Garden Planning

My housemate has sort of moved in, although she is sleeping in the guest room because we don't have her rooms ready yet.  We have moved most of the stuff that needed to be moved, and reorganized most of our house, from books to food storage, and given away a truckload of stuff, but there is still work to be done. 

At the same time, we are working on outdoor projects while we still can.  Our garden this year was haphazard, and next year we need to do much better.  Our soil needs a lot of help.  It needs organic matter, fertility, drainage, shading for perennial weeds, and pest control.  Unfortunately, it is too late to plant most cover crops this year.  We just got some rye in the ground, which is marginally worthwhile at this point, according to what I've read.  Yesterday my housemate tilled about 800 square feet of heavy clay soil with her medium-sized tiller and my mini-tiller (when the larger one overheated and quit), then came inside and baked an apple pie.  I tried to keep up with her by raking, picking out Bermuda grass and seeding rye, but I collapsed in a heap of exhaustion mid-afternoon.  My housemate is easily twice as productive as I am (and eats half as much - does that make her 4 times as productive?)  We have started buying materials for a 12x12 shed with a full-size loft, which we plan to use for shared household and garden storage, a goat shelter, hay loft and "treehouse" for the kids.  Then, we plan to put up a privacy fence around what is currently an area of brush and small trees, and get a couple of milk goats.  Livestock of any kind is illegal here, which is why we need the privacy fence.  We've already put up a second-hand iron fence for her hens and hung tarps on it so they won't be visible from the street. We are planning to put up a low tunnel and plant some late greens in it, in addition to the small fall garden I managed to plant on time.

I go through periods when vegetable gardening feels kind of lame.  Fruit trees, animals, and other projects seem more glamorous and appealing, although I know deep down that the vegetable garden is the heart of the homestead.  Maybe it's seasonal cravings for protein, or sweet things.  Maybe it's just a rut.  But at the moment, I am in love with vegetables.  I'm looking forward to this year's seed catalogs quite a bit more than any of the holidays that come first.  I'm going through last year's catalogs and marking things I want.  I'm reading gardening books and making lists and plans.  Instead of feeling tired of the garden, this year I feel like I didn't get nearly enough of it.  

So far, our plans for next year's garden include growing enough tomatoes for our yearly consumption, carefully planting potatoes and sweet potatoes and hopefully having better luck with them, planting seed pumpkins in a row of sheet compost I'm currently assembling, making a hugel and a wet rice paddy, growing 3 types of corn using time isolation, growing most of our animal feed, using summer and winter cover crops, using season extension, growing heirloom vegetable starts for market, acquiring a beehive, growing some new things like sesame, loofah, artichoke, peanuts, and edamame, and asking the neighbor if we can rent or sharecrop part of his backyard to grow some heirloom popcorn for market.  My husband thinks we're crazy for wanting to plant rice, and he might be right, but we want to experiment and we have a suitably low and damp yard for it.  I also want to experiment with grain sorghum, but probably not this year because we're planning to grow a sorghum Sudan grass as a cover crop.  Other priorities, for me, will be planting fruit trees and perennial vines and doing a much better job of growing berries and medicinal herbs.  Even expanding to use all the usable parts of our yard and some of the neighbor's yard, I anticipate we will run out of space, but we will also run out of energy (some of us more than others) and time.  I don't know how much of the above will actually get accomplished, but it sure is fun to plan.

My housemate also may be getting a part-time job working at the local-foods market nearby, which is great for our food security outlook, and also makes it easy for us to sell a few small cash crops there.

Protests

I don't watch or read the news that much, so my information about the Occupy Wall Street and the spin-off/solidarity protests is mostly second-hand.  Here in Richmond we have a protest coming up in a few days.  Many of my friends are supporting the movement, if not actually participating, and I've felt some peer pressure to join in, but I have been reluctant to do so.  Reading a few comments on an online news story (why do only mean, ignorant Conservatives comment on online news stories?) made me want to run and join the protests, but it was a temporary effect.  It took me a while to put my finger on what bothers me about these protests.  The "99%" slogans don't appeal to me.  I've always been an anti-elitist (or a "reverse snob"), but never a populist.  Being part of a huge majority doesn't feel like something to aspire to or boast about, to me.  If they brought back "Eat the Rich" I might be more sympathetic.  But it goes beyond the slogan.  I find myself wondering, why now?  Who are these people who are just waking up to the inequalities of our systems, the lack of effective socioeconomic leveling mechanisms in our culture?  I guess they didn't care about it until it affected them personally.  Can they possibly be serious?  What do they want to happen?  

I don't believe our problems can be neatly blamed on the 1%.  The 99%, the collective majority of Americans, has a lot of culpability in the situation.  I'm not talking about individual debt, it goes much deeper than that.  Are the protesters making real changes in their lives, other than easy ones like moving their money from banks to credit unions?  I suspect the majority of them want reform, not revolution, and certainly not a radical change in their own lifestyles that would take power back from the CEO's and politicians in a meaningful way.  Being a leftist movement, I'm sure they want to transfer some power from corporations to government, which is not a goal worth fighting for in my opinion, any more than the Tea Party's effective goal of transferring power from government to corporations.

I am working, in my own life, to transfer power from both corporations and government to myself and other individuals.  I have a lot of room for improvement, but I am working hard to meet more and more of my family's needs by producing things myself, community-building, buying locally grown, buying handmade, buying used, buying from small family businesses, buying from socially and ecologically responsible companies, consuming less, transacting in cash, and avoiding taxes whenever possible.  These activities take time, energy and money, which I feel is better invested than it would be in political action, and pays better dividends.

Failures

We are in the midst of a whole-house purge and reorganization, while simultaneously remodeling a bathroom and assembling our little greenhouse.  I am even more overwhelmed than what has become normal for me, and longing for a couple of days off.  You know, the kind of days off I used to get before I had a child - sleeping until 10, doing no work at all, maybe not even making my own meals.  

I just sold something I said I'd never sell - my recumbent exercise bike, the first big thing I bought new for myself as an adult.  It takes up too much space, and owning it for the these past 7 years hasn't magically made me lose weight, although at times I have been motivated enough to use it to treat a chronic weakness in one knee.  Making the house ready for more occupants has pushed us to do all kinds of things we were meaning to do for a long time, and some things we otherwise would not have done, but will someday be glad we did.

I just finished reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver and family.  If you haven't read it, you must.  I found myself moved to tears by nearly every chapter, not because the book is sad, but because it rang so true for me.  I loved the recipes, and I kind of wish I had made notes as I read about their planting and harvest times, since they garden right here in Virginia and seem to have a much better idea what they're doing than I do.  It's a library book, so I won't be able to refer back to it later.

Even with a few years experience and many gardening books read, I still feel like a beginner.  Our small sweet potato crop, like our Irish potato crop, was a complete failure.  My garden failures this year alone are too many to mention.  This year's garden was unplanned and poorly executed, since we had decided not to grow a garden this year at all in order to focus on remodeling the house.  All our gardening so far has been somewhere between recreational and compulsive - try though we might, we can't resist planting - but I'm ready to get much more serious about it, especially with another serious gardener moving in.  When I try to make a garden plan for next year, I feel so confused, because all the books I've read contradict each other in the most basic ways, and I can't decide which system to trust.  Do I plant my beans in a compost pile, or in a three sisters guild?  Do I mulch or not?  Plant clover in the paths, put boards over them, or eliminate the paths altogether?  Plant rows, blocks, or willy-nilly? 

