The Chatelaine's Keys

Sharon June 17th, 2009

Way out on the ocean
The big ships hunt for whales
The Japanese have caught so many
That now they hunt for snails
My fisherman’s not greedy
He seems content to live
With the sun and the sand
And a net full of fish when the tide turns

Pull on the ropes, Seine haul fisherman
Never catches more than he knows
He can sell in a day;
Pull on the ropes, Seine haul fisherman
Day’s for work. Night’s the time to go dancing – Judy Collins (and Asher’s current favorite song, which is why it won’t leave my head )

I must admit, it is a really long time since Eric and I have actually gone out dancing.  Now I’ve never been one of those unusually graceful people, but I love to dance, and once upon a time, Eric and I used to go to the occasional club, and even ballroom dancing.  I’m hoping we’ll get back to it one of these days.

Not, however, that we don’t have our pleasures.  There is always so much work to do – on the farm, in front of our computers, with our kids, in our communities that it would be truly easy to allow the work to rise up and wash us away.  Indeed, a lot of the work is enormously enjoyable – we like the garden, we like milking and cooking and sometimes even cleaning. We like the community work, I love writing and Eric loves teaching, and of course, homeschooling and caring for the boys is a job.  And yet, in the aggregate, it adds up some days to feel like a lot of work.

A lot of days, after the boys are in bed, we crash on the couch, each of us reading our respective book.  Occasionally, we watch a movie and do a little light evening work – Eric brushes the dog while I knit mittens, or I pluck the angora bunnies while he oils a tool or replaces a string on one of his instruments.  Sometimes Eric, who is a gifted musician, plays for me, or we sit together and he plays and I sing.  Often we just put our feet up, intertwined and do nothing, quietly together.

It would be easy to spend every evening that way, and it is always tempting, when we are invited out somewhere, to say no.  Going out involves getting the kids in bed early, finding a sitter, getting ourselves cleaned up from the garden and decked out for public.  It involves most of all finding the energy to get up and go somewhere at the end of the day, even if it is just to a friend’s house to play games, out to dinner, or to some social event at a  local pub, much less dancing.  Some days, getting out of the house to play seems like a good bit of work.

And yet, when I go, when I force myself to simply stop, to say that even though I haven’t dug out of the pile of writing I was supposed to do, even though the garden isn’t fully mulched, even though there’s work waiting, even though we’re tired.  Part of it is that community stuff happens at the end of the day, when everyone is a little tired, but still pushes through to end the workday or week with laughter and a beer.   But mostly, it is that time for play is part of the reality of a life filled with work.  If you wait for the work to make the space for you to play, you’ll be waiting a long time.  The only choice is simply to say “ok, I need to go do something fun, much as I like the work, it can’t be everything.”  And so, we go.

One of my summer plans is that Eric and I actually do go dancing at least once.  I know I won’t go out with friends as often as I’d like, I know I won’t have them over as often as I’d like.  I know I won’t make it to every thing.  But I am trying to remember that play is part of what makes work fun.  The day is for work, and at least once in a while, the night’s the time to go dancing.

Sharon

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Sharon June 16th, 2009

Hi Folks – I’ve still got spots in my fall gardening class coming up in July.  The class will run four Tuesdays, from July 7-July 28, and cover most of the details of setting up a fall garden.  For those of you in really warm or cold climates, or in the southern hemisphere, the information will be relevant but you will have to do some adapting to make it your precise schedule, but for most of you in zones 4-7, not only will we be talking about it, but more or less at the same time we’ll be doing it.  So this is a great chance to get motivated and start a fall garden.

Here’s my syllabus:

Tuesday, July 7 – The basics of cool season gardening – what to plant, when to plant, light, temperature and other necessities, and how to eat in the winter.

Tuesday, July 14 -  Variety selection for cold weather cropping and overwintering, summer seed starting, dealing with heat in cold weather crops, and cool tricks for getting things to survive tough conditions.

Tuesday, July 21 – Season extension techniques from the ridiculously simple to the complex – mulches, row covers, greenhouses homemade and otherwise, and other ways of keeping things going, crops you probably haven’t thought about.

Tuesday, July 28 – Bringing it all indoors -what you can bring in, what you can’t, root cellaring and in-garden storage.  Also, season extension on the other end – how to get things started (or restarted) earlier in the winter.  Making the most of fall and winter crops, preserving the winter harvest.

