Category Archives: Education

Living at 1.5 Speed

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Newly harvested winter squash

“Nothing important comes into being overnight; even grapes and figs need time to ripen. If you say that you want a fig now, I will tell you to be patient. First, you must allow the tree to flower, then put forth fruit; then you have to wait until the fruit is ripe.”—Epictetus

I enjoy boring people with the same punchline over and over. When asked how long it takes to make my gumbo (or a similar dish) I say, “Two years. A year to raise the hog to make the sausage, and two years for the rooster to mature, become useful at breeding, and then become even more useful for the pot.” The point, of course, is the same as that of Epictetus, one reinforced daily by farming, that small pleasures and life necessities take time. The process, the journey, if you will, is wed to the destination. One does not happen without the other. Be patient.

Some time back I was weeding in the garden with one of my apparently endless supply of nephews. We were chatting about reading books and listening to audiobooks, and he stopped me with a comment about his habit of listening to books at 1.5 times the speed of the normal recording. His reasoning was simple: he has limited time and an endless number of things he would like to listen to, so he speeds up the book so he can get on to the next one.

That comment, uttered as we yanked pigweed among the rows of tomato plants, has stuck with, and troubled, me ever since. Not because I think my nephew may be short-changing his experience while listening to whatever young adult schlock he has chosen to waste time on, but because his thinking so clearly encapsulates the zeitgeist of the millennium. That is, by putting one’s senses into overdrive, one can, even should, increase one’s experiences.

Perhaps it is our age difference. His life’s project is before him. Mine is clouded by the uncertain murk of a future too fast approaching, with a timeline of anywhere from another 32 years to … yikes, tomorrow. Regardless, his comment seemed emblematic, a touchstone, of our culture at large.

I sympathize (even as I do not comprehend) with a desire to experience more in life, to get more done. What I object to is the speed with which let us call them 1.5ers expect their experiences to wash over their lives like endless waves, skipping steps in a process that should be savored.

You cannot truly read a book without starting at page one and ending at the final word. Likewise, you cannot raise a child to be a responsible adult by concentrating only on years 2 and 13, cannot become a farmer by simply purchasing a parcel of land. Each act is an essential part of the play. Learning to see and experience the whole cycle, being patient for it, is part of the joy in living. Perhaps then, the lesson to be learned for those 1.5er moments in each of our lives is this: Those things we feel the need to rush are not worth pursuing. In leaving them unpursued, we allow more time for anticipating and then enjoying the ripened figs in the years we do have.

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Reading this weekend: Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (C. Lasch) and What’s Wrong With the World (G.K. Chesterton)

The Path We Take (replay)

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Today is the day we put the new ram in with the flock for breeding. He is a handsome boy and should be more than up for the challenge of mating twenty ewes. The three other rams will be moved to a smaller winter paddock and the main flock moved into a new larger pasture. The freezer lambs will stay put for now, gaining weight, until their date with destiny in January.

As you can tell from the header this week, I find the trumpet vine flowers captivating.

Meanwhile, I have been working on an advice column for aspiring farmers of our ilk, the small diverse farm. It is directed at a young man who has many talents, except for navigating. He inspired the piece below (first published in 2017). I’ll return next week with that advice post… or not. Enjoy your day.

Turn left in 300 feet … turn left … turn left…. Rerouting … rerouting … rerouting.

Recently, a young relative of mine set out on a 600-mile road trip to attend his cousin’s wedding — and got lost halfway there when his phone went dead. Hearing of his misadventure I was confused. How could someone go so far and then get lost? And how did a dead phone terminate his travels? Did he not consult a map? Own one? Pick up the free one at the state line? No, apparently a map wasn’t needed because he had a smart phone. Until it wasn’t. The would-be wedding guest set off on an eight-hour-plus journey, armed with no more than an address to guide him in where and how he was going. So, what did he do, when the phone, and consequently the GPS, died? He turned around and drove home.

As kids, my older brother and I would sit down with the National Geographic and, starting in June, begin to dream about August vacation destinations. The back pages of the magazine were chock-full of advertisements from state tourism boards. We’d send off for packets from exciting places like Montana, New Mexico, and Idaho, all locations with elevations higher than the six-feet-above-sea-level spot that we called home. Soon, fat packages of maps and “things to do” would arrive in the mail.

The maps would be unfolded on the kitchen table, where we would trace out routes we might take on the most narrow and obscure road possible. “Let’s drive down this little road in this valley south of Missoula,” I’d say. We’d pull out the encyclopedia and read about places we were going to visit. There were shoeboxes jammed with maps in the closet, a big globe and stacks of atlases in the den.

Today, in my own library, there resides a broad assortment of state and international maps and world and historical atlases. Because, maps give us more than a hopeful path to a distant destination. They inform. Why is there a Northwest Angle exclave in Minnesota, and just what is an exclave anyway? Where were the original colonial boundaries of North Carolina? How did the frontier of the late Roman Empire contract? Maps inform, and they also feed our curiosity: Is Puerto Rico surrounded by water? (Why, indeed it is, Mr. President.) They serve as a springboard into the past, present, and future. And, yes, even answer the mundane: What are my options for getting to a wedding in Oregon?

