, yes. To me, the sawmill is one of those tools that despite its noise and fury plainly illustrates the connective thread that runs through all our lives and ties us to the natural world. Forest. Tree. Lumber. Shelter. I like seeing that thread illustrated. I like following it from one end to the other just to see where it leads me.

In any event, I spent a half hour or so dinking with the mill. The hydraulic jack that adjusts blade tension was low on oil and the jack would not hold pressure, so I unbolted it and filled it with fluid. The line that feeds a stream of water onto the blade to cool and clean it during sawing was plugged with sawdust, so I removed it and poked a wire into it until it was clear. And then there was the simple remembering of all the levers and wheels and whatnot; there are numerous adjustments to be made with each and every turn of the log, and after a half-dozen weeks of not making these adjustments, I felt clunky at the controls, pausing after each pass for a second or two, unsure of precisely what I was supposed to do next. But after a few boards came off the mill, I was back in the groove, and I had the feeling of playing an instrument, albeit one that produces only a single, long note and is capable of removing a leg.

By 7:20 or so, with daylight waning fast, I nailed the last board to the north-facing side of the woodshed. It would’ve gone a little quicker, but I was using a bunch of nails I’d pulled from one of the boys’ long-forgotten contraptions, and most of them required a bit of straightening. The other sides of the shed, I suspect, will have to wait until next year or until I get to them, whichever comes first (my money’s on the former). The list of tasks separating us from winter is probably longer than the accumulation of waking hours separating us from winter can accommodate, though I suspect we’ll make it even out somehow. We always do.

And if we don’t? Well, that’ll be just fine, too.

Better Things

When I was a child, I read almost constantly. This was in part because for most of my childhood, I did not have access to a television, and probably in part because I was raised by bookish types: My father wrote poetry (still does, actually, the poor fellow), and my mother has written a couple of children’s books. Furthermore, I was not a terribly popular child. I was kind of fat and slow and ungainly, and I probably don’t have to tell you that these are not revered qualities in elementary and junior high schools.

I have a vivid memory from this period of my life of setting my alarm for 4:30, so that I could read for an hour or two before school began. I’d set up my bed so that the head of it fit into a closet; sounds weird, I know, but there was something cozy and comforting about it and I read in that closet for hour after hour after hour. Reading is just what I did.

We have spent almost no time formally teaching the boys to read, although we have read to them extensively almost since the day they were born. Penny has an enormous capacity for reading aloud; even now, with the boys nearly the ages of  9 and 12, respectively, she reads aloud to them every night before bed, often for more than an hour, and that’s a mere fraction of what she did when they were younger. Fin and Rye favor real life adventure stories, both fiction and non-fiction, and are particular fans of Gary Paulsen, which is convenient, because he’s a pretty fantastic writer.

Fin started reading when he was eight; a month shy of his 9th birthday, Rye is just starting to read. Both of them spend a tremendous amount of time with their faces in books, particularly during the colder months. Fin in particular carries books with him almost everywhere; I suspect that once Rye is fully capable of reading to himself, he’ll do the same.  I remember being somewhat stressed when Fin turned eight and still didn’t read, probably because their ability to self-learn reading felt to me like the first big test of our informal teaching stye. But of course my stress was merely the result of standardized expectations set by the institutionalized schooling system. Without those expectations, set by – well, set by whom, really? I can’t say, but someone, somewhere must have decided children should learn to read by age 7, just like someone, somewhere must have determined every one of the “educational” milestones that define our sons’ and daughters’ school experience. Maybe the people who set these standards and designed these curriculums really do know a whole lot about how children learn and are thus qualified to make such decisions. But I know for a fact they don’t know my children.

I’m struck by the fact that I don’t see many children reading books anymore. I know some do; I just don’t see it much. I’m struck by the fact that as a society, we seem to revere the ability to read, and we seem intent on teaching it to our children as early as they can possibly grasp it. And then what do we do? We take it away from them. Not overtly, of course. Not with any conscious intent, but by slowly filling every “spare” minute of their waking hours with activities and opportunities. I remember an article that ran in a local weekly paper about the implementation of iPads in elementary and junior high school. Here is a revealing passage (the entire story is here. Gotta love the quote about parents who spend their “time cutting down trees in the middle of the woods”):

BFA Fairfax middle school principal Tom Walsh is equally jazzed about iPads and their power to get kids more excited about learning, in and outside the classroom.

“It doesn’t matter what kind of home you come from. Everyone has the same access. Everyone has the same tools,” he says during a tour of the school. “To me, public schools are the last bastion of equity in education.”