The class is conducted online, and asynchronously – that is, I post my stuff and the assignments on Tuesday and you follow along on your own schedule.  Cost of the class is $100, and includes one phone consultation to help you plan your autumn garden.  Email me at jewishfarmer@gmail.com if you are interested in joining us.

 Sharon 

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Sharon June 16th, 2009

Read it yourself and find out: http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2009/06/definancialisation-deglobalisation.html, and if you haven’t already, go read his book.

 I should not admit this on the internet, but I got asked to blurb _Reinventing Collapse_ and after reading it, I sent to our shared editor my real blurb (which is on the book if you actually care) and the one that I didn’t want her to publish, which was “After reading this, I’d do Orlov.”  I still can’t figure out why they didn’t put that on the back cover.

Now I wouldn’t actually, since I’m married and he’s married and I’d never even met him at that point, and even after I did, it wasn’t that kind of meeting, and it was really more of a metaphor…well, you get the point.  But smart and funny are always attractive, and Dmitry Orlov is so smart and so funny that it is well…kind of hot to a certain kind of over-intellectual peak oil geek.  (As Sharon prays rapidly under her breath that he doesn’t actually ever read this, but she’s always said that the peak oil movement needs more salacious gossip if it is ever going to attract critical membership mass,  so I guess I’m embarassing myself for a good cause )

Anyway, all of this is just a long way of saying “Orlov wrote another really fabulous thing – go read it.”  I should probably just stop talking now .

 Sharon

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Sharon June 16th, 2009

Someday, someone is going to ask me what happened to the United States – wasn’t it once one of the biggest economies in the world?  I’ve already got my answer ready – we sold ourselves to other countries for flat-screened tvs and other plastic toys.   And weirdest of all, for a long time, we actually thought we got the better of the deal.

Of course, that’s an over-simplified answer, but I think there’s enough truth in it that I can get away with it as a short answer.  We can see it right now.  In April, 2009, foreign purchase of dollars and related assets fell to 11.2 billion dollars – 1/5th of what it was just a month ago.  And this happened just as we desperately need more and more purchases – to afford our wild deficit spending and compensate for lost tax revenue.  Our credit limits are now being revoked. 

So what now?  As far as I can tell, the US government has two plans.  Restore growth so fast and so hugely that we just don’t even notice our giant deficit.  Anyone want to make bets on how likely that is?  Right now, there’s the real possibility that all the growth we’ve seen so far is illusory – the Wall Street Journal posted a few days ago that the entire stock market rally seems to be based on the stimulus package. Hmmm…what will happen when that money is spent?  The same could be said of housing starts and purchases…hmmmm…. The second plan clearly involves magic fairies, all the leaders of China suddenly developing brain damage and wishing really, really hard. 

So where do we go from here?  Nowhere good – all of the assumptions made by the Obama administration have included that idea that China needs us just as badly as we need them.  We are being told, quite bluntly, that’s not true.  As those foreign investments dry up and the dollar is increasingly not the currency of choice, we are facing a new world, no plan, enormous debts and little hope of growth.

What got us out of the Great Depression was a war economy and massive borrowing.  The difference is that we’ve already spent more than we spent on WWII, on nothing – on keeping the ride going around one more time.  We’ve already borrowed nearly as much as a percentage of GDP as we did in WWII – the difference is that we’re borrowing not from allies that need us desperately, in a position of strength, as the only untrashed major economy in the world, with the largest energy reserves available at the time, but as a begging creditor that have nothing to offer but an appetite for plastic.

The mere idea that America could flourish by becoming the best shoppers on the planet and not much more is bizarre, and yet it has held a grip on us for decades.  Our job is to consume, while China and other states produce for us.  The reality is that an economy based on devouring what other people produce, mine, build and make is ummm…due for a refit.

My suggestion is that we refit it voluntarily, and rapidly.  It is time and well past time to begin making things in the United States again.  And by making things I do not mean “asphalt paving and cars” – the private car is doomed, and none of us are made much richer by acres of highway, which only increase our dependency on foreign oil and its toxic cognates. 

By making things, I mean things we actually need. I’m sure you can think of some – socks and shoes and tools and trains; beer and books and beans and bikes; hoes and hats, fiddles and fishing poles.  And on a small scale, keeping fossil fuels to a minimum, near where you live and I do.   Because the other choice is this – we become China’s supplier of things they want that we have – food, mostly, since we’re the biggest exporter in the world, and they can’t feed themselves.  And we do it on China’s terms, at China’s prices, with all that that implies.  There’s a kind of horrible justice there, since we’ve been doing that through globalization to countless poor nations – but there are better things than ironic justice.

