My Goal in life is to be a Yokel!

MY GOAL is to be a YOKEL! 

                              Ummmm, a LOCAL YOKEL THAT IS!!!

After experiencing multiple near-fainting experiences at the check-out line of our local co-op, I decided to try to find a way to buy fresh, local produce straight from the farmer. This, I imagined, had to be cheaper and better for me than buying organic produce from Mexico.

Also, I wasn't crazy about buying shipped in food from said country. Every time I picked up a high priced vegetable labeled "organic" from Mexico I hesitated, wondering - "Isn't that an oxymoron? Organic? From Mexico? You can't drink the water but you can eat the vegetables grown with that questionable water?" Sometimes, I'd put the vegetable back, other times, in desperation, I'd buy it. "Geez," I thought. There's got to be a better way. There is. After seeing a Facebook post from my friend and former neighbors Macon and Luke Costlow on the joys of being a CSA member, I decided to take the plunge.

I googled organic csa farms and found one near Brevard. Cool. I can go for a hike on the day that I go pick up my veggies. So I joined the group near Brevard, but quickly realized that it would eat up my day as well as my gas to have to drive out there and back every Wednesday. The notion of driving out to the country to hike and get my veggies sounded romantic at first, but after just one trip, I changed my mind.

Back to the drawing board. Could there possibly be one in Hendersonville? Hmmm. I picked up a copy of the local food guide magazine "ASAP" and found a farm that uses organic practices - (they are not labeled "certified organic", but they do not use harmful chemicals in the production of their food) right here in Hendersonville. I'd already paid good, non-refundable money to the Brevard farm, so I'll have to wait till spring to switch to Blue Meadow Farms, located "just down the road" from me.

Blue Meadow Farms in Hendersonville uses organic practices - and in my mind are the VERY best foods you can eat - local, foods grown without chemicals - is like eating local honey, these foods are designed to support your immune system. :0)

Besides all the obvious reasons of freshness, conservation of fuel (it costs a lot of gas to get veggies here from Holland or California!) and supporting your local economy/farmers, there are some serious health benefits to consider.

It has been said that we can benefit by cultivating an internal microbiome that corresponds with our external environment. If you are living in, for example New York City, amongst the native pollens, mites and microbiota of that area, but consuming foods shipped in from Mexico, Florida and China, your internal system won’t be in harmony with your external environment. You might have heard the idea that eating raw local honey is like an inoculation against seasonal allergies. This theory carries on from that concept.
In addition, seasonal produce that has been allowed to ripen in the sun, harvested, purchased and consumed quickly is left with more antioxidants and beneficial phytonutrients than those that took 3 or 4 weeks to cross a continent before they got on your plate. These nutrient-dense farm-to-plate foods support robust health and immunity, much more so than those that are picked early, treated with gases and then coated with wax to keep them ‘fresh’ while they are shipped.

BE a LOCAL YOKEL!!! :0)

I'm crazy that way....

I am simultaneously reading  Walden by Henry David Thoreau and binge watching Mad Men on Netflix.  Yikes! It is pretty jolting to switch from one to the other, but kind of fun at the same time. I seem to be crazy that way. I'm either knee deep into a book about Julia Child or Coco Chanel, or waist deep in a trout stream as the sun sets trying to cast one more time in hopes of an encounter with a brookie. There seems to be no middle ground for my interests. Walden or Mad Men. Who should I blame for that? Probably my mom. Or maybe it was the 60's that shaped me. Maybe that whole decade is to blame for the way I turned out. 

I am fascinated by that period of time - the culture, the politics, the clothes, the....well, let's face it, everything about the 60's. First of all, I love the style. My mom, as well as many American women, modeled her own style after Jackie Kennedy.  I developed a love for pencil skirts, white pearl necklaces, high heel pumps and black, patent-leather clasp-closing pocket books from watching mom get dressed for church or an evening out.

Also fascinating in a trainwreck-sort-of-way about the 60's was watching those around me go through major changes as the decade progressed. 1969 especially. I remember it well. I was 10 years old, and it seemed that was the year my world changed forever. One of the good memories from that year was of a hot Louisiana summer day. It was July 20th. I was sitting cross-legged on the living room floor in front of our black and white television, transfixed by the images on the screen, as a man wearing a bubble on his head walked on the moon. One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind. It was thrilling to imagine what it was like to step onto another world. 

And then there was my world. Tumultuous and fragile. 1969 seemed to be a turning point, and not for the better. It was the year of Hurricane Camille. I remember standing barefoot on the lawn, watching as my brothers washed out garbage cans and filled them with water, then later that day sitting solemnly at the kitchen table, while my mom nervously filled the hurricane lanterns and trimmed the wicks. Soon after, hurricane Camille roared through Louisiana, cutting a destructive swath through the state. We'd worried that if Camille came too close to our little town of Milton,  the Vermillion River just across the street from our house could easily  swell and flood its banks, sending tidal waves of  muddy water, gators and snakes into our yard and house. That was also the same year that my dad hurled our entire Thanksgiving dinner, one plate at a time, against the kitchen walls. It was then that the reality of how broken our family life really was finally dawned in my 10 year-old heart. 

1969. I have to remind myself of the good times. In spite of all the craziness, there are a few good memories. Not only did I get my love of all things Jackie from my mom, but she also passed on to me her love of the outdoors. She had grown up a tomboy in a large family of working class Cajuns, running around barefoot most of the time, gigging frogs for bait to catch catfish in the canal, stepping over sleeping water moccasins curled up in the baking hot sun on the levee to get to her cousins' house - in a word, fearless.  That year mom must have thought I was old enough to go tromping through the woods with my two older brothers. It became a normal thing for me to tag along with them as they wielded machetes and fired off BB guns. Our adventures in those tangled woods of Tarzan vines, poison ivy, and who knows what else, were not as genteel naturalists, but bold hunters - lopping off  the heads of any snakes that dared slither in front of us, and shooting the big banana spiders lurking in the webs spun high above our heads between the trees. Later in life, I grew out of the adolescent need my brothers instilled in me to kill things that moved, and became enamored with observing and appreciating nature instead. 

