So, I’ve been thinking a

So, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how to live more locally, how to resist the siren call of consumerism, how to build a sustainable life. I bought a house this year, and moved to Montana. It was important to me when I was looking for a place that I didn’t buy a “ranchette”, that I didn’t contribute to the development creeping across the open spaces of the West. So I found a 100 year old house in a funky town, a house with an old established vegetable plot in back. Planning the garden has me thinking about eating seasonally, about seeing how self-sufficient I can be, about how I can avoid buying food at the cost of fossil fuels. We’re a long way from everywhere here, and although I got spoiled living in the Bay Area, with its abundant local produce, I want to take the lessons of California cuisine — eat local, eat fresh, eat in season, and see what I can do with that up here in the frozen north. Because Montana is still largely an agricultural economy, as well as a remarkably beautiful place with viable wild animal populations, the choices about what and how we eat are a little closer to the surface than they are in more urban centers.
I’m a novelist (there’s a link to my website in the pane on the right), working on my second novel — the autobiographical book I’d hoped not to write, so along with musings about food, and gardening, and the environment, you’ll also find the occasional report on what I’m reading or attempt to define the aesthetic issues that I’m wrestling with as I work through this new project.
Please feel free to email me, I haven’t figured out how to put up a comments link yet, but then again, this blog is all of two days old …