Next door to Skerrett’s classroom, an eighth-grade language-arts class is engaged in iPad learning games. One student is playing “Words With Friends,” a crossword game similar to Scrabble. At a desk alone, a young boy is engrossed in “Math Ninja,” a game whose objective is to defend a treehouse using martial-arts weapons.

Walsh asks the boy what he likes about the game. “You get to viciously attack cats and dogs with throwing stars and swords,” the kid says with a perfectly straight face. To reach the next level, however, the player must answer basic math questions, such as 22 divided by 11.

“Not really rigorous learning,” Walsh says, “but if you’ve got downtime, there’s worse things you could be doing.”

Perhaps Walsh is correct. Perhaps there are worse things a child could be doing than viciously attacking cats and dogs with throwing stars and swords on his way to learning that 22 divided by 11 is 2 (which, by the way, either one of my sons could’ve told you long before they reached the age that would correlate with their being in 8th grade).

Yeah, so, perhaps there are worse things. But l know for a fact there are better things, too.

I’ll Take Sensible

Churnin’. Thanks to Matron for the churn advice!

This post by Matron got me thinking about our food preservation practices and how they’ve evolved over the years.

We put up an enormous quantity of food; strictly on a caloric basis, it’s at least 90% of what we consume, although that’s in large part due to the fact that we’ve largely aligned our diet with what we grow. For instance, we don’t cultivate any grains, and while I can’t say we don’t eat any grains – I make a wicked decent loaf of sourdough bread if I do say so myself, and I do – we don’t eat many. Maybe a loaf of bread and one pot of oatmeal per week, on average. A couple doughnut fixes annually, and pancakes every month or so. We don’t make hard cheese, so we don’t eat much hard cheese; the 10-pound block we recently acquired in exchange for blueberries was the first hard cheese we’d had in many moons. Other than grains, the occasional treat of hard cheese, spices, and salt, I can’t think of food item we regularly buy. Oh, yeah: Honey. We buy honey.

This probably makes us out to be more dogmatic and puritanical than we actually are. The truth is, we eat what we grow in large part because we love the process of growing it, and because we spend so much of our time growing it – time which is therefore not being hawked for the almighty dollar – we have to eat the fruits of our labors. We can’t afford not to; preserving and eating the gifts of our land is part of the ecosystem of our lives, and I can’t even begin to calculate what it would cost to actually purchase the food we raise and process. What with the two insatiable maws of our sons, I’ve no doubt it would literally be in the 10’s of thousands of dollars annually. Ain’t gonna happen, folks.

Anyhow and whatnot again, reading Matron’s post reminded me how we’ve streamlined our preservation practices over the years. We don’t do much canning, anymore – maybe a few jars of tomatoes and some applesauce – having almost entirely turned to lacto-fermenting. This is in part because fermented foods are healthier, and in part because, as Matron points out, canning is one of those tasks that can feel somewhat pesky, particularly in the high heat of late summer.

We ferment kimchi, green beans, grated carrots in ginger, and salsa on an annual basis. We have fermented fiddlehead ferns, broccoli (not recommended), and beet greens. We haven’t lacto-fermented meat (some people do, but it sounds wretched to me), although we do make a goodly amount of dry-cured sausage. Our technique for fermenting goes as follows: Dump the veggies in a jar, toss in a little salt, cover with water, and leave on the counter for a few days or until we get tired of looking at it, whichever comes first. At that point, move to the root cellar. Using this incredibly precise and highly laborious process, we’ve keep kimchi and green beans for more than two years with only minimal loss to mold.

What else? We freeze a ton, and this is definitely the Achilles heel of our preservation practices, if only because it compels us to rely on a precarious and vulnerable supply chain of inputs (electricity, along with the fuels and infrastructure that go into its production) and devices (namely, freezers). But damn is it handy. Right now, there are four freezers in our basement, and each is full: Berries (blue, black, straw), butter (94 pounds and counting), beef, pork, lamb, chickens, and of course Nate’s beaver bits. Oh yeah, and lots of bone broth, which we should probably be canning, but… well, see above.

Making kimchi, circa ’07

We dry a lot. Tons of herbs and foraged stuff like woods nettles and mushrooms and fruit (dried cantaloupe tastes just like mango) and other stuff I can’t think of at the moment. We just finished building a solar dehydrator out of an old sliding glass door a builder friend gave us, but we haven’t had much chance to use it, yet. The ceiling above the kitchen looks like a miniature upside down forest, what with the bunches of stuff hanging from the beams. Every so often, one of them falls on my head when I’m going about my business, and it always scares the crap out of me.