And my failures aren't limited to the garden.  Every vegetable ferment I made this summer failed, although I had made some successfully in previous seasons.  Every jam and jelly I've ever made has failed to set, but I want them to work so badly that I keep trying, with decreasing hopefulness.  

I'm a smart person who generally can accomplish whatever I set my mind to.  Failing at such simple tasks as growing potatoes and making jam, despite sincere efforts, is difficult to accept.  But I am trying not to be resentful about it.  We are making progress in some directions, and we have accomplished some worthwhile things, and other things seem much more possible than they used to.

Heritage Harvest Festival

The Heritage Harvest Festival at Monticello was this past weekend.  I talked M. and B., urban-homesteading and homeschooling friends, into going and giving me and my son a ride.  We camped two nights, as they are avid campers and had access to a pop-up.  I am not a huge fan of camping.  M. thought it strange that I want to live off-grid, but find it awkward to cook a meal at the campsite; but it's really more about familiarity and convenience (e.g. having running water at the sink) than the electric stove.  I also find all the packing and unpacking tiresome.

I got to take two brief, paid workshops on herbal medicine on Friday while they watched my son, but on Saturday I didn't get to do much because my son won't stand still.  Honestly, I couldn't stand still either, because it's all so overwhelming.  There are so many things to dream about doing.  Home dairying, fiber production and spinning, permaculture, beekeeping, solar dehydrating, heritage breed pigs, et cetera, et cetera.  I lose focus and end up just wandering around.  Which goes hand in hand with a conclusion I have reluctantly reached; that before we try to go in any new directions, we need to do a better job at the things we're currently doing.  We need to focus more on soil fertility.  We need to slow down, and do the hard and unglamorous work, and prioritize our projects based on real needs rather than shiny temptations.  We need to use the things we've already bought and the skills and advantages we possess.  And we can not do it all ourselves.  I dream of having enough land and freedom to raise all kinds of animals, as many people do.  Every time I throw food waste away, I wish I could have a pig or even some chickens (legally) that would eat our table scraps, and I constantly wish for a dairy animal.  But I also know that there is so much more I could be doing even without that, and land is not the most important limitation.  Child care, or child distraction, is a critical need.  Lack of physical stamina is a close second, if not the primary limitation for me personally; as lack of time is for my husband.  And lack of funds is obviously a concern.  

I'm trying to stick to my no-food-buying challenge, but it is really hard.  We are eating a lot less meat, because my meat stores in the freezer were a bit low when I started this challenge.  This weekend I bought some fast food on the road because we were starving and unable to access our packed food.  The retail farmer's market I buy from emailed me to say they had finally found me some pigs' feet that I had requested a while ago, so I'll have to buy them now.  My spouse is not on board for this challenge; he doesn't get the point of refusing to buy even an onion or a carton of eggs.  A friend wants to can some peaches with me this week and I find it difficult to say no to that, having become somewhat addicted to preserving.  And I still have 3 weeks to go!  I'm going to do the best I can.  Hopefully, even if I don't do it perfectly, I will accomplish most of my goals, and form some good habits like I did with my food preserving challenge. 

New Challenge

I made a trip to the mountains to visit Edible Landscaping (www.ediblelandscaping.com).  I have wanted to try pawpaws for several years, and they were ripe, and I've wanted to buy some plants from there for at least as long.  I didn't end up buying anything I would regret if we move soon, which is looking a great deal less likely than before.  I got a couple of small outdoor plants and several potted tropicals.  I got a coffee plant, which was probably foolish, since we'll get, at best, one small pot of coffee a year from it.  If I plant the seeds, in a decade or so maybe we'll be up to a pot of coffee a month.  At least it is a nice houseplant, requiring little light.  I also got two citrus, a Persian lime and a Ponderosa lemon.  So, while I've been needing a greenhouse for a while, now I urgently need one in the next 60 days or so.  I've decided to go with a commercial greenhouse kit, the kind with aluminum frame and hard plastic walls, and Sam's Club has one for just under $500, including the thermal vent opener.  I think the sheet-plastic-covered tunnel kind are just too ugly to set one up 10 feet from my neighbors' yard, since my kid is always at their house and I'm trying to stay friendly.  And the lovely greenhouses that can be made with recycled windows are permanent structures by necessity, and would have to be left behind if we moved.

  

Unfortunately, my husband just changed jobs again, and my unemployment payments are irregular, and we are currently broke.  So, my new 30-day challenge is to buy no food at all until October 11.  This will serve other purposes besides saving money.  It will force me to clean out my pantry.  It will be a good test of my disaster preparations.  And it will force me to attempt baking bread again, which I had given up on.  I didn't prepare for this, I just decided to do it, so there will be some suffering involved.  We will soon run out of real coffee, milk of course, tea, and honey.  I'll also be forced to give up my diet soda addiction, at least temporarily.  Caffeine headaches will probably push me to the emergency supply of generic instant coffee and powdered creamer, which I added to our preps after the hurricane.  I have herbs in the garden I can make tea with.  We have plenty of instant hot chocolate.  Am I obsessed with beverages?  Maybe, but it's probably just that I'm not remotely worried about actual hunger.  I did just finish a 30-day food preserving challenge, after all.  I will run out of onions soon, and I'll have only my Egyptian walking onions, which are very tiny and currently sprouting in the garden.  My son is going to complain when there's no more spaghetti, chicken nuggets, or bacon in the house, and the only milk is powdered skim, and I'll have to be creative to appease him.  Luckily he likes baked goods.  Oh, and eggs, I need to go freeze a few so my husband doesn't eat them because I'll need them for baking.  But mostly this will be an exercise in creative substitution for me.  Do you think I'll be able to do it?  Could you do it?

A reader recently pointed out that the comment "button" is hard to see.  It's the orange "0 comments" below, if anyone else is looking for it ;)

Tortilla Love

I think if you ask people what their idea of comfort food is, you'll learn a lot about how they grew up.  My comfort foods are things like American cheese slices, canned spaghetti, and Pop-Tarts.  I wonder what my son's will be.  I cook a lot more than my mom did when I was growing up, but I cook so many different things.  I don't know if that will change, if at some point, my cooking will settle into more of a predictable rhythm.  Because I try to cook flexibly with what's locally abundant and cheap, and because I cook nose to tail, and maybe because I have too many cookbooks, there aren't many dishes I repeat often.  My husband, on the other hand, is a creature of habit.  I suspect my son's comfort foods will be things like scrambled eggs with tomatoes, beans and rice, and of course, corn tortillas. 

