august

August turns to autumn, the air is as sharp as it is cool, this evening smells like my memories of this town. Dinner is peppery all-day chicken stew, crusty bread, the red and orange of a japanese maple (leaves falling across a shed roof thick with moss and broken bird nests), I can hear cattle from here.

I am taking a graduate-level course on sexuality, in the social work department. This is my first semester away from a community college and I throw myself into...this, and I still feel disconnected. I have two jobs and a child, why are my classmates so young? Mostly they're older than me.

I've been in this town through warm spring and turgid summer, autumn is an ending. It's a strange time to be a beginning. This is weather for tucking in, harvesting your last, covering your earth, settling your bets. It's a strange time to be a beginning.

i am still weird

As autumn comes dew stays longer on the ground, and under the pines at the front of this house the thin soft grass is damp into late afternoon. The deck is warm, open to sunrise over a deep long blue valley. I come here to clean house, walk dogs, make money.

I can't look at food without thinking about where it came from. I can't look out at the land without thinking, top of that hill good place for a house, gets flatter toward the creek at the bottom, that little woods along the slope might keep things cool, run pigs in there and goats at the bottom and where's the sun right now? Where does the rain stand? Can you terrace that slope for a garden? Nice healthy weeds, those.

I'm too loud for this college, too armpit-hairy for these hippies, still as weird as I was in high school. Good to know, awkward just the same.

If I weren't in school my hours at the library would be perfect for the life knocking around in my brain: Wake up crazy early, get dirty outside 'till ten, hang out in the library during the siesta hours 'till two, come home and muck around 'till dark, eat for dinner what I saw grow up from the soil. Throwing my kid outside naked half the day would help with the toilet learning too, dammit. Got a ten year plan though, ask me about it latter, time to mop these warm slate floors and drink coffee 'till I wake up some more.

tomato sauce

I was kicked out of a homeless shelter (The JesusDuplexes) over a bottle of cheap pinot grigio. Actually, the eviction notice listed in order: an unclean house (not mentioned at any of the dozen and a half daily inspections), socializing with other guests, and the bottle of wine. And I suspect the socialization was the "real" problem, seeing as how there was a meeting the day before prohibiting interaction, and the families guilty of hanging out on the sidewalk chatting about our kids after bedtime were all given less than three day's notice to leave. So I called the magistrate and wrote out little cards & handed 'em out to everybody, explaining the legal process involved in eviction and how to get a judge to order the JesusDuplex folks to follow the LEGAL, thirty day or more procedure. But I'm getting away from myself.

It's stupid now that I risked my tenancy over something I suspected would be unacceptable. It's stupid now that I thought the wine was important- I told Marc as much, and he said "They're ass hats."

"No, think about it, if you're dealing with homeless people, you can't just kick one person out for being an alcoholic and let someone else pretend to be Julia Child. Oh wait. You could have the rule, 'If any of your behavior or belongings are a problem we will ask you to leave,' that would cover it...anyway, they're used to crackwhores or something."

As I poured homemade blackberry wine into a pasta sauce made from tomoatoes, garlic and zuchinni, all gifts from friends or family, I talked about the women's shelter I stayed at before the JesusDuplexes. It was a communal facility, like a house, with seperate bedrooms and shared everything else. I told Marc I moved into the JesusDuplex to get away from the kitchen at the women's shelter.

We were assigned nights to cook meals. Food preparation consisted of things like "Remove plastic from Salisbury Steak, place in 350 degree oven. Mix 6 servings of mashed potatoes according to the directions on the box" of powdered whatthefuck "potatoes," and the Steak wasn't, it was some kinda soy & hog's feet concoction. Hog's feet would have been more respectable.

So you've got all these women tweaking about how much their lives suck, and you have Craft Nights for Therapy, but you have 'em cook shit? Why not some Food Therapy, y'all? Get 'em involved in some SKILLZ, hey.

I told Marc about a lady I didn't like very much because she was often irritated with her toddler, and said I should have been more patient with her because my child is an madly irritating todler now too. I told him I didn't like her until she cooked fried chicken one night - honest to god, "I found these chicken legs and some flour & eggs," give the lady a cast iron skillet, Fried Chicken. I didn't talk with her as much as I would have liked, but I think I might know some of why real food made with your hands was so important in that house.

When I cook, I gain a measure of control over my life and my future. When I take a collection of ingredients that used to intimidate me and I can make something that is sensually pleasing as well as functionally fulfilling, I've put thought and effort into a gift that is, with the prevalence of fast food, no longer neccesary. And when it's made with items gifted, foraged and recycled, there's a story on the plate worth admiring.