We make bacon and sausage. I smoke the bacon in a hole in the ground, and have never understood why people insist on building (or even worse, buying) those fancy smokers. All you really need to do is dig a hole, find a grate, build a little fire, and cover the whole mess with roofing tin that’s rusted enough that most of the galvanized coating is gone. As you might imagine, knowing me as you think you do, the whole scene – the old tin, the billowing smoke, the wafting scent of brined meat and fat absorbing the gases and fumes – appeals to the hyper-rustic ethos that for better or worse defines so many of my waking hours. Sometimes, I’ll sit by the pit in an old recliner, a cold Bud wedged in my crotch, a 12-gauge across my lap, and a wad of chaw in my lip. Every so often, I’ll yell at the boys to bring me another beer, and you best believe the hop to, lest they invoke my significant wrath.

The yellowfoot chanterelles and hedgehogs are going bonkers right now

Of course, we have the winter greenhouse, which is unheated but in which we sow enough cold-hardy greens to keep us in salads through the New Year. It’s always a slightly sad moment to eat the last salad, or to get the first serious cold snap from which the remaining growth never recovers. But as I’ve written before, if you really want to appreciate something, it’s generally best to do without it for a while.

And with that, I’m outta here. We were ‘sposed to go camping today, but there’s a passel of rain in the forecast, so we pushed it until tomorrow. Which means we’re either wimps, as the boys contend, or eminently sensible. I’ll take sensible.

The Best Kind of Contagious

Carding wool with Nate

The little kick of pre-autumn we had a couple weeks back has departed, and another push of summer has ridden in on its wake. I love that cool weather, but the heat and humidity ain’t so bad, either, what with the chill of the pond just a few steps and one cannonball away.

I’ll tell ya what’s going on ’round here: Everything. Every-freakin’-thing. If you’ve somehow gotten the impression that my life is naught but strolling through lush, misty fields, sniffing cows and eating berries from the vine, well, I got some news for you: There’s a wee bit more to it than that. The good part of that news is that the power project is nigh unto completion (does that make any sense at all? Hell, I don’t know, but I like it…. what I’m trying to say, if it’s not clear, is that’s it’s ’bout finished). As a whole, I vastly underestimated the project and the sheer amount of toil and burden it would necessitate. But that is ok: I think that electricity should perhaps not be so damn easy, given all the devastation its production wreaks. As a quick aside, I was more than pleased to see that in our first 24 hours of metered connection, we consumed a grand total of 7 kilowatt hours, and that’s with four chest freezers and one refrigerator humming. Once we get our solar panels feeding back to the grid – next week, hopefully – we’ll get that down to zero or so.

Anyhoo. On top of it all, we’re going canoe camping for two nights, a luxury enabled only by the enormous generosity of our dear friend Dan, who will be housesitting for a three-day period early next week. And by “house-sitting,” I mean milking a cow, feeding our menagerie of creatures, and generally being on-call should one of said creatures decide to take a walk-about. We love going camping, but rarely do… there just aren’t many Dans around, and leaving this place during camping-friendly weather is a fairly unrealistic undertaking, given the sheer volume of day-to-day tasks that are part and parcel of the season. But whatever. It’s gonna be great.

On top of it all again, Penny came home from Falk’s workshop frothing at the mouth in excitement. (By-the-by, I’ve been meaning to recommend his new book. It’s a wee more technical in parts than my sorry intellect can master, but it’s real, real good nonetheless). Part of it was the sheer inspiration of his place, which is a pretty remarkable example of what can be done on a relatively inhospitable piece of land. But another part of it was the recognition that already we have made so much progress and that so much of what he’s doing is well within our reach. Every so often, we are blessed with a moment of awareness regarding just what has been accomplished on our little piece of ground. Of what is accomplished from day-to-day. I realize that may sound a little, um, self-certain, but what can I say? It’s true. The other truth is that this awareness is generally lost to the minute-by-minute, hour-by-hour passing of our lives, and this is probably a good thing, only because it doesn’t seem all that healthy to walk around being all smug about what you’ve done.

In any event, visiting Falk’s place was for Penny one of those clarifying moments, both in regards to what has been accomplished, what will be accomplished, and how we can continue to evolve our practices. I love her excitement and the sheer joy she has for this life and the work it blesses us with, and it’s impossible for me to not get caught up in it, myself. It’s the best kind of contagious.

Over and out ’til we return.

