Turkey Dinner

I'm roasting a turkey today. It's been in Abbe's deep freeze since this time last year, but Greg picked it up after yoga Tues. night, and about eight of us are gathering for dinner this evening. The bird hails from Marionville, MO, actually out in the sticks near Marionville, raised by sweet Candi's dad. I placed it on the scale this morning, and it weighed 22 lbs., but I think my scale weighs on the low side by two or three pounds. It's a big turkey.

Candi told us about her father's turkey flock last Oct., and he planned to butcher them right before Thanksgiving. We paid our $50 and she delivered the birds a few days before T-day. We usually host the Radfords and the Kapps for the big holiday, but last year was a smaller gathering, and I cooked a smaller turkey. I kept intending to retrieve the one Abbe had in her deep freeze for me, but the occasion never arose. She reminded me about the bird-on-ice over lunch the other day, and it seemed like a good time to make an occasion.

I'm remembering a scene shortly after Thanksgiving last year when Justine described to us girls the preparation, cooking and eating of her bird from Candi's dad. With hands gripped and arms rolling, she described the massaging of the butter, herbs and spices into the body. Downright sensual. Sniffing the air and waving the imagined smells toward her, she recreated the rich aromas of the roasting meat. We laughed when she told how she almost dived for the trash can when her sister-in-law, after they had started the gravy, poured the remaining pan drippings into the bag discarding the golden fat and flavorful juices from an organic, heritage turkey. Sacrilege! I've been looking forward to cooking this bird ever since.

It's not just the promise of the delicious, organically and locally grown meal we're going to enjoy tonight. It's also the connective threads, the stories, the personalities and love that swirl around my community and my life. From Candi's turkey raising dad and the kale for tonight's salad grown by haiku writing farmer Mark to Jane's tomato basil jam for our bread and the craft beer we'll drink courtesy of our favorite local brewer Jeff, everything is connected. Very little enters our kitchen anonymously. Our food and drink comes from our friends and others putting their labor and attention into providing goods with joy and vitality and care. I taste it in every bite and sip. Wish you could be here, because there will be plenty.

Nicole Krauss on Love

My latest read pleased on several levels. First, the title is irresistible, The History of Love. Who doesn’t think the history of love could reveal some insight into the mystery? It captured my attention.

The author Nicole Krauss tells the story of two young loves from pre-World War II Poland who became separated after the German invasion. The story is revealed through several characters, each talking about his or her circumstances, thoughts, feelings, hopes. Slowly it dawns on you that these people have a common thread. I started flipping back to previous chapters not wanting to miss any clues to precisely how they might be connected. I took to reading long sections at a time rather than a chapter here and there.

The speakers were quirky and human, their voices rich and insightful. Once Leo, the main character, remembers a conversation with his love, Alma:

“If I had a camera,” I said, “I’d take a picture of you every day. That way I’d remember how you looked every single day of your life.” “I look exactly the same.” “No, you don’t. You’re changing all the time. Every day a tiny bit. If I could, I’d keep a record of it all.” “If you’re so smart, how did I change today?” “You got a fraction of a millimeter taller, for one thing. Your hair grew a fraction of a millimeter longer. And your breasts grew a fraction of a—“ “They did not!” “Yes, they did.” “Did NOT.” “Did too.” “What else you big pig?” “You got a little happier and also a little sadder.” “Meaning they cancel each other out, leaving me exactly the same.” “Not at all. The fact that you got a little happier today doesn’t change the fact that you also became a little sadder. Every day you become a little more of both, which means that right now, at this exact moment, you’re the happiest and the saddest you’ve ever been in your whole life.” “How do you know?” “Think about it. Have you ever been happier than right now, lying here in the grass?” “I guess not. No.” “And have you ever been sadder?” “No.” “It isn’t like that for everyone, you know. Some people, like your sister, just get happier and happier every day. And some people, like Beyla Asch, just get sadder and sadder. And some people, like you, get both.” “What about you? Are you the happiest and saddest right now that you’ve ever been?” “Of course I am.” “Why?” “Because nothing makes me happier and nothing makes me sadder than you” (Krauss, 90-91).

Krauss’s prose matches the bitter sweet epiphany that fate often lands us where we didn’t expect to be, and still, her characters go forward with hearts open letting love lead the way.

I realized I could have read the book that way too, not looking back so much for clues but trusting that everything would come together in the end.  A great story and a personal exercise in faith. Check it out.

Krauss, Nicole. The History of Love. New York: W.W. Norton Co., 2005.

  

Farm to Table Life

                                            photo by Sam Lines

We attended a local farm to table dinner at Adam and Melissa Millsap’s Urban Roots Farm recently. The Millsaps began developing their farm a few years ago in one of the city’s economically depressed and socially marginal areas. The farm spans four lots on a main neighborhood street and extends probably 150 feet in the back. There’s a greenhouse, lush garden beds of squash, chives, basil, greens, tall mounds of black compost with a Tonka truck or two, a pile of rocks excavated from the garden beds, a remaining row of apartments kept for interns participating in the World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms program (wwoofers) and three twenty foot tall metal frames, one open and two covered in opaque plastic. These high tunnels, Adam explained, are renowned for extending the growing season and protecting plants from harsh sun.  

