I met this chat buddy recently. He has an ambition to simplify his life. Sustainable living, they call it now. Once upon a time, I believe it was called farming (although I’m sure disciples of sustainable living would correct me where I’m wrong). It sounds like a romantic notion, but it's really quite practical. When I was a kid, I help ma can and freeze all kinds of vegetables and such – pickles, jam, tomato juice, we made sauerkraut, froze peas, carrots and corn and ate them all year long. All through the summer I’d dig potatoes for dinner and pick sweet corn right off the stalk and shuck them just a few hours before dinner. I had a professor in college, who lived in the middle of a small city and covered every inch of his small yard with plants - flowers, corn stalks, herbs, and many vegetables. It was a magnificient breath of fresh air admist blocks of well groomed or unkempt laws of traditional green or patches of green and brown with onion sprouts.
These days a lot of my food is probably produced is vats and sprayed to freeze dry, or comprised mostly of liquid acid, and sometimes I can taste the pesticides in my “fresh fruit.” “Always scrub them with Clorox,” my mom says. “WTF?” I say.
At any rate, there is a book one of my book clubs selected a few months back called “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life” by Barbara Kingsolver. Kingsolver, an author of fiction, poetry and creative non-fiction put herself and her family to the test. For one year, they ate only food they grew themselves or food they could buy from their neighbors. Kingsolver’s husband, Steven Hopp, an environmentalist, contributes to the Thoreau-like experiment, as does her daughter, Camille Kingsolver, a student of biology, anatomy and dance.
I skipped this book club meeting because I opted for another book instead. But my curiosity has been revived. I admit I’ve thought about being this free from working for someone else, to being in charge of my own life, with sunlight the only boss dictating the hours I work. Not to this extreme, but I was tired of working long hours, tired of not having time for my own pursuits, and tired of getting caught up in matters not of the heart, the distractions that pull us away from the core of what get lots deep inside of us all from time to time. (And sometimes takes a popular Christmas film to jumpstart it again. Yes, "It's a Wonderful Life").
Read more about the book here.
