A Literary Feast

I Think I Can’t

Posted on June 24th, 2013

Home canning is a great way to preserve local seasonal produce and it seems to me that everyone is doing it. I can’t scroll down my facebook page without seeing an instagram photo of the various stages of home canning, from the copious amount of item x about to be cleaned, cooked, and canned to the American made glass jars filled with the culinary rainbow. I think it’s great, and even greater when they share their bounty with the likes of me. I myself am no stranger to the commitment of cleaning, storing, and finding creative ways to enjoy the seasonal vegetative bounty available in New England, so it would seem that I should be canning up a storm. I am not. I am not even canning up a sun shower, in fact I am not canning anything at all. I’d like to be but I have taken one—make that several—too many food microbiology and safety classes to feel confident about home canning.

The conceivable horrors of bacteria creating a deadly colony in my jam just waiting to poison any who try to enjoy it is too much for me. Except, that I know that in order for that to happen the harmful bacteria must be present to begin with, which is unlikely in fresh produce. And that once it is heated to the correct temperature it will be dead, which eliminates the threat—unless it has secreted a toxin. I also know that when it is sealed properly there will be no oxygen which eliminates the threat of aerobic bacteria, leaving only the much more horrific threat of anaerobic bacteria which are even less likely to be present in the first place. Finally, I know that if it is improperly sealed it will be obvious, with the growth of mold or other visible or odoriferous unpleasantness and thus easy to avoid ingesting.

However irrational, my apprehension persists. What is even more confounding is my willingness to enjoy items canned in homes by other people—people who presumably know much less about culinary microbiology. I think I always assume their ‘ignorance is bliss’ situation extends to whatever they have made and whoever ingests it. Also, it’s much easier not to think of all of the perils of canning when presented with the delicious finished product than when faced with the pressure of actively avoiding all of them simultaneously.

I do love the idea of canning so much. Perhaps those pounds of tomatoes from our CSA share wouldn’t seem so copious if I could preserve them. If only I could keep their sun-ripened deliciousness tucked away until the bleakest moment of a barren New England winter! But alas, I am here at that place where my own idiosyncratic nature is keeping me from reaching my full domestic culinary greatness. It’s a problem. But I hear the first step is admitting you have a problem…perhaps this summer I can.

Categories: Uncategorized

Potluck

Posted on June 24th, 2013

I am very good at eating, and I don’t mean this in the joking sense of, “I eat a lot.” I neither want nor need to excuse my constant snacking, second helpings, or late night desserts. When I say that I am very good at eating I mean it in the traditional sense. Food – cooking and eating – is a part of my life that I devote time, skill, and artistry to; and I don’t go it alone. I have a pack of epicurious friends, a scullery support group, a guild of craft eaters: Tuesday Night Potluck.

It began, as so many things do, with discontent. We were all busy, feeling isolated, and were looking for a way to be together more. “Let’s try and have a meal together every week,” someone said. We chose Tuesday as the most commonly convenient day and made only one rule: show up and eat. No planning, no pressure, and so much butter. We did it, then we did it again, and to the surprise of even ourselves in a culture that tells us we – Generation Y-ers – don’t follow through with things, it worked. People came, people brought food, and people ate. Potluck soon became its own entity, whispers of it spreading through our various networks and invitations to join recieved as I imagine a request to tea with the Queen would be; “Really? I mean, yes! Oh gosh, what should I bring? I have to make a good first impression.” Some weeks I plan ahead, prepping and cooking for hours, while other weeks I offer up a bottle of wine and a block of cheese, and even other weeks – exhausted and running late – I don’t bring anything. We take turns hosting and count on someone else having the opposite kind of week. With a few notable exceptions, we always end up with a meal.

Potluck, however, is so much more than that. In Potluck, we’ve found a group of people who pay attention to all the parts of eating. The part where someone volunteers to host; the part where we all trickle in and talk about our days; the part where you wear a party dress or pajamas, depending on your mood. Bear hugs, tall glasses of home-brewed beer, and trying to find enough chairs are underappreciated elements of digestion. To eat, to really eat, you need to relieve someone of a stew pot so they can take off their shoes. You need to laugh over six different asparagus dishes because hey, it is June after all. You need to lapse into a stuffed silence, staring into the fire or out over a field of fireflies, in the company of people who also eat, who also pay attention, who also show up.

Having a craft implies the production of something by hand, with care and skill. This begs the question, what does the craft of eating produce? Certainly the various crafts of cooking result in myriad food stuffs, but when we eat together with such intention, with such care and purpose, are we simply consuming those things or do we make something as well? I can only say yes, then find myself at a loss for words, because the importance of Potluck still eludes articulation. By eating together, we make bad moods into okay moods. We make two hours feel like a whole day off. We make new friends, plans to go hiking, and suggestions on how to tweak a recipe. We make interesting conversation, and we make each other laugh until we cry.

Being a good eater is not always easy, but honing our craft has been worth it. Potluck practices the hardest parts of life – giving with grace, receiving with gratitude, abandoning the mask you put on for the world, and relaxing into the moment. As uncommonly strong as the gossamer threads of a silkworm, the product of Potluck is a chosen family. By eating together, we practice a long tradition of human community, of people creating and maintaining space for each other and all our various relationships, of sharing our bounty and our joy.

Even when we have popcorn for dinner.

Categories: Uncategorized

Daily and Supersubstantial

Posted on June 24th, 2013

“Cult” and “Culture”–the words share a root, the Latin cultus which, loosely, means “to aid, cultivate, and care for”. The modern usage of “culture” is essentially an agricultural metaphor, in which men and women are likened to plants that must be raised with care and patience so that they might produce healthy and nutritious fruit. It is a method of raising people in the way that agriculture is a method of raising crops. “Cult”, in antiquity, before it came to mean matching jumpsuits and cyanide punch, was the basic form of religious devotion, built on the idea that proper cultivation requires a patience and dedication that borders on worship. The argument implicit in both words is that people and gods, respectively, should be shown the same care and deference that is naturally shown to food (the wisdom of the mantra “eat, pray, love” must, then, predate Elizabeth Gilbert and Julia Roberts by an order of millenia). For the Ancient Greeks, “cult” was a much more profoundly divine and important practice than the poetic production and recitation of myth. In cult practice, the lives, struggles, and passions of the gods were reenacted ritually; much more than mere imitation, these performances were the means by which the stories and power of the gods were made real and immediate. They were creative practices which generated divine energies in the lives of human beings.