I'm grateful that I can choose, as a responsible adult, to drink a glass of wine while I'm stirring the tomatoes, pour a little into the sauce, and settle into a pleased glow because that graveyard up the hill fertilized the blackberries what fed the yeasts to make the wine and yea, this is the house that Sarah built, praise the dirt your god almighty, maker of food and wine, and I've had a little much to drink.

found object wine

Last night I bottled my first batch of wine: while I've helped Marc with the previous batches of crazy, this was the first I've done all by myself. Aww!

When I was visiting my parents' house last week my grandmother came over and borrowed my child while I made dinner, fed him lots of cookies, and brought him back with a bucket of figs from her sister's tree. I finally got the whole mess through the food mill's finest grind, separated into chunky-mess-for-preserves and thin-mess-for-wine.

The stuff was light brown and about the texture of pudding, so I added sugar 'till it was sweet and water 'till it was thin, and set it in my largest pot on the back burner 'till it was cooked (yeah, we're real precise around here).

The chunky mess went into a smaller pot with proportionally more sugar and much less water, a few shakes of cinnamon and powdered ginger and a drop of molasses, and let's call the resulting three jars of glop Fig Butter 'cause it's nice on toast (toast being that stupid-good oversweetened wonderful bread that Marc bakes 'cause my huffy pretentious "artisan hearth breads" take too damn long for a busy day).

When the doctored fig juice on the back burner had hung out for a while, I ladled it into a gallon glass jug (a stash of which we found in the chicken house/junk pile on my family's property, and LAWD I am thrilled to be mucking around in it for furnishings and whatnot like I've wanted to do since I was nine), added cold water 'till it was cooler and full enough. It was about body temperature, the kind of warmth you want on your wrist for bathing a newborn, and the kind of warmth yeastie-monsters adore. So I poured a coffee mug half full of the stuff, stirred in a packet of yeast what's been floating around in my cabinets neglected in favor of the jar in the fridge, and let it proof.

Shit foamed up boy-howdy fast, was poured back into the jug, sloshed around a bit, and we Ooh-ed and Aah-ed like the tiny happy bubbles were fireworks, topped it with a vapor lock, set it thus contented atop the fridge.

We racked (that's siphoning it out to dump the yeasts collected fallen at the bottom of the jug) and tasted the bottle of blackberry and jug of apple peach, and darned if they don't remind me of a cheap dry red wine and an oversweet white. I'm darn pleased.

at the deli

Marc asked, "What's on the Italian Fried Chicken?"

Deli lady answered, "Italian seasoning."

"What's in the Italian seasoning?"

"It's what we use to season Italian things."

"But what's in it?"

"The Italian seasoning."

"What does it taste like?"

"The Italian flavors."

"And those are?"

"It's what is in the Italian seasoning."

"OH MY GOD!"

So I looked at it and I said, "Ok, those are dehydrated red pepper flakes, and it probably involves basil and garlic and a lot of salt."

And Marc said "DOES IT HAVE ITALIANS IN IT"

And she said "YES, WE GRIND 'EM UP REAL FINE."

And the funny thing was, it tasted like Chinese greasy spoon orange chicken.

today's reads

Today I'm taking home from the library:

Handy Farm Devices & How to Make Them (A Classic of American Ingenuity)
by Rolfe Cobleigh (a 1996 reprint of the 1909 original)

Continuing the Good Life: Half a Century of Homesteading
by Helen and Scott Nearing (of course)

Trapping: A Practical Guide
James A. Bateman

A Natural Year: The Pleasures and Rewards to be Gleaned from The Good Earth - With Informal Instructions on Foraging for Wild Food, Gardening, Preserving, Bread Baking, Wine Making, and Many Other Family Pursuits
Grace Firth

Practical Blacksmithing: The Original Classic in One Volume
Compiled & Edited by M.T. Richardson (Because it is a veritable tome)

Building & Using Our Sun-Heated Greenhouse
Helen Nearing (Because she wrote it)

Making Authentic Craftsman Furniture: Instructions & Plans for 62 Projects
Articles from The Craftsman edited by Gustav Stickley

Planting Green Roofs & Living Walls
Nigel Dunnett & Noel Kingsbury

Second Nature : A Gardener's Education
Michael Pollan (Because, HELLO)

The above to be thrown at (or quoted from at) Marc, that he may be further educated thereby, and that I may be less irritated at his face hidden perpetually behind a book than I am when the distracting device is the INTERNETS. Because his mind, it doth wander, and it doth seize upon a concept or a task and focus all his efforts thereby until a goal is accomplished. And if that goal be homesteading we shall be thus satisfied, and shall have tomatoes and where shall be the goats?

