urban homesteader before her time

My apologies for having been away from my blog–life intervenes, and like going to the gym, once you get out of a habit it takes energy to overcome inertia and get back in the habit.  So, time to get back in the habit of blogging.

For the past month, I’ve had an article sitting on my desk about a woman named Harriet Fasenfest, who owns a business called Preserve in her Northeast Portland home, teaching classes in such topics as garden planning, canning, pickling, cheese making, and “ordering meat directly from farmers”. The recession has made all these old fashioned skills trendy. 

I’ve always been interested in these things.  I remember skipping down the halls of my junior high because my twelve week session of home ec class was about to begin, a rare pleasure point in a dismal day.  At the age of 11 we were expected to master such tasks as making a basic white sauce and sewing a machine-smocked apron.  When I got to high school, I asked my counselor about continuing in the advanced home ec program, which included such classes as gourmet cooking.  “Oh, no, that’s not for students like you!” she exclaimed (ie smart, college-bound). Home ec classes would soon disappear, a casualty first of the feminist movement and then of budget cuts.

When I met my future husband (at age 17) I told him about my very untrendy dream of having six children, cooking all the family’s food from scratch and sewing everyone’s clothes.  We’ve had four children and I do cook all our food from scratch; fortunately for them I do not sew their clothes(though I do knit and sew the occasional household item). Until now all this has earned in the outside world is curiosity.  What earns money and prestige (especially if you’re smart and college bound) is trafficking in abstractions.  A successful woman works ten hour days at her law firm so she can rush by the yuppie deli and buy dinner prepared by more lowly folks.  If I write about the vitamin A content of leafy greens–now that’s work–if I grow my own leafy greens and make them into a salad with homemade dressing–that’s an affectation to pursue in my leisure time.

I even found that stay-at-home moms got caught up in the same mentality, rushing about and processing their children through countless scheduled activities as if they headed up a family corporation, rather than staying at home and , God forbid, “homemaking”.  To chauffeur your child to cookie-baking class is a a valuable use of your time; to stay at home with that same child baking cookies is mindless drudgery.  When I lived on Long Island, I had to drive a half hour (to a less affluent area) to buy so much as a spool of thread.  When I mowed our postage stamp lawn with a power mower, people came up to me asking a) what it was and b) had my husband lost his job because we obviously couldn’t afford to hire a gardener.  Sometimes I entertained a fantasy:  if some apocalyptic collapse of industrial civilization happened, what would all these ladies with mile long nails, and their husbands, also with manicured hands, do?  When we moved to Portland we met far more like-minded people, but generally speaking, the culture of frenzy still prevailed.

No wonder our society completely lost touch with where their food and other goods (clothes, furniture, toys) come from as all these necessities of life appeared magically on a store shelf.  As I noted in a previous post, even the “resource economy” was dismissed as a thing of the past.  Now progressive people lived in the age of the “information economy”.  They went to college so they would never get their hands dirty.  Trouble is, we don’t eat computer chips. Plus all this abstracted frenzy rarely leads to the same primal satisfaction one gets from creating something tangible that is clearly linked to meeting basic needs.

 

Now a whole generation (or two) are going to learn this lesson the hard way and pickling home grown cucumbers is suddenly chic. Fasenfest makes a very incisive comment when she notes that we should think of ourselves not so much as consumers, but as producers.  I’ve always hated the word consumer, the way it reduces human beings to a greedy carnivorous maw, the way it defines us only by what we buy, what we use up and throw away. Sure, we all consume things, but all of us should produce things too.  The economic exchange should be one based on trade.

I still like making things. I still feel startlingly ignorant of most of the substances and devices I rely on each day.  I’d like to learn how to make more things, or at least understand how they work.  I must say, though, that if I wanted to order meat from a farmer I’d simply call up and do so, and I wish I trafficked enough in abstractions to be the first one to think that people would actually want to take a class about it.