The Skin And Bones Of Love

Civil Rights Is Not Just A Racial Issue

I am struggling to concentrate on the fact that I don't know how to do anything with the InDesign software and need a dummy book which means scootering in the rain to the library. Meanwhile my head is absolutely screaming inside at the bigotry that is still haranguing the homosexual sector of the population. I keep reading posts on other blogs about yet another attempt to keep gay people in domestic partnerships from becoming legally recognized as couples.

It is a civil rights issue and it just amazes me how we have to go through this all over again. The last time in our country that we fought over such issues was during the civil rights movement of the 1960's. You would think, that if we can recognize how wrong miscegenation laws were, we wouldn't need to cover the exact same territory again. And again.

Yes, I'm emotional right now. Apologies to those who dislike it when people believe passionately about anything. My passion doesn't actually interfere with my logic, which is lucky, and luckier still that I have logic at all when so many of my countrymen have none.

People (yes, mostly Christians) used to think it biblically wrong for a white person to have sex with a darker skinned person. What they were essentially arguing is that melanin in the skin is something that God cares a whole lot about and it offends him when people with different concentrations of melanin in their skin get together in the sheets. Worse yet when they get married and have babies and get the same rights as more "moral" unions.

A body, what it looks like, its racial profile, the color of its skin, the genitals that develop, the amount of hair it has, is all determined- not by evil or good qualities in a person- but by the particular combining of the genes donated by the body's earthly creators. Chromosomes decide what gender we are born with and hormones often have a strong influence on how our body functions and relates sexually.

Our bodies are just biological matter. Skin, bones, blood.

A penis is made up of the same essential material as a vagina.

Why does anyone care if people of the same gender decide to love and honor each other for the rest of their lives?

Perhaps an objection is that they cannot go forth and multiply which is the only reason for getting married, supposedly.

NEWS FLASH: the earth is overpopulated!!!

Many gay couples who want children either have one through a surrogate or adopt one. ONE. Maybe two. The very difficult aspect of similar gender prevents them from easily multiplying themselves and the expense of adoption does the same. When they adopt they are taking care of one of the products of disastrous unions between man+woman. Children are littering the earth and not being taken care of.

So it seems to me that gay marriage might possibly provide something we really need: loving homes for children abandoned (for whatever reason) by pro-life parents.*

You know what? Since my country made laws preventing gay couples from being legally married, we should make a law preventing anyone who masturbates from being married. Cause you know what? Supposedly god doesn't really appreciate that either. Wanna guess how many people masturbate at some point (or all points) of their lives?!

Maybe you haven't ever done it, and gosh, go bless yerself for showing such delightful restraint... but I have never met a man who hasn't enjoyed regular sessions of self loving and why not? And women? Women are much less likely to admit it (being so coy about such things in spite of women's lib) but are just as likely to be enjoying some sexy sessions with themselves too.

I really think it's time to appreciate that being gay is just one different but unharmful way to love another human being and when a gay couple wants to settle down together and make a steady life with vows to support each other and protect each other it is just as beautiful as when it's between a man and a woman.

Skin, bodies, bones, teeth, hormones: each and every one of us is made up of exactly the same materials. The only difference between us is in how those hormones, bones, water, skin, chemicals, and matter are distributed according to the map of our individual genes. There is no moral value inherent in the way one body lacks testosterone and another has different neurological wiring; or how one body has one x chromosome and another has two; or how one body's skin lacks pigment and another has a lot of it.

We are all made of the same matter. When any two adult bodies come together consensually there is no moral value attributable to their union of flesh. Moral value is attributable to behavior. When you look at a couple, the only thing you should be concerned about is how they treat themselves, each other, and the world outside of them.

*******************

I sent my Oregon ballot in today. Voting is done. I am no less tense than anyone else about the outcome. If McCain wins I will have to fight off a very strong desire to leave my country. I happen to love Oregon and my little town in it, and can't afford to move, so I won't. But it will be painful to face the next few years here. I am so sick and tired of my country's downward slide since Bush took office.

I wish I could go vote on proposition 8 in California. All I can say is: I give you my support! Equal rights for gay people is just as important as racial equality and gender equality is to me. I see no difference in the issue and my spirit is with you. I hope like hell that proposition 8 is voted down.

Added later: I also wish my own state would keep fighting to allow gay marriages. California was really trailblazing deciding to legally recognize marriages between same sex partners. You'd think that a state that legally recognizes an individual's right to kill themselves when terminally ill would be progressive enough to allow gay marriage. Perhaps it's coming soon.

I would like my brain to stop spinning now. I would like to feel hopeful about the future in my country. So I'm going to go do what I always do when I'm feeling buzzing mad or barely able to keep myself from imploding: cook food.



*I'm not working on any assumption here. If a woman opts to give birth to a child she doesn't want or can't take care of she is demonstrating a belief in pro-life. All those unadopted children out there flooding the foster care systems are the results of choosing life. No matter where you stand on the issue, the many unadoptable children in this country are direct results of choosing "life". I honestly don't see how it is morally alright to give birth and abandon your baby to the state but not alright to kindly spare a tiny being such a life. But whatever. AAAARGH.

Wisconsin Is A Separate Planet
(and how Romanesco is proof of alien life in Oregon)

All the time I was growing up in California my cousins in Wisconsin would make fun of our state saying hilarious things like "California is where all the fruits and nuts are! hahahahahahah!" Meanwhile, my view of Wisconsin was that it wasn't all that different. The way I figured it, there were just as many fruits and nuts, it's just that a lot more of them were wearing double-knit polyester.

As an adult I have listened to my Aunt make statements about her planet state with great curiosity. When my mom was helping her to paint a hallway wall a kind of Mediterranean yellow color my Aunt kept muttering things like "Oh, I wonder what so-and-so will think of this! People around here just don't use colors like these." As though she was painting her hallway glossy ebony or metallic gold. My main thought was "Why would you care what anyone will think?" But she did. She cared quite a bit and gave all the appearance of a kid defiantly chugging a vodka tonic in front of shocked parents.

Later she was talking about my cousin Nick's interest in heirloom vegetables. The way my aunt tells it, she seems to have never even heard of heirlooms before and was certain you couldn't get any in Wisconsin.

Now this I couldn't be silent on. Seriously, half the heirloom vegetables I read about originated from places like Wisconsin and Illinois and Michigan. How is it possible that I can only get them in California because we're into fads and everything super new and that in fuddy-duddy old states like Wisconsin they don't go in for these new-fangled crazes?

I didn't believe her. Just like I didn't believe her when she said you couldn't get fancy olives like Kalamatas at her little ol' plain grocery store. Not true. I had to go there myself when I was seven months pregnant to show her that the truth is, they're right there, she's just never looked for them.

The other day I was looking for some local produce at the health food store. I was eyeing the mutant Romanesco cauliflowers that are twice the size of my head. They are an old variety of cauliflower that the Romans supposedly grew back in the good old days when they were still throwing people to the lions for fun. It is admittedly one of the strangest vegetables around. It's incredibly architectural and seems to illustrate the concept of worlds within worlds. Each big angular sharp knob is made up of smaller precise replicas of itself, and each of those is made up of even smaller precise replicas of itself. I wouldn't be surprised to find that they look exactly the same on a molecular level.

Another older woman was also gazing at the Romanescos in wonder and awe.

"What IS that thing?" she asks me.
"It's a Romanesco type cauliflower." I say.
"Uh huh." she says uncertainly, like I might be baldly lying to her.

That's when I become the produce salesman. It happens all the time. I can't help it.

"It's really great roasted with some salt and pepper and olive oil." she still looks unconvinced and is circling the stand of Romanescos like they might draw weapons on her at any moment. I have detected a slight twang and drawl that is very unique to people in Wisconsin (and Canada).

"They don't have this kind of thing where I come from." just like a line out of a book.
"Where do you come from?" I chirp up. Because I'm affable.
"Wisconsin." she tells me gruffly.
"Ah," I say with total comprehension "I have cousins who are from there." you know that it explains everything when you say you're from Wisconsin.

"We don't grow weird stuff like this in Wisconsin." she repeats.

So it becomes apparent that people in Wisconsin all think of themselves as simple people from a simple state where weird things don't grow and exotic things don't flourish. They want to believe that anyway. It must give some kind of comfort to think that the best cheese available to them is fried curds.

This lady decided it would be a hoot to grow one of these things (interesting how she seemed reluctant to call it a vegetable) and asks if one can find seeds for it. I suggest a seed company and she repeats it several times before decisively announcing that she'll forget it before she gets outside. So I decide to leave her to her strange adventure in the bizarre land of alien food and pick out the largest of the mutant Romanescos.

I roasted a quarter of mine with some "non-weird" cauliflower and it was superb! Some seed catalogs refer to it as a broccoli and some as a cauliflower. In either case it is gorgeous, green, tastes a lot like a "regular" cauliflower, but perhaps with a slight semblance to broccoli. It would be awesome in soup (especially a cream soup), perfect for a stir fry, and what I really want to do with the rest of my ten pounds of it is to make a sharp Cheddar gratin.

If you would like to grow some (Allison) here are some places that you can get the seeds:

Seeds of Italy
Park Seeds
Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds

Rosemary Marinade

(Especially For Robin)

Ingredients:

1 cup olive oil
1/2 cup red wine vinegar
3 tbsp mustard (spicy brown or Dijon)
3 cloves peeled garlic, roughly chopped
3 - 4 sprigs fresh rosemary, chopped roughly
1 tsp salt
many grinds of fresh pepper

Put all of these ingredients in a deep bowl or measuring cup (large enough to use with an immersion blender*). Blend them until the marinade is thickened and all the rosemary is well chopped.

How to use this marinade: I brush it on everything I grill. It is my standby favorite. It is thick enough that it sticks to my vegetables and I love the rosemary and mustard combination. One of my very favorite ways to use it is to roast the following vegetables:

eggplant
mushrooms
onions
summer squash

Then chop all the roasted vegetables, combine with fettuccine pasta, and add some marinade to the pasta for sauce. Serve with Parmesan.

This would also be great on tofu.

I have never used a marinade on meat (because I have never been a meat eater) so I can't say if the proportions of vinegar and salt are enough to partially cook meat before being grilled as marinades are often used for. I do know that this is a very flavorful way to dress anything you want to grill or broil. I don't use it as a salad dressing because I don't like rosemary for my salad as I think it's too strong. So I don't think of it as a dressing.

*If you don't have an immersion blender, use a regular blender. Or a food processor. And then let me convince you that an immersion blender is so much better than a regular one.

What Is In My Head
(is now in yours)

I once said that rain hitting my face while riding my scooter feels like bullets*. I would like to add that sometimes rocks hitting your knees while on your scooter feels like bullets too. Or maybe rain feels like rocks but I like to be dramatic. When traveling at a speed of 60 miles per hour and a rock hits you anywhere on your body you don't particularly care if it's a rock, a marshmallow, or a squirrel because the main point is that it hurts like fucking hell.

Sometimes when I'm going really fast on my scooter I wish I could completely take off; be like a smear of light stealing other people's air as I speed past them. It makes me feel a little bit like an asshole. And a man.

When a dog doesn't want to see you, they have no inhibitions about letting you know. Today was the first day I ever stood around a dog whose hackles are up and teeth showing to say nice things to him. I think that shows how far I've come from hiding in the coffee Roastery's bathroom whenever a dog would come in.

I saw a dead kitty on the side of the highway and I said "meow" to its spirit.

It makes me really sad that there is a product so sub-standard that it has to be called "chocolate flavored chips".

I'm really thankful I don't pee my pants all the time. I wonder if I should present this gratitude at the Thanksgiving table.

I know it's terribly "western" of me, but I think eating the sperm of an animal is not a whole lot different than drinking its pee. It may not be bad for you (being sterile) but bodily fluids (including blood) as food really trips me out. I might still be thinking about it tomorrow morning.

For those of you with very dirty minds, the conclusion that you have come to about me is correct.**

Do any of you understand just how very much I despise balloons? I didn't think so.

I think it's important for everyone to recognize what they're good at and celebrate that. Even if what you're good at is counting raisins or picking fur out of sweaters. That takes patience. Don't let the rest of the world keep you from your empowerment.

There are a lot of people busy out there, right now, feeding yeast. I think that's just about as brilliant as it gets. I get very excited talking about yeast. Not yeast infections...yeast that we tenderly feed sugars to and encourage into full bloat mode so that our breads will rise, our grapes ferment, and our sodas fizzle. It's harvest and in my area and that means a lot of people working very hard to serenade the yeast that is now hanging out in the grape juice.

The owner of a winery has decided to call me Denise. Do Denises generally have chin hairs? I've decided to be Denise for this guy. It means that I can start calling him Ralph.

It freaks me out that almost all the Oregonian election candidates have six or seven children. I almost want to not vote for them just because of that. Except for the Catholic one. I kind of wanted to vote for him anyway. But only because the Catholics here are insanely outnumbered by the more fiery hot and bothered faiths. Catholics have the best music and art. But obviously I'm not going to base my voting on how many children a person has.

