the educated serf

Yesterday I spent some time out at Meadow Rock Farm weeding garlic.  Susan, who lost her husband only a short while ago, is hard at work keeping the CSA running on her own.  Her aunt and uncle and their honey-colored bassett hound were there hooking up some truck-based watering systems, washing out bins, and just generally helping out.  I did not get to stay for hot meatloaf sandwiches, which is sad since it sounded better than sitting in the bleachers watching a soccer game with a lot of suburban live-through-your-kids types.   I'll be going back soon -- I have more garlic to untangle. My weeding skills are a little rusty -- especially when you're facing a plot that's had some heavy growth.  Thistle and dandelions, I was prepared for.  But wild geranium plants with carrot-like root structures were driving me crazy, especially since they like to grow right up against the garlic root bulbs.    I wish I could run back up there today and do the other two thirds of the plot.   ...

( image: gil and lisa listen intently; craig harris and abby on the right -- literally, not intellectually!) Every year for the last eleven years, I've gone to a conference sponsored by the Association for the Study of Food and Society and the Agriculture, Food, and Human Values Society.   Those names are a mouthful, but the issues discussed by academics and activists are practical, significant, and easy to digest if you care about the way we lead our everyday lives.    We discuss sustainable projects ranging from growing methods to labor to consumption, the historical and contemporary conditions that produce cuisines through the mixing of cultures and ingredients, the unequal distribution of goods, services, technology, and information that shapes what we grow and how we eat.    Well, the list goes on. I have just returned from this year's conference, which was in State College, PA, a town I've been visiting regularly since 1981 (in-law family).  Not as exciting as last ye...

(maybe some photos soon...i used real film in a 35mm camera.  slows things down a bit...) I bought some perennials on Monday.  Things with silver foliage. Straw-like flowers. A scented geranium.  Something with purple leaves.  Variegated sage. A lupine -- because two tiny ones came back on their own and they're too fragile to accomplish much bloom this year.  Cut them some slack -- give them a big sibling to do the work for this July and then next year they'll be big and this one will be setting up shop more permanently.   Last year I pulled out a corner of the endless pachysandra that wraps around our house and started planting a few things: a little mint and oregano and the lupine.  They got all gangly by fall but they came back this year with more heft.  Just today, I planted the whole corner full of what I bought.   I think it's because Zack rototilled a big area in the yard, serious about getting a vegetable garden in.  It messes with the pristine yard effect, which I ...

This is a picture of Erik Selby ,  farmer and  radio announcer.  He and his wife Susan  and his father-in-law ran a beautiful CSA called Meadow Rock Farm in Butler, PA.  Erik passed away suddenly last week and I am saddened by it. As writers, there are certain issues that draw us in but remain elusive.  To speak about knowing someone and about loss is to enter into the realm of the cliched and the overwrought.   For me, it's almost impossible to write without considering the ontological, especially knowing the Other, so I've got to enter that fray each day armed with descriptions, new and old.  But loss is complicated in a different way.  The losses in my stage of life, in my geographic, social, and cultural context are different from the losses of those who live with war or poverty or other hardships.   I quote at length from a story by Jane Smiley, who has chronicled the kinds of worlds I often inhabit:   ..it seems to me that I have arrived at the age of grief. Others arriv...

I just love this.  I don't have the original photographer info -- it was circulated in a email -- but I wish I could get in touch with this person and tell them how much I love this.   Anyone who's ever had a baby give you that kind of kiss knows that this is one happy pig.   And having hugged a few pigs, I can say that the baby is clearly blissful, too.   Pigs are good creatures.  H1N1 really should be named  the "Humans are disease-carrying messes" virus.   My apologies for not having more to say lately. It's all being absorbed by the great big end of the semester/finish a million projects writing machine.  

Hey! Take your shoes off!  Yes, well, it's still mud season here in western PA (and I'm sure it's just barely that in western MA), but Tom's Shoes, the great company that sends shoes to developing countries (NICE new beautiful shoes, too, not just your worn out Nikes...), is sponsoring an event on the 16th -- it's go shoeless day.    I explained the event in detail on the Green Connoisseur Blog on April 14th (today, underneath the morel mushroom mention...) so take a look and consider kicking off your shoes while your tooling around the office, walking over to lunch, or hanging out on campus.  And if you've got the bucks, Tom's shoes come in an amazing variety of colors, shapes, styles (vegan, less vegan, yoga-inspired, and so on), and for each pair you buy, one pair gets donated to a kid somewhere who might get to school and back without risking infection and parasite-borne diseases through their feet.   

If I were able to do this more, pretty much every single post would be about my friends.  It's no accident that somehow the things I write about are, underneath, really about how we strive for these relationships despite all the obstacles.    I don't want to write about how much I miss the community of people who held me together in Pelham and Amherst.  It's one of the other critical aspects of my life where words fail.  I have been working hard on finding local friends. I'm doing okay at it. Not great, mind you, but okay.  The cultural divide is sometimes uncrossable, the geography of suburbia unforgiving, and the weirdness of academia infuriating.   The other day I compared it to how my African American students feel when they are in the minority in class and everyone expects them to "speak" for the black experience.   As. if. there. were. just. one.   Through all this, I am unaccountably blessed (and I almost never use that word) with a far-flung network of...