Here’s a little essay I wrote a few years back about the domestic and the wild, the virtual and the real. It’s part of the longer project I’ve been working on, both in print and in the real world of my backyard. That is: how do we survive enormous grief? How do we prepare ourselves for hard times, times when we might need to rely on ourselves and others? Times like these. Scott McMillion was nice enough to publish it in Montana Quarterly, but since the archives aren’t online, I thought I’d post it in case it’s useful for any…
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I must have a million photos of this bluff, that sky (this dog, and Raymond before him). This is my usual dog walk — in the winter we do it early in the day to catch the warmth and light, in the summer, late afternoon to catch the shade as the sun drops behind the mountains to the west. It’s about a mile each way, through a creekbottom, then opens out at the north end of the Paradise Valley. This is not a wilderness walk — although last spring a moose calved in there, so we had to be careful.…
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I was going to wait until later in the spring to get new chicks, but with everything shutting down, it seemed like time. On the way back from dog walking this morning, stopped at the ranch store and picked up a new Buff Orpington, a Silver-Laced Wyandotte, and a Dominique chick. This was the year I was going to start replacing old hens with Bantam hens, in part because my yard is getting pretty torn up, and in part because I thought “Oh, my chickens-for-the-apocalypse thing is overblown.” So here I am, with a new batch of chickens for the…
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Watching all the posts about cooking, and starting seeds and hunkering down it occurred to me that not only am I particularly suited to this moment, I’ve been preparing for it for decades. I never wanted to be right about something like this. I feared that our systems were brittle, that things would begin to fray around the edges, but I hoped it wouldn’t get to this point. And yet, here we are. The entire globe is shutting down for two? six? eight weeks? perhaps longer? How many years will it take us to climb back out of the economic…