I will absolutely base my voting on a candidate's stance on a woman's right to choose.

I will also base my voting on how a person looks. I don't think you can be a really put together human being if the picture you send out of yourself for your campaign looks like a federal prison mug shot.

I'm super bummed that Sarah Sidle has left Gil. Seriously bummed. Can't anyone have a good relationship anymore? Damn it.

SO NOT surprised that Madonna and Guy are getting divorced. Now I just wish they hadn't stolen that African child.

*As if I would know how that feels.

**For those of you who need it spelled out: I don't think human sperm is sexy "food" either. Pointing out how salty it is will not make it more appealing to me. Yes, prude prude prude me. I rather like to think of it as being discerning, rather than prudish.

Butcher, Baker, Candle Stick Maker

When I woke up, late, this morning at 6:15am I was a headline editor. I had grammar intact, an intellect sharp, and diplomacy beating like blood with coffee in my veins. My mind grasps words like art, I correct writing in my head not just for spelling but for grace because I want to feel it in every one's prose. I see the budding voice and I don't want to squash it, I want to move it, encourage it, and blow a little gold dust into it. Help it evolve, transform, and become more than it is. Because words have kept me alive. Words alone have kept the dark lit and the razors from dermatological contact. In words I have found everything a human heart needs most: hope.

By 11am I was a freelance photographer. I snapped grapes getting dumped into industrial vats for making wine. I stood high and looked low. I invaded the everyday work place of people whose job it is to feed yeast, to punch down the grapes, to wash and wash and wash an endless parade of dirty bins big enough to hold twenty dead bodies. My technology watched and wormed into private work moments, the sweat of ordinary men watched. I realized that the longer you stand with an apparatus to your eye the less weird those around you find it. But I take this role gingerly. I am naturally shy. I pretend often that I'm not. I bluster and chatter my way through everything. But being the eye, the great watching eye is uncomfortable. Photographers often talk about the comfort and anonymity of the camera but I find it makes me stand out more and I feel like a heel. Yet as I find my opportunities I lose myself eventually because others do too.

By 12pm I was a metal grinder. My hands forced weld to smooth. My hands took matter and made it different. I shaped and smoothed acres of weld into smoother joints that hands might grip without pain, without incident. Metal on metal makes directional fire that you must manipulate away from your own skin, your own hairs. Missing, I smell singed hair. Not sure if it's hair on my head, my chest, or my arms that have burnt. Body matter changes as you use muscles that remember nothing at first. In all these actions there is a deeper memory that eventually everyone remembers. The fires of early man being stoked with wood; hot breath on chilled open air, the clang clang of hard steel being hammered into swords to make mothers weep.

My eye has seen it all. My blood hammers through my veins like a mantra of faith. I have been here before. You have been here before too. These rituals of living. Rituals of survival. Of art seen through arteries of everyday life. So many people seek answers in the divine, yet all the answers are written everywhere if you look. You need no epiphany to know who you are. You need no express note from god to see magic when all the time it is reflected in your own cornea.

When I woke up this morning, late, all I thought was that I had some jobs to do, on a Sunday. I didn't know I was going to be so many people and bend so much matter. That at the end of the day my hands would ache from gripping a metal grinder for hours, that my cameras would be so full of hopeful apertures, that my inbox would be so full of words to translate and send back out into the ether. I merely woke as a simple human with the simple hope that this day would have a rhythm.

All day I kept remembering my nightmare. One of those boomerang dreams in which everything you never wanted to express for fear that if you did the whole world would explode gets expressed to its fullest ugly extent. It was full of moving, which I never want to do again, and my parents who never divorced twenty years ago*, and my brother and sister, all of us in a trailer, plus the girl my parents decided to adopt. I can't hold it together and I become the family bomb that makes an enormous explosion by imploding. I scream like a shrew, accusing everyone of everything I've ever imagined accusing them of, I am betrayed, alone, my lap full of crumbs. My family abandons me and I keep seeing them everywhere. We intersect at a Scottish inn that isn't in Scotland. I am ugly, shrill, and unbending. Except that when I'm in the inn I am seen for the person I thought I was, not the person I have become. It is a haven.

I don't know, when I wake up, how my family really sees me. Maybe I never will. Do they know what color my spirit is and what coat I wear when no one is looking? Do they know that today I was three people? That I can be an editing eye, precise with words, intent, and execution? That I can find the truth behind the eye of a shutter? That I can talk to wine makers about their craft and know enough about the process to not get lost? Do they know that I ended my day covered in grit from grinding metal smooth for a welder?

At any given time we are all many people. I know that my mother has spoken disparagingly of her tendency to be a "jack of all trades and a master of none" as though this was some kind of shortcoming. Better to be a master of one thing? I don't think so. I think it's pretty amazing to be a renaissance person. It fulfills so many needs, so many desires. It taps into something so much older than "career paths" and vocational dedication.

What all of us are when we are necessary.

It's 10:47 pm now. I came down here to bleed words. Even as I need sleep. I needed to channel this rhythm into something more tangible. It always comes back to words for me. I will vomit them in my sleep. I exude them. They leak from me and evanesce from my atmosphere. They drip from my fingers and seep into my shoes. It always comes back to words. A hammer of words that drive through my head like a grave digger's shovel in dirt.

I am afraid to stop. To quiet down. To stem the flow of thoughts. I wonder if I might bleed internally if I cut the line now and crawl into bed. Everything comes to me in sharp contrast. I feel so young and so old as though my spirit is suspended in some place just out of spitting distance of reality.

Sometimes I feel like a conduit of information. Like a fortune telling idiot savant for sleepers. Sometimes it feels like I know what is going to happen to everyone. I have looked at people and seen their spirits suspended brightly above their bodies, like hovering ghosts. I have felt my bones tingle and my hackles rise with these moments like I am a guest at a table of bodiless souls.

It has never scared me. Except when I try to pretend it isn't real. I hear what others might hear if they bothered to listen. That is all.

That is all.

And now I hunger for that silent embrace in sleep. That anonymous protective set of arms that finds me when I'm abandoned at train stations. The spirit that crouches close to the breaking point and softens the corners of madness; the spirit that kept hope alive when I was six years old and irreparably damaged. I hope that whatever guardian of sleep it is that visits me will visit me tonight, like it often does when I feel so small I might pass through the eye of a needle.

Take these words. Please hold what I was close to the fire and to your warm skin. Please don't let go until the light of early morning shivers through the air and breathes new ghosts into clouds. Please protect what still believes.

That is all.

I am butcher, baker, and candlestick maker.

That is everything.



*They really did.

Moulting

Dot, the head of poultry operations at the Williamson Farmhouse, has signaled to the rest of the flock that moulting should be in full progress. I would have taken a photo of them earlier in the season of moulting.

But they hide when they are going bald. When chickens moult they look mangy and half naked. They look, in fact, a lot like chickens getting plucked for dinner which I think goes a long way to explaining why they feel like hiding during the worst part of their moulting which goes on for about a month. Most of the girls' feathers are filling in again.

We're having a fly problem right now that we've never had with chickens before. It is normal to have a few flies buzzing around a chicken coop. You should not have a cloud of them. I put a fly trap inside the coop and caught a ton of them. However, now the problem is that they are hanging out in our "breezeway" right next to the run. I'm not sure why. they've had fresh hay and a clean out but I think it may be because we haven't been scraping down their droppings where they roost on top of their hen house.

I think scraps are a problem too. When they don't like a scrap we give them it rots in their run. It's not true that all chickens will love all your scraps. Chickens are individuals just as people are.

Here's what they love:

cruciferous vegetables
melons
beets
slugs
snails
weeds
greens
corn
bread

Here's what they like but would leave alone for something better:

cucumber
apples
plums
grapes
carrot tops
tomatoes

Here's what they don't like at all:

carrots
onions


I need to locate a reference for what's poisonous to hens and what you should avoid for their health. This is information that I would like to include in my poultry raising article in Roost. I'll have to look for that. I'm pretty sure you're not supposed to feed them raw potato. They are natural scavengers (and omnivores, they will eat meat) and so they can eat a lot of things without being harmed but I know that there are some things that aren't good for them.

My girls are still laying but production is easing up. They don't lay as much when they moult and when the daylight hours begin to decrease. I'll have to buy eggs now through spring at least periodically unless I set up artificial light to stimulate laying but I won't do that because it wears the hens down faster.



I would love to hear what other people's hens' favorite scraps are. Do share!

The Great Fashion Layoff

I really don't want to age like Susan Powter. Do you think I can avoid it by not getting "work" done and not being too thin? She's scary looking now like so many other people in the celebrity world. (I would have said "women" but have you all seen the work that Patrick Swayze has been getting done?)

I have a huge pile up of fashion magazines. I haven't been in a fashion magazine mood for a few months now. Most of them haven't even been opened. This has happened to me once before. I went through a couple of years of not wanting to see them and then I started seeing some interesting fashion come back. The interviews of famous people have long held a fascination for me but I'm tired of the sycophantic writing the interviewers use. It's really sick. The extreme effort they go to to paint a celebrity to appear "just like us". If a celebrity is so average and normal we wouldn't be interested in them in the first place. If a celebrity is extraordinary yet down to earth, this will be apparent in their conversation with the writer. There's no need to set us up.

It's almost as though the writer has been handed this directive by their editor: "Paint a picture of normalcy...make them appear 'just like us', alright sport?"

The best interview I've read in years was the one with Denzel Washington where he was a total asshole and the writer gave up trying to see the softer side of the jerk. It was great. It actually felt real. Denzel is beloved by everyone and is so charitable and down to earth and wonderful and perfect and talented and still married to the same woman how could we not all love him?! Yet, he was a complete and utter dickhead to the interviewer.

I'm not going to renew any of my subscriptions. The worst one is Bazaar. It is just one big showcase for the big name designers. I would love to see a magazine come out that only showcased small scale designers, indie designers, and people who are making it up as they go along. Fashion for me. Fashion for people drafting their own patterns and sewing their own clothes and accessorizing with choice pieces from the thrift store or the awful ubiquitous Ross.

So, I'm off to grind metal today. I hope you all have a great Friday!

Metal In Your Eye

(is not a medical mystery)

Sometimes there really is something wrong. This is why we go to the doctor even when we don't see any visible cause for pain. It turns out that Max had a tiny spec of what appeared to two doctors to be metal. A tiny piece of metal was stuck in his cornea. Causing him all that pain. Boy do I not regret letting him have that Motrin two days in a row! I was tempted to say "Stick it out kid, there's nothing wrong with your eye..."

But most moms know when their kids are faking it and when they're not. I knew he wasn't faking it when he told me he would like to rip his eyeball out because it hurt so much. The first doctor told us that tiny abrasions on the cornea can be terribly painful.

To see what was going on with his eye the first doctor had to put dye in Max's eye which would then be visible by ultra violet light. This was the coolest thing that happened to us today. Except that obviously it wasn't cool having a piece of dye covered paper poked into Max's eye. But we take our pleasure where we may.

The second doctor (the optometrist) put numbing drops in the kid's eye. That has got to be very freaky. The thought of a numb eyeball makes me flinch a little. Which Max did. Then more drops followed which made Max look insulted. The doctor was quite deft. Before we knew it the science fiction machinery was in front of his eye and a pair of the sharpest tweezers I've ever seen were navigating the surface of my boy's cornea. It took about three tries before the doctor got it. We could see it. Very tiny.

Then some ointment was unceremoniously slopped into his eye. This made him more squeamish than all the rest of the procedure. He hates weird textures of goop on his skin. But then it was over. OVER.

This was so much less like torture than taking him to get his nose cauterized the second time. That was pure agony. But this, this was not very much fun. Still, the metal spec is out of his eye and he's home enjoying sugar. Now this has become one more legend in the family history to retell over and over again.

Young American

I am impervious to sentimental bursts at most of the signs of maturation in my child that many moms succumb to frequently as their "babies" morph into fledgling adult people. I know I was excited at my kid's first steps when he was nine months old and it did seem fascinating in an awful way that four months after my baby was born he lost all the very dark hair he was born with and started sprouting white/blond hair in it's place. But these things have never triggered that strange stew of hormonal emotion that they seem to stir in other mothers.

I was happy (yes: HAPPY) to tote my kid off to kindergarten and thought "This is what it's about; the kid goes off to get some interaction and experience with the world outside and I get to spend time doing the things that remind me I'm my own person until the kid gets back. Then we hang out." Well, except that in California they believe that instead of "hanging out" one should do five pages of homework with your kid every night. Five. That's a lot. Other moms stood around the kindergarten classes with arms outstretched madly tearing up. I feared that a couple of them might actually end up completely prostrate.

I didn't shed a tear when he walked off with that huge backpack weighing him down. I didn't shed a tear when he started getting lanky, or when he started telling me not to hug or kiss him in public. This is part of what having children is about- seeing them through all of these periods of growth.

