|
Call
Me When Harvest’s Over
I
don’t really want to be writing this. No offense. Having
this space to write is a privilege, not a chore. It’s just
that upstairs there are two massive bags of greens that should
be blanched and frozen before they wilt. And maybe 10 pounds
of tomatoes to can, and piles of apples and crabapples and
rose hips waiting to be made into apple butter and jam. Not
to mention the berries and tomatoes we froze and now need
to can to make room for the rest of the greens and the pesto.
I need to look up how to best dry my stevia plant, and I’ve
been itching to buy extra farmers market corn to freeze.
Well, no one made you become an urban farm wife, you might
say.
You’re right. But see, I’m not complaining about all those
things. I’m itching to get to them. I’m tantalized by the
prospect of having enough frozen garden veggies to see us
through to next summer, and love walking in to the smell of
apple butter. The sight of two and half gallons of crushed
tomatoes lined up neatly in their pint jars on my table is
incredibly satisfying, as is the turn of the crank that turns
the cooked apples into applesauce, the shoulder ache from
trimming too many green beans at a sitting, and the assembly
line process I’ve begun to hone that turns a pile of fresh-picked
greens into neat little bags piled in the freezer.
It’s been a good year for us in terms of homegrown food. I
finally forcibly scheduled enough regular gardening time into
my week to make it through most of the growing season without
losing my grip on the learning curve, and landing flat on
my back in the weeds and rotten tomatoes. It’s been fun, exciting,
frustrating, tiring, and empowering. I squished approximately
13.4 gazillion bean beetles, dug up my first potatoes, and
discovered by accident that green tomatoes will ripen inside
a compost pile.
And all that means I’ve brought home a lot of food. With apple
season also upon us and my family’s insatiable demand for
crabapple jam, that means we have a lot of produce lying around
right now. Produce that takes time and effort to store. After
work, after dinner, after kid’s bedtime . . . we keep finding
ourselves starting these projects late in the evening, or
sacrificing a rare weekend day. And that’s why I keep finding
myself tempted to leave the computer, leave my deadlines,
leave my little office with a view of a brick wall, and get
my hands dirty in the kitchen.
That’s what feels appropriate. It’s harvest season,
after all. Can’t I get back to this other stuff once it gets
cold?
This is what I get for getting myself more entangled in the
changing seasons. I’ve always enjoyed the wheel of the year,
but my sense of the timing and order was a little hazy: “Well,
the equinox is on March 21, but of course spring doesn’t really
start up here until a little later.” My gardening and foraging
this year had me noticing everything from last frost to when
the cottonwood seed started blowing.
It was pretty satisfying, but thing is that once you start
reconnecting to these rhythms, it’s hard to disentangle your
brain again. And yet neither my bills nor my deadlines care
that it’s fall, that the apples are ripening, and that ripe
tomatoes don’t last forever. Finding that balance feels, though,
like the right problem to be working. I’m already looking
ahead to planning some time off next September.
I would love to just end this as a little musing about one
more part of the slow process of learning on a personal scale
to live in a lower energy, more local, more rooted way. But
of course I’m not a hermit. And the big news of the past weeks—banks
collapsing, markets tanking, government proving its shameless
preference for bailing out corporations over regular people—is
looming in the background to remind me just how tiny my efforts
are.
If I’d written a whole column on the economy right now, it
would have been titled “Sucks to have been right for several
decades,” by which I wouldn’t have meant me in particular,
but the legions of people out there who have been called all
sorts of nasty names (when they weren’t completely ignored)
for daring to suggest that banks ought to be regulated, that
predatory mortgage fraud was rampant, that market failures
are real and dangerous, that corporate welfare is not only
unfair but unproductive, and that economies ought to stay
connected to reality—to goods and services of concrete value,
exchanged with each other to the greater benefit of the community.
Any response to what’s happening right now that doesn’t move
us in that direction, that doesn’t end the deification of
Wall Street, that doesn’t remove the “moral hazard,” where
financial companies expect to be bailed out in ways they would
heap scorn and condescension on any struggling individual
for hoping for, is worse than an unprecedented transfer of
taxpayer money to the reckless, amoral, superrich. It’s losing
an opportunity to get ourselves on a better track and remove
from our economic infrastructure some of the overwhelming
hostility to building truly healthy, resilient economies.
If we don’t get started now, it’ll hurt even more next time.
It’s harvest time in more than one way. It’s a joy to carry
home the bounty of the earth. Too bad we’re all carrying a
home portion of what corporate triumphalism has sown as well.
—Miriam
Axel-Lute
www.mjoy.org
|
Site
Search 
