All I Need

All I need is another blog. I am having enough trouble keeping up with my other one, rowing back. But I began working on this other project too. My family's home in Mattapoisett, Massachusetts was a working farm when my mother grew up. They grew cranberries and raised chickens commercially and had a substantial garden for themselves. Not much remained of this when I was growing up. The cranberry bogs had been sold, the chicken houses were falling down, and the vegetable gardens were overgrown with brush.

But a cabinet in the basement was (and still is) filled with vegetables that my great-grandmother canned in the 1950's. This cabinet continues to fascinate me.

And one of my earliest memories is of getting stuck in a chicken box that I was crawling through during the demolition of the last chicken house. What remains of the farm does not function as intended.

It's kind of like growing up hearing your parents speak another language that they refuse to speak with you because they want you to assimilate. I knew that I had a farming background. It was also foreign. In the summer, we had a vegetable garden in order to add some fresh tomatoes to the table. But we didn't grow enough to live on, and we didn't can or freeze anything.

I've thought for a long time about this personal history. And this thinking has led me to consider the urban farming movement and a cultural resurgence of self-sustaining practices. I wonder how much this movement is fetishistic; I wonder if it's possible to go back to those self-sustaining practices -- if they can ever function as they did in the past or if the fact that we can choose to go to the grocery store  fundamentally changes the practice. I suppose that this doubt is related to my longer term research into the aestheticization of labor and craft practices. I consider art to be an aestheticized practice, not an aesthetic one.

I'd been thinking that once I finish the rowing-back project, I'd start gardening -- a growing-back project. But a few weeks ago, I realized that there is no reason to wait. In fact, there is such a steep learning curve, that it would be smart to start a test garden. So I've built raised beds and started some seeds. I'm dreaming of canning and of buying a deep-freeze. There is still a ton of work to do before it gets warm.