Corn tortillas have been a problem for us for a long time.  All the pre-made ones, and almost all brands of masa harina, are made from GMO corn.  We have some non-GMO dried whole corn, but it's not the right kind of corn for tortillas and only works so-so, and nixtamalizing and hand-grinding corn is more work than I'm willing to do on a daily basis.  Even making them from masa harina was too much work when I was employed outside the home, but now I've committed to making them this way, so I did some Googling and found the Bob's Red Mill masa harina, which is not organic but is GMO-free.  Not being able to find it locally, I ordered a 25-pound bag, which cost less than the shipping.  I was a little wary about buying such a quantity without having tried the product.  Could it be as good as Maseca, or passably close?  I was thrilled to find it superior in every way, from the smell, to the workability of the masa and easy puffing of the tortillas, and it got very good taste reviews from the household expert.

Here are some pictures of the tortilla-making process.  If anyone wants instructions to go with these, let me know.

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I know I've mentioned before my love of purslane and my frustrated attempts to grow it.  This year I didn't plant any, but we built a raised bed for herbs (most of which also didn't germinate, after planting them twice).  We filled the raised bed with compost and soil from our garden.  Among the weeds that grew there were 2 purslane plants, no doubt from seed my plants shed last year.  One of them was totally consumed by leafminers.  This is the other one:

I am patiently waiting to collect seed from this apparently leafminer-resistant plant.

August Food Preserving

Technically, my food preserving challenge is over.  But I can't bring myself to stop.  Today I'm planning to make some pickle relish, and I still have a couple of jellies to make that I didn't get around to yet, and some beef stock from the bones in my freezer.  But, I have to start winding down because it's time to move on to the next thing, and catch up on the things I've neglected while focusing on this.

This is what I preserved in August.

Canned:

gingered peach preserves, 4 12-oz. jars

halved peaches, 5 qts.

ketchup, 6 12-oz. jars and a half pint

salsa, 9 pints

apple pectin, 3 qts and a pint

bread & butter pickles, 3 pts.

watermelon jelly, 4 half pints

watermelon rind pickles, 4 pints of one version, and 3 and half pints of a second version

whole tomatillos, 4 qts.

salsa verde, 3 pts and 4 half-pints

plain tomato sauce, 2 qts and a pint

tomato sauce with onion and garlic, 8 qts

lamb stock, 5 qts.

froze:

3 pints tomato paste in a variety of re-used jars

a quart of lamb tallow

several large jars of chopped green peppers

dried: 

several bunches of cayenne peppers

about 10 pounds of green beans, "leather breeches" style (on a string)

some basil and some lemon balm

lacto-fermented:

pinapple vinegar, which I then used to make encortido (Latin American sauerkraut)

habanero hot sauce, which I'm not sure is edible - it smelled funky, but it's not something you can just taste a spoonful of.  My husband thinks its okay though.

I lost several ferments, including two attempts to ferment tomatoes, and two attempts to make cucumber pickles.  I was very discouraged.  I don't know if it was the summer heat, or if there's some bad bacteria strains in my kitchen, or I've just lost my touch.

I'll tell you a little about the lamb tallow I froze.  I skimmed the fat off my lamb stock, and rendered the fat still clinging to the meat, then filtered it.  It is a very hard, white tallow, and I think I'd like to make soap with it, if I ever get going with my soapmaking.  If not, I'll use it for cooking.  I try not to throw away animal fat in my kitchen.  (In fact there are several mystery jars of gelatin-topped fat in my fridge that I suspect were the juices from roasting chickens, which I saved but neglected to label.)

Surprise favorites: salsa, and watermelon rind pickles (both versions).  Another surprise: I reluctantly hauled out and used my Victorio-type food food mill, which I've had since 1999, and found it works much better than I thought it did.  It made such efficient work of saucing tomatoes that it was well worth the set-up and clean-up.

Seed saving is kind of like food preserving too.  I'm going to harvest a mature yellow pickling cucumber in my garden for seed today.  I saved seeds from 3 types of tomatoes, none of which I know the names of.  One was a volunteer in our corn patch which produced nice tomatoes with no water or fertilizer.  (My husband planted corn and field peas without thinking about how he was going to water them.  The corn didn't make it.)  The others were from the farm market, but obviously heirloom types, and I liked them for canning.  I took pictures of them for my own reference, though I have little hope of ever identifying them, with so many tomatoes in the world. 

Garden and Preserving Update

I've challenged myself to preserve something every day for a month, more or less through August 28 if I can keep it up.  I'm doing this challenge alone because I haven't been able to recruit anyone to join me. 

Food I've preserved in July (all Virginia grown):

• lamb stock, canned 3 qts., 4 pts.
• stewed tomatoes (from our garden), canned 3 qts., 2 pts.
• corn, canned 17 pts., froze some too
• beets, canned 2 qts., 8 pts.
• pickled beets, canned 8 pts.
• peach jam with honey, canned 7 half pts, one 4 oz.
• kosher dill pickles (from our garden), lacto-fermented 3/4 gallon
• dried a few sprigs of basil and some hot peppers from our garden.  (I don't have a dehydrator.  I've resisted buying an electric one, and the solar one I want to make is a big project for us, and won't get done this year.)

In the garden, this has been our best year yet for peppers, we have beautiful bell peppers this year.  Bugs have not been much of a problem this year, but weeds have, especially bindweed.  

The potatoes got some kind of disease that causes wet mushy spots on them and zero production.  We just harvested them today and we got less than what we planted.  This is a huge disappointment because I love potatoes and want to rely on them as a calorie crop.  Luckily, we won't starve this year because of it.  Wherever we garden in the future we will need to pay a lot more attention to both soil fertility and crop rotation.

I've planted a bunch of medicinal herbs in a new raised bed, and when they didn't germinate my husband planted them all again under a layer of straw while reminding me how bad I am at planting, but they still aren't growing.  

There is a volunteer watermelon trying to grow in our gravel driveway for the second year in a row, although we don't remember ever disposing of any seeds there.  It's doing quite well, in spite of not being watered or fertilized and my husband's affinity for spraying the driveway with Roundup, but it waited too late to grow and the frost will get it before the melons are ready, as it did last year.  If we're here next year, I'll plant a watermelon in the driveway on purpose, early enough for it to mature fruit. 

Nose to Tail Eating

I'm not going to start this post with the customary apologetic warning to vegetarians.  If either of my readers is a vegetarian, as I once was, I'll give you some credit and assume it's not because of squeamishness. 

It was Mexico that converted me from vegetarianism: I knew before I went there I would have to change my diet, but at first I was stuck eating chiles rellenos every day because I didn't know what most of the dishes were, and I was afraid my body had stopped producing enzymes to digest meat (which turned out to be untrue).  When I got going though, I didn't stop: chicken feet, cow feet, cow head, tripe, every part of the pig, almost nothing disgusts me.  My love of Mexican cuisine led directly to a love of nose-to-tail eating.  Really, nose-to-tail is not the best description of the meats I cook, maybe "nose and tail, and feet, innards and other cheap cuts" would be a better name for it, but that's too long.  Honestly, I haven't a clue how to properly cook a fancy steak, or a tenderloin, and I can't stand boneless, skinless chicken breasts.

I'm going to share with you some of the dishes I cook with offal and other underutilized (i.e. cheap) cuts of meat. 