Christian religious practice, from its earliest incarnations to the present, can, I think, be talked about as the cult practice of preparing and sharing a meal. Its central spectacle, the Eucharist, privileges bread as the means by which divine energies (which Christians call “grace”) are manifested in physical reality and distributed throughout the community. The priest, who has echoed the words of the Last Supper habitually for two millennia, recites the Words of Institution; “Take this, all of you, and eat it: for this is my body, which will be given up for you.” Much has been made of the implication of a god becoming a human being in the Christian story; it suggests an elevation of human life to a position of divine celebration. But what can we make of a god who also becomes a loaf of bread, a god for whom the place of the holiest celebration is not a temple but the dinner table?

One of the most recognizable, and often-repeated, phrases among the overwhelming volume of Christian text is the request in the Lord’s Prayer (also known as the Our Father) that god “give us this day our daily bread”. But the Greek word, epiousios, which is here translated as “daily”, is rather more complicated; it appears only twice in all known text written in Classical Greek – in the Lord’s Prayer as printed in ancient copies of the Gospels of Mathew and Luke. As such, it does not have a clear equivalent in English: the translation “daily” dates back to some of the earliest Latin translations of the Gospels. In his revised Latin translation called the Vulgate, St. Jerome offers the more direct “supersubstantial”, drawing on the Greek roots epi (over/on/against) and ousia (substance). In the space between these two translations, we can begin to glimpse something of the mystical nature of bread.

It is difficult, I think, for people in our time to think about religion and nature in the way that they must have seemed to people in the time that these Christian traditions were being established. The two would not have been as separate as we consider them today; thinkers as diverse in background and piety as St. Francis and Baruch Spinoza have espoused doctrines of the unity of god and nature that are based primarily on the kind of observable phenomena and sense of childlike awe that were much more widespread in pre-Enlightenment cultures. Without the knowledge of microbiology and chemistry that is so intrinsic to our modern process of cooking, each loaf of bread must have seemed like a small miracle, the ritual of human interaction with simple ingredients from nature combining with the mystery of divine intervention to form the daily meal. This is what makes the puzzle of epiousios so enthralling; it contains within itself the idea that the miracle of a loaf of bread is necessarily both daily (as in required regularly for human survival) and supersubstantial (as in beyond the physical, observable world). We can see, then, that the embodiment of god in a loaf of bread in the Christian cult of the Eucharist betrays a wonder not only at the mythic miracles of creation and resurrection, but on the everyday miracles that provide for human life; in fact, it places the two on the same level.

I don’t think it’s necessary for one to “be religious” to find something worthwhile in this perspective on breadmaking. In part, this is because I don’t think pre-Enlightenment religious groups had the kind of relationship with religion that we do; it was not a matter of belonging to one social group in contrast and opposition to another, but of contemplating one’s place within the enormity and complexity of nature. These rites were developed in a time when the overwhelming majority of the world’s population worked in agriculture, and the mysteries of beauty and nature must have seemed much more immediate in their lives then they do in many of ours. Every loaf of bread to them would have been the result of so many months of things going right, of all their hard work being rewarded by crops growing and yielding, and the final small miracle in which dough becomes bread must have seemed like confirmation that they worked in concert with forces they could neither understand nor control. From this perspective, we can really begin to understand what “cult”, “culture”, and cultus have to do with each other. The mysteries and miracles of religion, human life, and agriculture, though we so often speak of them in isolation, are here shown to be intrinsically woven together, and in fact part of the same ritual that melds the daily (that which we do every day in order to live and feed ourselves) and the supersubstantial (that which is beyond our power to comprehend) into one system of practices.

The next time you make a loaf of bread, try not to think about leavening or gluten, but think about your actions as a small, simple ritual. Think about how central these actions are to human life and history. Think about how many millennia, how many thousands of generations all over the world, have performed a variation of the little performance you and these simple ingredients are giving. Think about the reverence you might have felt if you lived two thousand years ago, and this ancient technique, handed down through your family since before anyone could remember (it wouldn’t have been written down anywhere) was the most immediate, necessary, and fundamental miracle that kept you alive, although you witnessed it every day. You may find that the idea of god in a loaf of bread is not so strange after all.

Categories: Uncategorized

Apprentice, Eating.

Posted on June 24th, 2013

I apprenticed in the furniture making shop of a surly old Swiss man with strong opinions and no desire to keep them from anybody. He would shape high finish masterpieces from rough slabs of lumber while telling dirty jokes and comparing the breasts of the women he had dated in his youth. He would pause in his work to belt opera and then, in the same breath, call the radio host the c-word for pronouncing the composer’s name incorrectly. He was quite a contradiction, but one thing that held steady in every aspect of his life was a fine attention to detail and a high level of pride in his work. I expected, of course, to learn more than my brain could retain about design, joinery, hand tools and the like during my time in his shop. What i didn’t expect was to also acquire a wealth of knowledge about food.

I spent my first few months in his shop (once an old train station it was still nestled in against a live railroad line and would rumble and shake whenever the big engines rolled by) nervously sawing away at the scrap wood that he provided me, learning to hand-cut traditional joinery such as dovetails and through tenons. I carefully pulled the blade through every cut, wanting to get a nice tight result and impress him. I cared very much about earning his approval and feeling like I deserved my place in his shop, and his stoic demeanor and sparse words when it came to reviewing my work made it hard to know if I was going in the right direction.

Every day at noon he would head home to have lunch and I would set my tools down, pull my dust mask off, and head out to the porch to have my sandwich and tea. He returned one day while I was still sipping out in the sun and handed me something as he headed back to his bench. I looked down and saw that I know clutched a fist full of radishes. I popped back in through the door and looked quizzically at him.

‘Eat them,’ he said simply.

I do not tolerate radishes well. It’s not that I don’t enjoy them, it’s that they are spicy. My guts don’t generally get down with that type of thing. But. What choice did I have? He wanted me to eat the radishes. I had better eat the radishes. So I did. I could see that he was watching me. As I felt the first ripples of fire spreading beneath my sternum I smiled and told him how great they were. He nodded his approval and went back to work. I stepped outside to gather my lunch things, lurched off the porch, and vomited beside the train ties. I swept some leaves over the pink mush and went back to work.

Sometimes he would recite recipes to me, which I would scribble down on stray pieces of maple and cherry. I would return home with instructions for baked apple tarts, turkey thighs, cheesecake, and proper ‘pasta bolognese’. Try as I might I knew my renditions would be considered inedible by him, but I choked them down and reported back on how great they were. This was because, in addition to being a far superior craftsman, he was also a far superior cook. Having been to his house once for an incredible dinner (even the salad dressing blew my mind) my wife and I feared returning the invitation because we knew we could not meet his standards. Luckily I knew his favorite wines and I think that helped him accept the dinner that we put together for him.

