Living-Deliberately.com

The consumer, that is to say, must be kept from discovering that, in the food industry — as in any other industry — the overriding concerns are not quality and health, but volume and price. For decades now the entire industrial food economy, from the large farms and feedlots to the chains of supermarkets and fast-food restaurants has been obsessed with volume. It has relentlessly increased scale in order to increase volume in order (probably) to reduce costs. But as scale increases, diversity declines; as diversity declines, so does health; as health declines, the dependence on drugs and chemicals necessarily increases. As capital replaces labor, it does so by substituting machines, drugs, and chemicals for human workers and for the natural health and fertility of the soil. The food is produced by any means or any shortcuts that will increase profits. And the business of the cosmeticians of advertising is to persuade the consumer that food so produced is good, tasty, healthful, and a guarantee of marital fidelity and long life.

It is possible, then, to be liberated from the husbandry and wifery of the old household food economy. But one can be thus liberated only by entering a trap (unless one sees ignorance and helplessness as the signs of privilege, as many people apparently do). The trap is the ideal of industrialism: a walled city surrounded by valves that let merchandise in but no consciousness out. How does one escape this trap? Only voluntarily, the same way that one went in: by restoring one’s consciousness of what is involved in eating; by reclaiming responsibility for one’s own part in the food economy. One might begin with the illuminating principle of Sir Albert Howard’s The Soil and Health, that we should understand “the whole problem of health in soil, plant, animal, and man as one great subject.” Eaters, that is, must understand that eating takes place inescapably in the world, that it is inescapably an agricultural act, and how we eat determines, to a considerable extent, how the world is used. This is a simple way of describing a relationship that is inexpressibly complex. To eat responsibly is to understand and enact, so far as we can, this complex relationship. What can one do? Here is a list, probably not definitive:

1. Participate in food production to the extent that you can. If you have a yard or even just a porch box or a pot in a sunny window, grow something to eat in it. Make a little compost of your kitchen scraps and use it for fertilizer. Only by growing some food for yourself can you become acquainted with the beautiful energy cycle that revolves from soil to seed to flower to fruit to food to offal to decay, and around again. You will be fully responsible for any food that you grow for yourself, and you will know all about it. You will appreciate it fully, having known it all its life.

2. Prepare your own food. This means reviving in your own mind and life the arts of kitchen and household. This should enable you to eat more cheaply, and it will give you a measure of “quality control”: you will have some reliable knowledge of what has been added to the food you eat.

3. Learn the origins of the food you buy, and buy the food that is produced closest to your home. The idea that every locality should be, as much as possible, the source of its own food makes several kinds of sense. The locally produced food supply is the most secure, freshest, and the easiest for local consumers to know about and to influence.

4. Whenever possible, deal directly with a local farmer, gardener, or orchardist. All the reasons listed for the previous suggestion apply here. In addition, by such dealing you eliminate the whole pack of merchants, transporters, processors, packagers, and advertisers who thrive at the expense of both producers and consumers.

5. Learn, in self-defense, as much as you can of the economy and technology of industrial food production. What is added to the food that is not food, and what do you pay for those additions?

6. Learn what is involved in the best farming and gardening.

7. Learn as much as you can, by direct observation and experience if possible, of the life histories of the food species.

The last suggestion seems particularly important to me. Many people are now as much estranged from the lives of domestic plants and animals (except for flowers and dogs and cats) as they are from the lives of the wild ones. This is regrettable, for these domestic creatures are in diverse ways attractive; there is such pleasure in knowing them. And farming, animal husbandry, horticulture, and gardening, at their best, are complex and comely arts; there is much pleasure in knowing them, too.

I”m SO EXCITED!! It opens next Saturday in the Greenbelt and will have ONLY local stuff! No re-selling off the trucks with stuff from Chile (take a hint Jacksonville!). Thier website is www.maryvillefarmersmarket.org

Yesterday was an excersize in emotionally charged organized chaos. Think: that pulsating moment before a storm breaks, where the birds have just stopped singing and the leaves are holding thier breath. Now imagine yourself STUCK in the moment and you can’t get out of it. Well, that reminds me of a song….but I digress.