Throughout the pre-dinner tour, children tore around riding tricycles and playing with the dogs and chickens. Melissa carried her cherubic baby boy in a snugli, and by the time the last question was answered, he had fallen fast asleep. The Millsaps and several of their friends and colleagues have young children, and the farm seems to draw the neighborhood children as well.

When dinner was served, we delighted in sweet potato pizza topped with peppery arugula, baby crudités with yogurt dip, vegetable soup, roasted potatoes, grilled carrots, organic local beef kabobs and fresh raspberry dessert. We also sampled new beer flavors from Mother’s Brewery down the street. It was a beautiful Ozarks fall evening, just cool enough, and local musicians played guitar and sang during the meal and into the night.

Our dinner companions are not newcomers to good local food. One recently launched a school garden project at the high school where she teaches biology; one has been writing about food in America for 20 years; another teaches in the hospitality department of a local university, and another cooks like a master chef. My friends and I have sought the nearest, freshest, best tasting food sources for a long time, and now those resources are better than ever. The Millsaps and an ever growing group of dedicated local farmers supply our farmer’s markets and farm stores selling local eggs, dairy products, meats, vegetables, fruits and preserves. In the past 10 years, my family has gone from our own garden produce making up the majority of local food on our plates to now being able to supplement with enough local foods to comprise 80% of our groceries. We’ve shrunk our footprint considerably.

The importance of everyone seeking such change came home to me a few days later at my reading circle. We’d read The Dirty Life by Kristin Kimball, a memoir about the author’s and her husband’s adventure in creating Essex Farm, an organic farm in upstate New York, one of the country’s first community supported agriculture (CSA) co-ops. Locals buy shares in the farm’s bounty for a weekly box of seasonal goods and produce. Kimball makes the work sound grueling but the emotional payoff huge. She is as much in love with the farm as she is with her good looking and hard working husband. Her experience seems soul satisfying and very romantic. 

The reading circle conversation meandered from the book’s details to the difficulties getting farm land into the hands of young people. We considered how starting a vegetable farm from scratch was probably a job for the young, strong and passionate, but everyone agreed upon the importance of local farms in the sustainability of not only our town but of the nation and the world.

Susan, one of our members, works for a local environmental firm, and one of their contracts is to make EPA inspections of industrial farming operations in the area. We live within a hundred miles of some concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) in Arkansas that produce something like half of the nation’s processed chicken. I had learned this a long time ago from my food writer friend, but according to Susan’s eyewitness account, it ain’t pretty. And beyond that, it’s mucking up our ground water, polluting our streams and fouling our air. Apparently the sewage lagoons overflow during big rains, and besides the bacteria, that stuff is loaded with antibiotics, hormones and who knows what else. And how do you feel about a rotting pile of chicken byproducts? That image keeps me happily paying a dollar more a pound for organic chicken from Autumn Olive Farm near my house.


Of course it’s not just meat production that is unsustainable. It’s corporate food production across the board. With the chemicals, farm politics, monocultures, genetic modifications, oil consumption, high fructose corn syrup, e-coli and empty calories tainting the food system, the only ones benefitting are Cargill, Monsanto and other big conglomerates. That system has to go.

Would it be radical change? Yes. Would it require drastic changes in the way we obtain food? Yes.  But would we dine at wild flower adorned folding tables on the farm that grows our food? Would we get to know the couple that milks the Guernsey for our cheese? And would watching all these things grow and produce and die tie us more closely to the earth and the cycle of our own lives? Yes, and once we realized what we’ve given up for the past 60 years, we’d see it for the blessing it’s always been. Farm to table is a beautiful and healthy way to live.

                                                photo by Sam Lines

Genesis of a Tattoo

This summer our friends Sarah and Greg visited from Portland. When they arrived, I noticed something new about Sarah, a tattoo on the inside of her left forearm. It was a line from the Mary Oliver poem Wild Geese. In old fashioned, typewriter Times script, the tattoo reads, "You do not have to be good."


I was familiar with the poem as I too am a devoted Oliver fan. Here it is:


Wild Geese
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting--
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.


I thrilled at the brilliance of Sarah's tattoo. Such permission! Such freedom. Such belonging. I instantly wanted one. I couldn't stop thinking about it, and I shared this information with my friend Abbe, also an Oliver fan. She liked the idea of the tattoo placement but thought the choice of text to be a bit bold. She also reminded me the procedure would be painful.

The pain factor ups the ante a bit. A tattoo requires a certain passion or fool heartiness, I suppose, depending on how you view it. I am pondering my motivation and weighing the gesture. In many ways I feel as if I stand upon a precipice in life, no longer young but not yet old, doors closing on opportunities and I haven't stepped up to the threshold, relationships long on history and short on enthusiasm, patterns falling away and leaving a void; what is the next incarnation of Barb? I feel in some small way, I could follow a branded message through the keyhole, that I could reflect something essentially true, and it would help me, comfort me. The tattoo would be a bond with myself, intimate and self affirming. Or crazy? I prefer Abbe's word, bold.

Of course there's the question of whether to duplicate Sarah's act. I have yet to land on a tattoo possibility I like as much as the line from Wild Geese. Perhaps because I have in my soul "walked on my knees a hundred miles through the desert, repenting;" I have experienced despair and realized "the world goes on." I believe with every fiber of my being that true salvation lies in the majesty of "the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain, ...the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers..." and the reminder from calling geese that we are a part of the beautiful, holy mix. Just as we are.

                                                                      Photo by Brett Miller