Instagram of a Trout Lily taken in the back forty (swamp area). God I love spring.
Month: May 2013
The Frustration of Food
Today’s level of farming ignorance is unprecedented in history—including all time and all cultures. Never have so many people in a civilization been able to be this far removed from their food umbilical.
Joel Salatin
An acquaintance of mine, Jenna Woginrich of Cold Antler Farm just received her order of 45 baby chicks today and posted part of an article written by Joel Salatin in response to those who would criticize the practice of sending chicks through the mail. Joel has the ability to explain in very simple terms why it is possible to have chicks comfortably make the trip from his farm to your house and remain perfectly healthy. He also wrote this article out of frustration and I’m sure that anyone that raises animals for food can appreciate that but I think everyone needs to read the article. The article is called Rebel With a Cause: Anthropomorphism Against Farms, take a few minutes to read it, maybe read it to your kids, you will all learn something.
I grew up when most of our meat was grown ourselves or my father shot in the woods. Sounds backwards and like I am some kind of hick doesn’t it? I think something is lost when you don’t make an effort to know where your food comes from. I believe you have to see their faces, understand what they are and what they give to you, sustenance. I believe you need to know the kinds of lives that these animals have led and what kind of deaths that they have had in order to make peace with the fact that you are an omnivore and flesh is part of your diet. Factory farming is farming at its worst, the only thing this is about is the almighty dollar, produce as much as you can as cheaply as possible. It’s all about volume.
The frightening part to me is now everything you can buy in a grocery store comes from some sort of high volume farming situation. If you want to know what is in your food you need to seek out the farmers of every single ingredient, visit their farms if possible and buy it directly from them. I am fortunate to live in an area where there are many farmers of various kinds. There is a small, family run dairy right down the street from my house in Enfield. Smyth’s Trinity Farm takes dairy farming to a new (old) level in my mind. I go there to pick up my dairy products and see all of the girls either in the pasture or in the stanchions in a very clean barn chewing their cuds and seeming very content. All of their products are processed right there. Once you start drinking and cooking with their milk, half and half and cream you will never go back to what passes as milk in the grocery store, you realize that you are being lied to about what they are selling you – it looks like milk but it doesn’t taste like milk.
Maybe that’s the problem, we’ve been lied to for so long that we now see what passes for food and something good and wholesome because it says so on the box. We’ve lost our way, we really don’t know what is good and what is crap. The gap seems to grow wider everyday. If you’re reading this you could maybe Google GMO corn, or Monsanto, or the difference between wheat 20 years ago and now. I can promise you it’s not pleasant reading, any of it, but it pays to educate yourself, you need to know what’s happening to us because of the profitability of big Ag.
Someone that reads my blog commented on what I really eat and if I was somewhat of a hypocrite. In a word, yes. I think we all are complicit in the problem with factory farming on every level. I cook at home a lot of the time from scratch but even those recipes handed down for generations use ingredients that are now questionable. It would require me to do a LOT of research to make some of my favorite meals from total scratch and I have not figured out how to replace American Cheese . . . sigh. So I may not always cook as fresh and local as I want to for every meal but you can be assured that I think about and calculate what is going into it. Then I make a decision about how bad I want that meal and at least know (and try to justify) what I’m ingesting. Sometimes that’s the best you can do.
The Magic Window
Sophie is a dog that is wound a little tight. She’s very nervous and barks at every little noise she hears. She feels as though she needs to be in the middle of everything but can be so noisy that she often is left behind when those little trips happen. I just don’t want to listen to her barking.
One of the things that sends her into a crazed state is what we refer to as the “magic window”. Cait believes that is what all dogs think of drive up windows at fast food places. They know that you drive up and a person hands you food, usually french fries which is a special weakness for all dogs and children. Sophie starts barking as soon as we approach the magic window and it escalates when she sees the person behind the glass. It doesn’t matter that there’s food. At least that is what I thought until today.
Once a week I go to the drive up window at my bank. It’s a very small bank in what seems like the middle of nowhere. Every time we go the teller gives me cookies for the dogs. We just started going to this bank about a month ago and it is on the way to Rowe so Sophie is always sitting in the front seat next to me. The first time we stopped she lost her mind when the teller appeared in the window. She opened the drawer and there were two milkbones in it. I gave one to Sophie and one to Chester. The teller gave me two more with the receipts. Sophie stopped barking.
Since that time Sophie has not barked once when we’ve gone to that drive through. This seems to be somewhat of a miracle to me. Maybe it’s not just the cookies, maybe it’s the teller. All I know is this is the only window I’ve found that is truly magic.
Weaving Wednesday 6
Last night at class I started by winding the warp onto the warp beam for the Maltese Cross throw that I’m making. The warp is JaggerSpun Maine Line 2/8 wool yarn (it’s yummy). This is my first foray into wool and it behaves a little differently than cotton – it’s “sticky” so extra care was taken as the threads came through the lease sticks. The warp is 36″ wide so it’s just fitting on the loom. This loom is the same loom that I have in Rowe. I’m seeing many wool projects in my future, mainly because I just love the feel of the yarn. Somehow loving the feel of it makes every part of the process that much more enjoyable.
These are the chained warp threads from the front of the loom as they are being wound onto the beam. I warp from the back to the front.
This is the view from my seat as I was threading the heddles. You can see a little piece of the draft hung on the castle of the loom, that’s my instructions, it shows what thread goes into what heddle in order. There are a total of 432 threads in this particular warp, I had half of them threaded by the time I left last night. Next week I will be finishing up the threading and sleying the reed.
