MamaStories

Do you think about the future? Do you wonder what it will be like? Or do you live like it’s always going to be the way it has been?

~

I found at least 5 entries like this one, all in drafts, abandoned. As I prepare for the growing season with more resolve and urgency than ever before now that my apprenticeship is over (ha!), I need to line up my motivations like a general does her troops. This is just a declaration, not a proof or demonstration: others are supplying the data much more clearly and comprehensively than I ever could.

~

1. We’ve got problems

I believe that sometime in my lifetime, and certainly in the lifetime of my daughter, life will be changed, drastically. This is because three changes are already happening.

• Peak Oil

(I believe that) there will be a chronic shortage in oil production and thus cheap oil. This year, in 20 years, I don’t know, but in my lifetime. This will not just affect the heating of our houses and our trips to the grocery store, but also the delivery trucks’ trips to the grocery store, and the farm equipment that “grows” our produce, and the factory equipment that put together all those plastic containers for our shampoos, and the pharmaceuticals producing our medicine, etc. (cf. The Oil Drum)

• Economic Depression

(I believe that) increasing debt, decreasing value of money, hyperinflation, the precariousness of globalization and the lie of never-ending growth will soon mean the end of any value to our national currency, the end of imports, the closing of  businesses and banks, rampant unemployment, the end of the middle class as we know it, and the cessation of public services. (cf. The Crash Course)

• Climate Change and Overpopulation

(I believe that) the Earth is changing and that it’s too late to do anything about it (if we ever could), that several tipping points have been already been (b)reached. The effect is the disturbance of the climate pattern upon which our agriculture and settlements developed and rely, and thus a growing difficulty for growing food and maintaining our towns and cities. This means a growing number of climate refugees and massive immigrations of our immense world population.

All three are interrelated. I suspect Economic Depression will be the first step, soon exacerbated by Peak Oil, then, more gradually but much more insistently, Climate Change. (Read also, John Michael Greer’s “Endgame” and Richard Heinberg’s Museletter).

~

2.  Collapse

I believe that even just one and certainly all of these events together will lead to collapse. I don’t believe it will be as bad as zombies or The Road, but I foresee some hard times and, at the very least, the end of the way we live our lives today.

I can’t say that it is my hope that this won’t happen. Don’t get me wrong, it would be great if it didn’t. If, for instance, we found some renewable, clean and omnipresent source of energy, freely and democratically available,  capable of powering our fleet of vehicles and our agricultural and factory equipment. Oh, and if it could also reverse the climate change tipping points… Sounds like heaven on earth to me, but I’ll just go ahead and prepare for if that doesn’t happen.

And it’s not like we have a lot of time. Collapse is already happening. Maybe not to me, or you, but to many in this country, in the world, and to whole countries even, to some degree or another. But for reasons that will become clear, here I just want to talk about myself, my family, and my neighborhood.

~

3. Hope

Still, I have hope. I hope that (for myself and my community, at least), collapse will be gradual enough. I hope it’s not a precipice, but a staircase, and that at each step enough people will (have to) take sufficient action to “catch up” on the decline. I hope that we can descend gracefully: without famine, violence, the destruction of culture and civilization…

A funny thing, though, this hope. I hope it’s reasonable (unlike “aw, come on, nothing’s going to happen!”). It will require hard work and sacrifices,  but we could pull it off. And to those who say “forget it, it’s too late, TS is really going to HTF,” I say “I hear you,  but you know what? I have no choice but to hope. My child leaves me no choice.” I must do my best to make my hope, her hope come true.

~

4. Starting descent

How do I do this? We, myself and my immediate family, have already started to power down. For instance, this month, February 2010, is our 16th month of the Riot for Austerity. In the Riot we try to decrease our consumption of oil, water, electricity, and consumer goods, and our production of waste, all to10% of the US national average. It’s tough! We’re almost there with certain things, but not anywhere near 10% with others.

We changed our eating habits: less meat, less food, more bulk, dry goods, and very little eating out. We are establishing a large food garden, with a hoop house for a winter harvest, and hopefully a beehive soon, and chickens. We work on our food storage and emergency supplies. The immediate goal is to grow and store enough and a healthy variety of food to feed two families, and to plant an extra row for the hungry. You can find more details of our lifestyle changes on the “What We Do” page.

