Harvest freak

I’ve been spending every waking moment lately between the obligations of paying bills and also maintaining the rituals of self-sufficiency, some rituals I have held since I was a child hanging with my grandma every day. Elk bones into canned broth and stew, Saskatoon berries dried and canned, Chokecherry syrup and patties, Peaches dried and canned, Pears dried and canned, Beets canned, Raspberries canned, Blackberries canned, Pear butter dried and canned, Acorns dried for flour, Coreopsis flowers for natural dying, Dyer’s Chamomile for natural dying, Hawthorn fruits for food and medicine, Tomato sauce for food, Plums sour and sweet dried and canned, dried Sumac for bark-tanning, and soon Apples for sauce, Cattails, Sedge grasses for baskets, and in a few months— Willow again for baskets. I feel like a madman/woman. On top of this, I also am scraping on a few animal hides, and I just strung up a giant bull elk that likely weighed over 700 pounds when alive, but I’m resisting the urge to do deep into hide tanning right now until harvest season is over. Though I am about to teach a sheepskin tanning class this weekend, an offering to share the skills with others so they can get as obsessed as I am with it all.

It’s been a big month. I actually made some money, and am finally paying off the debt my truck has accrued for me this year breaking constantly, keeping me trapped in place and unable to expand many of my ideas into intentional walks, ventures abroad to interview folks for my podcast, or finishing the renovations on my airstream home. It’s still not there, but the momentum is more than it has been in awhile.

It is exhausting though, trying to stay true to my morals and intentions for living a simple life and needing to make enough money to simply exist in this world- just owning a truck and a trailer, and being a human who also needs to take care of body and mind. I can’t even imagine if I had a mortgage, children, farm I owned. Or maybe, it wouldn’t be hard, who knows. I don’t want the fancy stuff. I don’t want to have symbols of status. I want to have enough, and live simply but with primal extravagance, it is possible. Rich with fruit.

I feel full with the harvest, a harvest freak, proudly so. I’m canning late into the night, my trailer smelling like slow cooked bones or pear butter, reminding me of the days spent with my grandma canning in her kitchen, putting up pears from the old pear tree that likely my great-grandpa planted in the far front yard. Even after she had passed, I would go gather those pears and can them up. There aren’t a ton of fruit trees where I grew up that are in good shape, as Apples and Pears struggle from Cedar-rust due to the local Junipers (Eastern Cedar) spreading the fungus to them. It is simply too hot. Peaches fair a little better. Persimmons do great, obviously they grow wild there especially in disturbed areas. I feel heartbroken as all hell, and have been distracting myself with busi-ness and drinking alcohol (as like so many Americans do) from the reality that my family has officially put my great-grandpa’s farm up for sale. The place where I grew up as a child, the only place that ever felt truly safe. I have no say, no control over it until I could suddenly come up with 300k plus another 100k to upgrade the house and barns from their dangerous archaic electric systems and lack of heating and cooling. To some people that money is easy to come up with. I’ve always struggled with buying into it all, and generating $, while part of me is against it- my Taurus moon loves stability, comforts and warmth, just enough abundance. And yet, my grandparents lived simply with land abundance like I do.

Canning pears feels like all I can do sometimes, no matter where I am, If I can SOMETHING in a season, I feel like my grandma is right there with me. I am right back at that pear tree. Sitting at the high chair in her kitchen while she cans green beans, making iced tea by first boiling the Lipton on the stove in a pan. The smell of her laundry room where she kept the canning supplies and ice cream. Extra pots. Utterly heartbroken, on top of 2 years of heartbreak from losing my best friend, I distract myself. Dry my fruits, can my meat, gather nuts. Scrape smelly worm infested hides. Get mucky and grimey. Leave the guts on. Too much beer. I used to hate beer. The fermented fruit. I can cry later. I’ve got plenty more tears left.