I bought some pastured chicken hearts and livers from a local farm.  I parboiled the hearts and drained them, then fried the livers in some previously rendered chicken fat (I gather bits of chicken fat in a bag in the freezer until I have enough to render), added a sliced onion, 3 peppers, one small eggplant (optional, I just had one I needed to use), and then half a dozen Roma tomatoes.  I added back the hearts and tossed in the unlaid eggs I had saved from a hen my husband butchered.  I covered and simmered the dish while some rice cooked.

Another farm I often buy grass-fed meat from has lamb bones and livers on sale at a ridiculously low price, 60 cents a pound for both.  I can use some lamb stock somehow, and I'll cook some lamb livers as described above - that dish is pretty adaptable and it's a favorite of my husband's.  I ordered 8 of the livers, I may make some into a stroganoff, and I also found a recipe online for lamb's liver marsala that looked interesting. 

And speaking of liver (which is actually my least favorite organ), I have a salt-and-sugar cured pig's liver wrapped in a cloth hanging in my kitchen right now, a recipe from Fergus Henderson's book The Whole Beast.  It's to be sliced and fried and put on a salad that includes radish leaves (the radishes are growing in my garden).  I love having things like this, and vegetable ferments, living with me in my kitchen for days or weeks as I anticipate eating them.

I also ordered a beef tongue from the farm, which I pressure cook (15 minutes, or boil a couple of hours, then peel) and make into tacos.  That's a delicacy for us, and a very meat-heavy meal, but a pretty cheap one at $3/lb.  We also cook pork jowls this way.  Pork tongue and beef cheek meat are delicious too but my local farmers don't offer those.

I am always adding to my collection of recipes using stew meat, and we really enjoy these simple, hearty dishes, especially in cold weather.  Our favorites so far are hungarian goulash and meat and potato curry.  I tend to prefer a stew to a roast, personally, so I will buy a cheap roast and cut it up.  Last winter though we were given so much venison we didn't need to buy any meat.  I soak venison in a salt brine for 24-48 hours, that takes all the gamey taste out of it.  We bought a hand-cranked meat grinder and made chorizo with some of our venison and some pork fat.  We left some meat on the bones and made soup with them.

I love bony parts, and not just for stock-making.  I pull the soft bone marrow out of my stockpot and eat it spread on a toasted whole-grain bread crust.  I used to eat chicken feet (which means sucking the skin and gelatinous bits off the bones, like a poor man's buffalo wing), but since my son was born I find they remind me too much of baby hands, so now they go in the stock pot.  In Mexico you can buy roasted chicken necks at the chicken rotisseries, which are quite cheap and delicious, if, like me, you like roasted chicken skin (admit it, you do!)  I've never been able to find them here with the skin attached, sadly, and my husband tends to give me mangled and bloody necks when he butchers chickens.  Pork and lamb neck pieces are good in saucy Mexican dishes, with beans on the side and lots of corn tortillas to soak up the extra sauce.  I'm anxious to try a recipe in an Asian cookbook my mom sent me, a braise of pig's feet and pineapple.  I love pork belly poached with Asian spices, served with rice and steamed greens.  We make beef soup with short ribs, which are probably my favorite cut of beef; oxtail makes a fine soup too, as does sliced shank (a.k.a. "meaty soup bones").  Mexican and Central American soups are a hands-on affair, with bones, pieces of corn on the cob, and chunky vegetables.  A tongue in the soup is a special touch. 

On really special occasions, I make a Mexican octopus cocktail.  Fish, other than tilapia (which we fry whole, unbreaded) and most seafood is intimidating to me though. 

Brains are something I used to be squeamish about, but I'm slowly getting over it.  I don't often find them for sale, though.  I've tried to get my husband to save the heads from the chickens he butchers to put them in my stock, but he won't do it, nor will he save the intestines for me to try Diana Kennedy's recipe.  I did finally persuade him to put the feathers in the compost though.  In case you're wondering, there are some things I won't eat.  My husband gets the eyeballs from my fish and any other eyeballs go uneaten around here, and I always politely turned down the free samples of spicy grasshoppers in the Mexico city market, which made the vendor laugh.  Crawfish are something I don't understand, I can't find anything in them to eat.  I've had very good and very bad alligator, and although the though of eating an animal that would eat me if it had a chance is satisfying to me, I don't think I'll bother with it again.  Frog's legs are gross, and I won't eat lizards (e.g. iguana, which they cook alive in Honduras, where it is endangered).  A year or two ago I saw a news report on one of the Spanish channels about old racehorses being shipped to Mexico from the USA to be butchered, and the meat sometimes being sold at taco stands to unwitting customers.  That made me cry with horror and disgust, and I will be very cautious when I return to Mexico to be sure I never eat any horsemeat (again?).  Horses are sacred to me; I'd rather eat dog or cat than horse.

As the folks over at Well Preserved have pointed out, the nose-to-tail philosophy can be applied to vegetables too.  I'm determined to cook some sweet potato leaves this year, probably in an African dish.  African, and Asian cuisines are going to get a lot more love from me in the near future.

Recipes, and recipe requests are welcome!

Personal Safety

This is tangential to a topic over on greenwizards.org.  I didn't post this there because I didn't want to seem like I was picking on anybody.

I see a lot of extreme viewpoints about safety in the doomer/declinist community, from people who think it's not a concern at all if you aren't rich, to people who think collecting guns and ammo and moving to a hunting lodge is the only answer, and there isn't a lot of discussion that I consider realistic.  There is a whole lot of space between our current situation and roving zombie hoards, which a lot of people don't recognize.  It's in that space that most of the world actually lives, both today, and historically; but rather than learning from the people who live/lived this reality, Americans who think about these things tend to go in for paranoia, idealism, and other kinds of navel-gazing about human nature.  This is just one manifestation of our superiority complex; we tend to think we're so different from the rest of humanity that we have nothing to learn from their experiences.

Let me declare my prejudices up front: I have shot .22 rifles, handguns, and M-16's, but I don't like guns.  I'm not really anti-gun, but I don't have the time, money, or interest to collect guns, learn to shoot them well, clean, and maintain them.  I do feel safer when I have a gun within reach, but I also think there will always be someone better-armed than me no matter how well-armed I might be (and at some point, the police/military has to be counted).  I think this country is going to be more dangerous than some others in the mid-term future because there are so many firearms here and I wish that weren't the case.  Now, drugs: I am in favor of legalizing everything except PCP and other drugs that cause people to hurt other people, or are frequently used to hurt other people (like date-rape drugs).  The war on drugs was never winnable, and at this point we have given so much power to the drug cartels that they would not disappear even if drugs were legalized tomorrow, but at least they would suffer a setback.  The damage the drug war has done and continues to do in Latin America is unpardonable.  That said, I don't agree that violent crime would decrease at this point if illegal drugs were taken off the table, I think we're too far into economic collapse for violent crime to decrease more than a blip here or there.  I work in the criminal courts and I have observed, in the police reports I regularly read, that in the past year or so, robberies in my city are more likely to end in violence.  I expect this trend to continue; crime not only increases overall in times of stress, it gets meaner.  And we ain't seen nothin' yet.  I fear that the perceived value of human life in this country has a long way to fall before it hits bottom.

I have recently been called naive by someone in my own family for saying that if the lights went out for good right now, I would go outside and talk to my neighbors and try to work with them, rather than sitting on the front porch with a shotgun in my hand.  I honestly don't know which is more naive - this is an unprecedented scenario in the history of humanity.  But the more likely scenarios are not so unusual.

