food. according to me.

Wishing I Were Closer To The Ground

          I am living in an old farmhouse with a massive, inviting porch. One side sags just a little bit. I am thinking of screening it off, to keep the summer bugs away and give the cats a place to lounge in the fresh air. There is a table in the far corner, and three chairs. On warm nights when I cannot sleep, I curl up there to read. Inside, to the immediate left of the small entry way, in which stands my parent's old, mirrored halltree and a small table for keys, change, and other household detritus, is my workspace. Two massive wooden tables are pushed together to create something reminiscent of a double desk. There are filing cabinets under the one on the right, closest to the dining nook. On the surface is my laptop, naturally, the digital camera, and a pile of books I've been meaning to review and pull recipes from. My full-spectrum desk lamp sits on one corner. I use it often since I am rarely at my desk when the sun is out. The office spills into my main living/entertaining space. My iPod lives on a shelf there, nestled inconspicuously among books. It's attached to ten speakers hung around the room and, at medium volume, music fills the house and warms it. The aging hardwood floors throughout are covered mostly with old rugs. The one in here is shaggy and green, mirroring the garden you can see from the front window.
     Past the dining nook - where a massive, roughly-hewn table and two matching benches fills the space almost entirely - is the kitchen, where I spend most of my indoor time. It's a temporally-confused space, but comfortable, and my favorite place to be. My long-lusted-after Viking range sits against one wall, not far from a porcelain farm sink. On one of the six gas burners sits a stock pot, simmering a few gallons of vegetable stock for soup and for freezing. There's a wooden manual coffee grinder, the kind that hand-cranks into a drawer. There are herbs drying in the window. Pots dangle on an iron rack hung from the ceiling. The paver tiles are cool beneath my feet.

     Over many months I have been building this place in my mind. It's my new fantasy and every day it enlarges, acquires new details. A handmade quilt for a bedspread. A chicken coop. Rows of leeks and garlic in the sunny spot out back. Candlelight during power outages. It is a naïve and overly-romanticized dream I'm spinning; and I know this, but I can't help myself. I don't want to stop dreaming it.

     I never expected to discover that I am not a city girl. When I moved to Portland three years ago I thought I was coming for a vibrant urban existence. It's what young people who grow up in small coastal tourist towns are supposed to think they want, I suppose. I imagined I would become a metropolitan gal, a mover and a shaker, the city wrapped around me, providing the kind of love that can only come from concrete and steel. As it happened, however, I have developed a love affair of a wholly different sort - a love of dirt. I have never felt "called" to anything in the same way, or with the same intensity, that I feel I must put plants into the earth and watch them grow. I have always been driven to create - crafty things and food and the like - and I have always been happiest when in the midst of such creation. Gardening, feels like a logical progression of this trend, a tightening of my life as a cook and an eater.

     So this is what I dream about: growing my own food and living quietly, a distance away from all of those things I thought I so desperately needed for fulfillment. A drastic priority shift.

     In real life, my blueberry bush already has fruit on it. Every day when I make rounds to water, prune, and dote on my garden I check in with each plant and, I swear, the pride and satisfaction I feel in admiring my growing garden is so expansive you'd think I'd invented photosynthesis - or at the very least, blueberries - my very own self. I feel so much wonder at those basic natural mechanisms - growth, flowering, pollination, fruit, dormancy. A plant just doing what it does qua plant takes my breath away sometimes. And makes me feel totally silly. And awed.

     Nothing tastes better than food you've grown and cooked yourself.

     Yesterday at the grocery store - an all-in-one mammoth compound of convenient consumerism - as I rode the escalator down from the second floor I had a clear look at the aisles of canned goods, cleaning products, housewares, frozen foods, dairy cases, chilled produce. The order and uniformity of that massive place, filled with packaged stuff arrested me in a new way. I wanted to run. Instead, I bought a bag of cookies and some frozen shrimp.

     But what I want, this fantasy of mine, is to leave. I want to somehow live without needing the bag of cookies, the frozen shrimps, the flash and the bling and all the rest. Actually, I know now that I don't need them. It is only that I am used to them. It is only that I don't have the time to make everything from scratch, that I am accustomed to buying fruit out of season, that it is often less expensive to buy processed foods than whole ones.

     I have been intermittently reading Barbara Kingsolver's new book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. It is the chronicle of Kingsolver's move to the Appalachian Mountains to live on a farm and do this very thing I have been dreaming of - grow her own food, live closer to her neighbors and to her family, eat locally and mindfully. It is a pleasant enough read, naturally well-written and insightful. There is a lot of food-and-eating ethics that I am mostly skipping over, having read a heap of it in other books. Though I am absolutely behind her philosophy, and more than interested in the story she has set to tell, I am having a hard time sticking with the book. I realized today that I am jealous.

     There are lots of books about "dropping out" and living independently and those who have done it claim that it's not that difficult to do (if you are ready to be cold, hungry, and tired). While I am not packing up the Prius and heading for the hills with my adze and seed pouch, I have begun to seriously think about the viability of such a plan. I am not particularly strong or clever in a survival-type way. This is the first year I've cultivated even a small garden and, while I don't think I am botching it up completely, I'm sure I could do it better. It strikes me as positively mad, the notion of growing enough food in a year to live off of, but there are in all crazy notions a smidget of truth, an edge of possibility. Reality lives in the middle ground more often than not, and a middle path - life farther from the City and closer to the dirt - does not seem crazy in the slightest. It seems, in fact, much more sane than staying here, living as I do now.

     It begins with my own garden, and shopping at farmer's markets. It begins with canvas bags instead of paper or plastic ones, and riding my bike to work. It begins with staking out the Goodwill and the Rebuilding Center when I set to do home improvement projects and having the patience to wait to find what I need. It begins with intentional eating and cooking and consuming. It begins with deciding on eating seasonally and, whenever possible, locally. (And not dwelling on what I would have to give up in doing so, like all of those tropical fruits I so love, which certainly do not grow up here in the Pacific Northwest.)
     I do not know if I will ever reach this dream of mine, this farmhouse tucked in the mountains. I don’t know if places like that will exist by the time I am ready to move, if I would be able to sustain myself in such a life, or if I will even want it by the time it is attainable. Some gals dream of perfect suburban houses or city lofts, of storybook weddings or men on motorcycles. I dream of dirt under my fingernails and collapsing hard into bed at night, exhausted from hauling the onions down the root cellar. I dream of cooking fresh food that, months earlier, I knew as seed. And maybe these dreams of mine are just as silly: “storybook” fantasies with slightly different kinds of characters. Though I may never get all the way to the farmhouse with the root cellar and the six-burner Viking, at least I will keep my garden. And I will do it better every season as I learn new tricks and techniques and ways to coddle the blueberries which will be, unequivocally, the best I've ever tasted.