They’ve made a permanent move from the garage, of course; Our Lady of the Circular Causality Dilemma sits in one corner of our backyard and the chickens have the run of the place all day long. They make good use of our small city plot, digging and scratching for all manner of small, delicious things in the dirt. Until the beginning of autumn, all three chickens—Trotsky (formerly known as Sister Who We Don’t Know What Her Name Is Yet), Sister Jezebel Turgenev, and The Edge—were laying an egg just about every day. Since October or so, it’s just been Trotsky, the Rhode Island Red. Until yesterday, we hadn’t bought eggs since August, when The Edge laid the very first one.

While the novelty of having three hens in the backyard has worn off, I still find their presence tremendously satisfying. Like any creature, each one has her habits. Having watched them all these months, I can tell you that Trostsky is the dominant hen and Sister Jezebel is on the lowest social rung. The Edge is the least aggressive. She is the last to arrive at the gate when I come with stale bread and veggie trimmings, but she will always get her share. Trotsky is the loudest and most vocal these days, singin’ and squawkin’ in the mornings when she lays her daily egg in the nest she’s made in the far corner of the yard, right next to the coiled green garden hose.

We’ve had rats this year. The Earth Machine we got from Metro first attracted them, and they stayed on when they discovered chicken feed and table scraps. Sometimes I tell myself that we have chickens and a compost pile because we are not 100% efficient and we use both to absorb and make use of leftovers from the house. I tell myself that we have rats now because the chickens aren’t at 100% either, inevitably leaving some nibbles behind for the backyard rodents. My feelings towards the rats change often. This week, perhaps in the spirit of Christmas, I am taking a break from wishing them dead.

We’ve had possums, too—or at least one possum, who caused quite a clatter a few weeks ago, just past midnight. After shooing the creature out of the yard and carrying the frightened hens through the dark and back to their coop, we determined that the possum must have been just passing through and curious about the hens and their food. In a city where chickens are regularly lost to raccoons and such, I count myself very lucky that all three of mine have made it thus far unharmed.

Chickens, I have learned recently, do not enjoy being cold. On the first day of this crazy snowstorm, when the flakes were small and the wind was fierce, I found my hens underneath the back porch, hopping from one foot to the other and making low, accusatory clucks. As the snow piled up around Our Lady of the Circular Causality Dilemma, the chickens grew increasingly bothered by the frozen world. They did not, as far as I know, venture beyond the shelter of the porch for more than a week. Their appetites for corn and fresh vegetables grew and, after four days of very cold weather, Trotsky finally stopped laying. Their water froze every day and every night; they huddled close together on their roost underneath a sixty-watt lightbulb we rigged up with a heavy duty extension cord that runs out the kitchen door. Uncomfortable and unaccustomed though they were, The Edge and her sisters were fine—inconvenienced more than anything.

Today the weather outside seems to be improving. The ice and snow began to thaw last night with drip and a trickle, and today all three hens are moving about in their full range, though no doubt with very cold feet. Judging by the racket heard during breakfast (Trostky’s usual egg-laying hour), I’d guess that there’s even an egg to be collected out there, when I get around to pulling my boots on and trudging through the slush.

The Edge is the first of the gang of hens to make an egg. I’ve been on the lookout for weeks, worried that the chickens would begin to lay and that I’d fail to notice, letting the precious eggs rot in the sunshine or be carried off my vermin. No chicken of mine, I reasoned, would be conformist enough to lay in her nesting box, no matter the pains her keepers have gone to to make it the sort of place that a chicken would want to be. So I’m out in the backyard a lot these days, bringing the ladies my leftover broccoli stems, stale bread, and corn cobs, and nosing around the yard in the hopes of discovering a warm little item, its shape somewhere between a sphere and an ellipsoid.

About a week ago, The Edge took to squatting, her wings lifted away from her body, head tucked. “That chicken wants you to know,” a friend told me as we watched The Edge take two steps, squat, get up, and squat again, “that she’s got an egg in her.” Since the first, there have been two more, right in a row, right like clockwork. She left the second egg in the same place as the first, in a little depression beneath the raspberries. The third – wonder of wonders – was left in her freshly-newspapered nesting box.

According to Barbara Kilarksi, a fellow-Portlander, author of Keep Chickens!, and my main source of chicken-keeping information, chicken eggs should be brushed off when you bring them in – not washed or rinsed – in order to preserve the protective anti-bacterial coating that is so thoughtfully provided by a hen as she ejects the eggs from her rearside. I read that after I brought in the first egg and, yes, rinsed it off before snuggling it into my waiting carton. I rinsed it not because it was dirty, but because – geez – it had just come out of a chicken’s rearside. Barbara had other good advice for me as well: give the egg’s giggly insides a few days to set up before hard-boiling it, for example. She also said that I should leave a plastic Easter egg or a golf ball in the hen’s nesting box if she continues to lay outside of the coop.