This is what I've learned from living in, visiting, and hearing stories from Latin America:

When the crime rate is high, you don't leave your house unattended overnight, or habitually during the day.  This is one reason it's practical to live in extended families.  If everyone in the household has to go somewhere, you ask a neighbor to come house-sit for you.  It's not that you have to defend the household in the way we might think - a child or an old woman can watch your house to deter petty theft, because the potential perpetrators are local opportunists and they don't want to be identified.  Violent home invaders are a different sort and they won't wait until you leave; fortunately they are less common.

You rely on family ties, you maintain civil relations with family regardless of differences, and family recognition extends out to anyone who can identify a common ancestor.  Neighbors are family too if you live in a small town - either because of tight community intermarriage, or you just decide to call your neighbors "uncle" and "aunt".  The downside of such an interdependent community is that when they are against you, you have no options: my father-in-law had some of his land stolen and his fence torn down to make a soccer field and he had to just put up with it.  A calm personality is important to avoid violence in these situations; it is the price to be paid for living in a stable community.

You don't wear visible jewelry or cell phones when you travel outside of your safety zone, however you define that.  But don't assume that just because you have nothing of value, you won't be targeted.  Try not to go into town looking, acting, and/or talking like a country bumpkin - people who are obviously from the country are targeted when they come to the city because they usually come for a reason that involves bringing the savings they had stashed under the mattress - be it for a doctor, travel expenses, or to make a special purchase.  In the old days, pirates and highwaymen preyed on travellers, and those days may come again; but nowadays you're more likely to get shaken down at police or military checkpoints.  Women must be more cautious about travelling alone and in small groups (including with a man).  Never assume a uniform makes someone safe; and never assume that if you cooperate with someone you won't be hurt.  One Honduran guy we know was kidnapped for ransom at the Mexican border, a common tale these days.  He pretended to be deathly ill, and they shoved him out of a car at a Wal-Mart, a risky move that probably saved his life, since no one in his family could have afforded the ransom.  Listen to your intuition, always!  The one time I was mugged I saw it coming and didn't listen to my intuition.  (If you haven't read any of Gavin De Becker's work, I recommend it.)

Pardon Our Progress

I've always felt like an outsider in my own country, but increasingly, it is the natural world that feels strange to me.  We have lots of these little black birds here now that make an ugly sound.  I'm always tempted to kill their babies in the springtime, but I never have the heart to do it.  Then there's the home-invading stinkbugs, and the tiger mosquitoes.  None of these things were here when I was a child.  I'm not against exotic species - everything came from somewhere else at some point - but the rate of change in my environment is disturbing to me.

I refrained from posting about my disdain for Independence Day, but I suspect that a good part of my feelings about the holiday are because I hate summer.  I don't mind hot, dry weather that much (we had a drought last year and I kind of liked it), but the soul-crushing humidity of typical Virginia summers puts me in a really bad mood.  I'm running the air conditioner (set to 80 degrees) and I'm still irritable.

The bathroom is torn out and awaiting tile work - the shower has to be custom-built because the pre-made fiberglass ones don't fit.  My son's reaction to the pile of debris in the yard (to paraphrase), "Oh no, bathroom!  Broken!" reminded me of the feelings I'm too grown-up to express.  Remodeling is an act of violence.  I feel so ashamed of the gratuitous waste that seems to be an inevitable part of home improvement.  My brother intentionally placed the disposable dumpster far from the street, his stated reasons being to keep anyone from salvaging anything from it (Why?) and, more reasonably, to keep anyone from putting anything in it, since the company that collects them prohibits using them for food waste.  I remember 15 years ago when my first husband and I were living in a rental house and the kitchen stove, an older but good-quality electric stove, had two burners that didn't work.  The landlord sent over some goons who literally pushed our stove off the back steps, and replaced it with a new, cheap stove.  Remembering that stove tumbling into the yard, getting dented so that it wouldn't be useful to anyone, almost makes me cry even now. 

A lot of things almost, or actually, make me cry lately.  Loneliness.  Fear for my child's future.  Frustration at the ever-widening gap between my goals and my accomplishments.  Thinking about the suffering that is in store for humanity as this age of relative peace and ridiculous prosperity (at least for some) comes to an end.

No good mother would ever say she regretted having a child, but I will say there's a lot I didn't know when I made the decision to get pregnant, besides the big things I didn't fully comprehend (peak oil, economic collapse, climate change, cultural decline, globalization, and all that).  I didn't know how difficult it would be to accomplish any task at home, finish a conversation with a friend, run simple errands, or travel, for several years (so far), or how urgently I would need to do some of those things during these years.  I've never been all that attached to my life, but now I have a child and I've realized there's no one on either side of his family I would want to raise him, so I'm terrified of dying and leaving him unprotected.  My panic is rising.  I feel conflicting needs: the need to keep my son close to family (though I don't trust them to raise him, it's even worse to think of dying while he and I are alone in a foreign country), and the need to not waste whatever is left of my life trapped in an unhappy situation.  

I seem to be stuck; but a recent conversation with a friend may offer some badly needed peace of mind.  More on that to come.

In the interest of some actual content, I'll leave you with the favorite summer recipe of the Zelaya-Carter household:

Cook a pound of pasta for 4 servings, and drain, reserving a ladleful of the cooking water.  We use plain ol' white spaghetti.  Finely chop about 2 pounds of fresh, ripe, unpeeled tomatoes.  We use Romas; if you use slicing tomatoes, put them in a colander briefly to drain some of their juice. Snip or slice the leaves from several sprigs of basil.  Coarsely crumble about 8 ounces of goat's milk feta cheese.  Put tomatoes, basil, cheese, and a little olive oil in a large serving bowl; add cooked pasta, a couple tablespoons of the cooking water, and salt to taste.  Toss together and serve.

Remodeling

I had an exciting and unlikely prophetic dream last night that, at some point in the future, there will be wild elephants in Mexico. 

My mother finally visited our hot and little-used second floor to see the extensive drywall repair work my husband had recently finished, necessitated by the much-regretted (on my part) joint decision 6 years ago to install a heat pump when we bought the house, and the unbelievably bad drywall work the installers did over the ducts (this is a Cape Cod house, so there was no space to do ductwork between the roof and ceilings.)  She peeked in the bathroom and made a decision to remodel it, something I've been campaigning for since we moved in.  The upstairs bathroom, victim of a very low-budget do-it-yourself remodel I'm guessing 30 or so years ago, features plastic wall tiles (where they haven't fallen off), a partition wall between the shower and toilet that is rotting at the base, and a space between the shabby homemade vanity and said partition so small you have to turn sideways to get to the toilet; I tell you this just so you don't think I'm frivolous in wanting to remodel it.  The whole room is about 5 by 5 feet and can't be expanded, far too small to contain a shower, but removing it and making the house a 1.5 bath would sacrifice "value", so we have to find a way to squeeze a shower in there better than it was done before.  My brother has been hired as the contractor, which is good because I know he won't treat me like a nutjob when I push for the lowest-environmental-impact options.  Remodeling this bathroom will make it easier to sell the house, and make it much closer to rental-ready if we have to rent it instead; it will also make it easier for me to share the house in the meantime. 