For those of you who didn’t get that reference, the song is from U2, and it, like the storm analogy, would be an appropriate description for the day yesterday.

I never cried. I just got that “I’m tearing up” choked-throat feeling over and over and over….

exhibit A: shame and anxiety: we all have our demons and seeing someone else’s come out spilling all over the place can be hard to get through. It wasn’t the point but it became a psuedo-target: my effort was the picking place. Shame, from those old feelings of not being good enough. Anxiety, from not knowing how far it’s going to go this time and digging my nails into the dirt to keep from going back there.

exhibit B: fear. I interviewed a new pediatrician yesterday. I was honestly afraid. I hate first impressions, both others’ and my own. I procrastinate to face the time of going back over what was at times a very complicated medical history. I don’t want to be rejected for my methods of raising children, methods not all doctors find respectable. I hate that dirty feeling of not being respected.

exhibt C: overwhelming relief! The office was beautiful. The doctors (two women, both very kind), were gracious and not patronizing. The main one I spoke with took more than ample time with me, answered every question and then some. The office staff was efficient and friendly and conversational. I loved every minute.

exhibit D: frustration. while I was wrapping up with the doctor the babysitter called to say the dog was lost. #%*#@ dog! Those were my last words out the door, “make sure the dog stays chained or inside”. This little beast, Lord love him, wouldn’t move off our porch while we were deciding to keep him or not. THEN when we do, and spend $$ on him, he takes to galavanting. Well, there went lunch and probably solitudnal grocery shopping as well. Time to drive around looking for Boy, hopefully before some benevolent stranger picked him up.

exhibit E: weariness. the bank. A reminder again that the commission check did not come through and how unspeakably frustrated I am with this job of dh’s. Knowing I squeezed blood from a turnip this month and miraculously we have everything covered again and feeling so dang exhausted from having obsess about every little penny.

exhibt F: hunger. Gave up on the dog and went to Target. Hadn’t eaten all day and by now it was 2. I got a hotdog and coke from the snack bar and choked on the MSG-filled saltiness of the dog. Ate instead a mustard smeared bun and drank the coke and bought a Snickers bar knowing full well that a sugar crash was in my near future. Ate it while running through the store to grab diapers, wipes, and dog food (the sitter called and said the dog came home. Guess I’ll buy his food now).

exhibit G: despair. Dragging my crashing self through the grocery store parking lot, talking to David about when he’d be home with Celia so I could get her back to the doctor at 4. (Doc wanted to resolve an issue C has had for awhile). Cutting it close; he thought he’d be home by 3:45. I had to get the babysitter home in Friday traffic between then; it was 3:15.

exhibit H: panic. At 4 I was on my way back from the sitter’s house to get C and head down to the doc’s. Got in the office at 4:15 and heard the staff discussing if they’d see me or not. Held my breath. They are nice and they said “yes”. Realized I was out of time to get focaccia dough in the oven to rise. There went my dinner plan.

exhibit I: angry. C’s rx is expensive and the insurance won’t cover it until May 3. We have W’s medical bills as well to pay now from his ER visit a few weeks ago. There is no choice but to use my Florida trip money to cover it. This hurts. I’m so tired.

exhibit J: foreboding. Those demons from the morning came out again. I’m not the only one who’s tired. Sometimes we lie so close to the edge and the temptation to vent on what we can control, about what we can’t control, is often strong.

exhibit K: love and empathy. It felt good to hit the pillow. It was bitter sweet to utter tired, “I love you’s” and know we are in this thing together, for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer. We’ve got each other’s back and we pray we both don’t need it at the same time.