After a trip to the Caribbean I returned with for-real fire sauce and watched in amazement as he guzzled it down while telling me that the peppers in the Caribbean were far hotter than any you could get in New England. He explained that he had to eat it up fast before it lost its potency after mixing with our bland air, and lamented how much his asshole would burn that night. I was schooled on which birds you could hunt in the area and how to prepare each one, went ramp hunting in the woods behind the shop and dug up bagfuls of the pungent bulbs to kick spring into gear, was taught to distinguish wild mushrooms from their poisonous look-a-likes, and learned that ‘all Europeans’ think peanut butter is filthy and disgusting.

I left after four years with a shiny new collection of Japanese chisels, a keener sense of design, a u-haul full of boards, and a much fuller appreciation of and passion for good food and careful cooking. I no longer shoved meals thoughtlessly into my face, but put them together much as I did the pieces of furniture I built, in a way where I would taste and appreciate each ingredient. I had learned that careful craftsmanship should carry over into all aspect’s of a person’s life. But. I will always eat peanut butter like it’s my job. Because not every lesson can be absorbed.

Categories: Uncategorized

Secret Handshake

Posted on May 17th, 2013

I’ve spent no small amount of time feeling that I needed to be more rooted to the here and now.  That my life was something that I was constantly sliding off of. Life as greased pig. I’d fling myself on top of it, only to have it run squealing for the fences again. Half of the time I’d feel the sharp loss, and the other half of the time I’d want to sit back on my haunches in the mud, light up a cigarette, and say ‘fuck you too, mister.’

 

Farming, in my mind, had always seemed a sure-bet way to anchor oneself to the present. There’s nothing more immediate, after all, than dirt, than weather, bare and uncaring. The last time I worked up the juice to leave the slow ebb of love, it also seemed like something I could pin future hope to—a bright thread I could follow back home, wherever that was.

 

After a month of riding my bike around a city that had never really been mine, interviewing young urban farmers with a pocket audio recorder, I successfully pestered a literary agent into being interested in my writing. Only, she didn’t care for the stories I’d gathered from countless lot-sized patches of dirt across the northern neighborhoods. Go back to where you came from, she said, and tell me what you do once you get there. Go put your hands in the dirt. I want that.

 

And, leaving, I thought that I wanted that too. Could see it, shuffling behind the atmosphere on the plane ride back across the country. Could feel it, geography snapping back into place along my bones disembarking in Boston, rising with the low-slung hills of my hometown. Their reasonably-sized trees. The west had perpetually overwhelmed me with its grandeur, and I’d rattled around in it, a grain of sand in an auditorium, hoping for purchase, skittering in every slight wind. So I came back, looking to scratch the ache for the familiar. Wanting to know, and be known, by the right landscape.

 

I got a job. I moved in with an old friend, who was living in the childhood home of another dear friend. A little house high on a hill, hidden by trees, inconvenient to anything in western Massachusetts. There were chickens and ducks. And, out at the other end of our dirt road—goats.

 

The woman who owns them is intimidating. If she wants to do something—cheese making, weaving, martial arts, biochemistry—she Does It. To someone who’d just recently spent the better part of a year Not Doing It, it was gut-knotting stuff. She was a woodcut. I was…a watercolor. I was going to try it anyway. Convinced of its rightness. I was going to try goats.

 

And this conviction is how you find yourself, stupid-thumbed once more, pulling on cold-stiff overalls in the thin dawn light. Over your pajamas. Over your hoodie. Thick socks, someone’s borrowed boots. Your tin can car rocking across the ruts that have frozen overnight. The high cry of the rooster chasing you down the hill.

 

But the goats are warm. Their flanks leak steam, and their noses are soft, lipping at you, curious, shy, indifferent. You learn their names. They each have a song. You’ll hum these self-consciously while milking them, later, but for now you’re punching ice out of nighttime water buckets. Plunging a heating coil into the waiting refills. Hay, tickling down into your shirt, your hair, your lungs. And that first day, that first week, is magic—the prep cook, pre-dawn part of you coming back to life in the quiet repetition of chores. Hands hauling water. Hands distributing hay. Hands stroking flanks, learning personalities.

 

You are ham-fisted when it comes to milking, and know that your first goat tolerates you, barely, jerking the teat around in your confused adolescent way. You’re told to go home, get a rubber glove, fill it with water, poke a hole in a dangling finger. Practice. The first time that you get this right, and the ripple of your fingers yields a steady stream of water into the kitchen sink, it feels like singing. Or cutting cucumbers, rapidly, or any activity that is the simultaneous remembering and forgetting of a thousand thousand things. The first time that you fill a large mason jar with warm milk, and carry it home, it feels as snug as a newborn in the crook of your arm, and some broken corner behind your rib re-inflates with it.

 

And for a short while, there are early mornings that pass in a growing surety of purpose, and there is homemade cajeta in your coffee, and the largest dog that leans contentedly against your legs when you come in from milking and sit at the kitchen table.

 

But, then, the new year. You get bronchitis. A week passes, fevers and strange dreams and texted apologies. The pattern breaks. And you hear that high squeal again, something running for the fences. Some will, departing.

 

Farming, of any kind, with any animal, requires the now. It requires it daily. It requires your sweat, and it wants your stubbornness in the face of illness, weather, sleepless evenings. And if you are lacking these things, it will find out, quickly. And I was. I let the hiccup turn into prolonged radio silence, and allowed the chatter of outside life down the hill to flood away the quiet animal mornings. One week, then another, and then the sudden realization that it had been months since I’d stood in the half-shadows of the early morning barn, watching the light take the walls.

 

I hadn’t meant to. But it had happened. The present had packed its bags—leaving only the echo, and the anxious anticipation. I’d lost it.

 

I’d also long since stopped sending pages to that agent—and hadn’t resumed. The thing about farming is that it’s a marvelous way to anchor yourself to a particular ground—but you have to be ready. You have to be sure.

 

And then, even with the surety, you have to be willing to get up, and get on with it, in the face of farming’s indifference about your infirmities. The goats don’t know that you won’t be getting married. The goats shove their rough heads into the bib of your overalls, asking for breakfast. There is the barn. There is the pasture. That is all the world.