Why are we doing this, making these sacrifices in the time and the land that is still plenty? Do I  think it’s going to make a difference to climate change? I’m not that naive.

• But I do it out of principle: to take more than what one needs is to be greedy and bad for the soul.
• I do it because, when I make something myself, with my own time and genius and effort, I take responsibility for it and I take care of it as a thing that I love. When I buy it, I just get the responsibility, like an extra price tag, easily snipped off. I “take care” of it only because it cost me so much – or, more frequently, I don’t take care of it at all, because it cost me so very little. I want to take control, responsibility, and care.
• I want to be prepared – practically and psychologically – for a future with less cheap oil, less income, less security, more manual labor, the need for different kinds of skills, etc.
• I do it to set up a model for others, for when circumstances will force them, too, to adopt such a lifestyle. That’s my next point.

~

5. A model

We take these and many other actions as an average (middle class) family, with an average income and debt. We can’t bring in the big machines to flatten the land and mow down all the trees that shade our vegetable garden. We can’t tear down our 1950’s ranch and put a zero energy house in its place. We can’t buy the $1000 compost toilet, the photovoltaics, the hybrid car. And that’s good, because that makes our place an attainable model for anyone in our quite average situation around here.

As people start realizing they can no longer afford the $300 electricity bill, the $4000 oil bill, or the cable subscription, we can show them that it’s possible both practically and psychologically, for them to descend without hurting and actually even gaining something. For we don’t need television and video games to entertain ourselves, and digging in the garden is better exercise than the gym, and eating from that garden is healthier than take-out. I hope to demonstrate by example that living with a little less at a time does not need to hurt.

~

6. Will that be all?

Do I think that what we are doing and working on – this 90% reduction in consumption of this and that, this 50% (?) self-reliance in food, this reskilling, etc. – will be all that is required of us?

Not by a long shot! But as a first step it’s the perfect preparation for the second step.

Which is? I don’t know. Ask me on a good day, then ask me again on a bad day. All I know is that what my family and I are doing right now is not what will be required, at some point, of all of us, and that after that, there will be even more.

Think of it. When oil hits $5, or $10, or $50 a gallon? When the shelves in the grocery store stay empty? When we are freezing in our houses? When half the people on the street are unemployed, and one third is homeless to boot? When a shift in climate wipes out a major crop? When the majority of us can no longer ignore or evade the situation, because our money can’t buy anything? Now we’re talking collapse.

There are times when I think the worst and that head-for-the-hills feeling flares up. When, in essence, I lose hope. But I squash it. Many reasons make it impossible for my family to pack up and dig in. It wouldn’t work for me to want to live as if collapse has already happened. It would wreck my family and isolate me. That’s not what I’m aiming for.

So if in the eyes of some I take it too fast, and in the eyes of others I take it too slow, so be it. I hope I’m hitting that golden mean, but I also know that mean is sliding down as we speak, until at some point “too much” and “too little” collapse into one.

In the meantime I hope the forerunners can be helpful, by their example, to the masses descending behind them. But if there’s suddenly going to be a whole lot of people barreling down that ever steeper and narrower staircase, it would be good for those who are ahead to install a railing as they go. Or else we’re all going to end up in a big, crushed heap at the bottom.

~

That railing is relocalization, but about that, next time. It takes a lot out of me to write this, and it takes a long time to write, because I know that most of you don’t agree, and I feel I have to be argumentative, on the defensive, and watch my words. While I just want to say it like it is for me, so we know where I stand.

Amie’s idea of cleaning up

As I was vacuuming I deplored (again) how often the work of a homemaker is lost. It is lost when half an hour later the flour gets spilled and a day later the dust bunnies are convening under the sofa again. It is lost when the dishwasher is full – or empty – again. It is lost when we step into the made bed, put on a clean sweater, finish the meal… And it is lost all over again when at the end of the day I tell myself:

“I didn’t get anything done again!”

Usually the latter refers to the work on my novel and my garden. I clearly don’t reckon all that invisible work that doesn’t get paid, or appreciated even by the one who does it.