But if there is a food politics, there are also a food esthetics and a food ethics, neither of which is dissociated from politics. Like industrial sex, industrial eating has become a degraded, poor, and paltry thing. Our kitchens and other eating places more and more resemble filling stations, as our homes more and more resemble motels. “Life is not very interesting,” we seem to have decided. “Let its satisfactions be minimal, perfunctory, and fast.” We hurry through our meals to go to work and hurry through our work in order to “recreate” ourselves in the evenings and on weekends and vacations. And then we hurry, with the greatest possible speed and noise and violence, through our recreation — for what? To eat the billionth hamburger at some fast-food joint hellbent on increasing the “quality” of our life? And all this is carried out in a remarkable obliviousness to the causes and effects, the possibilities and the purposes, of the life of the body in this world.

One will find this obliviousness represented in virgin purity in the advertisements of the food industry, in which food wears as much makeup as the actors. If one gained one’s whole knowledge of food from these advertisements (as some presumably do), one would not know that the various edibles were ever living creatures, or that they all come from the soil, or that they were produced by work. The passive American consumer, sitting down to a meal of pre-prepared or fast food, confronts a platter covered with inert, anonymous substances that have been processed, dyed, breaded, sauced, gravied, ground, pulped, strained, blended, prettified, and sanitized beyond resemblance to any part of any creature that ever lived. The products of nature and agriculture have been made, to all appearances, the products of industry. Both eater and eaten are thus in exile from biological reality. And the result is a kind of solitude, unprecedented in human experience, in which the eater may think of eating as, first, a purely commercial transaction between him and a supplier and then as a purely appetitive transaction between him and his food.

And this peculiar specialization of the act of eating is, again, of obvious benefit to the food industry, which has good reasons to obscure the connection between food and farming. It would not do for the consumer to know that the hamburger she is eating came from a steer who spent much of his life standing deep in his own excrement in a feedlot, helping to pollute the local streams, or that the calf that yielded the veal cutlet on her plate spent its life in a box in which it did not have room to turn around. And, though her sympathy for the slaw might be less tender, she should not be encouraged to meditate on the hygienic and biological implications of mile-square fields of cabbage, for vegetables grown in huge monocultures are dependent on toxic chemicals — just as animals in close confinements are dependent on antibiotics and other drugs.

The consumer, that is to say, must be kept from discovering that, in the food industry — as in any other industry — the overriding concerns are not quality and health, but volume and price. For decades now the entire industrial food economy, from the large farms and feedlots to the chains of supermarkets and fast-food restaurants has been obsessed with volume. It has relentlessly increased scale in order to increase volume in order (probably) to reduce costs. But as scale increases, diversity declines; as diversity declines, so does health; as health declines, the dependence on drugs and chemicals necessarily increases. As capital replaces labor, it does so by substituting machines, drugs, and chemicals for human workers and for the natural health and fertility of the soil. The food is produced by any means or any shortcuts that will increase profits. And the business of the cosmeticians of advertising is to persuade the consumer that food so produced is good, tasty, healthful, and a guarantee of marital fidelity and long life.

What a pretty day!! I’m glad I got to spend it OUT :-).

Okay, so with my gleaming clothesline all taught and ready to go, and a clear sky right from day break, I was sure I was going to get my first loads out in the spring air. And I did….until I noticed the lines getting closer and closer to the mud ground. Seems my poles stuck in the concrete JUST FINE but the concrete clumps pulled right out of the clay.

%&*&^*^%%$%$

So off the Little Red Hen took her self and her biddies to HOME DEPOT. We bought two  pressure treated scraps for a buck each, a new pack of clothesline, some neato twisty nais (for those of us who know screws are the best thing for the job but a hammer is more our speed) and a hammer. Forget sticking things in this ground: I pounded one end into my TREE (gasp and horrors but the thing is strong and seems to be handling it fine) and the other into our deck. I ran four lines giving me 100 feet of clothesline. It’s beautiful. And STRONG. I transferred my laundry from the old one to the new one and THAR YA GO. Gorgeous breeze blowing through and sweet smells abounded.