 

For now, I’ve failed at goat tending. And sometimes, it seems that aging is just a progression of losing the romance of different notions, each in turn, and waiting to see which facts will stay. I don’t have the fact of the ringing stream of milk steaming up from a cold bucket. But. I have the hands that know that motion, secretly, in my pockets. And you have to think that it’s a small hope. Riding it out. Ready, for when I’m sure.

 

Categories: Uncategorized

Protect the Freshness is Over

Posted on May 17th, 2013

If you’re living in China and just barely working out an income from freelance projects, you might take a job doing voiceovers for propaganda films. A string of hours in a Beijing recording booth can earn you fifty, maybe sixty dollars. You can take breaks and they’ll give you lunch. There will be bottled tea. Afterward, you will walk out into the spring air with a new sense of wealth and possibility, financially settled for another week and able to forget what you had just done.

I spent a year doing the odd English voiceover for Chinese Communist Party films. In 2006 I worked on a crushing celebration of Tibetan agricultural practices. “The women do all the cooking and cleaning, which is their pleasure,” I read from the script. “The farmers undoubtedly adore oats.”

“Tibetans love the local plants,” I continued, “using the woody stems for roasting barley. Its young leaves are eaten by goats and sheep.”

At the end of a section the editor, who had a PhD in television drama, played back my recording. I watched the high altitude wheat threshing and the gentle billow of women’s skirts, my voice skittering over the pictures.

On the way to the studio one day, I noticed a series of bright posters decorated with big bubble characters and photographs. I scrutinized the pictures. People could be seen pinning red Communist Party badges to their blouses and sweaters, or standing in a wooded area with their fists raised in the air.

“That’s probably part of the Bao Xian campaign,” an editor told me. “Bao Xian means Protect the Freshness. It’s the Party’s self-promoting campaign, started last year. You should ask Pan about it. He’s the Party member among us editors. He’ll know more.”

“It’s just a campaign,” Pan said. “All Party members have to participate. It’s a lot of meetings, not a big deal.”

“Not a big deal?” an editor named Yi seemed incredulous. “This is the largest political campaign in China since Mao died. Already the Party has spent something like 10 billion yuan on it—propaganda, organizing, everything.”

“A lot of people think that maybe that money could have gone to other things,” Pan said.

Walking into the recording studio, I pointed out the posters to the editors. “Oh, yeah, this is definitely Protect the Freshness,” Pan said. “Look over here, this is funny.” He drew a line with his finger under the main characters of the campaign name and then covered part of a third character with his hand.

“See, if you just read this part here,” he said, “it looks like it says, ‘advanced sex education.’” The two editors cracked up.

The Chinese Communist Party meets once every five years in what’s called the National Congress. That’s often where large, new campaigns get unveiled. Past campaigns include Away With All Pests and Grasping the Large, Letting Go of the Small. The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was essentially one massive campaign. The largest and best known campaign of recent years is Promote a Harmonious Society, introduced in 2005 and bolstered by former president Hu Jintao’s addendum of The Eight Honors, Eight Shames, which included the admonition: “Do not wallow in luxuries and pleasures.” Campaigns are communicated through ubiquitous billboards and signs, radio commentary, television chatter. They become folded into life in China, trickling down to the village chalkboards. They are implemented through regular meetings of China’s 80 million party members, roughly six percent of the population.

Living envelope to envelope, I had time to find out more about things like Protect the Freshness. I wondered what local-level meetings of the world’s largest political party might be like. I asked the editors if they knew how I could learn more. One gave me the number of Fu, a Party boss in Henan province. “This guy would have been responsible for implementing Protect the Freshness,” the editor said. “Maybe you can learn more from him.”

On the phone, Fu sounded confused, almost baffled, by my interest in seeing him. But he was broadly welcoming and offered to have one of his men pick me up when I got close to Jiguan, his village. I booked a sleeper train from Beijing to Zhengzhou, capital of Henan province. From there I could catch another train and a string of buses to the boss’ village. When I stepped down the stairs toward the platform, I noticed a sign in blue and red: “The moment of boarding is when the happiness of travel begins.”

Jiguan means Cockscomb. The village is located near the town of White Sparrow. The whole area had an especially bird-oriented turn of mind. I considered this as the morning minivan to Cockscomb filled up with smoking men.

“Boss FU!” the driver called when we pulled up. But Fu was already outside. What was this woman doing here? his expression visibly wondered. What does she want from me? Our cursory introductions over the phone coupled with my hesitancy to directly mention Protect the Freshness definitely rendered my arrival something of a random event. I was, by the estimations of all present, the first American to visit Cockscomb, a village of roughly 1,600. This alone drew what local crowd could be drawn.

Party Boss Fu’s home was a cement floored structure with basic wood furniture and a straw roof. A large poster hung on the wall depicting a western style living room. In nearly every rural living room I had seen in China, a photo of a nicer living room was pasted to the wall. The television rested on top of its original Styrofoam box on an old wooden hutch.

I told Fu again that I had come to better understand the conditions in a rural area. Fu nodded and remarked on how poor the place must seem compared to America. He offered me a cigarette before making a phone call to ask—what to do about this foreigner? The options proved indeterminate so Fu cut a watermelon and gave me a piece. I said, “You must be very busy” and he said, “No, no,” “Lots of meetings today?” “No.”

I handed over the gifts that I had brought—a photo album, a new soccer ball and a bottle of grain alcohol. Fu seemed most enamored with the alcohol, which he polished and showed to his wife before stationing it on a rack above their bed. He tossed the other items in the corner and, taking a second piece of watermelon, began to brief me on Cockscomb.

“The average income here is just over 1000 yuan per year,” he said. “Just about everyone is a farmer. One of the biggest events in recent years is that our secondary school moved to Chen village, which is far away. Now the students have to walk too far. Another problem is that the roads around here are bad and need repair.” Fu estimated that 500 people had left in recent years to find work elsewhere, mostly in Guangzhou, Wuhan and Beijing.

I decided to ask him about Protect the Freshness.

“Protect the what? I’ve got no idea about this campaign,” he said. “We have no connection to the bigger government bodies and their discussions,” Fu waved his hands. He threw a watermelon rind on the floor.

My heart sank. Party members and leaders at all levels across the country would have been involved in this campaign. There was no way Fu could have escaped. And yet Fu resolutely shut down any further discussion. I began to wonder what the hell I had done, traveling for days just to sit in a stranger’s home, bringing up political campaigns that he didn’t want to talk about. And why would he? In a place where everything gets done based on personal relationships, I had basically dropped out of the sky. I had become, as both a foreigner and a stranger, a kind of oppressive force—sitting around, eating watermelon, asking about Protect the Freshness. But here I am, I thought. I have to keep going.