But I feel I want to mark it. It is a large part of my life, after all.  I played with the idea of recording it in the blog, but how monotonous that would be, for reader and writer alike! Monotony – doing the same thing, over and over again – is the essence of this work, after all, no matter the tunes we dance and sing to.

So once in a while I write it down in my handwritten journal. Recently:

Woke up, got myself and Amie dressed. Breakfast. Dropped off Amie at preschool. Cleared breakfast table. Made beds.  Dusted furniture. Vacuumed whole house. Emptied dishwasher. Filled dishwasher. Handwashed big pots and pans. Wiped stove and kitchen counters. Picked up Amie. Prepared and ate lunch. Cleared table. Emptied dishwasher. Filled (laundry) washer, ran it, emptied it. Hung laundry to dry. Moved some of the woodpile. Refilled wood basket. Snack time. Played “Max” ten times. Prepared dinner, set table, ate. Cleared table. Put leftovers away. Soaked beans and split peas for soup tomorrow. Dishes. Got Amie ready for bed. Read story and stay with her until she’s asleep. Cup of tea and write this. Got nothing done today!

I can only imagine how much less I would get done if I also had to drive my child(ren) to extracurricular activities, and/or if I had to get to the gym and hairdresser and…

But of course that wasn’t all of my day. For instance, I played “Max” ten times because Amie insisted we get all the animals home safe, and I got to spend most of that time marveling at my daughter’s efforts to reconcile the lives of the chipmunk, the squirrel and the mouse (and their babies, waiting for them in the tree) with the hunger of Max, who would get sick if he only had treats and got nothing wild to eat, and maybe the mouse was worth sacrificing because it has only one baby, whereas the bird has three…

Still, at the end of it, that’s how my day felt. The journal entry may not be a statement of (all) the facts, but of the feeling of accomplishment, which was zilch. In that sense it is a true entry. And in that sense, it has to be recorded, once in a while.

During the Transition Training we watched a lot of images and videos of Transition Initiatives, and at first I watched them with mixed feelings of joy and anxiousness. My heart sank because I inevitably thought: “I can’t make that happen.”

That sinking feeling stems from the fact that, though I arrived here over 11 years ago, studied, married, bought a house and had a child here, I still don’t feel at home. Why? Not because of the people around me: I have found each and every one of my colleagues, neighbors and friends – Americans or not – to be sincerely welcoming. So it must be me.

I always assumed children have a natural sense of being at home, for I myself, as a child, felt at home, without ever a shadow of a doubt. But was it because of something a child does or is, or was it because of what my parents did and modeled? Or was it because of the place?

The place was Antwerp (Belgium), a city within half an hour’s drive of the city where my grandparents and aunts and uncles all lived. A place where my family can trace and place our ancestry as far back as the 1700s. And a place with a culture in which “migrating” is the exception. You see, Belgians don’t leave Belgium: the emigration rate is less than a percent. And Belgium is a small country, about the size of Maryland, so children “leave” (for college, or to live) to within at most a two hours’ drive away from their parents. In my family I was the third (out of four now) in the span of two generations to move abroad, which makes my family exceptionally migratory.

Let’s put this in context. The United Nations Commission on Population and Development concluded in 2006 that only 3% of the world population is an international migrant (with most migrants moving from developing to developed countries). The kind of mobility within the United States that makes for big moves, in contrast, is high: the Census of 2000 determined that, within 5 years, no less than 8.42% of its respondents had moved to another state and an additional 2.86% to a foreign country. That number has in all probability gone up in the last couple of years.

So let’s just say that my Amie is seeing a home very different from what I saw as a kid. We see family once or twice a year, not every weekend. Mama and Baba have strange accents – and so does she, insisting on “woh-T-er”. Mama and Baba can’t vote and they don’t know how to negotiate certain communal systems. So I am afraid that Amie will not know what “home” is, or that she will call “home” something that I would call but a weak version of my own rich childhood memory of home.

And so I must ask myself: can I, dare I, make this place my home? What if home means not just the core family of the three of us, not just lengthy visits (visits: that says it all) from grandparents and aunts and cousins, not just local traditions with good, good friends that we see often… but also the wider culture of a hometown?