My job was supposed to end over a week ago, but when I emailed the HR person on the second-to-last day to inquire about my final paycheck, she told me she had emailed my boss on June 6 to tell her that I could stay through July 22, but my boss apparently was so busy with some personal problem(s) that she hadn't gotten around to reading the email 3 weeks later, which is not surprising to anyone who knows my boss.  So, I am employed for a little while longer, and Carmaggedon (what I'm calling my anticipated liberation from daily access to an automobile and the resulting life changes when my husband takes the car) has been postponed accordingly.  I think I've gotten my bike trailer operational - it needed a new tire.  The bike shop would not sell me a new seat for my bike, instead the guy adjusted the seat I had and told me to ride it until I could describe specifically what was uncomfortable about it.  I appreciated that.  I've still got to learn to do roadside repairs (tubes at least) and think through what I'll do if something happens while I'm out with my son, because I feel like the bike and trailer are much less reliable than a car.  Maybe I'm wrong in thinking that?  Maybe it's just that the familiarity of a car offers psychological security, while the bicycle makes me feel vulnerable.  I've never changed a car tire but that doesn't stop me from going anywhere in the car.

I dropped my mom at the airport this morning.  It may take me months to recover from this visit.  A few good things came out of it, but the status of my plans at this point, the way I see it, is that I'm on my own.  I'm going to need a lot of determination to change my life into what I want it to be.

Family drama, and shifting gears

Sometimes, when you can't fix your own messed-up life, it's gratifying to try to fix someone else's.  I've adopted a family, a Dominican woman and her two young kids, who are living in a domestic violence shelter, although I'm not sure how much violence they've really experienced.  There were other forms of abuse for sure, and I sympathize with her, but I'm starting to think she is overly optimistic about what her life is going to be like now, because all she's seen of the USA is the suburban middle-class lifestyle she's lived since her American husband brought her here.  It's hard for an uneducated single mother to make a decent life in this country, maybe not as hard as I think it is, but definitely harder than she thinks it is.  She's going to have to adjust her expectations a lot.  And if she's going to move in with me - which is my plan, if I can convince my mother to let me have a housemate - she's going to have to get used to conserving energy and water and reducing waste, recycling and composting; and I hope helping with the garden and feeding her kids healthier foods than chocolate milk and potato chips.  I've been wanting a roommate anyway, and I want it to be a single mother with kids for my son to play with.  I've been anxious about my situation in the near future, being alone in the house most of the time, without a car, and no one really even checks on us on a regular basis.  Then there's the fact that my son likes to go play next door because he doesn't have anyone else to play with, and the 11-year-old kid he plays with is strange and sometimes mean, and I'd like to find a way to reduce the temptation for him to go over there.  And I hope that having another adult around to keep an eye on my son might allow me to do some work at home, or ride my bike to the store sometimes.  And lastly, it just feels wasteful to live alone in so big a house when other people have no place to live.

Speaking of transportation, the countdown to my personal carmaggedon is less than 2 weeks.  I found a cheap child-carrier bike trailer at a consignment store, but I've got to get to a bike shop to try to get new tubes for the tires, along with a more comfortable seat and a kickstand for my hand-me-down mountain bike.  I also need my brother to give me a roadside bike repair crash course.  I've been lamenting that there are no mobile bike mechanics, no AAA for bicycles, something a mechanically clueless rider pulling a small child in a trailer would really appreciate. 

Being with my mother is an exercise in patience.  It annoys me how she wastes money, even when I'm the beneficiary; how she buys so many toys for my son, and eats out at restaurants constantly.  I think she's going to be really obnoxious in a poor country.  She is an occupational therapist who works with young kids, and she doesn't seem to be able to shift gears and just enjoy her grandson without trying to fix him.  I haven't asked for help with his behavior, potty training, or anything else, but I am trying to tolerate her help, even though our parenting styles and values are different. 

As far as our plans, the news is good, but not as good as I'd hoped.  We've pretty much agreed to look at 3 possible destinations in Mexico, of my choosing: Morelia, Michoacan; Oaxaca; and Cordoba, Veracruz.  Mexico makes sense, it has always made sense, and it is the default after everyplace else has been disqualified.  I have a lot of feelings about Mexico: I love it intensely, and it hurts me to think about it.  I won't be able to avoid Mexico City, where I have so dramatic a personal history, and I won't be able to avoid looking for my ex in the places he used to perform as a troubador, even though I'm pretty sure he's dead now, and I'll never be able to know for sure.  It's been so long since I was there and my life has changed so much, and Mexico has changed too, and it's hard to really know what to expect, other than a lot of emotions.  It is the known quality that makes it both attractive and also scary, because when you (think you) know something, you're really in danger of being disappointed.  But the worst part is that my mother wants to wait until 6 months after her retirement, in 3-5 years, before committing to where she's going to live and buying property.  Which makes sense for her, but I can't live in limbo for 5 years.  I want a place to garden.  I want a horse to ride. I don't know how I'm going to get those things.  I'm feeling like I have simplified the problem, but I haven't found the solution yet. 

I've just about given up the idea of going to Honduras in December, now that we've decided on Mexico.  Mom wants to wait a little longer to make our exploratory trip, and anyway, Honduras is far enough from Mexico that it is practically a separate trip.  She also wants me to stay in the house as long as I can, while she tries to sell it, so that she doesn't have to carry the full mortgage herself.  I hate to go back on my promise to my in-laws, but I'm really considering doing so.  It's been a while since I've talked to my brother-in-law Roman and I think both of us are getting over the presumably mutual crush and thinking more rationally, realizing we dodged a bullet, and wanting to keep a safe distance in order to avoid another round of that.  At least, that's how I'm feeling; I have to guess about him because there's never been much real communication between us, and at this point I'm pretty sure there never will be. 

I kind of knew this would happen with me if my mom agreed to Mexico: it opens a door I've kept tightly closed, and changes the way I feel about a lot of things.  I'll have to adjust some of my ideas, even the way I speak Spanish; I kind of feel like I need to reformat myself and reboot from an old backup disc.

Running on Hope and Coffee

I may have solved my storage delima.  My husband's cousin lives in a rented house in a very remote area and has a large storage shed they don't use, which they have offered to me for free.  The only problem is, if they move or get evicted, my stuff may get left behind.  I will probably take my chances.  I may ask for the owner's number so that if I need to, I can negociate with him to pay for the space. 

Today is my son's last day with his babysitter, a wonderful woman we call "Granny".  Next week my mom will keep him, and then I'll be unemployed.  My son has a hard time with change and I feel bad that I'm putting him through so much of it this year - some of it inevitable, but much of it by my choice. 

I'm happy to report my second compost pile measured 130 degrees, right on the line between "medium" and "hot" according to my compost thermometer. 