I'm not very sentimental. But all of my much more sentimental friends will appreciate that when my boy came home yesterday with one of his front teeth in a baggy, proudly showing me the big gap between his teeth I almost broke down and cried. To me, losing your first front tooth is crossing a real line between your baby years and your adolescent ones. I see all these kids in Max's classes with their grown up teeth pushing into their mouths, reshaping their faces into older versions of themselves.

I have an innocent fascination with teeth. Teeth are important. Have you seen what happens to a face that has lost all its teeth but not been filled with dentures? Dudes, that's going to be me in, like, five years! It's not a pretty sight. Our teeth affect how we speak, how we eat, how we smile, and how our faces are shaped. Our baby teeth are nothing. They don't say anything about us and are milky nubs that get us through the first few years. I have known all along that my son doesn't look how he's going to really look because he hasn't got his real teeth in yet. The ones that he will wear for the rest of his life.

Unless he loses them all as a professional boxer or because of his very strong affinity for everything with sugar in it.

I put some David Bowie on and made some eggs while I was thinking about all this. I made eggs without any cheese. I contemplated what a life without cheese is worth to me. ( NOTHING.) I mean, if I was told by the doctor not to eat any more cheese or I will die I would steel myself up for the brave challenge and promise not to eat it and then I would wake in the middle of the night dying for a thick slice of cheddar and I would eat it before I gave it two seconds thought. It's amazing that people like me survive life as long as we do.

I was thinking how incredible it is that I'm sitting around getting sentimental about my son's first adult front tooth coming in. I was thinking about how most moms seem to feel that all of this babyhood goes by really fast...too fast...sobbing fast. I don't. It feels like it took a million years to get to this point. I don't see it all slipping away. I see it all before me. Max getting his first front tooth in is wonderful not because everything about my kid is wonderful (but, obviously it is), what it really means is that he made it through his earliest years alive and (so far) with all his limbs and digits still attached.

Although we do have to take him to the doctor today for some mysterious eye pain he's been feeling that reduced him to tears last night which brought on the biggest bloody nose he's had in months, it amazes me he's almost eight years old. For me the time does not go at breakneck speed. I am so anxious about parenting generally that I don't think I'll truly rest until he's an adult and I can at last say "Kid, it's all up to you now!"

Hopefully this eye thing won't turn out to be some rare disease. I may as well say that this kind of mysterious pain/illness really charges my atmosphere with apprehension. If it's possible, I've thought of it already.

So while I was listening to the song "Young Americans" I was wondering why people love that song "All I want for Christmas are my two front teeth"? As much as I'm a tooth person, that song makes my skin crawl six ways to hell. Someone played that song a lot at the Holiday Market downtown last year and I almost had a nervous breakdown over it. Why listen to such awful awful music sent by evil its self when we can all be listening to David Bowie instead?

When I listen to "Moonage Daydream" I always decide to forgive him for capping all his teeth so that he now has Hollywood teeth instead of cool teeth.

The face my boy will wear as a man is beginning to shift into place and that's pretty crazy.

Chickpea Rosemary Soup

Serves 6-8
Calories per 1.5 cup serving: 189

Ingredients:

2 Tbsp olive oil
1 onion, chopped medium
3 carrots, chopped in 1/4" thick rounds
1 (28 oz) can of diced tomatoes (or 1 quart of home canned)
1 (4 oz) can of tomato paste
1 quart water
15 oz chick peas (pre-cooked)
3 cloves garlic, minced small or pressed
2 medium potatoes (any kind) diced to 1/2" cubes
2-3 fresh stems of rosemary, minced very small
1 small head cauliflower, cut into med- sm flowerets
salt and pepper to taste
dash of cayenne


Method:

Snip the rosemary from your garden making sure to stop and take a deep breath of the pungent piney scent before returning to your kitchen. Note how nice it is to have gone to your own plant to get the freshest rosemary on earth.

Heat the oil in a soup pot over a medium high heat and throw the diced onion in. Let the onions cook (stirring frequently) until they are starting to sweat, then throw in the chopped carrots. Continue sauteing for a couple of minutes. Pour in your diced tomatoes, tomato paste, and water and stir well until the tomato paste is dissolved.

Wait until the soup comes to a simmer on medium heat, then add the chick peas, potatoes, garlic, minced rosemary, salt, and pepper. I usually put about a teaspoon of salt in but you can adjust it to your own tastes. I usually put in about ten grinds of fresh pepper.

When the potatoes are tender, add the cauliflower. Now cook until the cauliflower is tender. At the end add the dash of cayenne and stir well.

Please note: you may need to add more water as the vegetables cook depending on how thick you want the soup. If it cooks down and you want it brothier, add more water. If it's too brothy for you, let it cook down with the lid off for a while. I never measure how much water goes into the pot. I can only say that at least 1 quart goes in in the beginning.


Soup is one of the most flexible and forgiving foods. It is warming, nourishing, and easy to make. While soup certainly takes time (this one takes between 45 minutes to an hour) once everything is in the pot it's just a matter of stirring it.

You can use more rosemary than I do here if you like, or less. I always use at least two 3"-4" stems of it chopped fine. I don't like the rosemary to overwhelm the wonderful cauliflower flavor (the most delicately flavored of the cruciferous vegetables). If you don't like chick peas, use white beans. If you have celery, add a couple of chopped stems of it.

The worst mistakes to make with soup:

• burning it

• not adding any herbs (dried or fresh)

• not cooking your legumes enough

• over-salting (yes there is such a thing)

• burning your tongue with it

• not making any

• over-seasoning it

• not inviting me over for some

Next up: a rosemary marinade for roasting vegetables with.

Fresh Rosemary

It is cold and rainy out today with short blasts of sun through the clouds. I'm feeling tired and am fighting off a big panic attack which doesn't seem to have stemmed from any particular provocation or obsessive thoughts. So I put on some opera really loud, cut some fresh rosemary, and made soup.

That was right after cleaning out everything fuzzy and frightening from the fridge. It really bothers me when I waste food so I'm trying to keep the fridge cleaned out more frequently and eat what's in there. Never the less I found some hairy black beans, quite a few bags of liquefied vegetable matter (can no longer identify the victims), and a black spotted jar of dipping sauce.

Today all I really have for produce is cauliflower, potatoes, onions, and some little baby carrots that I try to keep around for Max just in case he'll get interested in them. While I really wanted to make some Aloo Gobi, I needed to make something I've made many times before that would use rosemary because that's what I wanted to smell and taste. I wanted soup. So I made my favorite rosemary chickpea soup with cauliflower, potatoes, chopped up baby carrots, and garlic in a tomato base. I used a jar of my diced tomatoes for it.

The kitchen smells great.

I'm drinking a cup of tea and imagining that I am in an asphyxiating awesome cloud of zen calm.

I do believe that everyone should grow rosemary in either their garden (or their window if they have no garden). Unless they hate it or are allergic to it. I never loved rosemary before I had a bowl of buttery rosemary garlic polenta at an Italian restaurant on Powell Street called Kuleto's. The rosemary they used was fresh, tender, and fragrant- everything fresh herbs should be whenever possible. I've been hooked on it ever since. Dried rosemary is only fit for making a tea bath to soak yourself in.

I am fully aware how bossy that sounds.

I'm too busy being zen to care.

(much)

Come to my house and I'll make you food with fresh rosemary that will cause you to agree with me.

Excuse me, I need to go rub my fingers on the extra rosemary stem I cut so I can keep my zen.

Roost Gathers Steam

This is a little pastry I made for a slow foods pot luck last Sunday. I wanted to make something that used what I already had on hand and the potluck theme was apples. I didn't have any fresh apples so I used apple sauce.

They turned out quite well but I learned a few things from my experimental pastry and before I offer this recipe up I will have to make them again to perfect it. I am going to save this for inclusion in the first issue of Roost. Since the first issue is the winter issue I think it fitting that a number of recipes be included that use home preserved goods. Or at least use the kinds of things many people do make themselves (apple sauce, pickles, etc.). That's the tricky part about preserving your own food- it's one thing to prepare something for storage but it's a whole other thing to-

a) remember to use it
b) know how to use it well
c) remember why you made cranberry flavored saur kraut

Today I will be working on my raised beds with the lumber I have remaining. I don't know how far that will take me into the project but I will take some pictures for an instructional article on making simple raised beds. This is not a project that has never been covered in print before but I have had enough people wonder how I do mine to warrant a piece on doing them my way. Because I need to finish this project in a timely way I may buy new lumber for it if needed. However, my blog friend Blaize did bring up a very good point which is that I don't look for salvaged lumber and it would be much more economical and ecologically sound if I did.

I have checked in with my local Habitat For Humanity restore and while they do have salvaged lumber, most of what I found was pressure treated. I won't use that for garden beds no matter how cheap because of the much worse chemicals used in them than are used for the regular lumber. What I haven't done is keep my eye on both Freecycle and Craig's list. So what I'm thinking is that for next year's raised bed projects I will wait to do them until I find the materials. Of course...if I could find stone or brick...oh yeah. A girl can dream, right?

But the monastery garden needs to be built and filled soon so that it is ready to plant in early spring. Since the weather is going to turn soon, time is of the essence.

Checking for used sources of supplies for projects is definitely an area I need improvement in. Thanks for the nudge Blaize! Impatience is my worst enemy when it comes to finding stuff on Craig's list or elsewhere.

So here's a little teaser for what is going to be in the first issue of Roost:
(I have each subject with the author who is writing it!)

Rabbit recipes

Simple raised beds

Making cool gifts for any occasion*

Quilt from scraps

Preserving citrus

Information about natural cleaners

How to choose hens for a small flock

Sage- herb of the season

Pantry recipes

*I have decided to go anti specific holiday. I realize that this is one of those things I do that keeps me from being a billionaire, and I'm ok with that. As Max puts it "We're hundred-aires!" and it's good to just dream of paying bills in a timely unstressful manner. I want to cater to the seasons with respect to what that means in terms of cooking, housekeeping, and raising animals. Crafts are great because we can make so many cool things ourselves but why gear it towards the holidays? I need gifts to give in exchange for other things I want and need from my friends. Gifts to give for birthdays and anniversaries are so much more personal. And sometimes giving gifts is best of all when there is no occasion for it.

I Haven't Changed...It's You

It's possible that some of you think I am suddenly becoming crazed and extreme in my desire to simplify my life and to save money where it is unnecessary to spend it. If this is so then you must not know my background well. I think, then it is time for a wee primer on my origins, my life as the daughter of an herbal hippie mother. The only thing my mother would probably not do is to use cloth wipes and cloth pads. But that's because she hates doing laundry. She used cloth diapers (at least with me) so I know that in concept she's totally fine with the idea.

• I grew up with a mother who believed in going to the doctor as little as possible. Only for extreme cases did she take us in. We got our required vaccinations and that was it. When we were sick we hardly ever even got an aspirin. We got herbal tea, soup, hot baths, and bed. We almost never got antibiotics.

• My mother grew as much as she could in her own garden. She has always had a garden and there has always been at least some herb and some vegetable growing in it. Most people we knew in Ashland Oregon did the same.

• We kept chickens for years for the eggs and the fun of having them. Yep, chickens are damn fun animals! Although my mother (at the time) was vegetarian so we didn't butcher any of our hens or roosters, many of our neighbors butchered theirs. No one thought it was extreme to keep and eat their own animals.

• My mom routinely made her own yogurt. Yes, you can buy it, but why buy it when you can make it for cheaper and better at home? I haven't begun making my own yogurt yet but I do make my own ricotta which is cheaper and better when I make it myself. Lots of people back then made their own yogurt. It would have disgusted almost everyone to have bought plastic tubes of blue yogurt for their kids.

• My mother canned a lot of fruit and juice every year. She doesn't have fond memories of making the grape juice but she made the best fruit butters, sauces, and her canned spiced peaches that she got from the local farmer's market will live in my memory as one of the greatest treats of my childhood. I only wish she had written down her recipe.

• My mother kept a clean house. Well, I always have to point out that eventually it was me who actually did most of the hard core cleaning... but she had (to my memory) only one nasty chemical cleaner in the house that she saved for only the gnarliest jobs. We always used Bon Ami to clean the bathrooms. She used Bon Ami because it doesn't have any toxic chemicals in it. She used it because her mother had always used it. What do you need Ajax for when you can use plain old chalk to do just as good of a job without poisoning your family?

• My mom never bought antibacterial soaps. Why? Because they are really bad for you. Our country has become increasingly obsessed with a fear of germs. Regular soap and water takes care of them just fine. How do I know? Because if our home and our habits were breeding grounds for bacteria then I would have spent a lot more time being sick as a kid. Kids now get sick all the time. We got sick once a year. Antibacterial soaps are just helping the bacterias to become stronger, more virulent in nature, and harder to fight off naturally. I have never bought antibacterial soap myself and never will. The more chemicals we use to keep the bacteria at bay the more sick our country seems to be getting. Doesn't anyone else see the connection?