The Training helped me realize that I should make this hometown happen, for myself, for Amie, and that it is possible. That this what a Transition Initiative could mean to me, my family, and the people in my community: not just becoming more resilient in the face of peak oil, climate change, and economic crisis, but first and foremost what our trainer called  “becoming indigenous toyour place”: coming home.

{Previously, about Transition: the giving of gifts}

I discovered Rob Hopkins’ book, The Transition Handbook, about two years ago and it immediately struck me as the right approach to our problems – climate change, peak oil and economic crisis (all bound up together, of course) – and to our solutions (grassroots, positive, pro-active, hopeful, inclusive).

It still took me a long time to try to act upon my enthusiasm. I tried to set up a meeting in my town to see who would be interested (and no one showed up, which I ascribe entirely to my awful advertising skills). This debacle did result in making a friend in a nearby town, and he urged me to take the Transition Training. I signed up and attended a training in Boston, led by Tina Clarke, about three weeks ago.

That’s the background. Now where do I start?

~

I’ll start with a conversation I had today with a mom at Amie’s school. It was the first time we talked and we sparked. As the kids played we spoke very passionately and openly about what moves us. From issues at school and global social justice we bounced into… peak oil, climate change, the end of the world as we know it. Only, I didn’t phrase it like that. I called it “this terribly exhilarating and terribly frightful time when we must all be heroes and activists and rise to the occasion of saving the world. Just here, in X [name of our town].”

What was that all about? Where was my usual hopelessness, helplessness? It’s still there (ha, I should be so lucky), but I am rising above it by stepping outside myself into a local community. There I can make a difference: “think globally, act locally”. So I explained:

See, these are the facts, and I laid them all out (my attitude changed, not my brain): oil is in everything and it has peaked, but not in time to stop the burning of it from frying the planet, our health, our spirits, and this economy is just going to get worse. This part took about 1 minute. What took longer was the “this is what I am doing about it” part.

I started with myself: I am taking back my food and my health, by gardening, by buying local, by keeping chickens (soon), by beekeeping (soon), by Independence Days, and I am lowering my consumption, by Rioting for Austerity, by Freezing My Buns, etc.

But that’s not enough: now I want to re-localize my life to within my community, by promoting community gardening and orcharding, or by organizing workshops on how to build with local materials, or by relearning to have fun and make art together, or by helping to retrofit and weatherstrip houses, or by setting up emergency supplies, or by giving frugality and sewing workshops, or by starting a bulk food co-op, or a local currency, etc.

I put it so that, even if my friend didn’t “believe in” peak oil or climate change (terms I had mentioned just that once), she could still find one or two items on my list that would appeal to her (thus the “or”s). She could still see how our town, the place she invested in and where she is raising her kids, would be better for it.

~

That’s what finally dawned on me at the Training. That’s what I think Transition is really about:

• all-inclusive: whoever shows up is the right person
• non-prescriptive, non-directive: give people access to good information and trust them to make the right decisions
• Let it go where it wants to go, which is where the community takes it

As our wonderful trainer said:

Transition happens when someone says: I have a gift (any gift) to give to the community. And the reply is: Be welcome! And thank you! And here is what I can give to you!

As such Transition is a “movement” only in the most basic sense of a change. It is not a “group” but, simply, community. Those who start it and guide it somewhat aren’t “leaders” but facilitators. It is not a “label” in the pejorative sense but only very basically a name, because it is facilitated by an organization that shares its experiences and its tools – free of charge,  run with ‘em and let us know where they are taking you so we can learn from you.

~

This realization was important for me. I abhor conflict. I was scared to be a Transition initiator and facilitator in my town because I foresaw people confronting me on “Peak Oil” and “Climate Change”. “Prove it!” they’d say. How could I? [shudder]. But now I realize it’s not about peak oil or climate change, it’s about Community.

So, you deny climate change? That’s fine, but can you show me how to sew this quilt? Or what are your ideas on a local currency? Or do you know what’s wrong with my lettuce? Or… [trails off having too many things to do to stand around arguing, already!]

I set up the kindling dryer – very simply the old soil screen under the shed roof. Amie and I hauled some more kindling, because I figured once it starts snowing it won’t be visible and for the picking anymore.