 

What I’ve Learned

The hide is coming along

Not so long ago, as part of my reporting on a story I’m working on, I attended a meeting in a community not far from here. At the end of the meeting, each person was asked to say something about what they’d gleaned from the gathering. Or about anything, really. A fellow sitting a few chairs down from me, dressed in classic business attire, said this: “I’ve learned that to be successful in life, it’s helpful surround yourself with successful people.” The crowd nodded its agreement.

The next morning, Melvin was up to breed not one, but two of our girls. It’s mighty convenient when milk cows synchronize their heats, one of those small rural blessings the overwhelming majority of the world will never be aware of (another of those blessings is to have a neighbor who’s attended school for the fine art of artificial insemination). Anyway, two cows in heat was a little much excitement for Snook, our yearling steer, and he’d busted out of the day paddock to accompany the ladies down to the barn for their date with Melvin.

As Penny and Melvin and I were standing in the barnyard chatting, I made a passing reference to Snook’s escape. Melvin looked at us in that way he has, which might best be described as a look of minor merriment at all the minor curiosities of life. “He’s not out,” Melvin said. “He’s just not where you put him.”

I’ve learned that to be light-hearted in life, it’s helpful to surround yourself with light-hearted people.

A couple days after that, Penny and I were up at the neighbors, moving our freezer out of their woodshed (more on this in a future post, as it relates to our decision to connect to the utility grid and all the ramifications thereof). It was an awkward move, what with the big step down from the shed and a variety of other factors too complicated to explain here. All of which is to say, we were struggling a bit more than I care to admit. Which is precisely when Jimmy happened by, on his way home from evening milking, on the tail end of a 14-hour work day, which is to say, at the end of average day for him. I saw his truck pass, then heard him slow his big diesel, then clunk into reverse. Without even asking, he was out of his truck and on the tricky end of the freezer and in a few almost effortless seconds we had it on the bed of our truck.

I’ve learned that to be generous in life, it’s helpful to surround yourself with generous people.

After Jimmy helped us load the freezer, we stood at talked for a few minutes about something unexpected that had recently happened in his life that meant he will need to think very hard about the precise future of his operation. It is nothing tragic, but it was not what he’d been expecting, and I can see that it’s thrown him a bit. “Oh well,” he said. “I can always pick up a couple thousand more taps and make more syrup.” He flashed a grin. “I love making syrup, anyhow.”

I’ve learned that to be positive and resilient in life, it’s helpful to surround yourself with positive and resilient people.

Sometimes it seems like the best teachers in my life pop up in the most unlikely places.

 

Today Is Now

In full candor, I spent much of yesterday in a sour mood. I had my reasons: The boys were being as the boys can occasionally be, which is to say, insufferable ingrates devoid of one iota of appreciation for the freedom and blessings that define their lives. There is nothing that irks me more than a couple of self-pitying farm kids on a gripe kick: We never get to hunt alone (well, duh: You’re 8 and 11). You don’t let us shoot the 12 gauge alone (well, duh: You’re 8 and 11). You’re always telling us to pick stuff up (well, duh: You leave your shit – most of which is sharp and metal, smelly and dead, or otherwise disgusting –  EVERYWHERE). I don’t really think it’s a child’s obligation to inhabit of state of conscious gratitude. At 41, I ain’t even close to that place, myself, and maybe I don’t even want to get there, if only because it occurs to me that it might actually be sort of exhausting to be grateful all the time. That said, I have little patience for the grousing of two boys who enjoy the tremendous degree of autonomy and parental trust Fin and Rye do.

And then there was my back, which decided to go on strike just when I was beginning to think I might be indomitable. It’s been a summer full of good, honest, physical labor – lifting and pulling and digging and whatnot – and my body has always responded well to this regimen. But at some point over the past week or so, I must have crossed some invisible line in the sand of my physical capacities, and I became domitable again. It’s much better today, but yesterday, as I shuffled my way to and fro, the echoes of my sons’ perceived injustices ringing in my ears, it felt as if the world were a heavy place that had decided, for the time being at least, to rest its weary bones across the fragile bed of my shoulders.

It is fortunate indeed that I awakened this morning with a sense of renewal, both physical and emotional, for the next few weeks are crunch time on our small holding. There is much to be done, more than I wish to take the time to write about now, and the days are ever-shorter: Each evening, dark chases me indoors a few minutes earlier than it did the evening before. Which helps explain why last night I was in bed by 8:30, preparing to sleep a sleep of such depth and duration that coming back into consciousness felt like digging my way out of a dark hole. I awoke feeling refreshed and limber, and when the boys trudged their tousled way downstairs and out the front door to release their bladders at the base of the fruit trees as instructed, I could tell they were in a better place. Not exactly grateful, but no longer bitter. No longer persecuted and bereft. “Can we shoot the .22 today, Papa,” Fin asked, and I although I was tempted to withhold the privilege after the previous day’s impudence, I said yes, and it was the right thing to say.