• Eventually my mom got her herbalists certificate. She made ointments and first aid supplies, and tinctures herself. She gave them all to us kids too. I used her comfrey salve quite a lot and it was great. It is my mom's influence that had me making my own shampoo when I was 19 years old. It is my mom's influence that has me always growing medicinal herbs in addition to the culinary ones. She has been my inspiration for learning to make medicinal salves and lip balm. (Although I still have to perfect my lip balm before I'll be truly satisfied.)

• My mom has used tooth powder on and off for years. She is always willing to try the natural version of any commercial product. Not all of them are as effective as could be wished. But it is always worth trying something new that is made without the use of harmful chemicals. My mom has been a trailblazer in this department. I have so many friends who, like me, are interested in finding the less toxic version of every household item, and for me my mom has been the greatest inspiration.

• Nothing ever entered the house I grew up in that had High Fructose Corn Syrup. Nothing. OK, wait...once a year we were allowed to go trick or treating and my mom never cruelly took away our candy. But nothing came into our house that used highly processed ingredients through the usual grocery list. In fact, we never even had regular white cane sugar. We had: date sugar (not my fave), honey, and molasses. I think we once in a while had brown sugar. She did it on the principle that the more processed a food is the less good it is for our body. She actually did research on the subject. The more processed your food is, the less it has to offer your body. Period end.

• We used cloth napkins and dishtowels growing up. We always had paper towels and paper napkins available, but I remember that we either often or always used cloth. We also used dish towels in the kitchen. In my own kitchen I use dish towels for almost everything. Less hygienic than paper towels? Not true. If you have any common sense at all you would figure out that you need to change out your dishtowels every day or every other day depending on how much you use them. I do buy paper towels, but rarely. I have very special uses for them and so I buy one roll every few months. Extreme? Life of deprivation? Hell no. Dish towels are much nicer.

• I was raised by a woman with a strong connection to the earth, what's healthy for both us and the earth. This isn't new radical thinking, people. It is only in the past century that people have disconnected themselves from their food sources (how many of you have plucked a chicken? Ask the same question 100 years ago and nearly half of everyone you ask would say yes!) and away from common sense. It is only in the past sixty years that we have become germ obsessed to the point of making the bacteria situation way worse.

• I was raised by a woman who was exploring all of these ideas long before me. Long before my friends. My mother, and many other people in the late sixties and seventies, were looking at the same situation we are now: the necessity to stop dependence on fossil fuel to run our society. It didn't go mainstream back then. I hope it does now. It isn't like you have to go back to the dark ages and throw your piss out your window into the streets, be sensible!

The subject of change is not one that, for me, has only come up now that everyone else is freaking out about a depression. I have been working along this path for many years now and through the influence of my mother it's more like getting back to my roots than an extreme life makeover. It's a slow process. You don't make tons of change over night. I'm not going to do cloth wipes tomorrow. I'm not ready. But I have the grace to recognize that it is not only a valid option but one that may eventually become necessary. Those who do it prefer it to scratchy toilet paper and they are quite hygienic people.

I made my own shampoo when I was nineteen using castile soap and herbs I made into a decoction myself. It was fun. My spirit came alive. I felt like a kid mixing potions from the dirt and the plants in my mom's garden. I really loved the shampoo, actually, it smelled great and felt great. It made me feel capable.

When I moved into our first house and had my very own garden for the first time in my life I found myself immediately rediscovering my mom's secrets: always plant sage. Always plant lovage. Always grow something you can eat. Always grow flowers for the birds, bees, and butterflies. It is as natural as breathing, these concepts. It took no effort for me to not plant any lawn. Every success I had felt like making another little connection with the ground under my feet. Botany, food, beauty. Are these things puritanical or crazy?

The difference between those who survive things like economic depressions and those who do not is a) common sense b) understanding the need of reciprocity* c) resourcefulness. I just read a passage of MFK Fisher's on some one's blog the other day that really struck home and I entreat you to go read it near the end of her post. Common sense is not something the people of the current generation in my country are famous for. We've lost touch. I'm lucky that I grew up the way I did. It's like coming home to make my own body products. It isn't crazy, it's better living. It also happens to save you money in a lot of cases.

So, for me, this economic downturn is just another excuse, (as if I needed any), to refocus my efforts on making my household more natural and less resource sucking than ever before. It is merely offering me the inspiration to redouble my efforts to simplify and learn more of what I've already been learning and doing for years now. I haven't changed, it's a lot of people around me who are changing, or refusing to change.

Like the people who refused to leave the mountain when Mt. St. Helens erupted, those who refuse change now will suffer more than those who embrace it early before the fire really touches them.

My previous post offers a way to narrow down different things you can tackle. It isn't an entreaty to do all these things right now. In fact, it isn't an entreaty at all. I'm not making more than half those changes right now myself. But the first step to making change is to recognize where change can be made.

If all you do this year is stop using toxic chemicals to clean your house you will have made great strides in improving the health of both your family and the earth.

I have already made that step so I'm on to the next one.

It isn't being extreme to make these changes, it's extreme to make none.

*Reciprocity is necessary to get along in tough times. Sharing resources with your neighbors. Trading eggs for fabric, or sharing tools...people have depended on it for thousands of years. It is how we help each other through rough times. When we pool what we have we have a lot more. Although this is the concept behind "Communes" which I think are an awful way to live. It is entirely possible to have your own home but still practice being a great asset to your local community and share your resources with your neighbors. I only lived in a commune until I was five years old but it has left an indelible bitter impression in my spirit. So I believe in fostering communal support without communal living.

America Feels The Heat

It seems to have finally hit America that our old comfortable life by the cabbana is not particularly going to cut it in this new world that is starting to feel a little like the world our Grandparents love to discuss after a greasy Thanksgiving dinner. Talk of paring down our purchasing habits is spreading across the airwaves like wild California fires. Some people have even gotten rid of their house boys.

If it takes a depression to get our asses moving then I'm happy we're headed towards this tough financial period as a nation. Personally I have already gone through my own personal depression and as I try to figure out how to deal with my credit card debt it is clear that we are far from out of the woods.

So. What to do? I'll start by saying that I do not cut coupons. Coupons, in case I didn't mention them on my extensive list of anxieties, make me anxious. I have coupon phobia. I hate them. It's why I didn't last for more than one shift at Safeway. I'm not kidding.

The first three customers came up clutching fistfuls of coupons for different products, or the same products bearing different bar codes which are only good with the matching coupon, and there were coupons that added value to other coupons but only if the weight of the product is the 11oz version, and then there were the coupons that canceled out some (but not all) of the competitor's deals, but some of those are only valid if you buy on Tuesdays and bring your dead mother with you for proof of age.

When the following two customers came up clutching their own enormous handfuls of coupons I was already planning my resignation. My palpitations were very bad that day. I believe that coupons kill people slowly over the years of paper cuts and a thick lust for saving 28 cents at a time. I think coupons are addictive like gambling. What I think is: if you want to give me a deal, just give me a god damn deal. I'm not your monkey.

So no coupons.

I have been reading a lot of great ideas on other people's blogs and it has got me thinking that one way to approach saving money is by making a grocery list, including the monthly household purchases you make, and look at it hard. Look at it like you're a serious Russian Author. (Yes, I mean: with a bottle of Vodka by your side. It's the only way.) I'm sure that if you need help picturing this I can do an informative self portrait by Sunday illustrating my point with my newly whacked out eyebrows.*

The next thing to do is figure out what you can start making yourself for cheaper. Here are a number of common grocery list items that can be made for cheaper than you can usually buy them:

toothpaste
shampoo
lip balm
toilet paper
menstrual pads
air freshener
sponges
Clorox wipes
ricotta
canned beans
herbs

Those are just some examples. Now find out if you can make any of these things on your own to help the environment and or your budget. I cheated, I only put down things that I know can be produced at home for cheaper. I know you're thinking "Impossible!" C'mon. Play. Imagine.

Toothpaste: using baking soda and salt is how people were caring for their teeth long before Crest and its ilk came along. Personally, I love the toothpaste I use (Tom's Of Maine which is now Tom's of Crest). I loathe the sensation of baking soda in my mouth. However. My toothpaste costs me between $3.98 a tube and $4.98 a tube. Which lasts roughly two weeks with two of us using the same kind. Baking soda is sold bulk at my cheap store for 5o cents a pound. A POUND. A pound of baking soda could clean a whole hell of a lot of teeth. So I have been trying to brave up to make the change.

Shampoo: baking soda made into a paste. You can read about it here. Baking soda bulk is really cheap (see above) and apparently it performs a whole lot of great household tasks. Plus it's nontoxic which you can't actually say of most shampoos. Even the ones that claim to be natural.

Lip balm: You can buy a bar of bees wax, get some sweet almond oil, and make a hell of a lot more lip balm than you can buy for the same price. At some point I'll be organized enough to cost it all out officially for you. Because you have to make so much at once generally, this is a great project to do with friends and split the cost. Or, make a bunch and store them in a very cool dry place and they will keep for a long time.

Toilet Paper: Don't use any. Yep. Don't use any at all. Instead make yourself cloth wipes. I know that people (like me) generally can't grasp this concept all at once. It requires some serious thought. I have two good friends who do not use toilet paper any more and only have it in their homes as a kindness to less advanced guests like myself. I have to say that if I can get my whole household in better order so that I feel some sense of calm I might be able to do this. Read all about how it's done here. Maybe it seems wild but it's not. How long have we all been using toilet paper? Not that long actually.

Menstrual pads: Another item that can be made from cloth. Wash them. Use them again. I may not be ready for cloth wipes but I am ready for cloth pads. Every month I buy some and it isn't exactly the cost that bothers me but the waste. Although, why not save the $4.00 every month? I have been meaning to do this for a while and what keeps getting in my way is the general chaos of my sewing room and house. This is one I plan to tackle before my next cycle.

Air Freshener: Dudes...it's called OPEN THE WINDOWS. Even if you live in a frigid region you should open your windows for brief periods of time to let in fresh air. It is what we need most of all to keep a house fresh. But if you insist on using a spritzer- make it out of water and essential oils. Shake it up and spray. Don't use that creepy bottled crap because a) it smells super creepy and b) the ingredients are going to contribute to your death.

Sponges: This is a weakness of mine. I love sponges. I am very particular about them too. I love the Scotch brand yellow ones with the scrubbie on the back. But this is still a cost. And I don't use them until they are black with grime. The obvious answer is to use dish clothes. They last longer, can be washed in the washer, and you can make them yourself. I'm not ready for this but I could eliminate it from my shopping list and I will... as soon as I get over my fixation.

Clorox wipes: These are evil incarnate. Yes, I have lambasted them. They are squares of synthetic material soaked in toxic chemicals. Don't wipe your house or children with them. Unless you wish to do them damage. You don't need wipes. Clean dish clothes are just as good for wiping down surfaces and children. Or plain wash cloths. Just stop buying these. Waste of money.

Ricotta: I no longer buy it. For a 15 oz container of it I have to pay at least $4.00. But I can buy good quality local milk for $2.69. It takes little effort or time to make ricotta. And when I make it myself it tastes better.

Canned beans: Buy bulk dried beans. They are easy to fix. Busy? Find a crock pot at the thrift store and put your beans in there while you're at work (on low, with lots of water) and when you get home they'll be ready for you to use. A can of beans generally costs at least 50 cents (usually more for me). You can buy beans bulk for the same price per pound and get four times the amount of beans for the price. Without using a single coupon.

Herbs: I do buy spices when I need them but I rarely buy herbs anymore. I grow them. And then I dry them. It costs me about $2.69 for each thyme plant and I usually grow four or five of them and use it fresh when I need it and dry the rest twice a year. The plants generally last a few years in my climate. I also grow rosemary, sage, tarragon, oregano, and marjoram.

There is so much we can do ourselves. I'm getting inspired by all the gloom out there to make change and I really hope it makes everyone else stop and think too. It isn't about "doing without" so much as it's about taking better care of ourselves for less money. Most of the solutions to spending less are also solutions to wasting and polluting less. What would life without luxuries be? I agree. But what meaning is there to luxury if we have it all the time?

I'm not proposing to make my life more difficult or unfun, the truth is, doing these things for ourselves and making these kinds of changes are mostly fun. Some of you won't believe me unless you try it for yourself. Obviously I'm going to write here about things I try. It's what I do. And if I try something and it's a disaster, I promise not to sugar coat it for you. The magazine (Roost) will also have lots of great information in it on making some of the things I've mentioned here because I have several amazing contributors.

Let's all reinvent ourselves as amazing capable tough people able to get through rough times with a sense of humor and with our teeth still in our mouths.

Well, it's time to get in my jammies and watch some CSI.