I also finished the putting to bed of the beds. As I was looking around when I was done, I thought I would share some pictures and show you parts of our property that I rarely show. Click on the thumbnails to see the image larger.

This is the view North (from the Front”, see below):

• three large beds under straw, two smaller beds to the right, which will be mainly berries and herbs. We hope the grass corridor in between will withstand the runoff erosion (the grass didn’t take too well) until we fix the problem next Spring (see below).
• There is a very large bed in front of the house (16 x 4 feet) for herbs.
• The veg garden (hoop house still without plastic) lies to the West of  the house.
• Behind the house is a large backyard, which is just trees, forest floor (no grass to speak of), and a playhouse. It is entirely enclosed by a chain link fence, and that’s where I hope to keep the chickens.
• Around that fence runs a strip of “wild”  area, home to squirrels, chipmunks, birds, snakes, foxes and deer, and behind that runs a lane 0f conservation land that forms a great wildlife corridor.

Above is a 180 degree view, from East (driveway) to West (veg garden) – so curl the image around your field of vision.  I labeled it so click on the image for a better view. From East to West:

• loam under blue tarp on parking lot
• the driveway runs from behind it down to the street
• a “wild” thicket  which in Summer provides a lot of privacy, the mosses there are beautiful and we’re leaving it as it is: maybe a narrow path with a small moss-covered stone bench hidden in the thicket.
• I drew in the proposed ditch which will carry runoff and rainwater to a small wetland below
• the two terraced beds you see to the left in the picture above
• grass pathway that leads down to
• the “Front”: septic leach field, bad subsoil, choked with weeds and mostly shaded: our greatest design challenge
• three beds you see to the right in the picture above
• more “wild” thicket where we could grow mushrooms
• two tree stumps that we’ll make into a bench
• more wild area behind that, where the horse path runs all the way to the back of the property
• vegetable garden

…

I know, it’s quiet here. First of all, we’ve been ill – Amie is much better now; we’re now even doubting whether it was the flu at all. Secondly I took the Training for Transition last weekend and I am still exhausted and exhilarated – too much so that I can’t yet write about it.

Today we are going to Thanksgiving with friends. It’s the first time in our 11 years in the States that we’ve been invited to have Thanksgiving with Americans. (Not that I was waiting for that; the coincidence just occurred to me.) I think we’ll add something to the party: our friendship and gratitude, of course, as well as an Indian (DH) and a European (myself) and the peaceful combination of those two (Amie).

I’ll be back soon, I promise. Happy Thanksgiving!

Wow, Sharon has another great blog entry up: Dreaming a Life, about radical lifestyle changes – “whether they come from adapting to a deeply damaged climate or from addressing the crisis, whether they come from adapting to depletion or from enduring it.”

Sharon points out that much of the political unrest we are seeing comes from the fact that people are realizing that they have been lied to, that they can’t “have all the things they want – a future for their children and an affluent present now.”  Sharon also warns that “unless a true and comprehensible story is offered, false ones will be taken up, and used as bludgeons.”

She goes into why we like being lied to, why we make it so easy to be lied to, and why it takes so long for us to finally see the lie. We are constantly fed dreams not of our own making, and we aren’t autonomous enough to dream differently, creative enough to make our own dreams. We “imagine ourselves as unique because we choose among a large range of commercial options – we can decorate our kitchen with baby ducks, pigs or flowers; can choose between coke or pepsi, can decorate our bodies within a range of a dozen or so arbitrated ‘personal styles.’  Given the sheer number of commercial choices, it is perhaps no wonder that we imagine that this is sufficient to constitute an identity and a dream.”

And, she points out, the “green lifestyle” we are offered is just part of that manufactured dream. It does not constitute the radical lifestyle change that will come for all of us, because “there will never be a society in which everyone can have a personal hybrid”, and because “even the rich having them is a disaster.”

Because:

The math is really clear – there’s not enough climate leeway, not enough water, not enough food, not enough money, not enough oil, not enough gas, not enough dirt, not enough phosphorous, not enough rainforest…. not enough left in the world to avert disaster if we have rich people, who see themselves primarily as consumers in a consuming world, and who live as we do now.

Which means we need an American (and European and Australian and Japanese…) dream that can work – and we need it fast.

