Ordinariest

Graffiti behind Goodyear Tire in Urbana, IL – photo by me

 

Hi, readers.

I am so very sick right now, felled by a massive cold that got underway not two hours after I’d bragged to someone, knowing it was a bad idea, that I hadn’t had a bad cold or flu in almost 3 years. Things are looking up, slowly, but this cold is the kind that you look at your co-worker sideways for bringing into the office – drippy, hacky, sneezy, involved. People are avoiding me, but it’s cool. I suppose it’s a good thing that it might mitigate by tomorrow, right? So I don’t get the stinkeye from the people I work with? Sigh.

I am very happy at this moment, however, because both of my children are home at the same time – Jim is too – and the four of us are in the same room eating food with the football game on and wisecracking and reading and are basking, quietly, in each others’ presence. With Cody living in Chicago, this doesn’t happen very often. He and I were out procuring groceries and stopped to pick Lilly up at a friend’s… and I had to think hard to recall the last time I was in the driver’s seat with the two of them in the car with me. It’s been more than a year.

Not much else going on – not worth talking about at this juncture, anyway. I’ll be getting back to putting the archived In My Backyard stuff up here soon. I’m planning on putting in a seed order from these folks any day, though the idea of getting into the garden exhausts me right now (I think I have food and garden burnout, but that’s a topic for another day). I’ve been trying to write something, somewhere, every day. I have an unhealthy interest in The Selby.

The Bears fans don’t sound happy. Booing!

Here’s what I’ve been looking at these last few days:

I’m eyeing these boots.

And these.

Editorial about farming subsidies in the NYT.

Mnmlst.

Portland Alternative Dwellings, or PAD. Supercool.

Video documenting a wall-painting in Goteborg, Sweden. From several pals on Facebook.

A show on public broadcast I’d never heard of until very recently.

I’m interested in attending this conference.

I ADORE these color combinations. Need color STAT.

The family togetherness was short-lived – Cody’s off to the cafe until later. Jim has a meeting & is making chili for dinner. I should probably get together a cornbread. Lilly is on the couch, snacking. I gave her Good Omens to read – we’ll see if she picks it up.

 

 

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In My Backyard # 19: Inspiration, Please

Oh, January.

The holidays have come to an end and, as I speak, there’s a fresh several inches of powdery snow covering up the remnants of all of our backyard gardens. I know a lot of my friends and fellow gardeners are up to their necks in seed catalogs, which is cool, but for some reason I don’t have that many yet, and it usually takes me until the end of January to get into a seed-catalog-perusing mood. What to do instead?

Well… I’m daydreaming of spring and summer. I think all of us are in the neighborhood. None of my daydreams feature humidity, or mosquitoes, or thunderstorms – nope, just sunny days, moderate temperatures, and an absurdly flourishing garden. Absent any outdoor experiences – and I know some of my neighbors cross country ski, and do other winter-season stuff outside, but it’s just not my thing – a lot of us daydream, and a lot of us turn to prose for inspiration. Or, at the very least, for the alleviation of boredom.

About a week ago, looking for inspiration, I pulled out two classics by nutritionist and writer Joan Dye Gussow. Ms. Gussow has been writing and teaching about food, nutrition, and ecology for decades and has written several books. My favorites are 1991’s short and more academic Chicken Little, Tomato Sauce and Agriculture and 2001’s memoir, This Organic Life. Her second memoir, Growing, Older, just came out a few months ago, and I had that on my bedside table, too. A few things about Joan Gussow: she’s eighty-two years old, eats only fruits and vegetables she grows in her garden, and manages the whole thing herself, even when it floods, which it does every year due to its proximity to the Hudson River. The other thing about Ms. Gussow:  Writer Michael Pollan, whose 2005 book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, is widely regarded as the impetus behind the current interest in eating locally, has said “Once in awhile, I think I’ve had an original thought, and then I look and read around and realize Joan said it first”. Right on, Joan.

I was in the middle of plowing through this new book while at a conference. One topic of conversation at the conference was marketing the agricultural experience as something to be consumed. You know, selling the experience of being outdoors to people. Maybe a farm experience, or maybe a food experience. Maybe both! And while I totally get and respect the fact that a lot of people desire having these experiences without ever getting their hands dirty in their own backyards, and I get and respect that a lot of farmers have diversified their offerings to include tours of their operations, I had a hard time thinking of visiting a farm, or eating a locally-raised dinner outside, or just enjoying flora and fauna, as something people wouldn’t be interested in unless they were given the hard sell. Maybe I just had a hard time imagining those things as something to be consumed, rather than just things to enjoy. Anyway, this dovetailed nicely with something Ms. Gussow was saying in her book, which I continued reading in my hotel room that night: Staying put is OK. Creating a place where you want to be without a lot of travel or reliance on others to re-create an experience for you is definitely OK. And being outside, even if you’re alone, puts you among so many living things.

That’s the inspiration I was looking for. I needed a reminder of why I plant things before I started with ordering from the seed catalogs. I do what I do in my backyard for a lot of reasons – I love to eat fresh vegetables, I love to be out in the sun, I love the way the early summer dirt feels on my bare feet  - but mainly I do it for all of the reasons. I like the experience.  I like being in the middle of so much life, even when things are looking desolate and bare those first few times outside in March, even when the weeds are taking over the edibles, even if one of those living things is a snake.

I know – we don’t all have houses on large lots, like Ms. Gussow does. We don’t all have big backyards. Some of us don’t have backyards! But in this area, there’s no shortage of unmanufactured, casual agricultural experiences people can have just by going outside.  And if you somehow find yourself in my part of Urbana on a nice day this spring, stop by and say hi. Somebody’ll get you a drink… and hand you a shovel.

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[Audio for this segment is located here.]

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