*I get my hair cut and my brows waxed about four times a year and I have been meticulously letting my eyebrows get wider because a few years ago they were waxed to thin by a pencil-brow whore. My trauma was severe. I do not look nice with thin brows. I only like them to be cleaned up so they are less HAIRY. Well, today they have been made super thin and it is humiliating to think that people will think I think my brows look great. Ironically, I generally get a crappy haircut and today my haircut was pretty good.

These Dirty Hands

I want to end this day with something like an elegant word. I feel one chapter in my life slipping away in a long sigh, like a hypochondriac finally being permanently admitted to the emergency room, it has somehow been validated by the amount of pain I have experienced in it's grip. Some chapters you want to have last forever, like the one in which Mr. Rochester is under the tree in the dark with Jane and talking of those threads holding them together. I never want that one to end.

But this passing chapter, this period of time we have lived through and wept through and literally limped through is one that I would like to kick in the ass on it's way out.

My son cracked my nose with his knee today during a wresting match I was trying not to have and it hurt so bad I almost cried. My nose bled and I was trying not to vomit or cry from the pain and when I saw the look on Max's face I assured him that I was fine. But that I might have to cry. And he said "You cry when you get hurt?" I said that I sometimes do. Then he said "Like you cried about money?"

This is something he'll remember for the rest of his life. The day that crap-ass incident with the "Knitting Junkie" t-shirts happened I broke down and howled and cried like I hadn't cried in a very long time. I shook my fists at the universe and said I'd had enough of being beaten down.

My kid almost never sees me cry. Hardly anyone ever sees me cry. If I cry in front of people I want to die afterwords. I want to hurt myself and cast myself out of contact with humans. I feel the most intense shame for crying. I lash out meanly at innocent bystanders sometimes. I become gruff and feral. So Max saw me crying in the kitchen and wanted to know what it was about. I had to explain it to him.

In fact, the worst thing about not knowing at any time if you're going to lose your house and your belongings and all hope is having this be something like a shadow over your child's head. Children shouldn't have to worry about such things but reality is that if parents are worried about something all the time their kids will know. If you think they don't then you're an idiot and probably half blind.

So when I say I'm happy to see this chapter easing its vice grip from around our throats I say it with the most urgent sincerity. It isn't as though everything is suddenly easy. Because it's not. Right now there are bills I can't afford to pay. Yet. They will be paid late. It will take time to untangle the mess this last few years has left us in. But the difference is that I can feel the change in the air. I can smell the end of this sewer.

I can feel this change in my bones and skin. I have never wanted to get to the bottom of my laundry pile more than I do right now. To set up my guest bedroom. To unpack my boxes. To actually clean the woodwork. I want to paint the walls in my house and actually put the linens in the linen closet. I want to clean everything out and shape everything up.

Depression and anxiety make bones feel like they are filled with lead. Over two hundred pieces of lead held together by adrenaline spiked veins, muscle, and skin. Your mind chooses constant flight because of the shoddy nervous system's false messages of danger but it can't get anywhere because of the heap of heavy metal your bones have become. In fact, it's exactly like doing a speed-ball. I'm not even going to tell you how I actually know this. And you aren't going to ask me. All I can say is that if people want to feel like I do all the time for recreation, they are piss-idiots and I will happily trade nervous systems with them.

Then again, maybe not. We'd probably have to trade brains too and frankly, if feeling like a hunted antelope in a mastodon's body is what someone wants to do for fun, I don't think I want any of their equipment.

When life gets easier, when the energy is flowing downstream with the rest of the world and the air is carrying with it that great breath of change, even depression can't resist letting its grip slip every so slightly. Enough that I find myself dusting furniture that I haven't cleaned in months. Everything gets just enough easier that I can make use of what time I actually have.

For this reason I hope you will all pardon me if the first issue of Roost is a little late making its debut. I have begun a cleaning of my house, the great unpacking, dusting, vacuuming, and tidying that I've been not doing well or regularly for three years. My house is feeling the same love I am. It is speaking back to me. It's asking for a little care. It's telling me that while the weight is lifted to please put it in some kind of order. Because the better order I get it in now the easier it will be to ride out the next storm.

I'm a realist. (Believe it or not). There is always a next storm. A next war. A next family fight. Another catastrophe.

Because life is a dirty affair.

And that's really what I wanted to say this evening. That my hands are always dirty. There is always dark dirt under my nails from canning jam, processing vegetables, picking fruit, digging in the dirt, grappling with dust, planting plants, feeding chickens, playing with glue and paper, or smeared with blood from my kid's bloody noses* or from sewing until I've made my fingers into pin pitted messes. I don't have a lady's hands. I have a worker's hands.

I love a beautiful hand. I would enjoy having hands with gorgeous (but natural) nails, skin as soft as a newborn's belly, and delicate like my sister's hands which might be the most beautiful I've ever seen.

But I have the hands I was born with. I like them. I like what they do. I like what they accomplish. I like how they find joy sometimes before my eyes do. I like how they care for me when I'm sick and how they don't mind being covered with my baby's spit and shit. I like how they can sometimes fashion beautiful food for my husband and also care for his sickbed by changing all the sheets and opening the casements wide to let in the fresh air. I like how they can use thread to bind fibers together. I like how they can tackle repetitive actions like birds flying south through the night.

I think the earth is ever moving. I think it moves through me as much as it moves through you. We are all like the soil, connected to rock, vegetation, and spirit, through hands. Our hands grab fistfuls of it and every cell vibrates. If we sit very still. If we let the whole world sit very still with us, our fingers will tell us everything.

I'd like to think that I'm under the canopy of good fortune again. I want to trust that this isn't like spring break: fleeting beer-soaked abandon ending in the reality of failed finals and unwanted venereal diseases.

I'd like to think that canopy of good fortune is one that spreads and shares and divides itself between us all.




Note: My friend Riana has a post about why many of us might be experiencing a fresh start right now. Also, my friend Kelly has a wonderful Flickr project about hands- check it out and consider adding to her great gallery of hands doing amazing things and looking beautiful!


*Thankfully he's getting fewer of them so that I go several days at a time completely forgetting what it used to be like.

Comfort Finds Us

When I had my baby, almost eight years ago, I imagined my world was going to change. I mean, doesn't every parent look forward to having their world rocked by this new experience called "parenthood"? Yeah, but what I didn't know was that I was going to go from getting sick once a year to being sick pretty much ALL THE TIME. It is definitely unfair that I also started developing seasonal allergies at the same time that went undiagnosed for the first two years of constant doctor's visits.*

Not all mothers experience this, but many do: you get sick every time your baby does. Which totally sucks because they have to catch up to you with their immune system and literally have to catch EVERYTHING.

For almost seven years I caught everything Max did and also had to deal with seasonal allergies which are a lot like getting constant mini-colds. Then a little over a year ago, nothing remarkable happened. And continued to not happen.

I didn't get sick. Not for a whole year. I was too depressed and anxious to truly appreciate that absence of bronchitis and the flu and strep, which is par for the course. But it slowly dawned on me that my 8-9 yearly colds had diminished.

Well, now Philip has a nasty chest cold, and I will probably get it too. This is always much worse for people with serious asthma than it is for the rest of us. He stayed home from work which is a true indication of how bad he is feeling because the man has a very hard time admitting to being sick.

So with hardly any teasing at all I made sure that my Camille in training got some good soothing comfort food. Luckily neither of us finds beans hard to digest. I served Philip some black bean stew with fresh cilantro over a layer of mashed Golden Hubbard squash with salt, pepper, and butter. I made it look super pretty so I could show you how amazing my culinary skills are.

Then I slopped some in a bowl for myself. Because I've been getting extra personal around here lately, I figured, why not show you my petticoats in the kitchen? Yes, I slop things in bowls for myself. This picture is not posed. In fact, I wasn't going to show you the underpinnings but when I saw how I had practically thrown my mashed squash in the bowl with bits oozing out it made me laugh and I thought you might enjoy seeing what a true slob I am at heart.

I ran a bunch of errands and then, when I returned home I made some soup. Not just any soup but some unphotogenic soup. The kind that frightens colds away and warms your body from the inside out. I made a curried winter squash soup with coconut milk, ginger, garlic, and hot peppers. My mouth is still burning from it and I feel empowered, like my alter ego could be named...

...(Nothing leaps to mind)...**

I don't know if I'm going to get this nasty chest cold or not. I've decided that if I do, I'm going to have a great attitude about it because there's nothing I can do to stop it besides eat well, sleep well, and get through it. I'll still have to work and it's OK. The fall is beautiful. Spicy Thai soup is the best remedy for the encroaching cold (though remedy implies that I don't want it to come, which I do!). Things around here are mending and healing on a cellular level. That's way more important than a stupid painful gut-aching sleep depriving virus.

Right?

Go eat good food and don't get sick, OK?

*The doctors laughed at me for thinking something was wrong because I was sick all the time. They'd say "But you have a baby, right?" and then "Well, you have a toddler...right?" Because that obviously explains the constant swollen throat.

**That is a bald faced lie. What leaped into my mind was "...Ginger Power Unincorporated!!..." but I immediately thought "Boy am I glad I didn't say that out loud!".

What I Learned From You This Week

I've learned a lot from doing my poll and from writing the post about fitting in:

• If you put a smart-ass option on a poll, some people will not be able to resist. (What do you think I'm going to do- post pictures of a naked Paris Hilton?! Or was someone hoping for something a lot less trashy? Richard Armitage?)

• There are two kinds of heat that would kill me if I ever lived in the south: the heat from the sun and the heat from the brimstone. I belong in only one direction and that's west. West of the Cascades. (Even if I am in the west's version of the bible belt.)

• People will probably not stop having big families until they find themselves having to fight all the other people on the planet for drinking water and food. Or, nature will even us out by sending us a modern version of the plague that will wipe out a third of the earth's population.* I hope I get to be spared, but I guess if I am one of the people wiped out at least I won't have to see my small family suffer.

• Lots of people feel out of place where they are. I think the Internet is a real blessing to those of us who need to find like-minded people to be in contact with frequently and can't find enough of it in our own communities. So whether you're a Christian who can't find other like minded Christians, a Yankee in a southern town, or just a regular old misfit...don't feel guilty that you need support and validation for being who and what you are.

• The blog content that got the most votes (besides the "variety" choice) was the mental stuff, but oddly enough it's often the mental stuff that gets the very least amount of comments. I send this dark stuff out there and hear it echo across an unearthly quiet universe. Every time I post anything about my mental illness or anything that has stemmed from it I feel edgy, uncertain, want to rip my computer out of the wall, throw myself on my dirt pile for a good cry, hide under a rock until I die, and generally wither up. Interesting that so many people like that stuff.

• Talking about parenting got the least votes of all even though often those are the posts that generate the most discussion.

• You almost can't decide whether you like my recipes or my cunning self portraits better. Recipes win by one vote. So I guess I really ought to post more recipes. Or fewer self portraits. I am SO not vain, but I admit I have a tremendously fun time doing the self portraits. I would probably post recipes practically all the time if I wasn't so lazy. Recipes, to be any good at all, have to be written very well.

• Considering the nature of a number of the topics I frequently cover here, it is amazing how few nasty comments I get. Is it just lucky? Or do they not think my small blog is worth attacking? Don't get me wrong...I'm happy I get so few. It's just suspicious when there are so many snarky mean people out there trolling for blogs to bitch at...I can't help but wonder why I am spared when a lot of better cooler nicer blogs get attacked?

• There is a church in my town that openly welcomes gay people. This makes me happy. This is something good. One of the things I think is poisonous about most forms of Christianity is the view it cherishes that being gay is a) a choice b) a sin and c) a disease. All of which views are products of a very narrow mind-set. I have thought about what it must be like to be gay in this town of mine and concluded that it must feel much harder to be gay than to be me. I'm glad there's somewhere spiritual where gay people are welcomed around here.

• I've discovered that it's really important to me that my spirituality does not acquire a name, any set rituals, find itself in a group setting, or fit inside the pages of any book. What's funny about that is that I don't mind if you put me in a box or category. I'm comfortable with labels and generalizations. But my spirituality is best enjoyed without parameters, names, or rules. As soon as it becomes fixed it ceases to grow and I like knowing that it will accommodate new information, discoveries, and that it will accept new thoughts. I want to keep evolving.

*The plague wiped out an estimated 75 million people in the middle ages. The world population at that time was around 450 million. People, I think, have turned out to be the real virus on earth. (Bitter Betty- I wrote this before reading your comment about Jacob including people as one of the seven plagues in his school project!)

Fitting In Is Hard To Do

There is a church for almost every possible religious denomination in my county. And there are always more being built. If the map of Yamhill County had been stamped "Bible Belt Of The West Coast" I would probably have chosen somewhere else to live. However, I found myself here and I love almost everything about it so I have to find a way to fit in where I don't fit in.