Over lunch, Fu talked more about the road and the school. His wife went to the table after he had eaten and piled her plate with leftovers before clearing the dishes. Soon Fu was snoring on the sofa. I decided to go for a walk.

A farmer in suit pants and a button down shirt spotted me and stepped out of his field. He carried a wooden hoe balanced over his shoulder. “Where are you from?” he asked me. “America” I said. “I just came to see the countryside.”

“Well, as you can see, this is a backward place,” the farmer said. “It has not yet developed. Of course, over there they are building a new set of houses and such,” he said, pointing someplace beyond the fields. “But not here.”

“One thing I’m interested in is the government campaign Protect the Freshness,” I said.

“Protect—do what?” he asked.

“Protect the Freshness,” I said again. “A government campaign among Party members. Are you a member of the Communist Party?” I asked.

“Yes, communist,” he said. “But I don’t know anything about this Protect the Freshness. It probably comes from a foreign country.” The man stared at me. “Are you looking for a refrigerator?” he asked.

“No,” I said.

“No. I haven’t heard of this,” the farmer concluded. “Just have a look around.” He walked back into the field, his straw hat casting a wide shadow over his shoulders.

I sat down on a rock. A one-legged man came by and introduced himself. He told me he lost his leg in a farming accident in 1991 and was still seeking the compensation he was promised: “Two hundred yuan every month they are cheating me out of,” he said. “Do you know a good lawyer?” I told him I didn’t. “Our biggest problem is corruption,” he said.

A 30-year-old woman who just returned from washing clothes in a nearby stream invited me to her home for tea. Her daughter attended the school up the hill. “Every year the price of attendance gets higher,” she said. “Now it’s up to 300 yuan per year. And it’s supposed to be free. There’s a big difference between the regulations and the reality around here.”

Suddenly Fu’s wife arrived, peering her head through the woman’s window and waving a hat for me. We went off down the road to find Fu who, she said, was “busy fixing the new road.” Fu’s wife paused at a small grocery where four women were playing mahjong. They gave us a package of child-sized popsicles. Fu’s wife and I ate them until, walking back along the road, she decided they were disgusting and threw the whole lot, plastic and all, into the glistening field.

Next stop was another village corner store and another game of mahjong, this one attended by Fu. A group of toddlers and children drifted around, barefoot and grubby. When one player tried to determine my Chinese level, I told him I speak Beijing style Mandarin but no Henanese. “Oh! Beijing-hua,” he said. “The language of lies!” The other players laughed and returned to their pieces.

Another player said between moves, “From the time of Mao, this place has not changed. Except now we are getting a road.”

Fu and his wife took me around the corner and down a dirt path to the Central Cockscomb Government Offices. “The Protect the Freshness campaign is over,” a man seated behind a desk told me. “It’s still continuing elsewhere, but it’s certainly not open to visitors. And it is not here.”

“This campaign was important to advance Party members and help us to remember the key theories,” the official continued. “I think all Party cadres benefited from Protect the Freshness. We had regular meetings here in Jiguan and we worked hard at it. And now that it is over we are even more engaged.” I asked if it was really, really over. He said it was really, really over.

A black sedan with tinted windows and plush, leather seats pulled up to the office. The officials directed me to the front and drove slowly, with all the windows rolled down. We pulled up to the biggest restaurant in White Sparrow and the men led the way to a private room in the back. White Sparrow is a gambling town, dusted with mahjong tables and little shops that sell playing cards, grain alcohol and sunflower seeds. The officers immediately seated themselves around a padded card table and began playing for cash. 70 yuan changed hands in the first round—about a month’s salary in Cockscomb.

Teenage waitresses began bringing in plates of fried egg with tomato, diced cucumber, braised turtle. The men commenced shouting, drinking, pleading that I call the boss “Fu Jintao,” a play on then-president Hu Jintao’s name. Faces turned red, crying with laughter.

The men drove Fu and me back to Fu’s house, as far as the car would go in the narrow village lanes. A profound blackness had settled on the fields, pierced only by fireflies. Fu lit the way with his cell phone.

His wife rushed over to me. “That legless man you met today,” she said. “He opposes us. He’s a cheat, nothing he says is true. Yes! Nothing! He takes everything from his parents. 45 years old and his parents support him. So he has nothing. It would be best if you don’t listen to him.”

She took a sip of water.

“What are you writing? Don’t write about him!” she shouted. “If you write about him, he will find out and get into my business! He cheats people. Forget you met him! He is a bad, bad man.” And with that, I slipped off to my cot by the pigsty and the Fu household retired for the night. In the black paddy fields the bullfrogs croaked one long, sustained greeting.

The next morning I got a better look at Cockscomb, its narrow meandering dirt roads, the canopy of tree branches overhead. The paddies were shallow, square pools packed with bright shoots. Several women in broad straw hats worked to transplant the rice shoots bunch by bunch.

The mammoth Fu family pig roamed through the courtyard, consuming ladles of slop at his trough. The following day would be dang wu jie, one of many Chinese holidays that celebrate a dynastic official’s triumph over corruption. A young woman entered the courtyard with a bowl of fatty, blood-smeared flesh. The morning was filled with the business of washing and feeding, of ensuring the chicken stay inside and the pig stays outside.

In preparation for the holiday, Fu decided to take me with him on his market visit. Suddenly, we were back in White Sparrow, the center of business and commerce as far as Cockscomb was concerned. A woman carried a large bloody fish by a handle of rope through its mouth and gills. The fish flopped and struggled as she brought it through the crowd.

We stopped briefly in the bird market. First their throats had to be cut. Blood spurted and then thickened. A woman ripped off their feathers. But this left behind a fine layer of downy fur. So she dunked the birds into a vat of black, bubbling wax and then threw them into tubs of water. The blackness congealed around the animals in a hard casing. This the woman peeled off with quick movements. The birds emerged spotlessly clean and unmistakably dead, not at all what they had been moments before.

Fu and his wife loaded their groceries and two of these birds into an old rice bag. They carried it through the market, each holding an end. At the convenience store on the corner, Fu’s wife inspected detergent while Fu drank a cup of tea.

Fu told me he was 51 years old and had been the Cockscomb Party Boss for “about 30 years” or “since I was 21 or 20,” he said.

“Isn’t that kind of young?” I asked.

“Huh,” he said.

Fu married in 1981. A matchmaker made the introduction and a pig and several chickens were slaughtered for the occasion. They have two children: a 24-year-old woman and 20-year-old man. I asked Fu how he could have more than one child given the country’s One Child Policy. “It’s not that you strictly can’t have more than one child,” he said. “If your first child is a girl, then you can try for a boy. But if your first child is a boy than you can’t have any more children.”