I shall take to repeating that, in the manner of & CARTHAGE MUST BE DESTROYED. I shall vow to hereby end all paragraphs with AND WHERE SHALL WE PUT THE GOATS?

plans

Marc wants to build a house with a garden on top. One of those earth-house-whatever-jobs, where half your house is underground and the other half has grass on top. I think there won't be enough light to make me happy, so last night we broke out the sketchbook and doodled some crazy two-story cave-houses, eventually coming up with a craftsman-style bungalow, half-buried in a hillside, atop a grass-roofed garage. Oh, and the bungalow on top has a skylight/koi pond amidst the grassy bits. BECAUSE WE'RE AWESOME.

This morning I said, why don't you apply your awesome productive brainpower to making some money so you can buy this fifty acres and a hill and we can have goats and tomatoes, yeahboy? Twenty minutes later he comes back with a plan to buy a few foreclosed-upon properties, open gas stations or waffle houses, own a company employing other people, and make millions of dollars. While in school. I said dude, yer evil, LETS HAVE A BIODIESEL CO-OP.

(When I say to him, "I don't think you can make all this money off your companies and not do any work," and he says "Wanna bet?" And I say "Well since your grandpa did that why don't you talk to him," and he says "Yeah, but I don't want to just do what he says, I want to do it my own way" and I say "K, then when your little plan explodes and all my money is in my own bank account, I ain't buyin' yer groceries," I don't know what to do with myself. "OK, you screw yourself up then" only goes so far...and this is why he's renting an upstairs apartment, damned if I'm gonna get entangled in someone else's finances again, be none of this movin' in with me boy...)

Meanwhile, I'm sketching plans for a coldframe/greenhouse thing on the side of the upstairs apartment, & sent him an e-mail consisting of the following: K, so we've got thirtyleven old windows in the crap-pile at my parent's house, let's build this and grow lots of turnips and spinach and herbs and HOW BOUT TOMATOES? Also, there's one of those big power-line spool things, have ye a table. I think we could manage a chicken tractor on the church soccerfield by the apartments, not that they'd like it but maybe, and how about trappin' them rabbits in the blackberries as the season is soon upon us, AND WHERE WILL WE PUT THE GOATS?

I want to be one of those young farmers, dirtyfooted damn hippy, and I've just about figured out how to swing it, just gotta start slow and give it all some time to settle. Oh, and finish college, and get child in Montessori, and finance land up here which is damn expensive, maybe out one of the backwood corners except there aren't really any in this county...give me some poor, tired, hungry cheap land...(Ok, I'll pay for it, someday)

child

Let's talk about daycare.

I placed my son in the only daycare who had a space available when I moved. They have a rating of one star, out of five available with the state license program. When I came in to visit & apply, I asked about the rating and was told "It's just because the teachers got nervous and didn't make the kids wash their hands during inspection."

RIGHT. Because that's what I want to hear. "Oh, it's just because we don't give a damn about E. coli & your kid's sanitation & health." Why not say, "We're doing this and this and this to improve our score" instead? Right.

My son's teacher told me she does a daily "lesson" for the toddlers, "Because the state requires it, even though it's not like they understand any of it." Activities like coloring, walking on a line, playing with bubbles. Once a week she sends home a copies of the lesson plan, with notes like,

"The children enjoyed this activity! Amber played with the bubbles, but Carlos decided to run around the room, for which he got in trouble. Terry couldn't be bothered to pay attention. Lacy didn't grasp the concept of saying the word "Bubble," but she liked splashing in the water."

Do you see the negativity? I hate reading things like "couldn't be bothered," "didn't grasp the concept," and that a child was punished for running around the room. Keep in mind, we're talking about kids who are between 16 months and 24 months old. Toddlers! Terrible twos! I'd prefer to read about what these kids CAN do, instead of how they "chose to ignore the lesson." I find the negativity creepy. She writes as if the children choose to disobey, like they know she wants their attention but their nefarious little brains WANT to piss her off.

So I'm looking at the local Montessori schools, because I've been aware of it for years, and the basic theory is brilliant: Let's teach kids to do what they can do at each stage of development. Let's teach them how to be people, how to ask questions, how to find answers to their own questions, how to learn and love to learn.

