Dying To Shop

For most of the last decade I've been in shopping withdrawal.  Along with the woods, the cow-dotted meadows, and the pastoral quiet of our former place in rural Vermont came an almost total absence of stores.

And in my heart I believed that this was a good thing.  It kept us from buying things that had been manufactured under dubious conditions in the far reaches of the planet and that we didn't need in the first place. It forced us to focus on our souls instead of on our stuff.

The availability of everything I could ever want on the internet kept this withdrawal from being absolute, of course.  But as far as actually seeing, touching, and smelling material goods for sale, I was as isolated as a hermit in her desert cave.  Occasionally this lack of stores got annoying, such as the time I had to drive forty-five minutes--albeit through a gorgeous snow-shrouded landscape--to buy a spool of brown thread.  And whenever we left home and ventured into civilization, a casual drive past a strip mall would have me slavering with the desire to buy something, anything.

Now I live around the corner from Vermont's ultra-cool shopping mecca.  The little market three minutes from our cottage carries four brands of Spanish olive oil, one of them from my mother's village in Catalonia, and goat cheeses from at least a dozen local farms.  There are furniture stores overflowing with exquisite pieces made by Vermont woodworkers from Vermont wood, and  boutiques selling clothes woven by Vermont weavers from the wool of Vermont sheep.  There are stores that cater to the enlightened pet owner and kitchen stores that make even me want to cook.

So I have been doing a lot of slavering, but mostly in vain.

If, for example, I go into the market for some breakfast yogurt, I have to ignore the olive oils and the cheeses and the racks of locally-baked breads bristling with grains.  For there is only so much even I can eat, and every day of the year Wake Robin provides us with a lovely, nutritious meal, and the oils would go rancid and the cheeses moldy and the bread stale in our pantry if I succumbed to my urges and brought them home.

I also have to give the furniture stores, the boutiques and the kitchen stores a miss.  Having just pressed one of my daughters into taking my husband's grandmother's wedding china, what am I doing even looking at noodle bowls from Japan?  We have given away, sold, or thrown out eighty percent of our belongings in order to fit into this cottage.  I'd better do a thorough examination of conscience before I bring even a salt shaker into our tiny space.

Maybe I could buy some clothes?  Clothes don't take up a lot of room, especially if they are made of silk.  But we all know where cheap silk comes from, and what those brilliant dyes are doing to rivers across the globe.  Besides, I have clothes hanging in my closet that are a couple of decades old and still perfectly wearable.  So buying clothes isn't a good way to assuage my shopping urges.

I suspect there isn't one.  Maybe what I need is to start meditating again, sitting on the floor and breathing, focusing on my soul, etc.  As it happens, my meditation cushion, which dates from sometime in the 90s, is looking scruffy.  There is bound to be a meditation store nearby....

A Time To Cook--or Not

For everything, as we know, there is a season:  a time to plant, a time to reap;  a time to laugh, a time to weep.  A time to cook...and a time to refrain from cooking.

My time to cook began in the Summer of Love of 1967.  Now, as of our move to Wake Robin a month ago, the time to refrain from cooking has arrived.  And not a moment too soon.

I got married just before feminism made its second pass through the American consciousness, when it was not considered particularly attractive for young ladies to be in graduate school, which I was.  Cooking, on the other hand, we were told was a feminine adornment and essential to the health of a marriage, so I strove to broaden my repertory, which prior to the wedding had been limited to boiling eggs.

It wasn't easy to produce a salad, meat, two veg and dessert seven days a week on our grad student income, and things got more complicated when our daughters began to eat solid foods.  Now, in addition to finances, I had three people's tastes to consider, plus I was starting to become aware, along with the rest of America, of the effects of diet on health.

At around this time I fell under the spell of The Mother Earth News, and became persuaded that the only way to keep my family from an early grave was to put on the table food that I had personally grown:  broccoli from my garden, apples from my trees, eggs from my hens, milk from my goats, and bread baked with my own two hands (though the flour came from the store).

This had a lot of charm, but it was a ton of work.  Once they'd eaten their first home-grown omelette and drunk their first miraculous glasses of goat's milk, home-grown food became the norm and my family gradually ceased to exclaim about the wonderfulness of my efforts.  And, children being what they are, the girls turned up their snub little noses at my hard-won broccoli, and pined for McDonald's.