Because yesterday was yesterday. And today is now.

 

It’s Going Through You

Late last night (well, late for me, which means the top of the eight o’clock hour had passed) I was driving home from further northern Vermont, where I’d been reporting a fairly ambitious magazine feature I’m working on. As is my wont, I was listening to the radio as I drove, which happened to be transmitting an interview with the front fellow of Gogol Bordello. I can’t say I’m a fan or anything; I’m not familiar enough with their music, although I did get a kick out of the tunes they played on air. Their work is infused with a likable whimsy, and if there’s anything I like, it’s likable whimsy. You know, because it’s likable. And whimsical.

But it wasn’t the music that struck me. Rather, it was the interview with Eugene Hutz. More specifically, it was these few sentences, which I casually jotted down on the back of a $100 bill as I hauled ass down I91 at 83 mph. I jest. In truth, I just transcribed them onto my laptop from the podcast while sitting on my ass.

“I thought that the focal point of where human potential goes wrong is that people are too busy living in the future or in the past on a regular basis. That’s what’s going on around. And it kind of deprives people of their vital energy. It actually creates duality, polarity in their mind which steals all their energy. And a very little amount of people are able to sustain that consciousness of presence here and now…. Life appears to be some dark, unsolvable mystery to most people. They’re like ‘well, how does it go? Where is it going?’”

“It’s going right through you, right now. It’s here.” 

You know how every once in a while you hear a nugget of wisdom that makes you sit up and take notice? In truth, it was probably something you knew already but had managed, in the small, swirling chaos that defines almost all of our days, to lay down. It might even have been something that you’d once promised yourself to never forget, but of course you nonetheless had. This is not your fault, by the way: In the market driven economy of modern America, there is little encouragement to remember what really matters, because if you remember what really matters, you become so terribly much less susceptible to those feeding on your forgetfulness.

“It’s going right through you, right now. It’s here.”

I have that feeling every so often. I suppose it’s really what I was writing about yesterday: That sense of my being present in my life in a way that I yearn to carry with me through all my waking hours but for a multitude of reasons regularly let slip through my fingers. Moving the cows is like that: I’m there. I’m not thinking about things that happened yesterday, or even last month; I’m not thinking about things that will happen tomorrow, or even next year: Gotta finish backfilling, gotta finish this story, gotta fix this, gotta fix that, gottagottagotta.  

The other thing that happened yesterday is that a friend emailed me a link to a blog written by a 36-year-old man who is dying. And not just dying, but writing about dying, and writing about it really, really well.

His story is sad but liberating and in a strange way does a similar thing for me that your writing does, is what my friend wrote, and at first, I had no freakin’ idea what he might be talking about. What connection could possibly be made between my ramblings and the unbelievably courageous and poignant self-told tale of a young man with only weeks or maybe months left to live?

It was Eugene Hutz’s words that made me understand, because they reminded me that when I’m at my best as a person – and, I strongly suspect, as a writer – I am blessed by that sense of my life going through me. Of being right now. Of being here. I have written about it before; actually, I suspect I have written about it many, many times. I just haven’t always been aware that’s what I was writing about. Perhaps, in my strongest writing, an element of that sense filters through, like sunlight coming through a dirty kitchen window. Maybe that’s not the best analogy in the world, but still I wonder if that is the similarity my friend speaks of, because how can you read the words of a young man in the latter stages of terminal cancer and not be visited by the very idea that Hutz speaks of:  “It’s going right through you, right now. It’s here.”

I have no idea if Ezra Caldwell – the fellow who writes the aforementioned blog – is blessed by that sense. And even if he is, he may not think of it as being blessed, and who could blame him for that? The feeling of life going through you, of being right now and right here may well lose some of its appeal when it becomes achingly apparent that the end of that feeling is in sight. I hope that’s not the case – not only for him, but for us all, because of course the end is in sight for everyone. It’s just in varying degrees of focus.

Whatever the case, and as occurs from time-to-time, I had the sense yesterday of forces converging in my life in ways that could be seen as entirely anecdotal and coincidental. A link to a blog. A radio interview. Little pieces of near-nothingness. Small splashes in the pool of my existence.

But damned if I don’t think I might just ride the wave of those splashes and see where it takes me.