Yesterday morning, as I set to make another batch of those spectacular blueberry muffins, I pulled from the fridge two store-bought eggs and The Edge’s first egg. I put The Edge’s egg back in the fridge and grabbed a third that I’d bought at the Cherry Sprout. I put the third store-bought egg back in the fridge and put The Edge’s back on the counter. Resolutely, I at last cracked The Edge’s egg into a bowl, and then cracked a store-bought specimen in with it. I should note that my “store-bought” eggs came from a local farm, from reportedly pampered hens who eat a fine, organic diet. I’d describe my hens in the very same way. I was, therefore, surprised at the difference in appearance between the two samples. The egg on the right came out of my chicken. The yolk was so orange and so firm, and the albumen (white) was much less runny than that of the Cherry Sprout egg. I guess you just can’t compete with an egg that’s only sixteen hours old, or one that came from a chicken who’s better fed than your average hobo.

1. Squawking and clucking and the clicking of sharp beaks.
2. Flight, especially the reckless kind.
3. Free nitrogen-rich fertilizer.
4. Watching the Girls stalk and eat each others’ feathers. Probably not a very healthy practice, but hilarious all the same.

Fowl Displeasure

1. Poop on the picnic table.
2. Unexpected decimation of area plant life.
3. Rats.
4. Flies.

P.S. No eggs yet.

Food is about farmer’s markets and a floppy hat to keep the sun off my face and hybrid cars and the chickens roosting on my back steps. It’s understanding some chemistry, and being able to manipulate a recipe so it comes out how I think it ought to – it’s making six batches, if that’s what it takes, to get it right. According to me, food has everything to do with politics and environmentalism and ethics. I use food for calories, for pleasure, for stress-relief, and, occasionally, for triggering emotional breakdowns.

According to me, food is about preserving biodiversity. It’s about affection and passion and communication. I can’t tell you what I was wearing when something significant happened, but I can tell you what I ate that day. Maybe I am obsessed – it certainly does appear that my life moves around this central theme. But I assure you, it is not so tragic as that. Food is self-care; food is compost.

I fantasize about self-sufficiency, about being more in command of my food supply. I make my own jam and haven’t eaten the store-bought stuff in more than a year. I’m into preservation, storage, and utilization. Dan – er, The Squeeze – bought me a chest freezer for summer berries and raw pizza dough and trout and anything else we can figure out how to make a lot of and keep in suspended animation. I am learning how to make wine; soon we will do beer, too. One evening last summer, we sat on the porch, eating a salad (for we are very in to salads), and he said to me, “Wouldn’t it be great to sit here next year and eat a salad full of things that we grew ourselves?” Everything about that question lit me up. So this year we have a garden – three gorgeous raised beds filled with dark, loamy dirt. I’ve stuck seeds and starts in all of the places I think a plant has a prayer of growing. There are strawberries, blackberries, raspberries, blueberries, figs, pomegranate, nasturtium, basil, cilantro, thyme, lavender, sage, rosemary, parsley, mint, sweet corn, sugar peas, lettuces, carrots, one surprise radish, bush beans, onions, garlic, tomatoes, watermelon, kabocha, pumpkin, zucchini, tomatillo, artichoke, hot peppers, and sweet peppers.

Did I go overboard? Absolutely. Does it make me feel a little drunk just looking at them? Goodness, does it ever. I grew up in Salinas, California, the daughter of farmers. I didn’t pay much attention until years after I moved away. Now my grandmother says that it’s something that’s in me, this need to sink my fingers in the dirt.

In March, Dan built a coop and we put three chicks in it. Now they are pullets, young adult hens that look awfully mature, but who have not yet begun laying eggs. I believe I can say with some degree of certainty that they are all indeed hens, and that I won’t have to learn how to kill a rooster. The chickens began as a way for me to look like an eccentric neighborhood kook, but soon they became part of the system around here:
        We buy and grow food, but we don’t consume all of it. The humans are not 100% efficient. The chickens, in turn, eat our weeds and our table scraps. Their feet scratch at the soil; their poops enrich it. When they are older and begin to lay eggs, I’ll bake with them, give them away to friends, and make Dan eat omelets for breakfast five mornings a week. We’ll put the egg shells into our compost bin. Next season, we’ll spread the compost in the garden.

Would it surprise you if I said that the laundry line strung between the backyard fence and my eighty-year-old walnut tree has to do with food, too? It shouldn’t. When it is warm, I can save electricity on drying clothes and use it for the food dehydrator, or to offset the extra fuel the stove uses during the midsummer frenzy of jam-making. Plus, the chickens look particularly picturesque walking around under flapping sheets and pillowcases.