Nevertheless, I persevered.  I still got pleasure from the garden and the goats, but cooking became a chore.  I've known people, all of them male, who say they come home from a day's work and look forward to making a creative dinner--they say it relaxes them.  I was not born to be one of these people.  I was born to marry one.
But I hadn't.  My husband declared himself willing to help, but on his terms:  TV dinners, soups by Campbell's, and green beans from the garden of the Jolly Green Giant.  Convinced that on such a diet we'd all be dead within the year, I shooed him out of the kitchen, gritted my teeth, and cooked on.

Years passed.  We moved from country to city to country again.  The city interludes were less arduous, because at least I wasn't producing the food, but I still had to shop for it.   I knew, as I opened my eyes every morning, that unless I caved and we ordered pizza, before I went to my rest that night I was going to have to do something about dinner. 

And for almost fifty years, I did.

Now that's behind me.  Our monthly fees include lunch or dinner, in the informal cafe or the  formalish (this being Vermont) dining room.  The food is, almost without exception, lovely, and of astounding variety.  I eat more vegetables here than I ever did before. Wake Robin is an important presence in the local farm-to-table movement, so the food is pretty much guilt-free.

Is there nothing I miss of my own cooking?  Certainly:  garlic sauteed in olive oil;  salads consisting entirely of arugula;  bread with, again, olive oil.  But our cottage kitchen is the most modern I've ever had, and its cupboards contain my old cast iron pans and well-worn wooden spoons.  There's a bottle of olive oil in the pantry, and a paper bag with the remains of last summer's garlic crop.  There's no reason I can't whip up a little Mediterranean dish anytime I really feel the urge.  I've even given some hazy consideration to getting deeply into bread making again.  And maybe I will--in the winter perhaps...

But for now, every day I rejoice in the knowledge that the season to refrain from cooking has arrived.

Rainy Sunday At The Farmers' Market

At the nearby farmers' market there is a little old couple--actually, they are probably my age, but never mind--who sell potatoes.  Tiny red ones the size of meatballs;  deep indigo ones bursting with phyto-nutrients; and waxy, buttery, elegant fingerlings.

Most of the vendors at the market sell more than a single product.  Especially at this time of year, the vegetable farmers sell everything from chard to pumpkins;  the meat sellers offer squash;  and even the potter sets out a basket of garlic next to her mugs.  But not the potato couple.  They only sell potatoes.

In a crowd of vendors most of whom look like graduate students who ditched their dissertations to go back to the land, the potato couple are old-time farmers.  They've been growing potatoes for so long that they've come to resemble their product, short and squat and a little lumpy.  She deals with the public and he deals with the truck and the tent and the crates.  She refers to him not by name or as "my husband," but as "He," as in,"He planted a lot of Dutch Creams last spring."

I imagine their farm, a no-nonsense place north of here.  No Araucana hens laying colored eggs in charming coops, no mache or endive sprouting year-round under glass.  Just potatoes, and maybe an old dog, and the two of them at the kitchen table with the TV on now that the children are gone.  And on Sundays, the trek to the farmers' market to sell to summer people and flatlanders and leaf-peepers who park their SUVs by the side of the highway and carry their purchases in New Yorker totes.

Last week when I went to the market the heavens suddenly opened and the rain came down in torrents.  Tents flapped and leaked;  people could hardly hear each other speak for the noise of the water; and the Indian summer day suddenly turned cold.  The potato couple's tent was at the bottom of the field.  He had strewn a bale of hay in front of the potato table, but I nevertheless sank down to my ankles in mud.  She was doing her best with customer relations, but I could tell that she wanted to go home.

How much longer, I wondered, will they be able to do this--planting and weeding and harvesting and storing the potatoes, plus the endless round of farmers' markets?  Do they have any help at the farm?  Do they have savings, a pension?  

Except for the wealthy, buying produce at the farmers' market is a moral gesture.  Yes, the food is usually better than what you find at the supermarket, but it is a lot more expensive. It doesn't make immediate financial sense, but buying from these small local farmers is an act of faith and hope in, and charity towards, the community.  Vermont, which  has the lowest rates of church attendance in the country, leads the nation in the proportion of food that people buy locally, and even on that rainy Sunday the parking lot was full and cars were lined up by the side of the road.

This is good news for the potato couple, and for the young families with their college degrees, their  home-schooled children, and their dreams of raising food sustainably.  But given the perennially shaky economy, I wonder how long Vermonters will be able to continue to support their farmers.