So what to do with two seemingly useless metal clothesline poles?! David had the lightbulb thought: TRELLIS. I needed one more and was out of sticks from the woods. They can’t hold up wet laundry but pea vines should be no problem. So I lugged my 40lb. poles to the garden. They worked perfectly! I got the twine half strung before I ran out and another sucession of peas planted beneath.

Besides mowing the yard and planting some beans, that was it. My biggun’ built a killer fort with the rest of my nails. My middle rode his bike and My Sunshine made a swing from the old clotheline cord. Lil’ Darlin’ toddled and explored and otherwise wallowed in the fresh air. He loves being outside…he gets it honestly :-).

The specialization of production induces specialization of consumption. Patrons of the entertainment industry, for example, entertain themselves less and less and have become more and more passively dependent on commercial suppliers. This is certainly true also of patrons of the food industry, who have tended more and more to be mere consumers — passive, uncritical, and dependent. Indeed, this sort of consumption may be said to be one of the chief goals of industrial production. The food industrialists have by now persuaded millions of consumers to prefer food that is already prepared. They will grow, deliver, and cook your food for you and (just like your mother) beg you to eat it. That they do not yet offer to insert it, prechewed, into our mouth is only because they have found no profitable way to do so. We may rest assured that they would be glad to find such a way. The ideal industrial food consumer would be strapped to a table with a tube running from the food factory directly into his or her stomach.

Perhaps I exaggerate, but not by much. The industrial eater is, in fact, one who does not know that eating is an agricultural act, who no longer knows or imagines the connections between eating and the land, and who is therefore necessarily passive and uncritical — in short, a victim. When food, in the minds of eaters, is no longer associated with farming and with the land, then the eaters are suffering a kind of cultural amnesia that is misleading and dangerous. The current version of the “dream home” of the future involves “effortless” shopping from a list of available goods on a television monitor and heating precooked food by remote control. Of course, this implies and depends on, a perfect ignorance of the history of the food that is consumed. It requires that the citizenry should give up their hereditary and sensible aversion to buying a pig in a poke. It wishes to make the selling of pigs in pokes an honorable and glamorous activity. The dreams in this dream home will perforce know nothing about the kind or quality of this food, or where it came from, or how it was produced and prepared, or what ingredients, additives, and residues it contains — unless, that is, the dreamer undertakes a close and constant study of the food industry, in which case he or she might as well wake up and play an active an responsible part in the economy of food.

There is, then, a politics of food that, like any politics, involves our freedom. We still (sometimes) remember that we cannot be free if our minds and voices are controlled by someone else. But we have neglected to understand that we cannot be free if our food and its sources are controlled by someone else. The condition of the passive consumer of food is not a democratic condition. One reason to eat responsibly is to live free.

I keep scrolling down to look at the second painting I posted earlier today. I’m spellbound by it. It positively draws me in. When I first found it I couldn’t find the title of the painting; only the artist’s name. I”m sitting here listening to crickets outside my open window and slumbering dear hubby near me and it occurred to me that I might love to have this painting as a print on my wall. So off I went to “google” that artist. And….lo and behold…my little lead is more than an artist name!

Zona pellucida: The strong membrane that forms around an ovum as it develops in the ovary. The membrane remains in place during the egg’s travels through the fallopian tube. To fertilize the egg, a sperm must penetrate the thinning zona pellucida. If fertilization takes place, the membrane disappears to permit implantation in the uterus.

um….yeah. Okay.

Well, I’m learning something. This painting is a bit hard to track down. Zona Pellicuda is also an art website.A very cool site called The Art of Parenting Through Art. But ZP is  NOT the artist who did this painting. From the url I figured out that ” serebryakova tata with vegetables ” must be the title. The artist also painted this girl brushing her hair:

But that first painting of her with the fish and radishes still grips me.  And so I kept looking…

Success! Here’s an artist bio of Zinaida Serebryakova (from Wikipedia):

Zinaida Serebryakova was born on the estate of Neskuchnoye near Kharkiv (now Ukraine) into one of the most refined and artistic families of Russia.