I'm actually pretty proud of myself right now .  I've managed to hold it together lately in the face of everything that's going on.  My husband hasn't even called this week, and I haven't felt up to reaching out to friends.  My friends are all new friends (because I'm not good about staying in touch with old friends), and I love, need, and enjoy them, but the social effort drains my energy.  So, I've been pretty lonely.  I was thinking as I washed my dishes last night - my dishwasher is leaking so I have a lot of dishes to hand-wash now - I might think I can't do it all by myself, but while I'm thinking that, I'm doing it.  I'm also suffering from insomnia lately, I just can't seem to turn off my brain at night, but even with less sleep than I'd like, I'm getting by.  I even finished putting the varnish on a cabinet my dad had made for my kitchen like two years ago, which I was determined to do before my mom's visit; and rewarded myself by playing with some leather stamping and dying. 

I hope the next time I post here, it will be to report some good news about our plans for the future. 

One Step Forward, One Step Back

Well, my plan to go with the flow ran into a glitch.  I got the books my mom sent me on living in Panama, and immediately skimmed them both, even though one was awful, self-published, unedited, and full of irrelevant stories, like a cheesy webpage in print.  I determined that it is going to be very difficult for me to get legal residency there.  It seems that if you're not on a pension, or rich, you have to either get a job, which is hard to do unless you're an experienced professional prostitute (a legal and in-demand job there, apparently); or marry a citizen.  I could go the latter route (after getting a divorce of course), but Panama only lets tourist stay for 90 days, and that's a pretty short time to find a husband, even one of convenience. 

Sometimes it's tempting to just give up on moving, and let the lullabye of everyday life put my adventurous dreams back to sleep, but then I remember that we owe over $100,000 on our house, and all the other reasons to believe we won't be just allowed to quietly tend our homestead here in years to come.  My Dad is pressuring me to look for another job, saying I can't count on unemployment even if I qualify for it.  He doesn't know much about my plans and my mom has asked me to tell him, because apparently he wants to meet with her while she's in the country to talk about his conerns about my brother, who is depressed, and mom doesn't want to have to keep my secrets.  So the next time I see my dad I have to have a serious talk with him, which I look forward to about as much as a root canal.

The bookbinding class I took opened some kind of creative floodgate for me and I've been daydreaming and sketching designs for books and shoes.  I ordered a reprint of a shoemaking book from the author.  I really don't have time to work on crafts right now, but I feel a need to do so. 

In my garden, the potatoes seem to have shed their bugs, and my reliable Roma tomatoes are about to ripen their first fruits.  I don't know what I'll do with them, because I'm not crazy about raw tomatoes like so many poeple seem to be, and preserving food right now seems foolish, as I'm trying to clean out my freezer and pantry ahead of my move.  I suppose I'll take a bunch to the food bank and see if its true that they accept fresh vegetables.  My grape vine is finally growing this year after taking two years to get settled (thanks in part to my husband weed-whacking it twice).  I've had bad luck with berries, but I have two blackberries setting fruit.  I wonder what the fate of this garden will be in the months to come, as it is subject to the chaos of our lives.

Stressed Out

Of the 5 adults in my immediate family: my parents, my brother, my husband and me; all of us have been affected by the economic downturn, 4 of the 5 having lost a job or suffered a large reduction in earnings and mom having suffered losses in her retirement funds.  I think all of us are suffering some feelings of isolation and depression.  My mother told me yesterday that she's had to see a counselor because she is so upset about my situation and our plans.  I give her stress, and she returns the favor: now she tells me she doesn't care enough about her stuff that's in our house to pay for shared storage when we move.  So all the stuff I'm going to want to send for when I settle down somewhere, including hundreds of books, my pots and pans and dishes, craft supplies and tools, household linens, clothes, and a couple of pieces of family heirloom furniture, I now have to figure out how to store.  My brother and my dad both rent rooms in someone else's house, and my husband plans to do the same, so there's no one to keep stuff for me, and I'll have no choice but to spend a large chunk of my very limited income on a rented storage space for a while.  I don't understand why my mother, who often throws money at us, is balking at paying for the storage, and making me feel like a moocher for even mentioning it.  Obviously we need to talk about the ground rules of this relationship, because they are not clear to me. 

My husband showed up for the weekend, and I dearly needed his help.  But still, I wish he weren't here.  My husband has an unfortunate character flaw: when I am distraught, rather than offering support or even indifference, he turns savagely cruel.  It's a trait that makes it hard not to hate him.  Considering I'm facing a job loss and the disintegration of my marriage, preparing for an international move and for economic and cultural decline, all while raising a difficult child mostly on my own, I think it's pretty understandable that I feel like crying or screaming much of the time.  I can't have someone around who makes me feel much worse.  He managed to make me feel bad again about taking his son away, before he started telling me that I shouldn't worry about our son's future because (in the event that I can't support him, I guess) he has a father who is, he proudly boasts, willing and able to pay someone to take care of him 24 hours a day, and who will send him to public school where he will learn to be social, instead of homeschooling him like his crazy mother wants to.  And that my desire to see my son happy, well-educated and well-adjusted makes me "the most stubborn, pig-headed person in the world".  Thank you dear for unburdening me of guilt.

Not all is gloomy and I am trying to think positively.  I found a garden task suitable for a 2-and-a-half-year-old to participate in: picking potato bugs and dropping them in soapy water.  I took a leatherworking class and made a Coptic-stitched hand-bound leather book, which was fun and stress-relieving.  I long to do more leatherworking but it's hard to do anything at home.  My mom is sending me two books about living in Panama, and I am looking forward to reading them.  We desperately need to settle on a destination we can both get excited about, and I am trying not to be so attached to my picture of what that needs to be.  I made a prioritized list of requirements and asked my mom to do the same.  She will be here in less than a week!

What the Hell am I Doing?

I've been doing the kind of crying that makes you feel like your guts have been turned inside out.  Partly it's hormones - isn't everything hormones?  Partly it's because Netflix picked entirely the wrong time to send me The Bridges of Madison County. And partly it's frustration from trying to live in two worlds, and not knowing what the hell I'm doing in either of them. 

My husband is working out of town for unpredictable numbers of days now, then showing up suddenly in the middle of the night without telling me he's coming.  His presence should be a relief, but increasingly it seems he comes home only to criticize me, fight, and yell at our son.  When he's not here I'm alone with an intense, demanding two-and-a-half-year-old, and barely able to keep up with the most urgent household tasks.  Yesterday evening I locked my son in the house while I worked outside, because I could not get anything done between retrieving him every two minutes from the neighbors' yard and from our front yard, where I can't see him from the garden.  If we could afford to fence the yard, my life would be a lot easier.  For about 45 minutes while I turned a compost pile and watered some seeds I had planted, my son stood at the window crying (and then he made me pay for it the rest of the night).  As I worked, I felt like I was doing the wrong thing.  I thought, what is the point of trying to learn to homestead if it means I have to neglect my child's needs?  I'm living in this crazy modern world of isolation and independence (and speeding cars and potential kidnappers), urgently trying to learn how to live in the other world that's coming, but without the support system that world generally offers. My mother doesn't want me move anyone else into her house who isn't family, even though we have 4 bedrooms.  My job is about to end, and even the hour a day I have to run errands between work and picking my son up from the babysitter's is about to disappear.  I won't be able to afford to pay a babysitter in order to pick beans or organize my belongings, much less to take some "me time" like the parenting books suggest.  Instead of getting more done at home when I'm unemployed, it's quite possible I'll actually accomplish less; and instead of being a better parent, I'll probably be a worse one.  Realistically, the odds of getting everything done I need to do in order to leave the country this year are pretty darn close to zero, and what I do get done will be because I've parked my child in front of the T.V.