Back in the village we walked up the dirt path to Cockscomb Elementary. The school had over 100 students, 6 to 12 years old, not enough supplies, dirt floors and brick walls. I peered slices of blue through the cracks in the roof. The statement “Education Forms the Basis of the Long-Term Plan” ringed the school’s outer wall. The slogan dated to the 1950s, the principal told me. “Mao Zedong Thought,” he said, as if identifying the make and model of a used car on a lot.

Inside we were flanked by portraits of Mao, Zhu De, Deng Xiaoping, and Zhou Enlai, all the heavy hitters of Chinese communism. We engaged in protracted silences and tea sipping as I tried to gauge their intentions and they, undoubtedly, tried to gauge mine. “The curved rooftop tiles are several hundred years old,” the principal pointed out.

“The government is not giving us any money,” Fu lamented. “We have to fix the leaks ourselves.” I recalled the gambling, the banquet and the fact that just by strangely, unexpectedly, being there I had probably caused money to be spent. “The school is actually free to attend,” Fu continued. “There is a lot of loose talk around here. We are charging 300 yuan per year, yes. But that is for necessary repairs, not for attendance. Of course, we have not yet been able to begin these repairs.”

I took down the school address, which read simply: Henan province, Guangshan county, White Sparrow Township, Cockscomb Village, Primary School. If anything got in the general area it was sure to reach its destination, no postal codes needed.

It was time for me to go. I thanked the Fu and the principal both with many handshakes. Fu flipped open his cell phone and placed surely a long awaited call for a car to come and take me away. One of Fu’s associates drove me in a red van out as far as White Sparrow. From there I caught a bus to Guangshan, and then on to Xinyang.

 

Along the way we passed more slogans, each printed in fading white paint on brick walls: “Care For and Love Your Daughter,” “The Road to Happiness Starts with Family Planning,” “Pursue the Study of Science,” “Oppose Evil Religions,” “Build the New Socialist Countryside.”

 

I told Fu’s driver I had heard the average Cockscomb income was now around 1000 yuan per year. I asked if the same was true of government officials. “Oh, that I couldn’t possibly know or guess,” the man said, chuckling as he gripped the wheel. “Our leaders do very good work, though. They are paid accordingly.”

 

Back on the train, three middle-aged men gathered around me. The fattest sat down on the end of my bed. They held court on America (good but full of blood-lust) China (on the up and up) the study of language (difficult) the merits of independence (mixed).

One of the men jotted a phrase down in my notebook to describe China’s interaction with the outside world as he saw it:

“Lang yan si qi,” it read. Smoke rising on all sides.

Another said he was a government official. So I asked him about Protect the Freshness.

“Oh yes, since last year we have been having Protect the Freshness,” he said. “Sometimes we meet every day. We study key texts and also write essays and responses, our thoughts on how to best implement this campaign. I myself have written over 300,000 characters in support.”

I asked him what the point of the campaign was. “Capitalist countries, like Germany, England, your America, they have all had a little bad influence on our communism,” the man said. “So we reviewed our mission. The result was Protect the Freshness, for the advancement of the Party.”

“Did you also criticize yourself and others in these meetings?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said. “There has been some of that.”

Outside the day passed: hot, flat and dry. Henan is part of an agriculturally rich valley that feeds off the Yellow River. From the window I could see some of the land was on fire. Sheets of smoke rose into the sky.

Suddenly the official got up and walked away. I still wanted to ask him how much longer the campaign would last, if it would be possible for a foreigner to go to a meeting. But he was gone and I did not see him again.

 

One of the remaining men grabbed my notebook and wrote: The Chinese People’s Liberation Army Central Entertainment Troup. He showed me his PLA-issued belt.

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Burning Ring of (CSA) Fire

Posted on May 17th, 2013

When most people think of retirement, images of relaxation come to mind. For Nancy and Bruce Livensparger of Fire Ring Farm in Portland, CT, retirement means running a labor-intensive non-profit Community Supported Agricultural operation (CSA). Nancy was a career landscaper whose passion for organic food grew as her interest in controlling invasive species in manicured lawns waned. As GMOs became ubiquitous in the American food supply, Nancy wanted to grow as much of her own food for her family as possible. Subsistence farming on any scale is a big endeavor and she wondered if running a CSA might be the ticket to subsidizing her efforts. As an added bonus, it gets a community involved in the natural food movement. Fire Ring Farm was born.

In 2006 she signed the Northeast Organic Farmer’s Association (NOFA) Pledge and decided to have an experimental CSA with only six shares; just to see if she would like it. She researched prices ranging from non-organic CSAs to organic produce at the local supermarket and factored in the cost of materials to determine a fair price for the expected fruits of her labor. The experiment was met with success and the following year the CSA doubled to twelve members and eventually reached its peak at twenty-four members. It now rests comfortably at twenty members with the remainder of the produce left for the original intent of feeding their family, including their daughter’s family of four who also live on the property.

Although New England’s growing season is limited by harsh winters, planning for and working on the CSA is not. Each season starts in February with a large spreadsheet of what Nancy hopes to deliver to each shareholder for each week from June to October. From there she works backwards figuring out how many seeds to plant for each item each week and when to plant and transplant them in order to have them harvested on the intended week. If that doesn’t seem complex enough, she also factors in a celestial planting calendar based on the lunar cycle to plant and transplant at the optimal times for roots, flowers, leaves or fruits. Then seeds must be purchased, and soon after that they must be planted in the green house.

Fire Ring Farm received an Environmental Quality Incentive Program (EQIP) Grant which provides financial and (just as importantly) technical assistance. Nancy therefore agreed to rotate her crops and grow (non-certified) organic, as well as implementing Integrated Pest Management and recording all diseases and pests found. To help with this the USDA sends a specialist bi-weekly to help her identify the pests and diseases and to advise her on natural ways to reduce or eliminate them. Nancy also works on growing nutrient-dense crops, which requires testing the crops and soil and re-mineralizing the soil as needed. The benefits of this effort are three-fold: it produces nutrient-dense crops with complex sugars; pests interfere less because they prefer simple sugars; and the reduced damage from pests means less opportunity for disease to strike. The mineralized soil which facilitates the nutrient-dense crops is also – in theory – less hospitable to weeds; but Nancy assures me that there are always weeds. When I asked about how the erratic weather patterns of the past few years have affected the CSA, the answer was ‘Not too drastically.’ I realized then that the true strength of CSA is that everyone takes the risk together so that any possible catastrophe doesn’t wipe out the farm. As a member for the past three years I can also say that the efforts put in by Nancy and Bruce throughout the wild weather we have had are extraordinary since I didn’t notice a decrease in the weekly share at all.