Ever since her youth Zinaida Serebryakova strove to express her love of the world and to show its beauty. Her earliest works—Country Girl (1906, Russian Museum) and Orchard in Bloom (1908, private collection)—speak eloquently of this search, and of her acute awareness of the beauty of the Russian land and its people. These works are etudes done from nature, and though she was young at the time, her extraordinary talent, confidence and boldness were apparent.

The painting’s name is Tata With Vegetables and Tata was Zinaida’s daughter.

I first heard about thisi earlier this year from my friend Cheryl. Her blog is in my sidebar because she’s making more progress than I am on a common goal of growing what we eat. In visiting all these agrarian blogs lately I’ve stumbled onto more of it. What is “it”? That’s a big question and I”m not sure I have all the answers. It involves tagging every animal on every farm, mandatorily and paid for by farmers. It seems to be quietly pushed by the big-Ag companies to run off the grass fed small farmer making a dent in the profits of those commercial meat companies. It reeks of robbed liberty of one of our most basic needs: our food. There’s lots to read about it here. Please do so! I’m still looking to see what I can do about it.

• It Worked!!!! My clothesline and cement experiment worked and I now have glistening white lines between stable poles all ready for the sunny day expected tomorrow. I can almost HEAR my electric bill dropping. Ka-CHING!

• soft spring rain sprinkled while I planted a succession row of peas, then the first green beans, and the fill-in seeds for the corn rows and cucumbers. The squash is taking off nicely and the tomato babies are bushing out; I actually pinched blossoms off three tonight. I want the plants to get a bit more heft to them before they start bearing.

• Boy was found…just as we thought someone picked him up at the restuarants across the street, afraid he’d be hit, and drove off with him. They figured they’d call around for his tag and it just took two days to get that done. He’s back home, smelling like the 4 dogs who he hung around with yesterday and today and much chastised. His life now involves a constant leash.

• that spring shower became a thunderous storm, just in time to water my seeds. David said it was so heavy in places that he couldn’t even see the shoulder to know it was there so he could pull over. I sat on the porch rocker, on the pretty new chair pads my mom made me while she was here, and watched for birds and squirrels with Baby. The Squirrels of Nimh do not hide when it rains!! After the thunder stopped, W splashed in the rain and puddles while the oldest two reinacted the George Burns and Gracie Allen show in the kitchen. They love those old radio programs! I’ll have to get them some more. C and her Lucille Ball-ish sense of humor just loves them all.

All this farm talk has me feelin’ sentimental for an old favorite song. Beit sung by Sting or Eva Cassidy, it’s a great one. Here’s the lyrics:

You’ll remember me when the west wind moves
Upon the fields of barley
You’ll forget the sun in his jealous sky
As we walk in the fields of gold

So she took her love
For to gaze awhile
Upon the fields of barley
In his arms she fell as her hair came down
Among the fields of gold

Will you stay with me, will you be my love
Among the fields of barley
We’ll forget the sun in his jealous sky
As we lie in the fields of gold

See the west wind move like a lover so
Upon the fields of barley
Feel her body rise when you kiss her mouth
Among the fields of gold
I never made promises lightly
And there have been some that I’ve broken
But I swear in the days still left
We’ll walk in the fields of gold
We’ll walk in the fields of gold

Many years have passed since those summer days
Among the fields of barley
See the children run as the sun goes down
Among the fields of gold
You’ll remember me when the west wind moves
Upon the fields of barley
You can tell the sun in his jealous sky
When we walked in the fields of gold
When we walked in the fields of gold
When we walked in the fields of gold

Eisenhower Farm by Kay Ameche

by Zona Pellucida

The Kitchen Garden by Victoria Webster

I have a collection of Berry’s essays called The Art of the Commonplace. They are beautiful, thought-provoking pieces. One in particlar, the last one in the book, is one I frequently go back to. It’s called The Pleasures of Eating and I think it explains well why the average person/consumer needs to understand on a basic human level the relationship we have with where our food comes from. In a society where we make a list, go to a box store, get what we want, come home and warm it up (or not) it’s easy to get away from a comprehension of how we are really fed and we take the availability of that food for granted. I’ve decided to post the essay in parts for easy um, digestion. I’m getting it from www.ecoliteracy.org

“Many times, after I have finished a lecture on the decline of American farming and rural life, someone in the audience has asked, “What can city people do?”