For as long as possible, though, those of us who can would do well to spend part of our Sunday buying garlic from the potter, some soup bones from the meat lady, and a couple of pounds of tiny red potatoes from the potato couple.  There are, after all, many ways of attending church.

Department Of True Confessions: My Fur Coat

It's hanging in the entrance closet, under a tailor-made cover with my name embroidered on it.  I've had it since the year I turned forty, a gift from my spouse.

It was supposed to signify that I had finally attained maturity, intellectual ripeness and maybe even common sense, and that he and I, together, had by sheer dint of sweat and some tears excavated the basement and were now adding floors to the house of our marriage:  children on the verge of adolescence, careers on the upswing, future looking o.k.  It was the 80s, and people wore fur then.

The coat wasn't a surprise, since it had to be fitted and adjusted to my measurements.  We shopped for it together, over a period of months, going from fur store to fur store in Baltimore.  We'd walk into those silent, carpeted rooms and were instantly attended by a salesman (never, for some reason, a saleswoman) while I tried to exude a self-confident urban chic that my academic weeds belied.

The salesman would look me over, then disappear and return holding what looked like a large animal limp in his arms.  Holding the coat by the shoulders he would sweep it insouciantly over the carpet and then  ruffle the fur the wrong way with his hand, in the exact gesture that cats despise.

I felt terribly nervous.  What were we doing, proposing to spend x amount of dollars on a winter coat?  Didn't I already own a perfectly serviceable parka?  But, hey, I was turning forty, and it was the 1980s.

One thing I was sure of:  I did not want mink.  Mink was of my mother's generation, and I wanted a fur that was more hip.  Coyote and fox were too dog-like.  Sable was out of our price range, as were marten and ermine.  That left--and I am beating my breast as I write--seal.

Not the pure white coat of the baby seal, but the deep, even, chocolate brown fur of the adult, short and velvety and delicious to the touch.  Its raised collar caressed my cheeks like a butterfly.  Its cuffs tickled my wrists.  And from shoulders to mid-calf I felt enveloped in a softness that was at once cool and amazingly warm.  We bought the seal coat.

What makes us do these things?  I have no idea.  All I can say is that, while I would not have bought something made from an animal that I knew to be endangered, such as an ocelot, I wore that seal coat as unthinkingly as I ate hamburgers at McDonald's or put newspapers in the garbage.  Those were the days.

But they didn't last, thank goodness.  By the time the decade was over, the horrors of the fur trade had been made public, and urban fur-wearers were routinely spattered with paint the color of blood.  On cold days I found myself reaching for a wool jacket, or my trusty old parka.

It's been a quarter century since I last wore that coat.  Although it makes me uneasy to see it hanging in my closet--I should do something with it, but what?--I'm glad that things have changed.  I'm glad that nobody--nobody I know, anyway--wears fur anymore.  I'm glad that many people think twice now before eating industrially-produced beef.  I'm glad that almost everybody recycles.

And on days when I feel that the world is going to hell in a hand basket, when the climate is warming and Egypt is exploding, I think of the fur coat languishing in my closet and say to myself that, at least in some things, we have made progress.

Walking

My friend John Harkey walks, bikes and practices sustainable living in Nashville, Tennessee.  I loved his essay on walking and thought you might enjoy it too.  You can read more of John's writing at
www.Harkeyresearch.blog.com 

Walking

In his essay of the same title Henry David Thoreau repeated the phrase wrongly ascribed to Horace Greeley: “go west young man, go west.”  Actually, Thoreau was talking about “walking” west, and for him the more precise direction was “southwest,” away from his village home (Concord), and away from the city (Boston), in the direction of the setting sun.  In his essay, he said he was going to make an “extreme” statement.  As he describes his walks, and the ambition of walking, the word “extreme” seems mild
.

For Thoreau a daily four-hour walk was the minimum duration, and more was preferred. His walking “ambition” was to leave civilization entirely, avoiding the well traveled path and claiming the uncharted wilderness to the south and west as his home. His “home” in the village was merely a starting place for his walking adventure, but his destination was the Pacific Ocean, or maybe the Rocky Mountains.
 

Unfortunately, or maybe to our good fortune, Thoreau never made it that far.  In fact, his pace wasn’t very rapid, and he was easily diverted. If you have ever been on a spring wildflower walk, you will know what happened.  Every step or two there is something new and unusual for a botanist/poet to look at, and if you are in a group, comment on.  Thoreau, like Christopher Robin, knew a lot about the 100-acre wood, but a 4-hour walk might take him one place in his imagination (say to some of the Greek Isles as he followed the meanderings of Odysseus), but while thinking about Odysseus he might be observing some ant platoons outside his door re-enacting their version of the Trojan war.