Here in my county one of the first things people ask you is "What church do you attend?" which I always want to answer with smart ass retorts like "I attend the Church of the disenfranchised Americans" or "I go to the congregation of non-believers." I don't say these things because I try to maintain respect for people who believe that worship must be offered to God in a very specific way in order for it to be valid even though it seems awfully small minded to me. As I said in my last post, I see a person who believes in god as a person who is not completely unlike myself who believes in nature as a great designer of life. They don't generally see me with the same willingness to open one's mind to different expressions for the same essential beliefs.

I bring this up because living in a community that takes god very seriously makes me frequently feel out of place. Add to that the high prevalence of people who want or have large families...

I wasn't going to bring this up to anyone besides my mother and my very close friend Chelsea because they are the only two people I could be sure I could really unload my mind to and receive the support I needed and know that they would still love me in spite of my idiocy. However, after talking with my mom I realized that my issue is one that is truly universal and to not talk about it is not doing myself or anyone any good.

If you are in a situation where you are the odd man out it sits on your shoulders to try and blend in. When you visit a foreign country do you read about it first? Try to learn a few phrases of a different language? Do you visit quietly, taking in the sights and the people with an open mind. Letting them be who they are? Or do you stomp around arrogantly pointing at the natives and expecting everyone to make way for you?

I try not to make a fuss about people's religion. I try to be respectful. I moved to a community that cherishes the bible and I try not to step all over that. In doing so I keep an awful lot close to my chest, even among friends because most of the friends I've made here believe in god in the biblical sense, though none of them actually attend a church. They don't ask me about my spiritual beliefs much and I suppose it's to preserve a friendship that might not stand the rigors of religious discussions between believers and nonbelievers.

I am not used to not being able to freely say what I think about religion. I am not used to knowing that most of the people I meet not only don't share the same beliefs as I do, but that they don't have much respect for mine.

So I don't say a lot of things that come to my mind. It's the same with the idea that people here never seem to be finished having babies or wanting more babies. It's the religion of family and children. I have never met so many women who would happily have four or five children if circumstances allowed.

I have already met my quota of friends with medium and large sized families. I literally have no room for any more.

So here's what I want you, increasingly alienated reader?, to understand: these aren't idle issues for me. These are fundamental differences in life view and choices. I spent half of Sunday having the most massive panic attack I've had in a long time. My palpitations felt like ball peen hammer blows about to crack through my chest. My thoughts were obsessively revolving around in my head over the subject of everyone in my town wanting lots of fucking babies. Why is everyone so goddamn obsessed with family and making babies?!

I'm not kidding. I had a massive panic attack (which sometimes feels like it might morph into a heart attack) because everyone around me would really like a large family and I feel very alone and I cannot understand it nor go down that road with anyone. I also can't talk about this very much because I'd pretty much find myself alone. Friendless. I can either have no friends, or have friends who would all just keep having babies until they were fifty five if circumstances would allow.

I worked so hard to talk myself into a calm about this. "Angelina, you unfeminine bitch, you can be friends with people who want lots of babies....it's alright...you won't implode...you'll still have something in common...you'll be able to spend time with them without babies and children everywhere when you're 102 years old....right when they go through that whole empty nest crap that you won't go through because you are like a man and-damn if you're not as hairy as one..."

So just as I'm getting calmer about this whole big family phenomenon here in the bible belt, I realize that sometimes being a non-christian in a christian community is just as alienating as being a woman who believes that having small or medium sized families is the responsible way to use one's ovaries. So my panic attack moves seamlessly into the religious realm. It's good to have plenty of fuel for my mental illness to feed on.

I unloaded all this on my mom and she made some very good observations which mostly boil down to the fact that I moved from a community in which I fit in well to one in which I am the odd man out. I am the Darwin fish on dry land praying to the mud heap from which I just exited to please help me evolve soon enough to not die out. My mom pointed out that I moved to a place where I don't share a lot of fundamental beliefs. She suggested I make more time to spend with my nonreligious and small family friends so that I can unwind and let my heart have a rest where it is safe and comfortable.

That got me thinking about how I've heard a lot of murmers from people in the last couple of years, both religious and stray religious sheep, who have been pining to find a greater sense of community by finding a church they can feel good about attending. I think us nonreligious people need to congregate too.

Every non religious person I have met in my community here in Yamhill county has expressed an alarming degree of relief at meeting another nonreligious person. I have shared that alarming degree of relief. We whisper incredulously to each other in dark corners about how some people here don't even believe in evolution(!!) and let our shock out from its guarded cell. I'm not easily shockable and I admit that I think not believing in evolution is EXACTLY like not believing the earth is round.

DUDES: THE EARTH IS SOOOO ROUND!!!!

The point is, people need to spend time with like-minded people. That's why christians feel a desire to get together in one place to worship. That's why agnostics need to gather in seedy cafes to drink gritty black coffee and smoke lots of Galoises. We need to spend some time around people we can show our true selves to. It gives us the power to walk through strange country and be gracious, be genuinely open minded, and accept that there are a thousand ways to live life. It gives us the strength to mingle. It calms the spirit and eases the temper.

I feel a lot of guilt that I never felt before. Because my views oppose those of people I have come to care about and I think on some level I know that I am oil to the Yamhill county water.

It is really hard for me to write all this stuff coherently because I have a lot of emotion wrapped up in it. The bottom line for me is that I can be friends with all kinds of people who have different beliefs than myself but I must stay close to those with whom I share fundamental beliefs. I need to break bread frequently with people who I know don't think my beliefs are wrong and invalid. I need to congregate with my kind to keep grounded because when I don't I start to feel isolated which makes me want to lash out unkindly to everyone else.

Whatever elements of who you are define you the most, you need to spend some time honoring that. It's important to have some place, or some people that you can always go to to refresh your spirit, and to quench your mind's thirst. It's important to find some haven where you fit in. Because fitting in is what reassures you that you're natural and that you are perfect just the way you are.

Because you are perfect just the way you are.

This Church Of Trees

Sometimes I think dogs and mathematicians are closer to god than anyone else. Mathematicians see the world differently than the rest of us. Every solid branch that scratches at them can be described in a sentence of numbers like an exotic ancient script. Every ray of sunshine can be measured and described with a number of mathematical equations and facts. Words that look like numbers, numbers that look like matter, matter that we can describe a thousand ways. There is a limitless number of things a person can know, which is why it's futile to expect one's self to know everything.

People seek places to worship, appropriate places to lay down their faith and go through the prescribed actions of their faith with others who feel as they do and believe as they do. It makes me infinitely sad and uncomfortable that everyone cares so much how other people worship and how so many people are wrapped securely in their belief that their way is the only way, which makes everyone else's way not just different, but invalid or wrong.

One of my greatest arguments with the concept of god is that most people who believe in god think there is only one way to see him/it, that there is only one way to describe his/its presence in our lives. I look at all these people arguing over the proper way to worship and I can't help but think: you are like husbands and wives arguing passionately over how to properly cook a grain of rice.

There are a thousand ways to properly cook a grain of rice but everyone who is eating rice is participating in the same essential action and shares the same fundamental belief that rice is nourishing and good, especially when cooked.

Language is beautiful in that there are so many ways to say the same things. Come, step out of your own skin for a little while and follow the leaves fluttering like delicate scraps of paper to rest in the paths of man. Tell me in your own language how it feels to follow the air as it follows the light. Tell me in your florid, spare, crude, honest, naive, pretty, guttural, splintered, distracted, mathematical, faithful, loving, thankful, shy, and individual way how you feel walking down the arching paths of this quiet cathedral of nature that smells like crushed leaves and damp earth. I'll bet we can sieve it all down and discover that our feelings aren't all that different.

That we are actually saying the exact same things but in our own way. God is god is god is god is god. If two people stand in front of each other and they both love god but they have a different way of expressing that love and different manuscripts of structure for their beliefs, I still just see two people who believe in god.

Dogs lead themselves forward on an adventuresome streak of madness like wild cannons. Shooting out randomly where the scent draws them. They worship at the alter of the trunks of trees just as I worship the light that filters through the canopy. They hunt for messages from other dogs writ loudly in piss and joyfully leave their own important messages layered on top. We walk through the orchard together, worshiping this same church of trees but we are looking for our comfort, our inspiration, and our wisdom from different pages, different passages, and using different language. Yet we understand each other.

As we approach the orchard the dogs set their heads at a more alert angle, their nostrils open and strive to reach the trees before their tails do. I quicken my own pace because I see the light is perfect and the trees, as always, are arranged like a Gothic cathedral, row after row of trees with branches arching upwards and meeting with a center point. The quiet comes down on our heads like prayer.

For a dog it's "pee", for me it's "nature", for you it might be "god".

Don't be so quick to assume we aren't actually all saying the exact same thing.

Food Nourishes Our Bodies, Money Nourishes Nothing

My friend Laurie brought me another bag of grapes and so after a wonderful day of dealing with all the accumulated detritus of a life come undone with stress and a lot of working away from my home, I cleaned the grapes and began de-stemming them to make more raisins. Plucking grapes off of their stems, especially when there are lots of little ones, takes time and care if you are trying not to wreck them with careless haste. I got to hearing people's thoughts whirling in my head "Is all that work really worth a pint of raisins that you can buy for a couple of dollars?" and "When I think about what money I could be making in the time it takes to make those raisins it just isn't economically worth doing."

There are only so many hours in the day. What do we spend those hours doing? Running around in cars hustling children from one activity to the next, working for someone else for dollars in the bank, scrambling to do all the things we're "supposed" to do like go to the movies, take vacations to Disneyland, and sit on school boards to prove we're good parents.

But what if we're looking at everything backwards through the lens?

I started thinking about how hard people worked during the Great Depression* and how people were working crap jobs for pennies just to barely survive. They may have worked 16 hour days to keep their family from drowning but a lot of them still had to make a lot of the things they needed for themselves. In fact, they worked all those hours and still baked their own bread, they canned food, they grew gardens. Why? Because there was no Walmart to offer them insanely cheap alternatives.

The real cost of things.

When people say they can buy something for less than they can make it, do they even understand the true cost of what they're buying? Do they take into account the quality? Do they calculate the human cost involved? If you're not making something yourself, someone else is making it for you. If it's cheap to buy, it was cheaper to make. Someone, a person not unlike yourself, was paid to do the work so you wouldn't have to. But for you to get it so cheap, that person is not making much money on the factory line where practically your whole life has been assembled.

That's a cost. Human sweat. The quality issue is a serious one. If you buy something really cheap, it was made cheaply and will not last long. The sooner things break down the faster the landfills are filled up and the faster the earth is covered in human detritus. Wasted money and time. That's what the landfills are.

I once bought a pair of pants at K-mart because we were on a budget and K-mart had some super cheap clothes. I wore that pair of pants ONCE before they ripped in such a way that I couldn't fix them. One day. So what did those pants truly cost me and everyone? They ended up on a landfill. I've made lots of my own clothes before and when I do I choose good quality fabrics, I use a short stitch (better quality) and I make them to last. I have rarely had to get rid of anything I've made for myself. In fact, if I ever lose my fat I will be able to wear them all again because I still have them. They were not only worth making, I made something worth keeping.

Of course not all of us were born with equal abilities. Not all of us will be able to become skilled at sewing, or canning, or woodworking. But all of us are capable of learning some of those things. Of practicing the art of doing for ourselves. We shouldn't be looking at these life skills through a money filter. Money is just a stand in for the things we can't do for ourselves. Originally money was how many chickens we had, how much produce came from our garden, and what skills we had that could be used to trade for other people's skills.

Bartering is ancient currency.

I used to have a knee-jerk reaction against the concept of bartering. It reminded me of a Hippie-style simplistic vision of utopia. I don't believe in utopias any more than I believe in panaceas. People who suggest that a world where there was no money and we all bartered for our needs sound just like evangelists talking about heaven where no one needs to eat. Once I got past my knee jerk reaction I felt anxiety at the concept of negotiating trades with people because I have a lot of weird phobias and irrational anxieties about dealing with people. Bartering seems like such a nebulous concept, one steeped in the possibility of tangles and snares. How can you be sure it's fair? How can you know what some thing's worth?

But I've changed my view on it. Oddly enough it is largely through blogging and being here in my small town where there are quite a few like minded people that I have come to realize that bartering is no more complicated than trading goods for dollars. I've come to regard trading skills and homemade goods as more honorable than buying. And more pleasant. How do I keep from getting fraught with anxiety? I realized a while ago that it isn't about fixed worth in the same way that money is about fixed worth. It's about need. Need is so much easier to sort out.

I need some wine barrels. My friend, who gets them for free from the winery he's working at likes my home canned goods and he and his wife value them and we make a trade. It isn't really about the worth of the barrels versus the worth of the canned goods. That would be looking through the money filter. It was need versus desire. Bartering is also often a matter of need versus need.

I have often heard people say that they can't make something themselves for cheaper than it costs them to buy it. But I think they're looking at it backwards. I think they should be asking themselves if it's worth all the hours they spend away from home to buy everything instead of making things for themselves? If they didn't have to buy so much they wouldn't have to work so much.