“Eat responsibly,” I have usually answered. Of course, I have tried to explain what I mean by that, but afterwards I have invariably felt there was more to be said than I had been able to say. Now I would like to attempt a better explanation.

I begin with the proposition that eating is an agricultural act. Eating ends the annual drama of the food economy that begins with planting and birth. Most eaters, however, are no longer aware that this is true. They think of food as an agricultural product, perhaps, but they do not think of themselves as participants in agriculture. They think of themselves as “consumers.” If they think beyond that, they recognize that they are passive consumers. They buy what they want — or what they have been persuaded to want — within the limits of what they can get. They pay, mostly without protest, what they are charged. And they mostly ignore certain critical questions about the quality and the cost of what they are sold: How fresh is it? How pure or clean is it, how free of dangerous chemicals? How far was it transported, and what did transportation add to the cost? How much did manufacturing or packaging or advertising add to the cost? When the food product has been manufactured or “processed” or “precooked,” how has that affected its quality or price or nutritional value?

Most urban shoppers would tell you that food is produced on farms. But most of them do not know what farms, or what kinds of farms, or where the farms are, or what knowledge of skills are involved in farming. They apparently have little doubt that farms will continue to produce, but they do not know how or over what obstacles. For them, then, food is pretty much an abstract idea — something they do not know or imagine — until it appears on the grocery shelf or on the table.”

I don’t “surf” the web much. I am the proverbial creature of habit and I have my little routine of places I go every morning and then it’s off to bigger and better things (otherwise known as life with children). But lately I’ve become totally hooked on agrarian blogs…blogs written by city people like myself who are compelled to move towards a more organic life. Some of them do it on suburban acres, some on rural homesteads, all with alot of sacrifice and love.

Here are a few of my favorites:

a Kansas dairy farm

The Deliberate Agrarian (gotta love that title ‘eh?)

doin’ it without moving out to the sticks

she has bees and goats!! and a cow!! And she lives in my state!

Now, it definately begs an explanation. Why, in the season in which I’m planting a large garden, hosting visisting family, finishing up many activities for the year with the chickens, do I have time to be perusing blogs??!?!

Well, that’s due to my uber-guru, aka brother in law Joel. This is him:

After hours upon hours spent on the phone walking me through Dell’s screw ups, Joel (also the designer of this blog) spent much of his visit this weekend getting my router set up to work. Which means friends, I’m WIRELESS!!! I can be online (and it’s a deliciously fast connection too) in any room of the house. On the front porch! In the yard under my big tree!

Ah….freedom. No more swishy “dial up” noise and sitting there waiting for things to load. No more avoiding a huge percentage of the internet because it would take too long. In short, it’s a tool that I can use and in a techno-strange way, getting more sophisticated has actually simplified life.

So thank you Joel! He does computer stuff for a living and also sells for one of the companies that he manages web stuff for. Thier company has tons of sunbrella fabrics for porch furniture, which just so happens to be on the spring chore list of many! You can buy great looking teak furniture and umbrellas here.

“And I think to myself….what a wonderful world…..”

Today I didn’t get out in the garden until most of the day was done. After hanging my beautiful black and white photos my parents brought up from storage, after working with W and his letters, after multiple loads of laundry, after driving for over an hour trying to find Boy who went missing last night, after violin lesson. So, after the day. I almost could’ve skipped it; 5 o’clock is dinner prep time! But this house that is like an aviary struck me with it’s situation, clothed in green and flowers, and as I drove into the drive I knew I had to get my “dirties” on and get out in the garden.