For me, a walk in the wilderness is a deep pleasure. But my wilderness walks are a part time occupation. I take those walks several times a year, but in my daily walks (and bike rides), I turn Thoreau’s treatise on its head, and turn towards the city, to meet friends, to purchase coffee, to shop for groceries, and to enjoy the pleasures of the urban experience, which are many.
 

Thoreau, of course, did too.  His sustenance was more from the village and the city than from the wilderness.  He thrived on the intellectual stimulation of Concord and the wider Boston community, and he enjoyed friendship. He wrote about the horrors of the village (“most men lead lives of quiet desperation”), but was really sustained by The Village.

For Thoreau, walking was an elite activity. While it involved only a modest investment of money (good shoes, sturdy clothing, and a hat), it required time.  In Thoreau’s day, the only people with “time” were the wealthy and the occasional bohemian poet.  The men (and women) of quiet desperation walked to work and to market, but otherwise were busy creating the economic engine that won the Civil War.

One of Thoreau’s more memorable trips was taken by train rather than on foot, from Boston down to New York, and there he met a promising new urban poet, Walt Whitman, who had just been “found” and promoted by Thoreau’s mentor, a Mr. Emerson.  Thoreau had just published his masterpiece, Walden, a year earlier (1854), and Whitman had just published his first edition of “Leaves of Grass.”

In contrast to Thoreau, Whitman looked toward the city and its thriving masses of people for inspiration rather than to the uncharted wilderness near Thoreau’s cabin. Whitman’s walk is also open ended —walking “the long brown road before me leading wherever I choose”—but is about those he meets rather than where he goes—“the felon, the diseased, the illiterate person” and “the escaped youth, the rich person’s carriage, the fop, the eloping couple.” And, the objects of civilization: “planks and posts of wharves, rows of houses, porches” and then the ideas, the “philosophies” and the “music.”  Whitman’s walk was an exploration of culture—the city—rather than fields and forest, and he liked what he saw, as much as Thoreau liked wilderness. 
 

I like both walks. For my wilderness walks, though, I take part of the city with me, in the form of a friend or two. Climbing up a mountain along a shady path, we observe the beauty of a cascading stream while discussing whether charter schools really make a difference.

Walking is easy, requires no new expenditures, can be fit into a busy lifestyle, and helps you maintain health. It’s also fun, or can be. Twenty minutes a day (just over a mile) is helpful to health.  Forty minutes (2-3 miles) will help you maintain weight, and with healthier eating, possibly lose weight.  Either distance gives you time to think (alone) or banter (with friends), improving your mood and your friendships.

Thoreau set the bar too high, leaving his quietly desperate neighbors behind as he walked “away” from the Village. Today, in Nashville at least, the Village is the spark, encouraging its residents to leave the desperation (the TV, the computer, the couch, the bag of potato chips) behind, and take a walk (on the new greenway or sidewalk) “into” the Village.

For a description of one of the more interesting urban walks in America, try this:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/22/nyregion/high-lines-best-kept-secret-its-a-fast-commute.html?hp

Research note on Walking for Health

Two researchers at University College of London conducted a meta-analysis of 18 observational studies (460,000 participants) on the health effects of walking published between 1970 and 2007. Their study was summarized in the August 2009 edition of the Harvard Health Letter.

• Walking reduced the risk of dying by 32% during the study period. The study period averaged 11.3 years for the studies reviewed. )  
• The risk of cardiovascular events was reduced by 31%.

• Benefits of walking were found for people walking as little as 5.5 miles a week at a pace of 2 miles per hour.  Greater protection was obtained by more miles and a more rapid pace

Here is a link to the Harvard Report

http://www.health.harvard.edu/newsletters/Harvard_Mens_Health_Watch/2009/August/Walking-Your-steps-to-health

Let's Clean Our Plates

Here is what Pope Francis, or Pope Frank, as the Nuns on the Bus call him, said last week:  "Throwing away food is like stealing from the table of those who are poor and hungry."