The local Montessori schools are expensive, and my child goes to daycare on a government subsidy for poor folks. I pay 10% of my income or thereabouts - so $60 instead of the usual $400 - $600 I would pay. I don't know if they'll take the subsidy, even though I'm awesome and my kid is awesome and Montessori is awesome.

And from what I can tell from the internets, they only offer half day programs for children under three, and only three days a week. I understand that parental involvement is fundamental to the Montessori philosophy, but hello folks:

I'm in school as a junior in the social work degree, and I'll probably continue as a graduate student either in social work or library science. I am in class 12 hours a week - that's four classes, and the minimum to be a full-time student (which determines my financial aid eligibility and amount). I work twenty hours a week as a reference librarian, and cut my summer job (cleaning, gardening, dogwalking) to five hours a week when I was hired at the library. That's all I can do within the hours my son's daycare is open - 7:30 to 5:30; and after I pay rent, phone and car insurance, I have $40. So groceries, gasoline, diapers, laundry and any "luxuries" like clothes that fit my growing child depend on excess from financial aid or government assistance.

Isn't this what I should be doing? I am young, shouldn't I be in college? I am financially independent, shouldn't I be working?

But I'm a mother, therefore my son should be priority, therefore I should be doing everything possible to ensure that when he's an adult he is intelligent, confident, ethical and successful (success on his own terms, defined by his happiness, because I think people are at their best when they can guide themselves).

But I'm a single mother, so I'm the breadwinner, head of household, sole supporter (don't get me started on why child support enforcement is a crock of shit).

Here's the guilt : I should be home with my son.

Here's the indignation: So how should I support us?

I was reading a microeconomics textbook last night (yes that is my idea of fun), and the introductory paragraph attempted to hook the reader with a personal example. It described a college student and her decision about how to use her spare time. She could study economics, or psychology, or "take a nap, ride her bike, go out to eat, spend time with friends, or work at a part time job for some extra spending money." Her parents could choose to spend their extra money on "retirement, vacation, or a savings account for their children's college expenses."

Who the fuck does this? Who the fuck works a part time job in college for extra spending money? Who the fuck can save for their child's college years? Who the fuck goes to school on daddy's dime? Is this normal? Fuck y'all.

hippy

Made some art today: pastels on scrap wood. Gotta figure where to hang 'em.

Making dinner now: braising chicken gizzard & heart (mostly gizzard, as the package explains apologetically), dry beans rehydrating on the back burner, all to be a jambalaya tonight.

Picked up three five-gallon buckets from the deli, formerly containing icing, Marc cleaned 'em in the bathtub. He said "Damn shame to be throwing out this much sugar" and I said "If we had pigs we could feed it to 'em & they'd turn it into butter" (Seriously). The pails will make useful storage for the 25 pounds of flour his mother picked up for me, or wet pails for child's cloth diapers. Filled a couple of bags with ugly old t-shirts for a dollar a bag at a local thrift store, intend to sew a bunch of diapers, 'cause fuck buying 'em. Also fuck paying the laundromat - I've been able to wrangle free laundry once a week and supplement with bathtub washing & clothesline drying when the weather's nice...damn dirty hippy.

Sewed a cloth book for child, using scrap fabric & photos of some punk band from a trashcan salvaged copy of Rolling Stone - they're making silly faces, so I labeled eyes and lips and teeth and child & I talk about faces.

Childmonster is diligently rearranging my house and Marc has himself elbow-deep in the plumbing grumbling about how much he loves me to be dealing with standing-water corroded pipe nastyness. He just strolled through the room all happy 'cause the corroded pipes include copper, so he'll buy new plastic bits & use the old for brewery parts. Distilling's illegal, isn't it?

Started a few jars of what hopes to be fruit scrap vinegar, recipe from this site. There's blueberry and apple, and a jar with some mint leaves from the huge feral peppermint in the backyard, don't know if that will work but it's worth a shot. Mean to make some more mint syrup tonight 'cause it's beautiful in iced tea or water.

I'm happiest, I think, when my life is neatly circumscribed by kitchen: reading about food, thinking about food, cooking food. So this is what I do.

home

Sometimes I think nothing is real outside my kitchen. I once opposed kitchens as the entrance room of a home, as a tiny disorganized catch-all with shoes piled against cabinets and purses on the counters. My kitchen is the first room of my apartment, and since my son's crib and belongings occupy the bedroom so that my life happens between kitchen and living area, my kitchen is half my home. When I sleep in the corner of the living room my bed is a dozen feet from the fridge, and the pipes and wires and electricals sing and hum sci-fi music lullabies. No wall separates, the only distinction is the end of linoleum and beginning of carpet.