And it’s up to us – the rich people – to imagine it and promote it.

It can’t be a nightmare. It has to be, Sharon writes,

immediately accessible. It cannot require vast creative energies, because honestly, most people don’t have them.  It cannot require that everyone go against the grain, because, quite honestly, most of us go with the grain.  It cannot require that we build an imagine entirely internally – you have to be able to go look at it.

I am taking this to be my personal challenge. I choose to believe it is possible. How do we already live that dream, and how and where do we show it for all to see?

Someone asked me: What if you  would have to move now? This was with reference to the vegetable garden, to which I have devoted many, many hours of hard labor and a whole lot more of research, hopes and dreams. My answer was: It would be no problem. Really? You could leave all of this behind?

What would I be leaving behind? A half acre of land, some well-tended topsoil and some raised beds, and a fence. Possibly a season’s harvest.

What would I be taking with me? The knowledge of what vegetables, herbs and flowers are available for my region, where to buy them, how to sow them and tend to the seedlings, how to amend soils and dig beds, how to compost, how to space vegetables, plant companions, water them and wage war on bad bugs and weeds. What tools are needed (surprisingly few). Knowledge of the path of the sun in the seasons. Of the functions of the soil horizons. Of the fact that organic materials don’t “break down”, no: they are broken down, by fungi and bacteria and little critters. That chipmunks dig holes in the beds, deep ones. That it’s okay if a couple of bean seedlings are eaten  by an entity unknown: pull and reseed. That it’s good fun, “tucking in” seeds here and there. All that, and also a fitter body, more physical endurance, and above all a happier spirit for my entire family.

That’s what it means to be self-sustainable: to have skills and knowledge that can travel with me anywhere.

Amie’s picture of Mama in the Garden (taken with her very own camera)

Here’s one of the reviews I wrote for Suite101.com. The copyright recently passed to me, so I can share it with you here.

It’s of Home Ground, a book that deals with the concept that is most on my mind these days: place. The more I think about place, the more it amazes me that its concept (if not the physical thing itself) entails all the other concepts at the heart of our endeavor: nature, culture, self-knowledge, sustainability, wholesomeness, care…

Home Ground reflects this complexity, so it is a book that is within reach at all times at our house.

~

With over 850 definitions of landscape features, many specific to America, this book is about geology and history, American identity, and how one makes a place home.

In Home Ground, Language for an American Landscape, Barry Lopez (editor) has brought together forty-five writers and more than 850 new definitions for the terms Americans use to describe their unique land. Some of the contributors are Michael Collier, John Keeble, Barbara Kingsolver, Jon Krakauer, Bill McKibben, Robert Michael Pyle, and Barry Lopez himself.

What is so fascinating about these definitions is that they are (mostly) not technical, objective, general or scientific – however you want to describe the glosses in an average dictionary. Indeed, the intention is not to give standard definitions, but to approach the subjects from personal and specific point of views.

• Taking “place” personally

The personal line may be that of the authors, each of whom tackles the terms they are familiar with because they actually live with the landscape features they describe. Each was free to impose their own style, making some entries read like fairy tales, prose poems, or even jokes.

The personal is also injected by the inclusion in the definition of the people who invented, imported and evolved the term as they made themselves at home in a place. These can be a large group of people such as the Inupiaq, whose word for a swollen ice hill informs the Canadian and Alaskan word “pingo.” Or Conquistadores importing Spanish adaptations of Latin and Arabic words. Or a romantic ranger inventing the word “kiss tank” for the pool of rainwater that refreshed him in a dry place. Or even an individual, like Farmer Peek, after whose kill or brook the city in New York is named.

• The skill of naming a place

The authors know that only such personal connections can make these terms recognizable and thus usable to us. For, notwithstanding our alienated and predominantly urban existences, we are still looking for a place to call home. And a large part, if not the first part, of making oneself at home is naming the features of the new and alien landscape and thus appropriating it, in a way.

And let’s face it: we have lost the skill of naming. Land is merely a valley, a mountain or a plane. Water is but a lake, pond, river or brook. Such an impoverished language will not do if we want to honor a place as home and take care of it as something precious and worth preserving.

