Living-Deliberately.com

• The Maryville Farmers’ Market had a FABULOUS start! We got there at 9:30 and a few sellers had already sold out (they opened at 8  ). I spoke with almost all of them, the most lively definately being two ladies who had thier heirloom seed packets out to show what they were growing for market in the months to come. I met Dr. Chad Berry, who heads the board and who granted permission for me to post the logo in my sidebar, and I met the artist of the most wonderful logo! I also bought the T-shirt. Or…is that that “drank the kool-aid”? I hope our market grows and thrives and exceeds every expectation!!! I”m hoping that they also get a bread baker vendor and a cheese maker. Both are offered locally, along with locally roasted coffee and all would be great additions to our open air market.
• Last night our little five year old had his Kindergarten graduation, which was cute and unapologetically sentimental and emotional. He marched to Pomp and Circumstance, got a diploma and trophy, and was part of a long but precious slide show. His fellow buddies, all bedecked in purple caps and gowns, were equally as cute (almost LOL) and for whatever reason I marveled that seeing them walk across the stage as a little tyke really does give one a whisper of what their big man-self will look like.
• After the market we bumped into our friends the Smalls’, just moments behind us. We’d just had fun chatting with them and others at the graduation reception and both times I looked up at our clock tower and marveled at how much I LOVE living in this small town.
• From the market we headed out to Townsend for their Old Timers’ Days festival. What a great time!!! First of all, it was at thier visitor center, surrounded by high green hills and blue sky. There were so many bluegrass muscians! Organized groups, singleton string players, motley clusters playing impromtu compositions…you couldn’t go anywhere without hearing really great music that was entirely in keeping with the setting. They had great local vendors: we sampled several varieties of raw honey that was as sophisticated as a wine tasting and almost an ode to the theme of “from East Tennessee Hands” that the Farmer’s Market espouses, we listened to handmade dulcimers, ate kettle corn, tasted Muscadine juice, got AWESOME BBQ from their cook-off, and played in the antique cars (hobbiest will do just about anything for cute kids who ask questions ).
• front porches have to be one of the very best archectural (yes, I know I spelled that wrong) details ever. The hours we have spent on ours, on swing and rocker, in the short time we have lived in this house, have been many.

This is an article written approximately 5 years ago that some online friends are discussing. I found it very timely not only for what we are going through employment-wise but also in regards to how I view my own education, how we view our life-long learning, and what we hope for our kids. It also inspires me to hope better things for the millions of kids in public classrooms.

I’m posting it in parts, like I have with others in the past, due to length.

after W stormed through thier room with his Darth Vadar mask on, making some kind of warbled growl, she angrily retorted, “Wheaton! Darth Vadar doesn’t have red hair!”

Suddenly the image of that deathly white face with a really bad, bright red toupe came to mind as DV whispers, “Luuuuke, I am your Fah-ther”.

She get sooo mad when I can’t keep a straight face

on sunshine and fresh strawberries and spring air, that is :-).

Today my friend Jennifer and I took our kids to an area u-pick. It’s early in the season; the fields just opened and we plan to go again next week.

We drove past farm fields and fields eaten up with houses by developers, out past town, where rolling hills and lazy bumblebees were plentiful. A few cows were taking a dip in thier little pond and a black calf bounded up a hill to it’s mother. We saw big, weathered barns and followed signs up twisting roads to a large farm with a berry patch.

You could smell them before we even got out of the car. How can a scent make the soul ache? Strawberries warming in the sun, with freshly cut grass, and a sweet breeze coming over hay fields….it was a tangible ache in my chest that was pure longing to lay down and wallow within the warm goodness of it all.

We were handed little baskets and instructed how to pick among the rows and set free to select red gems from the plants. They really were gem-like….ruby red and shinning in the sun and the seeds bright yellow. Picking didn’t take long since all involved had financial restrictions, hence the return trip next week. A flat filled quickly and the farmer’s wife complimented our well-behaved children who picked thier berries so well that all the green tops were intact.

My radiant treasure sat up in the front seat with me and with the windows down I inhaled deeply until I feared the oxygen was too much for my brain and judgement. At some point I reached over and took one warm orb and bit. Juice actually ran down my hand! I’ve never eaten a strawberry that juicy before….these were so fresh they still remembered life. There is nothing in the world like them.

We had a fun friend day at home, sitting on the porch swing and talking, kids playing and getting dirty, eating chicken salad sandwiches and fresh berries sprinkled ever-so-lightly with sugar. The sun and breeze blessed down upon us and we counted birds, including the neighbors’ little banty rooster who is so proud of his ability to cross the road that he always does a little crow when gets to the other side.

Those berries sit waiting for much-loved grandparents to come for a weekend visit, for shortcake and fresh eating. Next week’s batch can go into the freezer for smoothies and jars of jam. Today is for eating whole.

I’ve got new pretties in my sidebar!! Under Dave there is the link and logo for the Maryville Farmers’ Market, which I am so excited about I can hardly wait until Saturday!! And right underneath that is my “Recommendation of the Month”. Each month it will link you to one of my favorite books, music, movies, etc. This month it’s This Organic Life: Confessions of a Suburban Homesteader, by Joan Dye Gussow. It was a wonderful love story, gardening tale, and food experiment and is one of my favorite gifts from David. I hope you enjoy it too.

Through the quotes in Joan’s book I first learned of Wendell Berry. Her life and loves truly are organic…she feels the earth, a good house, a plot of land. She lives her convictions and in writing about them, brings the reader in as well. There’s even recipes, which I found homey and comforting, bringing the trial of growing unfamiliar things full circle when the inevitable question comes, “But how do I eat this?!”