I can’t even look at the listing for the farm for sale, if you want to you can here, and if you want to be an investor and save the farm, I’d welcome it. It would be a thing to take on, but you never know who cares. I’d love to see the place with some restored piedmont prairie, planted nut and fruit trees that will grow in the region, the place a kind of learning space, though the estate sale that happened last month just emptied out all the old tools and artifacts I used to literally pray over. I know my family is sad about selling it too, but I feel like sometimes it isn’t ok for my to express my grief, given I have a public platform that people see, observe. Me expressing my grief doesn’t mean I don’t respect my family and their decisions to do this, but I can still disagree with it, feel mad about it and know there could have been another way. My whole work in the world is seeing the hidden tendrils that connect things. Traveling outside of the tiny isolated farming community in southern Virginia I grew up in, has shown me what is possible there, and yet the difficulty of making it happen with generational trauma and a culture that resists change, made me give up long ago. I guess I never really did, but in order for me to do something, tend beauty where I can, I need the freedom to express myself and love fully, which also means grieve fully. Perhaps letting go of the farm means I can built something anew elsewhere. But still, my prayer of my 20’s was the hope that the land could be used for good, after 100 years of tobacco draining the soil health, after a deeper generational heritage of owning slaves, of inherited wealth from eras where white skin meant you got to eat inside or sit in the front row at the movie theatre. That to redeem, to create balance now, would to be to restore land, to create beauty, fertility and wealth in the soil itself.

Instead I scrape the stinky elk, on someone else’s land, also in existence because of inherited wealth, a place I cannot create beauty, but merely exist confined in a little corner for awhile until I whisk away to the next place.

What does it mean to get to belong and settle in, and create? Can we really do that with the concept of private landownership? Yes ‘stolen land’ but really the social and political construct of ‘buying land’ is what stole the land, if we were allowed to just live, with the land, together, and take up our little spaces of tending, then what would the world look like? It can’t look like a grid, it has to look like a tapestry, like ecologies and life shows us. It is overwhelming since we have never seen what the world looks like without it gridded out into boxes and squares that only some get the right to ‘own.’ So as I mourn the fact that a barrier of 300k keeps me and my family from being able to be ‘home’ I ask myself if it would be worth it for a lifetime of wage labor at $15/hour to be able to own. And wait, that wage would never afford even the meager humble farm my ancestors built from the ground up with not very much at all. This side of my family only had what they needed. Nothing more. And yet, I could not sit in an office job at a corporation to maybe make a little more income to get the $, I’d rather be over here, a harvest freak, scraping stinky elk, getting sugary sticky from the pear processing, or salty from the tomato sauce. It’s an ironic twist of torture- if I sold my soul, I could afford to buy out the farm to live on the land my ancestors tended for a couple generations, or lease it to others who want to take care of it. If I actually live like they do, I could never afford it.

I’ll keep canning pears like my grandma did. I don’t waiver from the thread, the little thread that keeps it all woven together.

The seasons of missing, of remembering, of story in the body. It’s been on my mind a lot, and in early October I’m facilitating a little class on somatic storytelling where I am going to do some journaling and map-making with students on how we hold these things in our bodies. I’m not a somatic therapist and this is an experiment in remembering. Come out if you want. A lot of this started for me in how the objects of my grandparents’ farm held entire universes in time and space, and it spread to the plants from there. My papa could tell me a story about every single object, tree. I used to ride around on his golf cart with him and ask him about every single thing and now all those objects are gone into other people’s antique collections or as decorations in people’s homes, with no context for the multi-layered universes those things hold. My dad could tell me stories about the plants though. He planted the big white oak in the front yard of this old farmhouse over 30 years ago.

Interesting how Oliver Anthony just got famous. He is from south-central Virginia, the region where I grew up. My mom went to Longwood college, in Farmville, where he currently lives. The backroads between South Hill (my hometown) and Farmville, are a secret gem, of abandoned little villages and poverty from the end of tobacco farming subsidies, and in some ways I don’t want it to change, and turn into ‘north of the James’ vibes. He sings about rich men north of Richmond to talk about D.C. but also, north of the James river, a socio-political divide in Richmond, suddenly the farms are fancy and everyone has horses and you’ve got things like the fox hunt where folks on horses go around harassing foxes, dressed in English riding garb, to carry on a ‘tradition’ holdover from England. Richmond is full of rich men, mostly white, mostly looking all the same. Richmond is also full of punks, black civil rights activists, college students and artists. And much more diversity than exists in the 1%. Give me salt of the earth, give me the neighbors I don’t agree with politically but hunt and fish and fix things, any day over the office job, the pink tie, the glammer and city life. Even give me the hunting and fishing over the life of my liberal friends getting to eat any kind of food at at moment in the Bay area, go to any kind of music on any night, go to a political protest held on pavement poured over the dirt over and over. Don’t get me wrong, we shouldn’t even have to have police, nature is inherently queer, if cis-gendered people want to get plastic surgery for bigger breasts or lips than so should non cis-gendered folks, everyone should get to eat good, and eugenics as it subtlety trickles into our society without it wanting to admit it is morally, horribly wrong.

So I scrape, can and dry. Harvest freak.