Does that sound familiar?  It's something my  mother could have said, and probably yours too.  I remember sitting numbly before a congealing omelette, being told to think of the starving children of Africa, or China, or some other far away place, and not waste a single mouthful.  And I remember wondering how forcing down that last scrap of food on my plate was going to make any difference to hungry orphans, since I couldn't actually ship my leftovers to them.

Later, when the age of dieting was upon me, I read that the old compulsion to clean our plates instead of listening to our bodies was largely responsible for weight problems among adults.  Some diet gurus even advised purposely leaving some food on the plate at every meal.

At about that same time my husband and I were facing the dilemma of how to handle our children's reluctance to eat almost any food other than cheese, crackers, and dessert.  Both of us had been brought up according to the clean-plate philosophy, but we had come away from the experience with opposite attitudes:  my husband was for hewing to the family tradition, whereas I was loath to turn the dinner table into a battleground.  I  had great faith in Dr. Spock's statement that babies (and children too, I surmised) would, if presented with a variety of wholesome foods, over time choose to eat a balanced diet.  

We finally hit on a compromise:  the girls had to serve themselves at least a taste of every dish on the table--and this might mean a single green bean--but they had to clean their plates.  We thought this was brilliant:  it exposed the kids to a variety of foods, gave them a sense of control over what they ate, eliminated waste, and, at least in theory, made for amicable mealtimes.

Food plays a mysterious but powerful part in the parent-child dynamic that has nothing to do with flavor or nutrition, so often times even that single green bean became the pretext for a power struggle.  But on the whole our mealtimes were reasonably civilized, and free of waste.

As to the latter, it helped that we had a compost pile and chickens.  We still do.  Nevertheless, just the other day I threw out a couple of moldy onions (chickens don't eat onions).  I should have bunged them in the compost, but before I knew it they were in the trash and on their way to the landfill.  Tonight, after a belated Mother's Day dinner out, I watched the waiter put the little container of butter, still three-quarters full, on the dirty plates he was carrying away.  There went a considerable number of calories that somebody could have used.

The same day I read the Pope's words about waste I learned that, according to the United Nations, one third of the food produced on the planet goes to waste.  How is that for an appalling statistic, a statistic that needs to change?

In future posts I plan to explore this topic further, and with your help I hope that we can come up with some things that we can all do, right now, not only to stop stealing from the table of the poor, but to put some food on it.

Needle And Thread

Spent some time with  needle and thread this morning, repairing my spouse's pants.  But first I had to blow the dust off the tray that holds my sewing supplies.

It's rainy and gloomy today, what my mother used to call "a day for mending socks."  A day for staying indoors, sitting by a window, working at some undemanding yet productive, soothing task.  I can still see her, darning egg in hand, bent over an old sock while our Andalusian maid regaled us with stories of Holy Week in Malaga as she folded the laundry.

While struggling to thread my needle I thought of the two pairs of socks I had thrown away in as many weeks.  Each pair had one hole in one sock, but they were different colors, so I couldn't combine the remaining good socks into a pair.  I remember thinking, "I should mend this hole," and then quickly, "Life's too short to be mending socks."   Before I could change my mind I dropped them in the trash, and now they're on their way to a landfill, along with 85% of clothing purchased in the U.S. on any given year.

I've been feeling some clothes guilt lately, having bought two dresses in the same month as the Bangladesh factory disaster.  But one of those dresses came from Gudrun Sjoden, a Swedish designer who, on her website, advises us to wear our old clothes with pride and to wash them only when they are in fact dirty.  Otherwise, she counsels, we should just air them out and spot clean them.  Needless to say, her clothes are manufactured in observance of fair-trade and ecological standards.  When you buy one of her outfits you feel that you're actually contributing to the well-being of Mother Earth.

Nevertheless, I know that the kindest thing I can do for Mother Earth is to keep wearing the clothes that are presently in my closet over and over and over, until I die.  If I stop washing them so often and begin to mend them, I can probably even pass them on to my descendants.  This is how it was for most of human history, after all, with textiles being saved and reconstructed to fit the next generation.

If current apocalyptic scenarios come true, those days may come around again.  Good-bye then to clothes as entertainment, as expressions of a spring day's mood, as symbols of momentary enthusiasms.   Hello to clothes as mere weather protection.

But maybe there will be some good times in exchange.  European lyric poetry began with the chansons de toile, the songs that women sang while sitting at their weaving a thousand years ago.  Maybe when the economy collapses for good and the climate changes beyond recognition, on rainy days women will again sit together by a window, mending socks, telling stories, making up songs.