I’ve got some strong feelings about how I think commercially-produced food should happen. If, after reading this, you have lingering curiosities about the nature and scope of these feelings, send me an e-mail or pick up a copy of Peter Singer’s The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter. Or both. As a liberal arts sort of gal, I’ve taken more than my share of environmental science courses, and anyway it doesn’t take that big of a geek to see that our farming practices are unsustainable and dangerous. If I were in charge, we’d all have time – and space – to grow our own food. Many of us are already sure that we cannot responsibly do otherwise.

So, here is my confession: I’m sort of an urban hippy-type.

And here’s another one: I break my little rules every day.

According to Dr. Weber, my very first Philosophy professor at Monterey Peninsula College and the dude responsible for settling me on this ethics kick, the most powerful objection leveled against John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism is that – get this – it’s too demanding.

But the objection isn’t about laziness. This construction of Utilitarianism calls for behavior that always maximizes The Good. The Good can be defined in any number of ways, but let’s just say for now that The Good is Zero Environmental Harm. We may do things that cause Some Environmental Harm, but we must always keep in mind our moral duty to cause Zero Environmental Harm and do everything we are able to get as close to living a harm-free life as we can – that’s the rule.

Imagine you need to get to work. You certainly can’t drive your car alone. You could carpool, but the bus is a better choice – and the MAX train, better still. Preferable to motorized transport, you could ride your bicycle, but biking generates more waste heat than walking does. It’s awfully efficient though.

So maybe you choose to walk to work. Now let’s think about which shoes you should wear : what materials they are made from, how far away they were produced, what they’ll do to any plant life you should happen to step on as you walk.

It might be better to stay home and telecommute – but what environmental impact does your personal computer have? It’s made from all sorts of hazardous stuff. And in your home office space, are the light bulbs compact florescent, or incandescent? Do you pay a little extra for electricity generated by wind or water? Does your employer? It gets worse, this Utilitarianism-business. It is crazy-making to constantly think of the ways you can do better, because you can always do better. I can, anyway.

I take my responsibilities as a consumer, a cook, and an eater very seriously. The things I do these days in the name of our little blue planet would have seemed very unlikely to me as recently as four years ago. I arrived here incrementally; but here I am, saving chicken shit, walking miles to school, collecting old CDs until the pile is big enough to justify a trip to the recycling center. I’ve tried to think of something that I do that’s outlandish and I can’t. Collecting gray water is normal. Washing out plastic bags for infinite reuse just makes sense.

Back to my confession: As much as I am tryin’ to live and eat in ways that feel right to me, I fall short. Often. Some days, Panda Express just pushes my buttons, and I am pretty sure that everything they sell came off of a Sysco truck. Conventional (read: factory farmed) eggs are a lot less expensive than the eggs from hens fed organic meal and allowed, supposedly, to roam free and cluck in the sunshine. There’s an economic premium to this lifestyle, and times can get rough. I’m not often motivated to drive even twenty minutes out of my way to get the Draper Valley organic chicken meat. I should, though. Actually, I should ride my bike out to get the Draper Valley stuff. Or, I should give up eating meat altogether. See how it can get out of hand quickly?

If this ethical eating business is such a huge and important part of my life, then why do I still shop in places I know I ought to avoid? Why do I ever use my car? Why can’t I resist the mangoes from South America? Well, all I have in answer is that I’m doing my best, and my best isn’t perfect. We all hide twinkies – in some form or another – in our desk drawers. As much as I’d love to believe that I can save the world, I know that I am just one girl: one girl who loves mangoes and, occasionally, greasy steam-table chow mein. I won’t feel guilty about my food. My food doesn’t deserve that.

According to me, food is about more than what’s for dinner. According to me, food is about craft and about dirt and about making choices true to oneself and to the rest of the planet. Food is about honesty, and about love. It’s about acknowledging that butter makes it taste better, but not going crazy with the saturated fats.

According to me food isn’t worth much if it doesn’t feel good, if it can’t keep you alive and healthy, if you can’t share it with friends. Food, you see, will soak up all the meaning and the heft you want to give it. And if you don’t want it to mean anything, then just eat it already –– Bon appétit.

California never seemed like a desert to me before. My parents live just outside of Salinas, the Salad Bowl of the World. I grew up eating fresh, hand-cut broccoli for dinner four nights a week, and unrefrigerated lettuces, cabbages, and the like on the other nights. Prodding me to eat more veggies, Dad always said that steamed zucchini and patty pan squash tasted “just like candy.” I ate it back then, though I did not agree. A few weeks ago I uttered those very same words to a friend, and was more surprised to hear my father’s pet phrase come out of my mouth than I was to realize I now share his esteem for summer squash.