Here’s a gem for eating seasonally from Alice Waters:

The things most worth wanting are not available everywhere all of the time.

The Logical Song

When I was young, it seemed that life was so wonderful,
A miracle, oh it was beautiful, magical.
And all the birds in the trees, well they’d be singing so happily,
Joyfully, playfully watching me.
But then they send me away to teach me how to be sensible,
Logical, responsible, practical.
And they showed me a world where I could be so dependable,
Clinical, intellectual, cynical.

There are times when all the world’s asleep,
The questions run too deep
For such a simple man.
Won�t you please, please tell me what we’ve learned
I know it sounds absurd
But please tell me who I am.

Now watch what you say or they�ll be calling you a radical,
Liberal, fanatical, criminal.
Won�t you sign up your name, we’d like to feel you’re
Acceptable, respecable, presentable, a vegtable!

At night, when all the world’s asleep,
The questions run so deep
For such a simple man.
Won’t you please, please tell me what we’ve learned
I know it sounds absurd
But please tell me who I am.

I totally “get” that he was taken off his otherwise healthy and developing track into a system that denied personality and creativity, into a mold, and the result is someone who doesn’t really know who they are or how to marry a love and enjoyment of beauty with living in the world as we know it. He was crammed into the machine and churned out assembly line style.
Here he is…he longs for simplicity and for self-awareness. He feels cheated and robbed.  Maybe abused?

But while I’ve loved the song for years, I find myself with a bittersweet desire and hope that we can raise children who still find life to be magical and joyful while at the same time being logical and approaching the world with reason, even as they’re raised by a couple of cynics….

That website I posted below on the 100 Mile Diet  is more than just exciting!! Spend some time on the tab “A Year on the 100 Mile Diet” and you, like I, might find your mouth watering for some of the best of the best: the most seasonal and local meal of your memory. I’ve been moving in this direction for about two years now but I’ve yet to get as stringent as they did with 100 miles. Lots of times I’ve settled for “this continent”, meaning no produce from South America. Most disturbing to me is that without a tremendous effort, it would be difficult for most people to eat a balanced diet locally. That’s because we’ve segregated crops to whole states, sometimes whole countries, in favor of big-business agriculture.

Enter a fuel-crisis and it’s pretty easy to see one reason that is not sustainable in the long run.

Eating seasonally is whole lot more tasty. This week we are going berry picking and those berries will be at their very peak! If I had to guess I’d have to say I have our family’s meals about 50% local within a 500 mile radius and probably 85% seasonal.

Some people will think this is “just for foodies” but if you pay taxes, it affects you. If you buy gas products, where food is grown and shipped affects you. Getting involved in food politics opens up a whole new world of issues that need our attention. Maybe you can’t change the world all by yourself but there are a few movements that are trying and your changes at the grocery store can join a collective that WILL make a difference.

Try it! Start small if you want. Just don’t buy any produce with a sticker on it from another country. Or, eat apples in the fall and berries in the summer. Or plan one meal that is in season and locally grown. Go from there.

It follows that there is great displeasure in knowing about a food economy that degrades and abuses those arts and those plants and animals and the soil from which they come. For anyone who does know something of the modern history of food, eating away from home can be a chore. My own inclination is to eat seafood instead of red meat or poultry when I am traveling. Though I am by no means a vegetarian, I dislike the thought that some animal has been made miserable in order to feed me. If I am going to eat meat, I want it to be from an animal that has lived a pleasant, uncrowded life outdoors, on bountiful pasture, with good water nearby and trees for shade. And I am getting almost as fussy about food plants. I like to eat vegetables and fruits that I know have lived happily and healthily in good soil, not the products of the huge, bechemicaled factory-fields that I have seen, for example, in the Central Valley of California. The industrial farm is said to have been patterned on the factory production line. In practice, it looks more like a concentration camp.

The pleasure of eating should be an extensive pleasure, not that of the mere gourmet. People who know the garden in which their vegetables have grown and know that the garden is healthy and remember the beauty of the growing plants, perhaps in the dewy first light of morning when gardens are at their best. Such a memory involves itself with the food and is one of the pleasures of eating. The knowledge of the good health of the garden relieves and frees and comforts the eater. The same goes for eating meat. The thought of the good pasture and of the calf contentedly grazing flavors the steak. Some, I know, will think of it as bloodthirsty or worse to eat a fellow creature you have known all its life. On the contrary, I think it means that you eat with understanding and with gratitude. A significant part of the pleasure of eating is in one’s accurate consciousness of the lives and the world from which food comes. The pleasure of eating, then, may be the best available standard of our health. And this pleasure, I think, is pretty fully available to the urban consumer who will make the necessary effort.

I mentioned earlier the politics, esthetics, and ethics of food. But to speak of the pleasure of eating is to go beyond those categories. Eating with the fullest pleasure — pleasure, that is, that does not depend on ignorance — is perhaps the profoundest enactment of our connection with the world. In this pleasure we experience and celebrate our dependence and our gratitude, for we are living from mystery, from creatures we did not make and powers we cannot comprehend. When I think of the meaning of food, I always remember these lines by the poet William Carlos Williams, which seem to me merely honest:

There is nothing to eat,
seek it where you will,
but the body of the Lord.
The blessed plants
and the sea, yield it
to the imagination
intact.

When the average North American sits down to eat, each ingredient has typically travelled at least 1,500 miles—call it “the SUV diet.” On the first day of spring, 2005, Alisa Smith and James MacKinnon (bios) chose to confront this unsettling statistic with a simple experiment. For one year, they would buy or gather their food and drink from within 100 miles of their apartment in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Exciting site!!!!  http://100milediet.org/home