Making breakfast this morning I realized that everything on my plate was homegrown or foraged, and that this is not an accident, but rather, the result of nearly 20 years of being “weird” about food, about cooking, and about the coming disaster. This is the first morel of the season, sauteed up with some butter (oh! KerryGold. Totally not local), some backyard green spring onions, and a backyard egg. Toast from my own sourdough no-knead bread. Even the plate is thrifted, and the silverware was my great-grandmother’s. The thing is, I’ve been doing this for years. I haven’t really chimed…
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Amanda Mull tweeted this morning that nearly every food culture except “modern American food culture” has a host of recipes and techniques for dealing with leftovers, and I replied in a way that made me feel like the 10,000 year old crone. She’s not wrong at all, but I tried to say something that can’t be said in 280 characters, about why “modern American food culture” makes me cranky, and I just came off like a finger-wagging boomer. And then my friend Sara, who stayed here last night (sadly because of the virus, we didn’t get to see one another)…
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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…
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Here we go, once more around the back side again, about to come out into the light. There have been a lot of posts out there in the intertubes about the end of the decade, and asking folks what they’ve done this decade, or what has characterized it for them. For me, this decade has brought a long-sought stabilization of my personal life, including finally building a life with a partner. He hates being written about, so I try not to, but if there’s anything that marks this decade it is having spent it with Himself. He’s a good man,…
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Life has been quite manic around here lately, and last weekend I had to go to Arizona for a family wedding. With my mother. Anyone who has followed the blog for a while knows that my mother is a very difficult person, with whom I have a fraught relationship. But she wanted to go see the granddaughter of her late sister get married. My cousin Jennifer is sentimental about our side of the family, because she lost her mother when she was just 15, and so, because it was important to both of them, I made it happen. It was…
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For the first time in ages, Hank and I went for a real walk this morning — a walk up one of our favorite drainages. There’s a trailhead at the top of the road, but often in the spring and fall, as the wild animals are moving around, we’ll stick to the road. It’s a great walk — about a mile and a half each way, with probably about a 500 foot elevation gain so you get a little workout. There are squirrels in the woods that Hank is convinced, Every Single Time, that he’s going to catch. And it’s…
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I’ve been working too much, and this winter has been brutal. I had to sell my beloved Honda Fit and buy an Outback because the Beloved Fit was just not holding up to driving over the Bozeman pass three days a week. That I have the kind of financial stability that means I can drive into the Subaru dealership and just trade in my car for a new one, and finance it, and all that, is something of a miracle to me, especially considering I quit my “real” job four years ago, but here we are. However, weeks of subzero…