• the never-ending clothesline project continues: getting the poles secure in this clay is wretched business and is proving to be incredibly difficult. This time I tried concrete after procrastinating on doing anything with those bags of grey rubble in my kitchen for well over a week. I dug the holes and poured in the gravel. I did give the directions a perfunctory read through but I felt very (overly) confident that I could match the water/concrete ratio by feel. So W turned on the hose and I splashed some in and….

• concrete is hard to mix. I stirred and stirred but still most of the water stayed in a runny, soupy mess on top. I got crabby fast. No way do I want the embarassment of goofing this one up with arrogance (should’ve read those directions better and hello?! Measured?!). But, onward I went. I held the metal pole up with one hand and poured in the mud with the other, dumping the unmixed powder over the top. I kinda mixed it in the hole. Then I scooped the dirt I’d dug out from the hole over the top of that and tamped it. Probably incredibly unothodox. Probably stands a good chance of fouling up. We’ll see.

• The rest of my time was spent weeding. There is some kind of funky ground cover all over the yard and it was in that garden plot before we attempted this transformation. Lo and behold, it’s showing itself all over the place. As I have no hoe or weeder, it was on my hands and knees and pulled out with gloved hands.

• the corn is up!! There are only a few gaps to fill in! I’m so excited to see my rows of corn…I talk to my plants as I go and I heard myself urge one plant on..”you can do it boy…”. Is corn male?

• true beauty: one curled corn seedling, about 5 inches high, cradling a single drop of water.

• as I came in for Taco Salad and the first guacamole of the year a storm came up. Beautiful wind, sunrise coming, and thunder. A rainbow was in the sky ahead. The birds barely ceased singing long enough for the rain to fall.

“…the bright blessed days, the dark sacred nights, and I say to myself, what a wonderful world…”

I’ve fought the “digital camera resistance” for a long time. Primarily because I LOVE AND ADORE the Nikon passed to me from my parents-in-law. I love it’s heavy reliablity. It’s tendancy to take fantastic pictures. It’s feel in my hands. I don’t have the budget to allow for a digital that has SLR quality and a “point and shoot” often is so slow that it misses kids-in-action. I don’t want a cheap understudy to make me use my star favorite less.

But…..developing film and putting it on disc is getting expensive. It takes longer to get the pics online. And blogs like this one  (that I found through a blog with a list from a list from a list…. you get the idea) remind me of my tendancy to want to take pictures every single day, of just about every fascinating thing I want to record and remember.

So, very hesitatingly, I”m adding “the best I can get” digital camera to my list of techno-dreams, along with an ipod that allows me to persue another love: lots and lots of personalized music on my play list. Finally, when I crave Carly Simon, she’s just a click away!

So, why is this filed under “homestead dreams”? Well go see that blog, Rurality, for one. But also because we have a new (and yet no so new) bee in our bonet: to build or not to build.

The current wave of discussion: what about building a BARN? Maybe like this one:

from backroadhomes.com.

And turn it into a house?! Getting a barn finished, with a basement foundation, is easier than getting a house done in a decent turn of time and would allow us to move in to one section while finishing the rest on our own timetable. We could finance less of the project and pay cash for a good portion as we went along.

Fortunately, my dear parents raised me in an environment of “houses as projects” and I’m not naive as to what it’s like to live to like that. The bigger questions are:

Can we find land in our budget?

How does a barn actually get raised?

Will this really land us closer to attaining our rural dreams?

Can we do this while living in this house for very long? How much would we have to swing both payments?

Questions like these follow me as I go through my day. When I wipe down counters (or little bottoms for that matter) I’m thinking about it. When I sweep the porch I remember the barn plan has to have a porch attatched. I dream (as in the kind of dreams that 50’s do-wop love songs sang about) of a basment laundry room with a large lab table folding area and all painted out in pale green and white. I’m aware as I garden that even if we don’t live on the land yet, I’d be able to work on the grounds and beds, cultivating growth that would be part of our lives for years.

We are ready for roots. For a place to stay for a long, long time. A place to pour part of  ourselves into with love and sweat and tears and be there later to enjoy what we built.

“I like dreamin’…’cause dreamin’ can make you mine…..”