My kitchen is half my home, and more, when bottles of brewing wine run out of space atop the fridge (competing with the radio, iron, and motorcycle helmets) and begin to colonize the shelves above the art desk (which is half the counter space in my kitchen and in fact built from discarded kitchen cabinets topped with an old door and shelves taken from an apartment after eviction before demolition), or when a bowl of fragrant rising bread is shuffled onto the upturned-bowl cushions of the papasan chair (fifteen bucks at a thrift store I AM NOT EVEN KIDDING) while we run lumpy green apples tiny and hard and bitter, fresh from the trees by the apartments, through an aged food processor that looks like a nineteen-fifties sausage grinder, into the bowl for the kitchenaid mixer because it's the biggest we have and we're making the beginnings of apple wine...

My kitchen is half my home, and more, when I'm painting on scavenged wood and cowboy coffee boils on the stove, and my son sits at my feet eating blackberries from the graveyard, and my boyfriend sits on my bed braiding a bullwhip (this week's obsession), and there's no place that food ends and life begins because we're all right in the middle of it.

I paused from flinging and folding shaggy rye dough to kneel at my son's seat and ask why the yelling. He reached for my hands to grab the peeling oil and flour, and said "BITE" and shoved a tiny chunk of juicy white pork chop into my mouth. I chewed wide-eyed and he laughed, babbled, sang to his dinner as I covered the dough to rise.

By ethics and not only architecture my life inhabits the kitchen. I choose to come home and begin the next day's bread, and wash dishes while my boyfriend cooks dinner and my son stands on a sturdy box beside me splashing and telling me about "WATER?" and "SPOON?" and "BUBBLE?" and says a quiet "bye-bye" to the sink when we're done. I read books about food - M.F.K Fisher, Julie Child, bread and Bombay, agriculture and gardening, homesteading and slaughtering goats, bees and tomatoes, chickens and zucchini. When I am outside it is to herd my son up the hill to the playground, and farther up to the graveyard, while I pick blackberries and he rambles close & observed. He brings me flowers and I name them, and the berries will be tomorrow's breakfast cobbler or a bottle of hopeful percolating wine.

What else would there be?

Yesterday

Yesterday I walked along the edge of a small old cemetery, following a lichen-aged wood slat fence that circumscribes the top of the hill. Clouds hung mottled dark and low, and from the hill I could see the weather rolling in, displacing the early autumn sun tracing the outlines of farther ridges.My son and boyfriend followed, and my chattering toddler was happily herded away from the fence and weeds, picking up fallen artificial roses while I ducked under the fence to pluck heavy ripe blackberries from biting briars. Marc brought a rope and tied a bowline around a sturdy fencepost, and as the rain began and the two wandered back to my apartment, I started down the slope below the graveyard, keeping the rope tight around my arm as I slipped on steep damp periwinkle. I filled a two-pint yogurt container, wrapped in an old cloth diaper and tied to a belt loop, all from standing in one place. It's been a damp summer, but good for the blackberries.

I slid down to the road, leaving the rope for later, and walked back through the rain. Below the road is the county penitentiary, and above is the church whose cemetery I've been foraging. Cold rain was welcome after sweaty work, and I picked up trash and crabapples from unattended trees, came back around the ridge to fetch the rope, and presented the berries and my damp self to my boyfriend's arms.

"You're freezing!"

"Feels good though. Think we have enough to brew?"

"That's why I'm still holding you, it's been hot in here - oh what yes?!"

So we have now a chorus of glugging, chirping fermentation. The five-gallon bucket under my bathroom sink is converting sweet tea to some perverse homebrew (we tasted it last night, and it smells like holding a glass of Pinot Grigio and a fresh yeast roll under your nose, and tastes like a mouthful of the two but less complex than wine - he says all is as it should be), and atop the fridge a reused wine bottle holds opaque screamingly fuschia blueberry juice and yeasts, clockwork ticking bubbles popping through an improvised vapor lock. The blueberries were given to us yesterday morning at the Farmer's Market, when we wandered by to say hullo to his mother as she peddled ceramics and lavender and surplus fruit from her garden.

And a gallon glass jug of bright red blackberry juice waits in the fridge, promising to begin this evening, when Aaron returns from working in his mother's studio and hopefully brings a proper vapor lock from his father's unused homebrewery.

My son has blanketed the floor of my tiny apartment with his toys. Walking back to my reading chair will be a crunchy kicking adventure, but I might have time to finish my coffee and go a little further through the "Manual of Practical Homesteading" before he's tired of the solitary moments of our morning.