Now, in my 50's, after a decidedly tumultuous life of my own, I have come to the point in my life that a cabin in the woods (near a river) sounds like a great idea, (at least for a week or two at a time anyway), far from the madding crowds,  where I could emulate some of my heroes.

Robert Traver is one of them.

“I fish because I love to. Because I love the environs where trout are found, which are invariably beautiful, and hate the environs where crowds of people are found, which are invariably ugly. Because of all the television commercials, cocktail parties, and assorted social posturing I thus escape. Because in a world where most men seem to spend their lives doing what they hate, my fishing is at once an endless source of delight and an act of small rebellion. Because trout do not lie or cheat and cannot be bought or bribed, or impressed by power, but respond only to quietude and humility, and endless patience. Because I suspect that men are going this way for the last time and I for one don't want to waste the trip. Because mercifully there are no telephones on trout waters. Because in the woods I can find solitude without loneliness. ... And finally, not because I regard fishing as being so terribly important, but because I suspect that so many of the other concerns of men are equally unimportant and not nearly so much fun.”

Henry David Thoreau, another of my heroes, said the following:

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."

So, I confess. As a fashion-loving, fly-fishing, bird-watching, what-plant-is-that-and-what-is-it-useful-for kinda girl, I divide my time between passions that have no common ground: Walden purity and Mad Men schemes, Chanel wishes and Robert Traver dreams. Like I said, I'm crazy that way. 

Where's Walden???

Where’s Walden???

No, that’s not a typo. As I sit here in my log cabin in front of a flickering fire, listening to the wind play a wistful tune on the chimes hanging just outside our back door, I bless and curse this power outage simultaneously, reflecting on how different life is now than when Walden was penned, and struggling with guilt over my addiction to the luxuries in life that I take so much for granted.

It is nice, I think, to stop and just sit sometimes.  Do nothing. Not even speak. Just sit and watch the flames before me flicker and dance. It is true that my sabbatical from the 21^st century has been forced upon me by Mother Nature, but If I really wanted to, I could go out to the garage and charge my dead cell phone with my car charger.  I still have some juice left on my iPad that I spent good money on to have cellular service for just such an occasion. I could message, Facebook, email and surf the web to my heart’s content, but here I sit, thinking about how we as a culture have allowed ourselves to be enslaved to the technology that surrounds us, taking us farther and farther away from the simplicity of life that could be ours. Who has time to just "be"? To just sit? Watch a fire, or sit on a swing in the middle of the day and listen to the clear notes of a wood thrush or the tin horn tunes of a nuthatch? 

One of my favorite poems is called Leisure Time. It is to a certain degree, a sad reminder of how I am frittering away precious moments that I can never recover, spending my life in the pursuit of obtaining things. Henry David Thoreau said that the cost of a thing is the amount of what I call life which is required to be exchanged for it.

What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

No time to stand beneath the boughs
And stare as long as sheep or cows.

No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.

No time to see, in broad daylight,
Streams full of stars, like skies at night.

No time to turn at Beauty's glance,
And watch her feet, how they can dance.

No time to wait till her mouth can
Enrich that smile her eyes began.

A poor life this is if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare. 

William Henry Davies

It is so easy in our day and time to be consumed with the luxuries and conveniences of our culture. On the other hand, by the minute I am getting hungrier, grubbier, and colder the longer our power is out. Funny what a little deprivation can do to a gal.  "Are we really enslaved? Or have we been set free from the harsh life that our ancestors endured?  Hmmmm...Something to Think about, for sure. Pioneer life without any conveniences sounds romantic at first, but try to live that way for a week even, and most people, including myself would bolt like a (fill in your favorite saying here  – branded cow, spooked horse, groom on his wedding day, etc.)

Last night we lost power  - an ice storm, a blown transformer somewhere close – and were instantly plunged into the dark ages – that terrible time many years ago when there were no glowing cell phones, iPads, computers, or TV’s with which to warm the cockles of our hearts, no sleek electric stoves that, with a touch of a button, would summon glowing rings of fire without flame with which one could whip up a tasty dish from the latest Food Network recipe email. Back then there were no monolithic French-door refrigerators – big, amazing boxes with 4 convenient doors one could open and retrieve cold milk, vegetables, chilled drinks and even frozen meat from without having to trudge down to the root cellar or smokehouse, or for that matter, the barn, where Betsy the cow waited impatiently for her morning milking.

Nope, nothing like a power outage to inspire gratitude for the smallest of conveniences in our extraordinarily privileged, totally cushy, 21^st century life.  I have come to understand this fully every time in the last 12 hours when I have walked into a dark room and went to flip a switch and nothing happened – every time I wanted to cook a meal, wash my hands, flush a toilet, or even try to hang out anywhere but in front of the fireplace – no central heat! 

The thought that keeps me happy, feeling like this is some camping adventure of sorts, is that it is only temporary. Soon (hopefully), as if by a miracle, all the lights in the house will blink on, and Duke Energy will breathe life back into all our cute little artificially intelligent devices – sassy phones that talk back to you when you ask for directions, computers that know you so well they anticipate what ads, stories, or searches you want to read, and television shows that tell you what you should be wearing, eating, thinking, doing or stop doing. 

Ah, yes! Life as we know it, life as we want it. Life as we live it....and yet, I dream of a Walden life....longing ...for that simpler time...WAIT!!! The lights just flickered!!! POWER'S BACK ON!!!!