Nancy believes strongly in the Community part of CSA and frequently invites members to come help plant, transplant and socialize around a bonfire. Many of the members also maintain vegetable gardens at home, which Nancy encourages and is always willing to assist with; even donating spare seedlings to those who come to help plant. At heart, she wants everyone to grow some of their own food. Nancy’s dedication to expanding her own knowledge is tireless. For every crop that doesn’t yield quite as well as intended, she is looking for a way to improve it next year. I am told she has new ideas for increasing onion and potato yields this year.

Membership is relatively steady with around twenty percent turnover each year and a waiting list that has gone from seventy-five three years ago to around twenty currently; most likely due to an increase in CSAs in the area. When I asked Nancy what she wanted people to know about CSA membership, she said “It’s a lifestyle.” It is a commitment to getting to the farm weekly and then cleaning and storing your share properly to be able to get the best and most out of it. That means at the very least going home and washing and trimming all of the produce, and putting it in Ziploc bags or glass jars to stay fresh. It could even mean canning, or chopping and freezing,or blanching, peeling and freezing – which takes a lot of effort on the front end but can keep you from eating so many peppers in two weeks that you never want to see one again. It will also allow you to enjoy your share of local organic produce into the winter.

Fire Ring Farm currently operates as a non-profit and would require more shares, land, and employees to do otherwise. The likelihood of expansion is slim since the goal was to grow food for their family and educate a community about local and organic food…and they seem to be doing that perfectly well.

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Asparagus officinalis

Posted on May 17th, 2013

Asparagus is a pretty funny thing, when you really think about it. I’ve heard it’s some sort of grass, which makes sense when you see the way it grows. Individual stalks poke up from beneath the dirt, sometimes clumped together with others but mainly striking out on their own, a single minaret growing to seemingly impossible heights. There’s no foliage between the stalks, as one might expect with other plants, just dirt and these towering green fingers. With each day, each hour, practically each minute you can see the stalks reach further toward the sky, making it look appear more like some sort of subterranean being poking up probes to test a new and alien aboveground environment.

In a home garden, asparagus is really a strange thing. You plant it a few years before you want to eat it, an exercise in patience almost entirely beyond my realm of possibility. After years of waiting you can harvest, crouching down to the dirt of the garden bed to cut the stalks, which present themselves in a carelessly diverse array of sizes. Some as thin as disposable plastic straws require nothing but a quick slash of a kitchen knife. Some as big around as a silver dollar require strokes back and forth, moves hopefully quick and efficient enough to get through the outer skin on the far side. In buying asparagus at the grocery or from a market booth the bunches come grouped by size, perfectly categorized for even cooking and so that it all looks good on the plate. One’s own asparagus patch, however, cares little of your desire for homogeneity.

All patience and adaptability aside, however, asparagus is a particularly great thing to be able to harvest from a garden. Gathered directly before eating, the stalks are sweeter than I’d ever tasted, tender and full of that flavor that can only be described as “spring.” I’ve heard that flavor comes from chlorophyll, a desperately-needed green respite after months of white and orange and purple. Whatever it is, it is spectacular.

When you have backyard asparagus to harvest, a world of opportunities awaits. You can slice the bigger, fatter stalks into discs and roast them all together, the thinnest stalks cooking until overly tender and tangling together all the rest of the stalks on the plate. You can blanche and ice-shock the more moderately-sized stalks and use them as a vehicle for aioli, each half of your snack lifting up the other into the realm of the gods. Or you can shave your raw asparagus into long, thin ribbons with a vegetable peeler and pile it into a mess of salad, and eat it like it’s no big deal that you’ve been eating asparagus every day for weeks, like some luxuriating king. You can put it in pasta and top it with a confetti of fresh spring herbs, you can put it on pizza with an egg that has a golden yolk, you can puree it into a creamy green soup topped with big toasted croutons. You can cook it just to look at it, if you want to (not the most responsible use, let’s be real). You could put it in a vase on your bedside just so that each morning you can awake and be reminded of all the asparagus just waiting and at the ready. You will be flush with asparagus, and spring will be a diet of riches.

After the asparagus season is done – you likely will not have had your fill, but with an eye toward stewardship you’ll know you need to think about next year’s crop – you will once again exercise your remarkable powers of patience and let the stalks go to seed. Unharvested, they will grow taller, and taller, and taller still, at the end bursting into a towering, intricate web of spindly asparagus ferns and tiny yellow blossoms. This mess of delicate stalks and adolescent leaves and pinpoint flowers will threaten to overtake whatever deigns to grow nearby, and that corner of your garden will remind you yet again that the things we eat are, at least ideally, wild beings. And just when you think this green bramble cannot grow any larger, you will cut it all down and wait until the next year. You will wait until those strange green stalks start poking their heads up through the soil again in the spring, all innocent and unassuming, ready to takeover your kitchen once again.

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Potatoes, Comrade

Posted on May 17th, 2013

Like a dog who thinks he’s people, I was a child who thought he was an adult. This presented a conflict, growing up in a working class Moscow neighborhood where most of the children spent their free time beating each other up in schoolyards and in a large field, seeded with broken glass and dog excrement, an enormous heating plant looming over the proceedings. This hell continued until we left Russia when I was nine years old. (Growing up the rest of the way in a lower middle class neighborhood in Brooklyn presented a whole other kind of hell, at least until I hit high school age.) School was my least favorite place to be; I preferred spending time alone with my encyclopedias and classical radio and crayons. Relief from the Darwinian experiment that was my elementary school sometimes arrived courtesy of my mother.

 

My parents were deeply entrenched in the arts when we lived in Eastern Europe. (Immigration took care of that.) My father started off as a civil engineer but became a professional playwright. My mother performed with a puppet theater troupe. When I mention the latter to anyone here, the general response is somewhere along the lines of, “Oh, how charmingly eccentric!” But it wasn’t eccentric at all, in a country where television channels numbered three or four, and parents frequently took their kids to see age-appropriate live performances in order to foster an appreciation of culture and the arts at an early age.

 

My mother’s troupe performed at a space located in the dead center of Moscow, but frequently went on the road to entertain children in surrounding exurbs and sleep-away summer camps. Occasionally, my mother would take me on the road with her, usually when I was on vacation, but sometimes when my complaining about the barbarism of elementary school got to her and she would take pity. I became a sort of pet for the troupe, and I liked it that way; sitting around and pretending to understand what the adults were talking about suited me better than the alternative.