Of course, GPS is a remarkable technological feature. It gets us to a destination without getting lost, without having to wonder where we are. Yet, cocooning ourselves in a cushion of geographical illiteracy also breeds a listless lack of awareness, demanding nothing more from us than an abiding self-interest. And, in the absence of an alternative mode of mapping — whether it’s orienting to the sun or grabbing the gazetteer — when the GPS goes dark, it leaves us with no option but to turn around and go home, wherever that might be.

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Reading this weekend (2020): Corduroy (Adrian Bell)

The Memory Keeper

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We were chatting one day as we built a fence line, me and the kid. He had been working with me every Saturday for close to five years and was closing in on his 20th birthday. I knew the broad outlines of his life and relations. So what he told me came as a surprise, when I asked after a grandmother who lived next door to his family. His response was something I’ve pondered many times in the intervening years.

He had never had a significant conversation with his grandmother: did not know how old she was, where she was born, who her people were. He had never stopped by just to sit with her — talk, ask, listen. These two, in and out of one another’s house and life for 20 years, but not once had either exercised the minimum of curiosity called for to learn about the other. Atoms floating together in the cosmos, yet neither magnetized by the familial connection.

That I grew up amidst spoken volumes of family stories is often referenced in these pages. It’s an experience that is not at all unusual. My partner comes from a similar background, as do most of my peers of a similar age. We all were surrounded by memory keepers. But I wonder, is that a tradition that is now ending?

My aunt, who will soon be 99, is by inclination, ability, and longevity a memory keeper for my family. A woman who still recalls the names and gifts of each person who gave her a wedding present in 1945 is someone to be respected. As important as the capacity to recall such ephemera of one’s life are the ability and willingness to be a storyteller, to be the person who weaves the details of personal experience into a meaningful narrative that sheds light on class, history, family, and place.

The role of memory keeper is as old as our race, but its status in these times is precarious. Our ongoing political project of individual liberty, supported by our technological self-absorption, has freed us from the connections of those who came before. The courtesies of community are now left to be redefined by an ever more ambitious globalism. The struggle of the modern has become one of repudiation of place and a need for constant reinvention. The result is that we no longer belong. We are left floating unmoored, selecting a story to tell that has been personalized for us by others — complete with a “who” we have decided to be in this moment, cut off from embarrassments of birth, childhood, parentage, scrubbed clean of politically incorrect markers.

We have become too prideful of who we are as individuals, too ignorant in self-interest to want to understand, let alone embrace, the intricate web that defines us. In truth, we see no web. We pretend a text message is the same as a lunch with a friend. We believe a wave of the hand sufficient substitute for a face-to-face with a grandmother or grandfather, aunt or uncle, niece or nephew.

Even dinners and evenings sitting on a screened porch now leave no place for the elders to share their stories: The great floods. The first and second world wars. How my grandfather lost his business, farm, and fortune to the Depression, yet still managed to support his family by taking work with the New Deal’s Civilian Conservation Corps. Without those slow evenings, I would have missed out on playing checkers with that same grandfather. Missed out on learning how to lose the game and still win. Because, while he hooted with laughter and hollered “Run piggy, run!” as he chased my last remaining piece around the board, he also told me stories of family — our heroes and our rascals; told me of his life; taught me who I was. Memory keeping needs time, space, pacing, and checkers even, to flourish. Most important, it needs love.

That we live in a segregated society, walled off from people of a different age and from our own past, is not new. But now, as our memory keeper nears the end of life, few care to know her stories, or their own. A memory keeper needs a listener. And it needs a caretaker, someone willing to take on the responsibility, accept the burden, to tell who we were and still are. That role has become obsolete. It has been handed off to the faceless and unknowable, entrusted to server farms and social media, and we are left with the carefully curated life of the moment.

Now our living, breathing memory keeper is no more. She is rebranded instead as a scrapbooking product sold at Walmart, the oral traditions of the millennia having been reduced to a cheap item bought, stored on a remote shelf, and eventually discarded. That is who we are now, what we have accepted. Yet at what price?

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Reading this weekend: Duck Season (McAninch) and more Berry from the Modern Library collection of fiction.

The Great American Unread

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I’ve long been disheartened by the downward spiral in the number of Americans who read, and an article in The Washington Post this summer further fueled my dismay.

Fewer than 15 percent of American males, it said, read for leisure on a daily basis. (Women are at 29.) Only 43 percent of all Americans took in a novel, short story, poem, or play in the past year. And lest we think that those 43 percent are reading stimulating and illuminating works of literature, the Post stated that more than half of adults who read choose young adult literature as their primary genre.

In my off-the-farm job, the following encounter is depressingly common: A young couple strolls into a bookstore — okay, shuffles in, feet barely lifting against the pull of gravity — and the female dully inquires after the latest zombie (ghost, vampire, superhuman) romance.