If you made all your own clothes you most certainly would have to spend more than you would if you were buying them from Walmart, but if you let me teach you to sew, or another friend, you can make a better quality item that will be useful for years. And when it's done, you can make a patchwork quilt out of it because you will have chosen natural fabrics. Think of all the hours of working for money you could save yourself by not having to buy clothes so often.

Needs Versus Desires

Then there's the semantics of the issue that drives me nuts. Choice and Need are two words that get abused all the time. When people say they have no choice but to have two cars they are generally not being honest. Maybe in a case where one of the cars is a truck that is necessary for work, there is a need. But most families in the Untied States have at least two cars. I know lots of them that have more. I hear them say "We need all the cars because of the kids." Each kid as they grow seems to think that life requires a car of their own. We choose where we live. We choose the activities we follow. We choose how far we live from our friends. We make all the choices that lead to our needs.

I would like people to stop saying they have "no choice". We all have choice. We can decide not to keep up with the Joneses. Maybe if we're so concerned about keeping up with the Joneses we should move to where the Joneses don't care what we do. Maybe your kids don't need two or three extracurricular activities. Maybe you don't need to chair any school or work functions.

We all make choices that lead to the lives we're living. A lot of the things we say we "need" we don't really need, we just want. It is easier to convince ourselves to work harder, earn more money, even when we're bone tired already, if we believe that what we want is really what we need.

I look to myself in this. I have thought about selling my Scooter because if I really examine it, I know that I don't "need" it. I love it, I enjoy it, and I use it. We have one car. One scooter. Many bicycles. I don't need my scooter, but I have it. For the time being I have decided to keep it because we don't use our car very much each week. Philip rides his bike to work. We use the car to run errands and to visit friends. We only have to fill up the car with gas once every couple of weeks now. We used to fill it up every week. We've made our life more local on purpose. Yes, there's a price. Local jobs don't pay well. It's been a struggle. But we're happier.**

I know that I could run a lot more errands on my bicycle than I do. If I didn't have my scooter I would still be able to go grocery shopping on my bicycle.

So I don't need my scooter. I'm trying for honesty in myself just as I'm asking everyone else to be honest. You can still make your choices, and maybe one of your choices is to have two cars. But recognize that it's a choice, and a desire, not a need.


In spite of being tired at 5pm, de-stemming grapes doesn't feel like work, it feels like meditation.







*So great it gets capitalized like God and Jesus.

**Well, we're happier now that I have a job that is going to make a huge difference, but it's local too since I work from home!! We really are happiest not commuting to jobs fifty miles from home which is what Philip used to do for seven years.

Take My Poll

At the very bottom of my blog there is a poll. I would like everyone who visits here with any regularity at all to please take it because polls are one of my favorite things EVER. Plus I really really want to know the answer to my question. I've asked before and gotten one or two responses (OK, maybe a few more than that).

I have read more blogs in the past week than I have in the past few months and it has made me think (again) about what blogs do for people, about what mine is doing for anyone besides myself, and how does one decide on focus? I am currently categorized in one of Blogher's food sections and when I had to say what I talk about most on my blog I thought food was the obvious answer months ago. However, I go long periods of time without mentioning how much cheese I'm eating or what's cooking in my kitchen. So Blogher is going to kindly move me to the parenting section.

But, is that really where I belong? Half the day I'm looking at people with their kids and thinking

"This whole parenting thing is a crock."
"There are too many kids in this world."
"Why do people keep having more kids?"
"Wow, kids are annoying."

I'll be the person in parenting who pisses every doting loving mother off because when anyone asks me how wonderful having kids is with those dewy baby-loving eyes I have to practically bite my tongue in half to keep myself from saying "Why do you want to go messing up a perfectly good life with babies?"*

When I hear any woman pining for one more baby than she already has I want to scream on the top of my lungs:

WASN'T THE LAST ONE GOOD ENOUGH FOR YOU?!!!

Nothing makes a person more lynchable popular than when you ask them that question.


So, where do I belong? How can I tell if I should be focusing more on one subject than another? What does everyone want to hear about the most? It's all right there in the poll. You can tell me anonymously what you like best about my blog.

Focusing on a single subject is very hard for me. If I focus on only homesteading then where do I channel all my mental health stuff? Where does the rare parenting post go? Where do I direct my razor sharp political viewpoints?

I've noticed that most blogs that enjoy any kind of busy traffic are single subject blogs. Is it really true that everyone prefers single subject blogs?

Good god people, will you put me out of my misery already?!!!

Take the poll!!!

*I am obviously not very baby friendly. Which is funny because when I see them in real life I feel very comfortable around them and enjoy their drooling little faces. Is it possible to be fine with something in real life but to be philosophically opposed to it? I believe I'm philosophically opposed to people have lots of babies and feel quite fiercely about it, yet, I have never met a baby I thought shouldn't have been born.

Cherry Tomato Gratin

There are still just enough cherry tomatoes around to make posting this recipe for Michelle worth while. It is an adaptation of a recipe from a book called "The Vegetarian Table: France". What's really great about this recipe is that you can use a ton of your cherry tomatoes all at once and you don't have to cut them. Just wash and de-stem them. This recipe is easy, quick, and so good. The only problem I can find with it is that it doesn't photograph well.

Ingredients:

cherry tomatoes (enough to fill a small to medium casserole dish half way)
ricotta (appx. 15 oz, or however much you get from making one batch of your own)
1 egg
splash of milk or cream
6-10 big basil leaves, julienned
a few grinds of nutmeg (or a few shakes)*
salt and pepper to taste
olive oil for drizzling




Method:

Preheat your oven to 375 degrees.

Put your washed and stemmed cherry tomatoes in your favorite gratin dish. Grind some fresh pepper on them, and sprinkle some salt on them too. Drizzle a little olive oil on them, you don't need much, maybe just a tablespoon or two.

In a medium sized bowl combine your ricotta, the egg, the splash of milk (cream if you like food richer), the basil, and the nutmeg. I always add freshly ground pepper and about 1/2 tsp of salt to the ricotta. If it's home made you may wish to add a little more. Mix the ingredients together well.

Spoon the ricotta over the tomatoes. Smooth it out so it's all covered. You may add grated Parmesan to the top if you like. I rarely remember to add Parmesan, but it's good that way. Cook for 15 or 20 minutes. You want it to cook only long enough to set the ricotta and make the tomatoes hot. If you cook it too long the tomatoes will burst. It will still be delicious, but much funkier looking. What's particularly pleasing about this recipe is how the tomatoes burst their juices in your mouth and how the ricotta adds just the right note of creaminess to the tomato tang.

This is a very healthy dish to eat. You can use low fat ricotta (or nonfat) but be aware that the nonfat has a considerably different texture.




*As strange as I think it is, some people hate nutmeg. If you don't like it, just omit it. But I promise you, it's better with the nutmeg.

Play With Your Food

When cauliflowers are as big as your head I think it's important to understand how easily it could get the better of you. There's no need to shoot it from a helicopter, because vegetables do not, as a general rule, move very fast.

There really isn't much I can say. It is so much better to see it for yourself.

Don't all families photograph themselves with giant cabbages?

This photo does not lie. If you look very carefully, you will see that this cruciferous mutant is sitting on a dinner plate. A regular sized dinner plate. You could feed a family of thirteen with this cabbage.

The cauliflower is dwarfed next to the cabbage, but never the less, aren't you impressed with Max's sangfroid? If that cauliflower was a cannon it could do some serious damage.

Those Max pictures are from two years ago. It is obvious that I never get tired of the silliness of giant food.

Max won't pose for me anymore because he's mature now. He also doesn't wear underwear with kid's motifs anymore because they are for people less mature than him. I enjoy the irony of this picture. My kid doesn't eat vegetables.

Cauliflower is one of my favorite vegetables. Here is what I did with one of these giant ones two days ago: cut it into flowerets, roasted it with olive oil, herb salt, and pepper at 385 degrees until cooked and browned pleasantly in bits. We just kept eating it off the pan. Now I need to make more because roasted cauliflower is great over pasta with or without other roasted vegetables, added to cous cous, eaten on salad, or added to rice.

Another way I love eating cauliflower is to make it into a gratin- a cheese and cauliflower casserole.

Adding it to stir fries and soups is also really wonderful.

The only way I do not eat cauliflower is raw. I do not like raw cruciferous vegetables as they do not agree with my stomach.

Cauliflowers that are small are just as good as big ones. In fact, in general I don't favor especially huge vegetables. I buy these because they are grown locally and are inexpensive, and are irresistible to play with. I'm afraid to find out what chemicals the grower uses to promote such mutants. However, I have an obligation to find out, so eventually I will ask. For all I know the grower could be using steroids or witchcraft.

For the moment I'm satisfied to play with my food and then roast it until it's perfect.

I am so excited by the weather (turning cold and really wet!), the smoke on the air (people burning branches in orchards and lighting their fires) which seems so primitive and charming now that it's been long enough to enjoy the smell again, and the smell of dropping apples everywhere. I love that people are buttoning up. I love that I have work now that will allow us to slowly climb out of the financial abyss we've been sliding ever deeper into. I love that it's something I can really enjoy*. I feel hopeful in a way I haven't felt in years.

I love that everyone else's thoughts are turning to pumpkins and leaves and colors and nesting and cooking.

I love that soon I'll have the time to work on my magazine and that my brain is not half so consumed with worries about money. It's so easy to say money doesn't matter, when you have enough to pay for the basics. If you can pay for the basics then your mind has room for other thoughts, other cares, and it even has enough room to clear out once in a while. Free to simply enjoy the moment.

I also love these pictures of my kid playing with my food.







*You're annoyed that I haven't said what it is yet, aren't you? OK, I'll tell you. I got a job at Blogher Ads because my friend Laura who already works for them thought I'd be good at it and suggested they hire me. I'm a headline editor now. I wake up at 5am and have to be done by 12pm. I LOVE IT!!!!! (The job, not the waking up at 5am).

Grape Jelly

Ingredient ratio:

1 cup grape juice, strained
1.75 cups sugar
1/4 package liquid pectin

Note that it isn't recommended that you crank up a huge vat of hot water just to make one and a half jars of jelly. This is a ratio of ingredients so that you can use any amount you have and still make a successful jelly. I followed the instructions for liquid pectin because it's what the Ball book of canning calls for. I cannot say with any expertise what the ratios would be if using dried pectin or home made.

1. Put your grape juice in a pot on the stove and crank up the stove to high. Stir the sugar into the fruit and bring it to a roiling boil.

2. Add the correct amount of liquid pectin, stirring it in quickly.

3. Boil for exactly one minute. I'm lame and don't have a kitchen timer so I watch the clock which is inexact.

4. Skim foam off. The foam won't hurt anything. It will make your jelly UNSIGHTLY, is all.

5. Ladle jelly into hot jars.

6. Leaving 1/4" headroom, cap the jars.

7. Process in a boiling water bath canner for 5 minutes.

Grape jelly is not a childhood memory of mine. Grape jelly was for those kids who got white bread and Skippy peanut butter. In my house we had honey, jam, or fruit butters with our peanut butter sandwiches. I never once felt my life was worse off for the absence of jelly in my life.

I don't think I ever experienced it until I was twenty two years old. The memory of that oozing squishy gluey "bread" confection is just as vivid to me today as the day I actually experienced it. A peanut butter and grape jelly sandwich on gluey bread is not the kind of food one can take lying down, partly because this might lead to suffocation, and partly because one must have the senses wide open and alert to appreciate it.

This type of sandwich must be eaten with some kind of beverage such as water or milk lest your throat glues itself shut in protest while you're trying to make sense of the cement like substance that saliva reduces it to. There was a moment for me, that first time, when I couldn't decide if this jelly sandwich was so strange it was charming, like an exotic tropical dessert, or if it was going to kill me once it hit my intestines and was therefore not charming at all.

In the end I decided that my life would be pretty good if I never ate a peanut butter and grape jelly sandwich again.

Then one day, several years later, I got a jar of my cousin Christa's grape jelly made from grapes growing wild in her yard all the way over in Wisconsin. It was a lovely blushed pink color and smelled heavenly. I ate some on toasted wheat bread with butter and experienced something so wholly unlike my previous jelly experience...it was beautiful, flavorful, and without the peanut butter to smother it, it was marvellously cool to the tongue and yet also like warm sunshine spread across a field of wheat.

Ever since then I have courted the idea of begging my cousin for more of her jelly.

When I got free grapes from my friend Laurie I seized the opportunity to make some of my own. Concords are the classic grape for that purple grape juice flavor. I figured it must be perfect for jelly. I could serve it up in tiny jars and pretend to be eating in a cafe, always an ambition of mine.

It took me nearly a week to prepare the juice for it which consists of cleaning and de-stemming the grapes, mashing them with a masher in a big pot, boiling them for a few minutes, and then straining them. Straining them again. Then, against the sage advice of Internet friends who know about things like this, straining them once again because I don't want to have my first grape jelly be ugly.