But this last weekend, their yard seemed dry and hard to me. It might have been the heat wave, or the ominous plague of caterpillars hanging in the oak trees, darkening their prickly leaves. Plants still grow like mad there – they get so much more sun than I do here in Portland. Mom’s tomato plants are easily five times the size of mine, and the backyard trees are a frenzy of nascent apples, figs, walnuts, and cherries. Despite the evident fertility of the place, it seemed to me that all of that food grows in spite of its surroundings, not because of them.

Flying up from the dusty Salad Bowl and the rocky coast, Portland looked to me like a jungle or a giant vegetable garden or a terrarium. I am a year-round fan of this place. I chose it deliberately and I suspect I will stay here for some time. This part of the year, though, is a favorite. Winter always feels a bit too long, and the Californian in me starts to panic that the rain will go on until we are drowned. I see now, as I do every year, that we will dry out, probably become uncomfortably hot for a few days, and that things will grow. In my adopted terrarium-home, things grow. And all I want to do – so much more than the end-of-term school projects presently dominating my waking life – is to be out in the yard, digging my fingers into the dark earth and cheering on the squash.

My reaction to her story then was very similar to what I’ve been hearing lately from other people – Chickens? In the city? It was my understanding that barnyard fowl, whether Chicken Little or Robot Chicken, belonged a bit further away from the CBD, for all our sakes. But no, I overheard her saying later, it is indeed quite legal to keep chickens in the city and yes, the eggs are fantastically delicious.

Fast forward through our final exam, a very unpleasant August heat wave, and a couple of years where a bunch of totally unrelated things happened — I’ve just brought home three chicks. They’ll live in the garage until they’re older and heartier, then they’ll have the range of our backyard. The Squeeze was generous enough to build a coop for them, which we’ve named “Our Lady of the Circular Causality Dilemma.” Two of our residents are proper Sisters – Sister Jezebel Turgenev (she doesn’t give a cluck) and Sister We Don’t Yet Know Her Name. The third is a cultural refugee, just looking to escape the grind and retire in peace: The Edge. We picked them up at Livingscape Nursery, along with all of their gear: feeders, food, heat lamp. The folks at Livingscape were quite helpful and friendly.

The chicks are probably gallinas. The process of determining the sex of newly hatched chicks is, I have read, imperfect; and the folks at the nursery said that we can be around 90 percent sure that ours will grow up to be hens. If there is a gallo in our coop, he’ll be awfully gender-confused by time we know for sure, what with being treated just like one of the girls for so many weeks. We’ve already had some talks about surprise-rooster contingency plans, and while I don’t know if I could kill a chicken, I am quite sure that I could eat one, even one that’s currently peeping away downstairs. If we do have to deal with it, however, you can bet there will be a “free rooster to loving home” ad posted on Craigslist before I set out to sharpen the hatchet.

For most of my family and friends, the arrival of these chickens to my little home has cemented my reputation as an eccentric person, perhaps even a naive one. Before there was any real action, when I was just talkin’ chicken, they tried to warn me: chickens are stinky; chickens will attract rats and gophers and wildebeests. Chickens are noisy; chickens don’t cuddle. I know that chickens don’t cuddle (which, I’ll admit, is usually one of the first things I think about when considering new pets), but they do four other things which I find very exciting. One: Chickens eat food scraps. Right now, some of my food waste goes down the garbage disposal and some into the very slow-moving compost pile. In addition to their normal feed and scratch, chickens eat all manner of household compostables, thus eliminating my need for the frequent garbage disposal-ing and diverting scraps from the compost heap. Then, chickens do the second thing that I am interested in: they poop. Chicken guano is great fertilizer for the garden and I will have an inexpensive and consistent supply of it. Third, chickens eat bugs, and while they are eating bugs they also scratch around aerate the soil – two more good things for my garden. Finally, chickens lay eggs. Though I am not an egg-in-the-morning kind of a person, I am a bake-lots-of-cookies person and also a give-eggs-away-to-friends person, both of which I am eager to do with their very fresh, drug-free eggs.

On the day we got the chicks, I was very tempted to try to cuddle them. They were so tiny and so fluffy and so cute. I’m over that now, though. Mostly, I am eager for them to grow up, move the heck out of my garage, and start pooping in the yard. These Sisters and The Edge, I think of them mostly as employees, though I know that sounds strange. Of course I want them to be comfortable, well-fed, and emotionally secure, but they are still chickens and, well, folks spoke the truth when they tried to warn me: chickens are stinky.

Blackberry.

Dahlia.

Pear.

.
Trolls, evidently.

This afternoon as I walked about my neighborhood the light was just so lovely, and there was food growing everywhere. In my little corner of the city, we’ve got walnuts, hazelnuts, pears, peaches, four kinds of plums (that I’ve spotted so far), apples, figs and berries, berries, berries. And that’s not even counting the scores of planted gardens. Last year it was the farmer’s markets the struck me as the best part of the season. This time around, I hardly have to leave my porch.

          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.