We Don’t Get to Walk it Again

Amy posted a podcast based at least in part on one of our interviews. You can find it here. 

By gum, we got summut done this weekend. We harvested, processed, and jarred the ingredients for 74 quarts of kimchi and kraut. I made a four-pound batch of butter and rendered 10 quarts of lard from the back fat of this summer’s pigs. Penny turned a five gallon bucket of elderberries into approximately enough syrup for the entirety of Northern Vermont (btw, is anyone else suspicious as to whether or not that stuff really works? I ain’t convinced, myself. At least it tastes good). I mixed up a batch of bread to be baked in the cook stove later this morning. On Saturday, we visited with friends and strangers alike and on Saturday night, we stayed out to all hours (10:30!!) at a delightful vaudevillian show. Of course, there were chores and given the inevitable shift in the weather toward something more appropriate of the date –  yesterday even brought the first tentative flakes of snow – fires to kindle and feed.

Penny and I have heard from more than a few folks recently some variation on this comment: I bet it’s a crazy time of year for you guys or you must be real busy these days or ya’ll are f’ing nuts. Actually, we’ve never heard the lattermost, but there are times when I wonder if perhaps it’s implied, because of course strictly speaking we don’t have to be doing any of this stuff (and in particular the elderberry sauce, which has never, not once, not one friggin’ time, kept my sore throat and sniffles at bay. Not that I’m bitter about it or anything).

I would like to make a couple quick points, before embarking on yet another batch of vegetable ferments and stoking the cook stove  to achieve bread temperature.

1) In my experience, there is a world of difference between forced busyness – the obligatory busyness visited upon us by the many institutions prevailing over our lives – and the busyness that comes of providing for one’s self and in the process, fomenting a sense of agency over one’s life. Because that is a large part of what we’re doing here: Cultivating in ourselves the feeling that our lives are in our hands. That’s not a feeling that just happens in this day and age. You gotta work for it a bit. Or maybe a lot. But it’s sure as shootin’ worth working for.

2) In varying measures, there is some truth to our friends’ comments, mostly relating to the underlying sentiment (or at least, my perception of the underlying sentiment, which of course is really all that matters, right?), rather than the exact words. Lately, we have been strategizing ways to simplify our lives even further, based primarily on our desire to spend more time exploring the wild places we feel increasingly drawn toward.

We love almost everything we do on our homestead, even those tasks most would deem onerous or flat-out unpleasant – the manure mucking, the firewood splitting, the post hole digging, and so on. But in way, that love is its own strange burden, because every time we think about cutting something out, we can’t quite bring ourselves to do it. The truth is, though, the diversity and abundance of our food production has become almost laughably absurd. If you were to stop by for dinner tonight, I could offer duck, chicken, beef, pork, lamb, venison, or the varmint of your choosing. With the exception of the venison, all were raised and/or harvested on this land, by our hands. For vegetables, you might choose kale, or potatoes, carrots or beets, with butter from the churn. Kimchi. We could have applesauce and chokecherry sauce. Green beans. Dried chanterelles from the pantry. Blueberries, raspberries, strawberries, currants, gooseberries. I could go on for quite some time.

We don’t actually need all this stuff; we’ve just gotten used to it. Don’t get me wrong, it’s real nice to have all this amazing food. Real nice. And it’s even nicer because rarely in its growing and processing do we feel that obligatory sense of busyness I wrote of earlier. Rarely do we feel anything but gratitude for the opportunity to work for something as liberating and flat out beautiful as the sense that our lives are in our hands.

Penny and I talk a lot about balance. And about how our sense of balance is not a static thing. Our idea of how to structure our lives to accommodate that balance is constantly evolving. I think that’s good. Lately, we’ve been wondering if perhaps we don’t need six or seven species of meat to choose from. Maybe four or five would do. Maybe we could get by with only three varieties of berries in the freezer. Maybe then we could spend a bit more time walking the woods with the boys, who growing up as fast as all the cliches suggest. Faster, even. Rye just turned 10; Fin’s about to hit 13. They’ll be gone soon enough and when they’re gone, I suspect we won’t look at one another across the too-quiet dinner table and say too bad we took all those woods walks with the fellas or I really regret making time to go fishing with the boys, don’t you? 

Of course, there’s no point in living life in anticipation of future regrets, because the risk of someday realizing you should never have lived in anticipation of future regrets is far greater than the risk of anticipating those regrets, if that makes any sense. But there’s every point in stepping back every so often to take measure of your balance and, to the extent it feels necessary, shifting weight on the tightrope of your life.

Because last time I checked, that’s a one-way tightrope. We don’t get to walk it again.