This post is not for the squeamish.   I hope I’ve managed to gently offend a couple folks here these last months, otherwise what good is a blog?  If I haven’t, here’s one that goes that extra mile.

Handy hubby, this one I owe to him.  This man’s got serious skills!  He assures me among Southern men, at least 80% can do it.  But he and I both originate from Chicago.  There, and most other places in America, the percentage surely hovers closer to 25%, tops.  In any case, I am standing in awe.   Handy Hubby, t-shirt now splattered with blood (did he wear white on purpose?), gun still strapped to his belt, an axe and an array of various sized knives and a cleaver on the counter next to him, which he had sharpened last night in preparation,  has between the hours of 8 am and 12, again impressed me in is handy-hubbiedness.  I have witnessed a pig trapped, heard him shot, knew him to be gutted and skinned elsewhere, heavens be praised, then watched him slaughtered and then butchered.  My sole responsibility in the process?  Bag and tag.  Brilliant!

I’ve handled fish the size of large mammals after being freshly caught and cleaned in Alaska, but the feeling of a boar left me less, let’s say, elated.   It was not the feeling of the freshly slaughtered flesh, which was surprisingly similar to a really enormous salmon, but which is distinctly different from store-bought.  Reminds me of Jell-O.

And it was not the butcher shop smell that soon overwhelmed the kitchen though the windows were open and fans fully employed; the odor was not at all offensive, not the heavy musk and rot like in the Spanish charcuterie, where the pig trotters dangle from the ceilings.  And, like the finest Iberico ham, the color was beautiful, rich red and uniform in its leanness, with a taste that seemed to me closer to duck than to the pork we get from the supermarket.

And it was not that I felt bad for his life, exactly, because wild pig in these parts are considered vermin, not unlike the rat of New York city streets, an invasive species.  What was it then that made this feel so much less thrilling to me?  Maybe because, the fish, I knew I could tackle it, and did, (though with the skill of a child).

This is in fact the ideal win-win.  Handy hubby gets a manly satisfaction out of at least some of the process as well as the fact that he has now fed his little family for free for some months and should a mass welcome disaster close all the Wal-marts out here, he has just proven to us and himself that he can control his environment, a true alpha male feat.

Despite all this, I cannot put my finger on it, I wish we’d caught a fish.  While I watched handy hubby hack away at femur bones with a cleaver, I could only think, “Thank you all on Earth and in the Heavens who have conspired together in the blessed result that, this is not “my job.”

I don’t want to think of it as a sexist stereotype, but of course it is.  Even in the South I do not have to pretend to know or like guns, or skinning, gutting, butchering and well, pretty much anything terribly disgusting .  I consider that a true gift.  Contradictory I know, me, all espousing on autonomy, the heart of homesteading.  But I beam at the knowledge that I can I can observe this ritual from a curious distance, and enjoy the pretty-smelling side that comes out the other end of the process, when it is roasting in the oven.

This gift comes just in time for my upcoming birthday.  And I have another one to boot:   Where last year I was clubbing in Florida with the fab girls of my family, this time I will be alone in my garden shoveling 4,000 pounds of mushroom compost.

Amazing what can change in a year.

A win-win all the way around

Sunday BBQ YES!

Before: A perfectly manageable size he says

After: Here's where I come in

Want change?  Excitement?  Adventure?  Romance?  Of course you do.  At least you say you do.  But you’re probably happier just to watch it on T.V.  Most of us say we want it, but once we manage to get it, we find it’s not what we really wanted at all.

To say something as simple as:  “I’ll be happy if my husband brings me home flowers,” is actually an impossible statement to make.  Will you really?  You wouldn’t have a single doubt why he brought you flowers out of the blue, for no reason at all?  What if he brought you nauseatingly-scented lilies, which you KNOW you’ve mentioned before that you don’t like?  What if they’re a wee bit wilted, like they were on the clearance rack?  What if he tossed them on the table without a look, instead of offering them to you sweetly with a kiss?

Politicians and lawyers depend on the fact that we are, as a species, brilliantly inconsistent.   This is true primarily because we are, and maybe I am even more than most, comically poor predictors of our own future feelings (thank you Kevin Hogan for making that my new mantra).

Still, when it comes to feelings, it is Proust I thank for making me first realize the power of circumstance.  No, not the power of memory, definitely the power of circumstance.  The very same moment can be, and always is, totally altered by every single other aspect, oftentimes with little matter of how huge or tiny:  Expect a war or economic crises will make it impossible for you to enjoy your anticipated New Year’s Eve celebration?  Doubtful.

But the state of your health, the presence or absence of a friend, the meal or beverages served, your mood, others’ moods, the weather, can totally ruin an otherwise perfect occasion.

So, on to my point.  It’s now nearly six months living in the sticks and despite my mind’s regular buffing, the sheen of country romance is already growing dull.  I know that’s pretty clear from reading the first blog to the latest, so since I have the illusion that I am actually being read, which is the same as being observed, (which of course makes all the difference, look at The Biggest Loser’s success rate!) I feel required to come up with a reason why, after only six months, I can feel the honeymoon period is already passing.

Is it simply that for romance there is a requirement of novelty?

I don’t like that answer, it sounds excessively shallow, and American.  I think I can come up with a better one here in a minute. . .

Take our little country “homestead”:  It’s not as if I like it any less.  Not at all.  Every day I still see something I haven’t seen before; I still marvel at some new plant or insect, or the beauty of some new view I hadn’t noticed.  It’s not that I’m already sick of the work, or as if I am not enthusiastically adding to the honey-do list:  a greenhouse and new flooring top my current demands.  And it’s not that I no longer look forward to my own upcoming projects, like fall tree planting and inventing a dozen new varieties of kim chi to process the excess cabbage sure to soon be overwhelming me all at once.   And it is still everyday a personal satisfaction to look out over our landscape and see we are slowly taming, but not overhauling it; our quaint view everyday suits us a bit better.  That still gives me great satisfaction because the carved out, hyper-planned communities, whether city or suburb will never qualify, to me, as ideal.