 

The troupe traveled in what resembled a small school bus, minus the air conditioning. They stayed in hotels of varying quality. Some towns had liquid rust for tap water; bottled water did not exist in Russia at the time, so foregoing showers (and tea) was the norm in such places. You bought food where you could, between performances, as most stores were closed at night. Sometimes, you’d come across freebies.

 

Driving between towns one unusually steamy day, we saw potato fields. Enormous swaths of space filled with nothing but potatoes in season, stretching off to touch the horizon on either side of the road. The yellow bus pulled to the roadside. Actors filed out, surveyed the scene, whipped out plastic bags, and set about picking the free dinner. I stood there, uncomfortably shifting from foot to foot.

 

“What’s gotten into you?” said my mother.

 

“Are we… stealing those potatoes?”

 

The actors had a field day with that one. “That’s a good little future Party leader you got growing up there,” someone said to my mother and lightly elbowed me in the arm.

 

Russian schools did their best to instill feelings of patriotism not only for the country but for the Communist ideal itself. Any sort of dishonesty toward the system, no matter how small, we were told, was a crime against society. We weren’t told what the system was doing to the country and the people, how farmers – who did not own the land or anything that grew on it – lived in poverty, how their crops were taken and dispersed as the government saw fit, and how as a result much of those fruits of the earth would go to waste and rot, because in a system like that, what’s the difference? But this is not what we were taught in school, and I remained unconvinced.

 

At the hotel that evening, the actors boiled potatoes. Salt and butter were brought out, as were bologna, cheese, and cucumbers. I decided to resist what unfolded before me, choosing instead to live off my conscience. My mother’s friend, young and thin and all long silky black hair, stepped in. “We rescued those potatoes,” she said. “They would have gone to waste. You should really have some. The little we took – it won’t be missed.”

 

This was too much for me. The sight of actors putting away those buttery, salted potatoes combined with reasoning from a woman whose pull I could not yet comprehend at that age, and I fell on the plate that was set before me. My conscience bothered me no more; was a system keeping me from dinner really worth my loyalty? And those potatoes – they were delicious.

 

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Taproot

Posted on May 17th, 2013

I’ve roamed and rambled and I followed my footsteps
To the sparkling sands of her diamond deserts;
And all around me a voice was sounding:
This land was made for you and me. – Woody Guthrie

 

I grew up in a small New England town, in the same house all my life, so I always thought I had a good sense of what makes a place a home. Apart from the relative seasonal changes of spring to winter, the scenery didn’t change much and there was a comfort in that. Until one day, in the farmhouse bathroom of a woman I hardly knew, I went to wash my hands and I spotted her soap. It was large and yellow and covered in dirt. That unapologetic bar of soap was the cleanest, most honest thing I had ever seen. And since that moment, my whole adult life turned into an exploration into what makes a home.

Great energy has been spent traveling from place to place trying to find just the spot to set down roots. Fresh out of college I moved into a housing collective full of musicians, on a swamp with something of a sculpture park in the backyard made by an artist friend. When the house literally began to sink, I headed to the city with my new partner and baby where we found a small, bright apartment in a bad part of town. It was the first place of our own and we adored the pool-colored, sunshiny kitchen and soapstone sink. I grew herbs, tended a rose bush. When the crackhead who lived upstairs shuffled up to our door at 2am trying to sell us his beanbag chair (it with a rip, he with a bloody nose) and the pipes burst and grey water decanted three stories down into our bedroom, we headed to the suburbs where we settled into a lovely yellow house with a backyard and a lake view. We chopped wood, built raised beds. And when the house went on the market and we realized we couldn’t afford to heat the place any longer, we headed to the center of a small town and found a one bedroom apartment on the town green and across from the library. We slept in a single room and spent a glorious amount of time outdoors, teaching our daughter how to ride a bike and sipping IPAs and sangria on the lawn. My musician husband began working on a farm and our lives became filled with mustard greens and muddy boots. I started a potted garden in the windows, bought a worm bin. When the space of one bedroom for two adults and a toddler became increasingly cramped, we figured out our budget and happily moved into a two bedroom apartment within walking distance to the school our daughter would be attending.

This apartment has been our home now for three years. No matter the ceiling fan in the hallway is eye level and dangerous when turned on. No matter the gentle slope of the roof causes an inability to stand comfortably upright in the shower. No matter the bedroom does not have a closet and the stove is electric and not gas. Within those walls we have created a comfortable and greatly satisfying space where we truly feel at ease. And yet… I still feel a sense of hunger, a sense that something is missing.

I had been so busy trying to create a home that I hadn’t stopped to realize our happiness didn’t come from within any walls; it came from the swamp, from the rose bush, from the raised beds and potted vegetables.

Late at night I search the depths of online real estate archives to find the perfect spot, and find that I am drawn more to the land than the home that sits upon it. That three-room cabin with a half bath, no plumbing and no electricity? On 25+ acres that seems to foot the bill. A neglected home on 15 acres with a mold problem and destroyed foundation? Yes, please. I thrive on descriptions like “great for the right person, needs lots of loving TLC.” Nonetheless, it remains out of reach, though we have found a slice of compromise in 10,000 square feet of field on a property that is not our own. Property situated on a lot with a home that will inevitably be sold (not to us) in a few short years, our field along with it.

Funny how one can feel a sense of ownership over something that is not technically theirs, but yes, that is our field. Land is like that. After two years of tilling tall grass, fighting pests and poison ivy, and praying for cotyledons to survive in the nutrient deficient dust, our field is slowing beginning to resemble a garden. Sundays are work days and we’re there turning the compost and watering rows, paying our six-year-old daughter in quarters to haul rocks (or equally to sit quietly in the shade). As time allows I will go there alone after a full day of work and stand, pitchfork in hand, at the roots we have set down. On land that has yet to viably produce, on a property I do not own, 25 minutes away from where I live, I feel like I am home. And when the dirt turns to rich soil and the seeds we have sown blossom and another family moves in, I will give up this land freely with the hope that the space continues to thrive, with the understanding our work may again return to dust. I will know the taproot remains deep and we will take that with us wherever we go. Building and breathing with one’s hands in the dirt, with the wood, with the rock is to foster nourishment that can only be found with your feet firmly planted wherever you may be.

There will never be a structure that will make me feel at home. There is only land and a clean, dirty bar of soap.

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