Once the juice was strained sufficiently I refrigerated it because having five jobs can really get in the way of making jellies*. On Saturday I made the jelly. I did set aside some fragrant fine pulp for making into a jam/jelly hybrid since I hated wasting perfectly good fruit pulp. I used pectin because even though Concords are one of the few grapes that have a decent amount of pectin I didn't want to take chances. In case you decide to make some of your own, note that I'm very happy I used added pectin!





*It will reduce down to three jobs soon enough. Two of them are freelance. Then it will be just two jobs because one of them is temporary.

Make Your Own Raisins

This is total pantry love. It makes me feel that I must bake something right now using raisins. I haven't bought raisins in over a year and now the first raisins to come into the house after my local food challenge are ones I made myself from free local grapes. It doesn't get cooler than that for us pantry types.

The grapes I picked last week-end have held up remarkably well in the garage while I try to squeeze my grape processing between my five jobs (six if you include the Etsy shop). I've got a gallon and a half of grape juice waiting to be canned, some of it to turn into jelly, and more grapes in the garage with a big question mark hovering in a cloud above them. Now that my first batch of raisins has come out of the dehydrator* I have concluded that raisins should always taste just like dried grapes.

Raisins usually taste like very sweet gobs of sticky fruit. I like them. Many people I know don't care for them. The grapes (pictured here) that I used for making raisins taste a lot like a concord grape- think Welch's purple juice- but are green, small, and seedless. I believe it's a variety called Interlaken.

The only successful fruit drying experience I've had in the past was when I dried sweet cherries that had sat around macerating in sugar for twelve hours, then rinsed, before drying. I don't like how the dehydrator often makes fruit hard and stiff. It's challenging to know when to pull things out; how to achieve the perfect ratio of dryness to moisture for best keeping quality. Apparently, soaking fruit in sugar improves its texture while drying so that it retains a pleasant quality of tackiness that has some give to it so you don't mistake your fruit for a little piece of shoe leather.

Sweet cherries do not, in my opinion, taste good when dried. But having made them and not liking them insured that they would stick around in the cupboard long enough to see if they would mold. A year later and they are just as "good" as when they first entered the pantry. Too bad they taste like bland stewed fruit.

I sugared my bowl of grapes and added a tablespoon of vegetable oil. I stirred them well with a sprinkle of water to dissolve the sugar. After they sat for a few hours I rinsed them then dumped them unceremoniously onto my dryer trays and shook them into a single layer.

Twenty four hours later at a 135 degree heat most of them were perfect. A few of the larger ones needed more time to dry. These grapes were not at their peak sweetness so they have an amazing balance of sweet with a little zingy tartness and what's better: they taste like grapes, not raisins.

Philip waltzed into the kitchen ate a few and glibly said "You can buy raisins, you know."

I have never seen him snacking on raisins and noticed that he kept taking a few more. And a few more.

"That's why, you smug ass! They taste damn good."

He agreed.

Furthermore, the grapes were free, we already had a dehydrator, and it didn't take much work to throw them in there.

Plus they're the only raisins I've ever actually thought were worth eating by themselves.

But now that I see how good they are I know what I must do with the rest of my seedless grapes.

Why make your own raisins? Because it's fun, it's easy, and they taste better. Do you need more reasons than that?

*Now that I see how good the results are I covet the Excaliber!!!!

Gratitude

Sometimes all you have left to say is Thank You.

Unless you are a writer like me, in which case there is literally no end in sight to the things left to say. But tonight I have some very specific messages to send because sometimes your own cup, which may have been empty for a very long time, has become so full of beer water that it's time to share it.

In no particular order-here are some messages that need to be sent out there:

To Capello: If I was an unmarried lesbian I would- never mind. I just want to tell you that you going to bat for me makes me grateful beyond belief. You offered my name up for some work I totally want to do even though I still haven't sent you that contest prize you won 10 months ago. Plus, you have really awesome teeth. And such gorgeous green eyes. And no one uses swear words to better effect than you and, just, thank you.

To Lisa and Lawrence: Thank you so much for being such good friends, so good that when I am very sick you bring me food and beer (!) and when I'm very poor and scared you offer me what work you can to help us get by. You've overlooked our differences and been willing to grow with me. Truly good friends are one of the most valuable assets a person can have and being able to count you among mine makes me feel rich.

To Linda: Your vote of confidence and willingness to hire me without so much as an interview was a huge boost to my eroding self esteem at a time when I couldn't even get an interview at a cookie factory. I am fortunate that you have such a generous nature and are still willing to take chances on people. Plus, you have the best toy store on earth.

To Don and Adam: You have never been truly menaced blessed by my effusiveness and I worry that it will frighten you. So I'm going to keep it brief- you hired my talented husband a year ago after he endured two awful years of unemployment and even though we've still gone through a rough year, it is a highlight that he loves where he works and the people he works with. Now that you are hiring me for a copywriting freelance job, I just feel that much more warm and fuzzy about you both (in a totally appropriate manner). Yes, that is me being brief.

To Hope and Jennifer*: You are both unfairly gorgeous. I have never seen two more gorgeous pairs of brown eyes nor met- oh, I'm letting myself make you uncomfortable!! I feel honored to know you both and appreciate that you are looking after my interests even though you both have so many of your own to look after. I have enjoyed my first freelance photography job and if WCW really wants more pictures I will be pleased to work more with you Jennifer! Damn it, thank you.

I'm not sure I'm allowed to give any disclosure on the details of my day. I think no one will mind if I point out that all of the above people I have thanked are responsible in one way or another for the five jobs I now have. Yes, that's what I said.

I was previously unemployable but now I have FIVE jobs. (OK, three of them are freelance, but still, FIVE.) They must have all read my Fake Resume, because, honestly, who wouldn't hire me after reading that one? I guess I'm not making much progress on my efforts to say "no" to five people who want my time.

Philip and I have been through a whole lot of hell in the last few years. It's been really hard. We kept saying "I think it's all going to work out. I don't know how, but I'm sure it will." And then one of us would break another bone or make us lose all our money trying to run a retail store, or make us move out of state.

Oh, that was just me...

I think it's so easy to take a job for granted until you don't have one and can't seem to get one. There are few things more primal than the fear of not having any beer starvation. There are so many people who have nothing in this world and it actually hurts my body to think of other people's children starving and cold out there and how their parents must feel because I know how close we've come to losing what we have, which is a blessed lot.

For so long I kept crying "Why doesn't the universe give us a god damned break?!". I know a break (or five) when I get one and so, Thank you. Thank you Universe.

And friends.



*No links available for this gorgeous mother and daughter.

Grapes

In my garage I have a box, a bag, and a giant pot all full of grapes. I know that the seeded ones are green Concords, there are a few purple bunches in there too, the red ones are similar to Red Flame, and the green seedless grapes are most like a variety I just tasted at One Green World called Interlaken, a variety that is known to do very well here and tastes similar to a concord.

I got them all from my friend Laurie's vines in her garden.

Now, please be very still and quiet while I say this: Max ate a whole bowl of red grapes. He hasn't eaten grapes in over a year. I din't coerce him, beg him or bribe him. Because that never works. We were grabbing our bicycles from the garage and he spotted the huge pile of grapes. I saw the glint of curiosity in his eyes and explained that those were grapes from Laurie's garden. He reaches out to grab one as though by instinct but hesitates, so I say (very casually), "Go ahead and try one, these are the kind you like. They're very good!" He does. I don't jump up and down screaming

MY KID JUST ATE A GRAPE@! YAHOO!!!

Because that would scare off my wild little beast.

He kept grabbing for more, like he couldn't help himself, because they are so good. So later, maintaining my cool air of not giving a whoop-holler-ring-a-doo, I say that he could have a bowl of grapes for one of his portions of produce. And he did. It's possible that's all the grapes he's going to eat for another year, but dammit, I'm happy about it!

Max said "Laurie grows good stuff." (He's been eating apples again and all of them have been from Laurie's tree!)

Now, what to do with all that bounty. At this very moment I have grape juice filtering ever so excruciatingly slowly through a strainer. It smells fabulous! Concord grapes are the classic grapes used for purple grape juice. Because I only had a few of the purple ones the juice is actually red. Straining the pulp out is important if you want a really good quality clarified juice that a picky child will be interested in drinking. Fruit pulp is obviously good for you but it will lend a browner look to a beverage. I am also going to make grape jelly for which you are supposed to strain out the pulp.

Here is what I'm going to be making today:

• grape juice

• grape jelly

• raisins

• pickled grapes

I am not at all sure about the pickled grapes but if you have the fruit, why not try it? I don't have the kind that is recommended for pickling but that doesn't mean I can't experiment. The kind recommended for pickling are the seeded muscat variety. The truth is I don't like eating seeds. I don't like having to spit them out either. I like my grapes seed free. I like my pomegranates seed free too (I spit them out).

The pickled grapes are supposed to be eaten with cold meats or hunks of pork. Since I am a vegetarian I will obviously not be doing either of these things. However, generally speaking, if something is good with cold meats or pork it is also good with cheese. I love cheese.* Cheese is a necessary food to me. It has been greatly vilified in the last ten years but I have to say that it has always agreed magnificently with my constitution. My only problem is over indulgence in cheddar which is the explanation for why I have a slightly annatto cast to my skin and vaguely resemble a giant block of Tillamook.

I am always mystified at reports of cheese constipating people. I can eat a pound of cheese a day and not have that problem. I guess if you aren't eating enough other good foods with plenty of fiber you may have this problem. Or, perhaps, some of us are made to eat cheese just as some of us are made to eat meat, while others cannot eat one or the other without unpleasant consequence.

That one time I ate a pork chop when I was a kid it sat in my belly like a cannon ball for at least 24 uncomfortable hours. (That was after the two hours it took to make my body accept it in the first place. The only reason I didn't vomit it all up was because I'm emetophobic). This is where it pays to listen to your own body and not assume that everyone else's body is the same as yours. I never preach at people for eating meat because I know that just like other animals, some people's constitutions were made to eat it. Meat can be unhealthy if not eaten with plenty of fiber rich foods like fruits, grains, and vegetables, but the same can be said of almost anything, and certainly it can be said of cheese.

So tell me, how do you like your grapes? Peeled by a naked virgin and fed to you on a divan while a minstrel plays you sweet little tunes? Or in a chutney to spoon onto your mighty hunk of pig fresh from the spit? Do you like to drink it clear and purple? Or do you prefer it fermented? Do you like to eat the seeded kind or the seedless? If you eat seeded grapes do you spit them out in a handy spittoon or do you chew them up and swallow them to scrape your guts clean of accumulated cheese deposits?

Harvest is starting in the vineyards now that the weather is turning. It's a time of heavy work in the fields and the resulting crush will keep much of my county busy. People will slide into their beds in the wee hours after back breaking sixteen hour days of work. All for wine. For love of grapes. For thousands of years people have been moving in these same rhythms. The equipment has changed but the rhythm is much the same as it ever was. I always love this time of year because it reminds me how our needs have changed so little, how people must still work with nature's schedule. To nourish ourselves we must bend ourselves to her needs, to her whims, and to her clock.

I love doing my own preserving because it keeps me close to nature's apron. It keeps me humble. It reminds me of how much labor it takes to transform the fruits and vegetables, the meats and dairy into food that can stretch into the winter months and through the barest time of all- early spring. It builds a deeper respect for the human ingenuity it took to allow us to stop migrating and plant ourselves in still homesteads.

Preserving my own food connects me with the great harvest that is happening right now all over this hemisphere. The gathering in is like one graceful motion shared by millions of animals and people. The air is buzzing with all the nut gathering, the grape harvesting, the threshers, the apple pressing, and the jars filling up with food for the pantry shelf. This is more important than anything else we know how to do. What is the stock market to us in the middle of winter when we're hungry and don't have excess cash to withdraw? What good is a house to us if we have no food to put in it? What good would a grocery store be if we didn't know how to fill it with food? People of industry may feel very important. CEO's of corporations may feel very entitled. But if they lost their jobs and had no money to buy food from the grocery store, would they know how to grow food for themselves and store it?

Not many of them. They would depend on farmers. On neighbors. On people like me who know what to do with a bounty of grapes and constantly seek to learn more ways to preserve the incredible gifts and treasures of the earth. Knowing how to harvest food and preserve it is a life skill everyone should have to learn. It serves our most basic needs. Money is only important because we can trade it for food. It stands in place of gold which was used to trade for other more basic needs. We can all live without money if we have a source for food, but if there's no source for food for our money to buy then money is worthless to our survival.

So while this country of mine is experiencing the worst bank crisis in history I will focus not on the financial disaster but on the possibility that it will inspire more of my countrymen to realize what is really important. I will practice ancient rhythms today and take heart that underneath all our industrialized trappings we are still just creatures of the earth who need, above all other things, the bounty that this season traditionally brings. We are hunters and gatherers still. Come join me in gathering and storing our treasures so much finer than gold.

Grapes are beautiful.

*Cow cheese only.