Still I have griped about more than a few annoyances and complications out here, in fact I’ve been bitching about them now for weeks, and those are just my issues.  Handy hubby’s got a whole long list of his own:  equipment constantly failing, important deliveries needed to complete a project lost for weeks in transit, flat tires, wrong tools, poor planning, and of course the inevitable Homer Simpson “d’oh!”

Sometimes to gauge whether I am happy in any one set of circumstances I ask myself, “if you won $50,000, or $100,000, or $200,000 or some other decent sum, not enough to change your life totally, but enough that if used wisely could make a huge difference in circumstances, what would you do differently?   Change careers?  Start a business?  Go back to school?  Move?  Consider kids?  Buy a designer wardrobe?”

When I can answer, “What I really want can’t be bought, or produced, or faked, or invented, or even learned, but only FELT,” then I know I’ve got myself on the right path.  I think Master Hogan would choke laughing on that one.

Through my office window I feel the gentle breeze coming up from the little valley, and I smell the rain soaked earth, and see the first traces of yellow and red in the leaves, and I am relieved.  I have no answers at all.  The world and all in it is still a huge, gorgeous mystery.  And feelings are the only way to truly experience that.

Maybe the romance lives not in novelty, but in wonder.  You feel it’s right out there, exactly what you’re looking for, just out your window.  But even when you know it’s there, you still keep looking out for the next want:  today love, tomorrow sex, next week security, this moment happiness, next month purpose.  It makes me think of juggling pins, because once you have managed to catch one, you look up to see there are still many more waiting to drop.

For a long time I have wanted purpose, and out this window is the only place I have ever seen a glimpse of it.  What that means exactly, and how that can be true, and whether it will ever pay the bills, I have absolutely no idea.  Call it inconsistent, unreliable feeling if you will, but I will continue to call it instinct.

It is with sex, as with money, or time, or choices, or influences, or friends, or zucchini: in surplus they become meaningless and while they are best left somewhat untamed and unregulated, still it is our nature to attempt to control every aspect of each of them. There is no real difference between enough and too much, because not enough is too scary to even consider.  That reality is surely what drives us to attempt to control scarcity and achieve surplus.  But don’t we forget the surplus causes distress too, sometimes to a nearly equal degree as the scarcity?

The melons, squash, okra, that were left to the fates while I perused intellectual interests in London are still haunting me.  Surplus is considered a success.  But why?  It comes with just as much baggage to handle.  In your career surplus money always leads to scarcity in time.   In the home my fridges are so stuffed that each mealtime requires an elaborate unloading of frozen packages to the counter to get to the desired item, always in the back. Every table, counter top, chair, or other viable surfaces are covered with melons and squash and okra and a half dozen culinary herbs, so that surrounding me at every moment is the visual image of my success, and then the nagging reminder that this all must be processed.   Melons, once adored, are threatening to give me a gag reflex on sight.

Success is over-rated, just like money, and most work actually.  I take double notice now of all those around me not only driven, but damn near obsessed with success.  I’m not trying to say there is not a certain joy in good work, yes even hard work, but who is to say what is good, and what is hard, and for that matter, how much of it we must do to claim we have achieved something?  Where others often see success, I am apt to call it ego.  Goal-setting, schedule keeping, personal growth, it’s a veritable carnival of over-achievers out there.  I feel I need to remind them all, and myself while I’m at it, that there really is no achievement in surplus.  The achievement should be rated not by the façade of success, but by how many others are able to appreciate and grow in that success with you.  And looking around my kitchen I see I have sorely failed somewhere along the season.

Do I control the surplus? What about the scarcity?  When the work, people, zucchini are in abundance we are stressed, but when they are rationed we are downright scared, bewildered, dismayed even.  Well, o.k., not for the zucchini.

Enough is enough!  I do not want to choose between the city or the country, intellectual pursuits or physical labor, kids or quiet, time or money.  I don’t even want to choose surplus or scarcity, because they both pretty much suck!   I do not have the nature to choose.  I am American after all; I should not have to choose.  I want the best of both worlds, I mean, all worlds.  I want connection with the natural world and connection with the man-made world and I do not understand why the status quo is continually insisting CHOOSE!

Why?  Why choose?  Why must I choose between two worlds that fit so logically together.  The city is inspiring.  It is a tribute to man’s illusion of control.  Function is paramount.  Control appears achievable.   Achievement rules.  But nature is true reality.  There is no ego.  There is NO control.  ALL control is illusion.  And achievement is far more relative, and personal.  Because, simple as it is, if nothing else fails, there is still the weather.

Weather is the environmental equivalent of emotion.  Feelings.   Both we are trained not to trust and have little skill in predicting.   But I am convinced they both have a far deeper logic in them than we realize.  In the modern world we believe logic can rule nature, but that’s like believing man has triumphed over weather, or emotion.  There are still tomatoes growing out of the gutter, but the book about the complexities of growing tomatoes costs $12, and the course will run you $250.  Is it even necessary to have so many books about growing tomatoes when so few people actually do it?  Man plays his achievement-driven game, but nature doesn’t play along.   She really couldn’t care less about all our big plans.

When there is a surplus of choice, I hate choice.  When there is a scarcity of it, well, what on earth is worse?  So it goes on and on, everyone’s afraid of scarcity, but surplus is no picnic either.