Point me to one single piece of evidence that suggests the US will be fine if other nations stop buying our debt, please.  Point me to our plan – one that doesn’t involve rapid growth or actual fairies.  Otherwise, better get started making something useful.

 Sharon

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Sharon June 16th, 2009

Yes, I know it is late June, and the quiet season for most communities in terms of holidays.  And yet, I think it bears talking and thinking about – that we should be thinking now about preparing so that we can engage in basic celebrations of whatever feasts and festivals are important to us.  By this I don’t mean “time to do your Labor Day shopping” or anything along the lines of what most Americans mean when they talk about preparing for “the holidays” – I mean making sure that in the worst kinds of personal or collective exigency, we’d have the basics to make something special.

Think about how archetypical the ability to celebrate in difficult times is – in mainstream American literature, for example, Christmas is the archetypical celebration, but it crosses cultures – there are plenty of stories in every culture about the holiday that almost wasn’t.  Think about the literature of an American childhood – Tiny Tim, Laura Ingalls and the March girls of Little Women are always figured as pulling together a way of making Christmas different, real and special, even in the most troubled of times.  And this is no accident – the ability to celebrate central holidays is proof that “we are all right even if things are tough” – proof to children, certainly, who need stability, but I think proof to adults as well.

When you build your food storage, it should include the components of festival foods – those few special things without which it “isn’t really Passover” (note, the beauty of matzah is that it tastes pretty much the same whether stored for 10 years or fresh ) or “that we always have on Dia de los Muertos.”  This may involve some recipe triage – can you make good stollen with canned butter, or with coconut oil, which lasts longer than butter?  How long does cranberry sauce store, anyway?  What would you do if you couldn’t get a goose, or a tofurkey or a ham – or whatever the traditional feasting meat is.

You may have to let some foods go – one of the things I learned when I converted to Judaism and began keeping kashruth is that it is surprisingly possible to adapt most recipes to keeping kosher.  Vegans, those dealing with gluten or other intolerances, etc… all find these things out.  They also find out that there are some things that probably they just won’t get.  I can make decent mashed potatoes without butter.  I cannot make really fabulous mashed potatoes without butter, nor can I make my father’s mashed potatoes with carmelized onions and cheese, at least not with a turkey at Thanksgiving.  So I’ve accepted that that’s no longer in my repetoir for Thanksgiving, and while I like the basic mashed pototoes ok, have decided that our family likes roasted potatoes with garlic and chiles even better.  So, mashed sweet potatoes, but no mashed potatoes (they show up as the centerpiece of dinner now and again as a treat, and that’s actually better, since they are so rich – really, who needs that much lily gilding, along with the turkey, the sweets, the pumpkin pie, the roasted onions, the…)

But I think it is important to keep as much basic structure of your accustomed meals as possible – if not the turkey, at least the ingredients of pumpkin pie, if not the marinated brussel’s sprouts, at least Grandma’s marinade, applied to some other available green.   This is the time to invest in the things that make your family identity special – the ingredients for the lasagna you always have, the wine that marks a special meal, the favorite preserve you only bring out at the holiday.  These mark the day as “like the past” and tie us to family and tradition, even if family can’t be here, or we can’t afford to go to them. 

You can endure an austerity diet, a great deal of stress and poverty much better if a few times during the year, there comes a moment of excess – one in which you eat as much fat and sweet as you could want, in which you drink more than you usually do, and in which you feel yourself momentarily freed from your constraints.  In our ordinary lives, where we often can eat and drink to excess routinely, where we are pressured to make the holiday perfect, or spend too much, we can think we’d be glad to be freed from these excesses – and sometimes that’s true.  But the stripped down version, in a stripped down life, one that maintains essentials in tough times, is, I think another thing all together.

My family can’t imagine Chanukah without latkes, or without gingerbread cookies, which come from my own family’s Christmas celebrations, but are now, made in Jewish shapes, part of our Chanukah.  Passover must have matzah, of course, and Sukkot and Thanksgiving both require pumpkin pie.  The sabbath means grape juice (wine for the grownups) and the ingredients of challah.  These are small things to add to my storage – I don’t need a six month supply of cranberry sauce, a couple of jars will suffice.  But they matter vastly in excess of their space – they remind us that the cycle of the year goes on, and that joy goes on, even when it seems most difficult to remember.

 Sharon

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