Home Ground re-introduces us to a treasure trove of words and definitions, some very old and on the brink of extinction, some relatively new. It offers time-tested approaches to how to make up our own terms. Home Ground is thus a dictionary, an etymology, and a collection of essays about place and our habitation of it.

It must be added that, though the explanations are personal, they are still accurate. The authors did careful research, in the field as well as in reference books geology and history. And the scientific accuracy of each entry has been checked by an advisory board.

• A literary effort

Another way in which Home Ground strikes a departure from the average dictionary is its realization that it is the writers who keep these special words alive. It is up to the settlers and inhabitants to name the places and their specific features. But it is up to the novelists, poets and essayists to record and preserve, interpret and explain these in their specifically human context.

The scientists – geologists and geographers – strive to make descriptions of place generic so as to fit them into an all too common framework, one that is too general to have any purchase on our minds. Writers, on the other hand, keep words alive in the lived-in situations of their stories. Thus Home Ground demonstrates how so much of American literature has been shaped by the American landscape.

• An American land

This brings us to quintessential American-ness of the book. The authors make it clear that their effort is “an invitation to learn American geography, to read American history, and to celebrate a deeply engaging dimension of American character.”

Perhaps it is even this American character that makes an effort like Home Ground possible and eminently successful. The book celebrates a distinctly American attitude to a land that was only recently a vast, diverse and often frightening New World as yet unnamed and thus ready to receive names. It also honors the native names that were sometimes adopted by the settlers, sometimes ignored and overwritten – but now, recovered.

Home Ground is not the kind of book you can read in one sitting. It is to be consulted again and again, measure by measure, for its scope is vast, even though its approach is personal. It also doesn’t end on the last page: if the essays don’t point you to more reading, the bibliographical note (however short) and the biographies of the writers will. The introductory essay by Barry Lopez provides more food for thought. There is also visual distraction in the form of 100 delicate black-and-white line drawings by Molly O’Halloran. If that were not enough, the authors invite readers to contribute their own landscape terms on the Home Ground website.

• Details and resources

Home Ground, Language for an American Landscape was published by Trinity University Press in 2006.

Click here to hear NPR’s Alan Cheuse discuss the book, broadcast on All Things Considered, December 11, 2006.

Click here to hear Barry Lopez and contributor Michael Collier interviewed by Jim Nielsen on NPR’s Morning Edition, first broadcast on November 16, 2006.

• One

Our renovation project has so far generated a fair amount of scrap materials. Luckily it’s mostly wood and only some drywall, which is virtually not reusable.  Of the wood  DH and I have saved most: we take out the nails, tease off the drywall and have built up a nice stack of project wood in our shed.

But then there is the wood that is no longer structurally sound, or boards that are so driven through with nails that taking them all out would reduce them to splinters.  Just as we were going to delve into our (pricey) options of disposing of this, I received a Freecycle notice asking for “untreated, unpainted scrap wood for boiling down maple tree sap – nails no problem”. Well!

The guy came by today to pick up heaps of scrap wood. Turns out he started syruping five years ago as a school project for his daughter. He asked around his neighborhood about maple trees, and everyone offered their tree. It’s so much fun he does it every year now. The sap is running already and he ran out of wood.

• Two

We started building our first cold frame.  The “lights” – the glass frames that sit on top of the box – will be the Freecycled storm windows we picked up a while ago from someone who had them sitting in the basement. Hadn’t fit a window in years.

We’re going for a very simple design without hinges, very much based on Eliot Coleman’s cold frames.

In a few weeks the lettuce seedlings in our basement will be ready to be transplanted outside. We won’t have raised beds yet (unless the weather atypically cooperates). But we’ll have lettuce! I’m thinking I should sow the spinach too…

• Three

This is the one I’m most excited about. There’s a house around the corner with a stable attached. In the stable, two horses. Amie and I sometimes drive or walk past there on the way from or to school. Last week I left a note in their mailbox asking if they could spare some manure.

The owner called today and very generously offered us all we could take, indefinitely! As soon as the snow has melted we can go and take a look. In the meantime I’ll be figuring out how to transport it and reading up on how to compost large amounts of horse manure…

Anyone any experience with this?

I love my new neighborhood!