Pamela reminisces.

What terror stalks the heart of darkness in midnight Portland? The answer: unattended, languishing vegetables, ripe for the picking at the hands of an unsung, mysterious benign force for creative produce ’emancipation’. We bring you, in an exclusive interview: A Canner Darkly.

It was only when I sat the wrinkled brown paper bag on the table at the bridal shower that I started to feel self-conscious. Beautifully-wrapped large rectangular boxes containing lovely things and useful appliances had already started to accumulate, and here I was, placing what looked like a prankster’s bag of dog shit in their midst. I looked around for a Sharpie in order to write some kind of witty explanation on the bag, but all I could think of was “artisanal tonic syrup” and that would probably just make it seem worse.

From my leafy guard I could see the passerine flocks soaring past—almost at finger’s reach—I was so high up this tree. I could see the entire world from my roost, and was deliciously invisible doing it. This was true freedom. The wind gushed, and I waved with the tippy-top of this spindly bole, less afraid of those great heights than what was on the ground.

When I mentioned to my friend Amanda that I was collecting interviews with first-time farmers and foragers for our New Agrarians series, she immediately knew that I had to talk to her cousin, Nick. Nick Zigelbaum, founder of the Bull Moose Hunting Society, is also a first-time farmer–and, as it turned out, a passionate champion of farming being a means of healing economic potholes, teaching you to be comfortable with failure, and, most importantly, giving you the chance to eat some really, really good eggs. This is the record of our conversation, which ranged from open-source farm machinery to the benefits of grass-fed animals and back again. Chickens may be farming’s gateway drug, but, Nick does an excellent job of making you believe that everyone should be taking hits off of the self-reliance pipe, and doing what they can to put the power of growing your own food back into the hands of as many people as possible.

The smell of freshly cut grass has always been one of my favorites. Usually accompanied by a warm summer day, the anxiolytic odor of mowed lawns has a great effect on my mood and almost always leads to a smile. Here in the Northeast we have just emerged from a particularly terrible and odorless winter, and I probably won’t be huffing any cis-3-hexenal for at least another month. So to bide my time, I set out to create some cocktails that evoke certain feelings associated with grass, landscaping, and general bucolic splendor.

While some immigrants assimilate as quickly as possible, some stay foreign. The Laotian and Cambodian kids I played with as a girl were so Asian: barefoot all the time, weaving long Chinese jump-ropes from scavenged rubber bands, eating green plums from neighboring fruit trees, with salt and hot sauce. Some of their parents never really learned English, even after many years in Portland. The southeastern Asians pretty much stuck to themselves, and by the late 1980s, they’d formed little cliques of attractive, popular kids with highly-styled bangs and superior pencil erasers, and seemed to prefer their exclusivity to integration.

It was late January and I’d been in Portland all of two weeks. We do odd things to get ourselves where we need to be, especially when love has gelatinized the mind into a quivering blob of pure acquiescence. In this, my own state of fevered madness, I had inserted myself voluntarily into a room with free rent above a canine hotel in yon Southeast.

Last summer, we burned our tomatoes.

I’ve heard that other people have soft sensory memories of childhood–the warm embrace of a parent. The pleasing shape of a favorite toy. The mad lights of an amusement park, spangling the interior space of the file drawer marked ‘Age 10’ in the basement recesses of the brain. I chiefly remember what I ate and what I read.