While she is off examining the possibilities for stimulating the remaining portion of a once active parietal lobe, I turn to the male and ask the question for which I already know the answer. “What do you like to read?” I say to the hoodie-cloaked figure before me. He looks up, surprised. As his brain slowly digests the content of my complex question, a look of disgust spreads over his face. I’ve somehow insulted him by suggesting that he might be among the realm of the literate. How uncool is that, man. He shakes his head and returns to his natural state, eyes lowered and locked into The Device.

I am not amused. This republic of ours cannot flourish, cannot survive, without an actively literate citizenry. It is not enough to read only young adult or genre novels. We need to exercise our remarkable gift of reading with a thorough workout each day. Otherwise, we get the politicians that we have today, left or right.

The problem with a small, obscure blog like this is that the message goes out to you, the readers. It preaches to the choir, as it were. It is not within this blog’s scope or power to correct this aliterate trajectory. And I really don’t know how, if it is possible or even desirable, to reach those who don’t read. Peak literacy has passed. I feel, these days, like an anachronism, muttering something about “cultivating one’s own garden” — only to have some think I coined the phrase.

(Sigh.) Time to go out and do some real work … in my own garden.

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Reading this weekend: The Vanishing American Adult (Sasse), which hasn’t helped my outlook today.

How to Visit a Farm: A Primer for the Considerate

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We receive a lot of visitors to Winged Elm Farm. Most are thoughtful and respectful of our time, appreciative of what we have to offer. We enjoy the showing and explaining of our routines. For many, it is their first outing to any sort of farm. With that in mind, I offer this curmudgeonly guide to the dos and don’ts of a visit.

Somewhere

  • Sturdy shoes don’t have suede: Bare-toed Birks among the clover, where the bees are busily gathering pollen; suede designer boots calf-deep in pig muck; Italian loafers tiptoeing through the sheep poop — all have all been worn by ill-prepared guests. A working farm means manure, nails, and insects that sting. There’s a good reason we warn you to wear sturdy footwear.

 

  • “Arrive at 10” is not simply a suggestion: When we ask that you be here at 10 a.m., we expect you to arrive at 10. Not 9 and not 11. And certainly not 2 p.m., when we are just lying down for a nap. Farm work is never ending. We will be at it five minutes before you arrive and back at it five minutes after you leave. Letting you come to “see” the farm is, in our mind, a treat and a courtesy. Respect the offer and watch the clock. Be aware, too, the subtle signal to end the visit. When we say “Better settle in and help us do some work,” don’t be surprised if we hand you a pitchfork when you don’t take the hint.

 

  • Pets are accidents in waiting: Don’t bring your dog. Yes, he is the light of your life. And, of course, everyone deserves to scratch his fluffy head. He is well-behaved, you have perfect control … until he sees his first chicken or his first flock of sheep. Or much worse, our varmint-killing farm dog catches sight of this unexpected intruder. Tears will ensue, trust me.

 

  • Children, Part 1 — playing with electric fencing: Our farm contains miles of electric fencing. There’s a reason it keeps cattle, sheep, and pigs in their respective places. We will point it out as you stroll the farm. Don’t touch it or pee on it. Don’t let your kids touch or pee on it. (Yes, that’s your responsibility.) When your darling daughter reaches down and grabs a six-joule hot wire … again, tears will ensue, trust me.

 

  • Children, Part 2 — harassing, damaging, or killing livestock: When your son squeezes the baby chick so tightly he squishes it, there is a proper first response. No, it is not consoling the crying boy. It is placating the horrified farmer, whose future egg layer hangs limp from chubby fingers. It is he who deserves consolation, if not at least the offer of compensation.

 

  • Children, Part 3 — staring at screens: You thought getting the kids out of the house to see a farm was a great idea, right? We do too. That’s why we must insist that they refrain from wasting their visit staring at a tablet or iPhone. Leave the digital devices in the car.

 

  • Gates work best when latched: There are dozens of gates on this farm, and they all serve the same purpose: keeping the livestock contained. Feel free to walk the farm, but do close the gates behind you. And, yes, closing means latching.

 

  • Don’t call it a hobby farm: We understand, the farm is fun and its animals cute. But, we work to make it pay for itself and support our basic needs. The term “hobby farm” is a slur to the working rural community.

 

  • These are not therapy animals, and this is not a petting zoo: Remember that we raise animals to be slaughtered and eaten. While they are on our farm, they are treated with respect, fed and housed and handled with care. They are not here to be cuddled or coddled, but to provide protein and good taste for yours and our dinner plate. Admire them, even pet them under supervision. But keep the life cycle in perspective while visiting.

 

  • It’s all fun and games until someone gets sucked into the baler: There are a million ways to be injured or even killed on a farm. This is not an OSHA-sanctioned environment. Keep a close watch on your youngsters and husbands. And that fancy scarf around your neck? It is a magnet for a PTO shaft. You really don’t want to find out what that means.

 

  • You are welcome to buy something: We don’t charge to visit, although some farms do. But if you need eggs, veggies, honey, beef, pork, lamb, chicken, or even lumber, we have all available to sell.

 

  • Dinner is served: We are generous with our time, and, truly, we are glad to have you visit. Be respectful, show an interest, and ask questions. And, if invited, we hope you’ll accept our offer to stay for dinner.