By Anyone Else

Peppers drying

“There are so few left, so few who believe the earth is enough.” – from The Earth is Enough, by Harry Middleton. Thanks to Isaac for reminding me of this line. 

Yesterday morning Rye and I went down into the woods to one of our favorite mushroom haunts. The chanterelles are pretty much done, but there’d been another flush of hedgehogs since our last visit and we quickly gathered enough to eat with lunch.

When we returned home, Penny was putting a few gallons of wild chokecherries through the mill in preparation for making a winter’s worth of chokecherry fruit leather, which the boys covet and which I think is only ok. There was a fire in the cookstove, though maybe we could have done without it. But we prefer to cook over wood, and for lunch we fried up the mushrooms and a couple of steaks and Penny ran down to the potato patch and we had baked potatoes, too, with generous dollops of the butter I’d churned the evening before.

While Penny milled and I cooked, the boys modified traps on the living room floor. They’d spent the previous day at the Trapper’s Rendezvous, an annual event they await with feverish anticipation. This year, they started notching sticks two weeks prior; every evening for 14 evenings straight, they huddled in the living room carving the day’s notch. The notched sticks are strangely beautiful.

Later, Penny and the boys worked on black ash baskets while I sawed lumber, then we all did chores. I cleaned up and made soup (more potatoes, sausage from the freezer, cream from the morning milking, celery and an onion from the garden, and so on) while Penny and the boys read. By 9, no one in the house was awake. Well, maybe one of the cats, but if so, none of us were awake to bear witness, which begs the question: If a cat purrs in a slumbering house, does it make a noise?

More than once recently, I have heard it expressed that we might not be adequately preparing our children for the “real world” and so I spent a bit of time this weekend wondering what, exactly, constitutes the “real world.” I remembered how in my first draft of Home Grown, I’d referenced the “American Dream” and my editor, being more astute than I, thought to question me. Isn’t there more than one American Dream, she asked, or something close enough to it. And she was right. Of course there’s more than one American Dream, if for no other reason than there is more than one American Dreamer.

I suspect that some people view our lives as being quaint. Maybe even a little backwards. They hear about Fin and Rye wanting to be trappers, or about how they got their first knives when they were four, or about how they can identify every tree in our woodlot from 30 paces, and they think it’s all well and good but not actually very realistic, because the real world does not run on fur and blades and timber. It runs on finance and code. On buying low and selling high. On convincing people to trust you more than they trust themselves.

Is it presumptuous of me to suggest that our life – our world – is no less real than any? Because to be honest, it feels to me as if gathering mushrooms from the forest with my son to cook with a steak from the cow I shot only a few weeks prior is plenty real. I watch my boys carving with their knives, their skills honed by years of practice (and yes, a bit of spilled blood) and I see how they’ve learned to hold within themselves the competing senses of respect for the blade’s ruthlessness and their own feeling of confidence. Competence. In the comments to my Outside article, someone scoffed at our fear of having our children tested, and it was a mean-spirited comment, but I had to chuckle. Tested? I’ll show you a 9-year old refusing to let me put down an ailing buckling from his doe and instead pulling the trigger himself. I’ll show you him crying in the aftermath of the shot he didn’t want to take but knew he must. Yeah, I’d say they’re tested.

What is the real world? Is it the one I keep hearing about, the one that’s going to eat my sons alive for not having followed the prescribed path, for testing themselves by bullet and blade, rather than pencil and paper? Is it the one that’s going to punish them for their parents’ naiveté that resourcefulness and curiosity and self-confidence are enough? Or is it the one we awaken to every day, the sun burning through the soupy September mornings, the animals going about their daybreak rituals, the pasture grass rimed in first frost?

Maybe it is both. And maybe there are a million other ways to shape one’s life. Maybe that’s really what I want my boys to understand: That they have the ability to shape their world as they imagine it and that what is real – what they value and respect and honor and cherish – need not be determined by anyone else.