All this has put me in a rare mood, and when my husband corralled me into the bedroom today for my semi-weekly duty, I told him, "I don't want you to come here anymore.  I want a separation."  I don't know yet what the consequences of this will be, in concrete terms.  The first words out of his mouth were about how he's going to have to start paying hookers.  It used to bother me when he said that, thinking that some poor exploited woman is going to have to take my place because she has no choice, but I'm no longer willing to take this particular bullet for all womankind. 

The other part of all this is the doubts I'm having about my plan.  Going to my in-laws' makes sense because I'd have child care, a free place to stay, and people to show me the ropes as I learn third-world subsistence living at my own pace. On the other hand, I don't want to get too settled in there, or ship a bunch of my stuff there.  I don't know exactly how I'm going to find another place to live with a built-in support system.  None of this information is new, it's just hitting home with more impact as the clock ticks down.

My Mom's Visit

In about 2 weeks my mom arrives for a visit.  She lives in Okinawa, where she is a civilian employed by the military, so we don’t see her very often.  This is a visit I’m not particularly looking forward to because we are overdue for a serious talk.  Mom and I have been planning to live together when she retires, a suggestion I made and was very surprised she accepted.  She likes the idea of living somewhere where her retirement money will go farther, and where the climate is warm.  She has been reading books about retiring overseas and studying Spanish with Rosetta Stone.  She has lived overseas for years, although always in the protective shadow of U.S. military bases, and with luxurious housing and plenty of money.  She has also lived alone for years and we already know we’re going to have some very basic getting-along issues with living together, without all the extra issues I’m going to pile on. 

We can’t agree on a destination.  Based on what she’s read, she likes Panama; I’ve never been there, and I’m trying to keep an open mind, but I have my doubts about the culture, climate, and the prospects for a country so dependent on fossil fuels and on the USA (at least, this is my impression of it).  I love Mexico.  Mom thinks, as most Americans these days do, that Mexico is too dangerous.  I tell her that’s like saying Vermont is too dangerous because of crime you’ve read about in Detroit, but she points out we’ll want to cross the northern border occasionally.  I love the culture of Mexico.  Mind you, I’m no fan of human sacrifice, but what survives in present-day Central Mexico of the Aztec and other cultures is rich, unique, and valuable.  (Unlike the surviving remnants of Mayan culture farther south, which doesn’t seem to do its beneficiaries a great deal of good.)  From what I’ve seen, I don’t find the Afro-Caribbean cultures, which is what I think Panama most closely resembles, appealing or very practical.  I also prefer a slightly cooler, higher altitude climate; mom likes the beach.  Clearly, some traveling together is called for to settle on a destination, at least one trip to each country.  But her vacation time will limit that and there might be a year between trips, which might be enough delay to render the second trip unfeasible, effectively forcing us to choose kind of blindly.

Then there are the issues like transportation and housing: mom is going to want a car and a car-friendly place, while I want a horse and a horse-friendly place; mom is going to want to live close to shopping and other American retirees; I like urban settings but also long for land and livestock.  Mom is going to want to rent an apartment, I’m going to want to buy a homestead.  She’s going to feel like she gets the deciding vote, and she does, because she’s the one with the money.  But when the money is gone or worthless, and mom is old and sickly (never having been of very robust health), she’s going to need us – how do I keep from using that probability to get a little leverage for myself?  Finally, our values are just so different.  I was horrified that after the disaster in Japan, her only concern was when her electricity would come back on.  She has taken trips to volunteer in China before but I haven’t heard a word about making any sacrifices to help the Japanese or even to determine what help they might need.  She doesn’t prepare for disasters herself, but blindly trusts governments and social institutions to keep her safe.  She is generous with her family and friends, but feels no personal, individual responsibility to the greater world. 

So, some not-fun talking is in order.  Communication is difficult for us.  Mom is very sensitive, and one cross word from me inevitably leads to a lot of drama, which leads to eye-rolling from me because I don’t really want to have a long tearful talk about why I said something snappy, I just want to apologize and get on with it.  I could go on – the point is, we get on each others’ nerves, and we have conflicting styles of dealing with that annoyance.   

But I think that somehow we have to learn to live together.  Otherwise I might be stuck with my husband, whose ignorant and increasingly harmful parenting practices are not what I want my son to grow up with.  If I could design the culture I want to live in, it would look something like one I read about somewhere – African, I think? – where women sleep with whoever they want, and raise their children with the help of their brothers and the rest of the maternal family.  (Of course this happens locally too, but I mean for it to be accepted as right, as normal, rather than dysfunctional.)

And as for Mom, neither I nor she knows what she’ll do if she doesn’t live with us.  She hadn’t given the first thought to retirement when I first asked her about it, and she was 51 at the time. 

To me, the fact that this is even a dilemma, that such choices are possible and have to be made, that such distance exists between generations and within pretty typical families, is just another sign that American culture has drifted so far from the normal human condition.

Oh, and on top of all this, we have a lot of work to do.  We have to make decisions about all the excessive stuff we have - what to store for shipment and what to get rid of.  What to do with the house.  Not looking forward to it.

When will staying cool become uncool?

John Michael Greer (The Archdruid Report) thinks using less is about to become faddish.  I tend to agree.  There’s a toilet paper commercial on right now where the cartoon bears ask “How are you going to use less?” I think it’s relevant because advertisers are pretty tuned into what people want, and “use less”, as a phrase by itself (as opposed to “use less” of something specific), is something I hadn’t heard in advertising before.  My other reason for agreeing is simply that I’ve joined the use-less movement myself, not purely out of economic necessity, and, as long as electronic devices aren’t involved,  I tend to be an early adopter of cultural shifts. 

I wish it would hurry up though.  In particular I’m getting sick of people whining about the heat and their broken air conditioners.  I’m ready for it to be socially acceptable to give someone a hard time about using air conditioning, and for people to feel some shame at least about doing so.  We have been a bit warm in the house, but I’m resisting turning on the air conditioning now that we have screens on enough windows to get some breeze.  I’ll probably turn it on today because I have a pregnant friend coming over to help me build a solar cooker and it’s supposed to be in the 90’s.  I’m certainly no enviro-saint myself;  I am making an effort now but I didn’t always take responsibility for my resource use.  I just think of the kids who are growing up today in air-conditioned houses, who as adults will be so ill-adapted to an even warmer climate combined with energy shortages.  Kids (or at least mine, who always wants to be outside), seem to be so much more adaptable to temperature variances than adults are.  I think we do them a big disservice by getting them used to such a narrow temperature range.

I’ve washed my hair 3 times now ( every other day) with a locally-made shampoo bar and rinsed with homemade vinegar.  I expected a break-in period, based on what I’d read, I expected my hair to feel straw-like for a few weeks.  So far, I am pleasantly surprised to say the only difference I’ve observed is a small improvement in manageability.  So…tell me again why I’ve been putting all those chemicals on my head for 37 years?