It seems like such a production when you try to describe it to someone but I find all of it to be very relaxing. I need to concentrate to make sure threads are in the right order, and they aren’t crossed. The perfectionist in me tries to make sure everything is in order so when I throw my shuttle the first few times I’m not looking at it in disgust trying to figure out how many mistakes I have to fix before I can weave. This is where I think the perfectionist trait pays off, weaving is very unforgiving. If it’s wrong, it’s wrong. Of course some of those errors quite possibly are only things that I would see – but I would see them from across the room.
Pay it Forward
All along the Mohawk Trail through the town of Charlemont someone planted daffodils years ago. It’s probably a 10 mile stretch of the road on the north side where there are clumps of various types of these flowers. I look forward to seeing them every year and am always sad to see them go.
Daffodils also grow in what seems to be random places. You drive by what may once have been someone’s home, now gone and there are daffodils blossoming on what may have once been their front yard. I find the resiliency of these flowers amazing. Not only do they come back year after year they multiply. A few turn into hundreds.
This is one of the things I’ve learned about gardening over the years – it’s slow. Whenever you are planting perennials, shrubs or trees you always have to think years down the road. Don’t plant things too close together or you will end up digging them up. Take into consideration the spread of some plants before you plant them. I have echinacea that takes up a good part of a garden now, that was the intent. It has other things growing with it but I love that sea of pink in the summer.
Bill thinks the idea of planting new maple trees in the front yard of the house as pointless because we won’t live to enjoy the shade. I say plant them now so my grandchildren will have beautiful trees shading the front of the house in the summer like they did when I was a child.
Perennial gardens are gifts to future generations in my opinion. Some of the gardens I have in Rowe were planted by my mother, most of the plants cames from her friends and aquaintances. She planted them for herself and to beautify the property but as a gardener you know that she probably knew that the garden would go on long after she was gone. I love being able to go through my flower gardens and know where the peony came from or the dark purple iris. They came from people I loved dearly that are no longer with us. I love my gardens because I remember a day spent with Bill or my sister sweating with a shovel or moving stones. Year after year I will walk down the stone path and see how my flowers are filling in. A few years from now I won’t have to worry about the weeds because the perennials will have taken over. A few years after that I will be dividing things up and giving them away – to people I care about. It’s all about paying it forward.
The Debate Over the Ethics of Photo Restoration
Wonderful blog post on photo restoration. A must read for anyone interested in their family legacy of photography.
Heartfelt
“Making the decision to have a child is momentous. It is to decide forever to have our heart go walking around outside your body.”
Elizabeth Stone
Today is my youngest’s 26th birthday, it is also the week before Mother’s Day. I’m not one to celebrate mother’s day in an extravagant way. For me everyday is mother’s day even though my children are well into adulthood. Of all the things I have done in my life being a mother has been the most important to me. It defines who I am now. I just always hope that I have raised kind and compassionate people, both with themselves and others.
Then days come like yesterday when I get to spend an afternoon with my progeny – two that I raised and one I did not and was recently reunited with. It was a quiet time enabling me to reflect on who they’ve become. A chance to look at them and see my history in their eyes – my mother, my father, my grandparents and marvel at the wonder of it all. There are so many things they are born with that just need a little nurturing. The amazing thing is you often don’t see these things until they are adults.
I wasn’t fully aware how many of our children’s talents are inherited and blossom with a little nurture. It’s so much like planting a garden. You put those seeds in the ground knowing what they are and how they will look but you fuss over them and water them and watch over their growth and maturity. When they mature it is still a marvelous revelation. You think how beautiful even though you knew it all along.
Seeing what they’ve become is only part of it though, there are no words to express the swelling in my soul that encompasses them. It defies description, yet I know when they have children of their own they will know the feeling. The idea that your heart is walking outside of your body embodies so many things. I think I’ll try to remember next time I’m out in the world that every person has a mother who has this same primal desire for her child to feel the sweet kindness of those who come to know them.
Every mom’s heart is out there in the world walking outside her body.
New View
I took a walk yesterday out through the woodlot. It’s been dry this spring so I was able to get to it without the use of waders. This is the second year we haven’t had beavers on the property although their handywork is ever present. Without them there their ponds get a little smaller, their paths are beginning to grow in. They had a pretty extensive network that is now being slowly reabsorbed into the earth.
I walked along one of the boundary walls so I could see how extensive this pond was. I could only see the marsh reeds from the house and once the leaves are on the trees the only notion you have that it’s there are the birds. Different birds live around these little ponds, that’s why I love having them here. I had thought I could see a beaver house from the other side of this pond but as I discovered in my little hike there wasn’t one. This must have just been another one of their engineering projects while they lived in the pond behind Hoover Damn.
The best part about this little hike was the view – I’ve never seen the house from this vantage point. Timing is everything, once the leaves come out there really won’t be a view of the buildings, at least not this clear a one. So what started out as a walk in the woods on a glorious spring day had the added benefits of a beautiful new photograph, a renewed sense of well being and 2 really muddy dogs.
Retreat
I’ve been in Rowe for the past few days, needed a retreat of sorts. The weather is beyond beautiful and there is so much that I wanted to get done. What I’ve found is that I’ve been most distracted by the quiet – in a good way. The lack of activity all around you helps to bring you back to yourself, it helps to restore your soul. Very few cars go by, very few planes fly over, there aren’t any people that I run into that I don’t already know. My shelves are stocked if I want to make myself something to eat. There is no schedule. The only thing you really have time to do is think. It’s as if your entire day is spent in meditation. It’s a good thing.
Sophie likes to spend her day on the pillows on the sofa. As you can see she has no trouble relaxing at all.
Fort Pelham Farm 