Cottage Economy

Tomorrow I will begin the process of making a confit of squirrel, followed by the construction, and eating of the cassoulet next weekend. To better myself in the meanwhile, I have been rereading William Cobbett. If you are unfamiliar with this man, more is the pity. He could write volumes, and did, about the most common place things (such as raising pigs) and insert the most glorious, opinionated bits throughout. Since I started curing another ham this week, I thought I’d read his Cottage Economy again. This gem of over-the-top, tell me what you really think, digression on Methodists had me laughing. For your enjoyment:

But about this time, it is more than possible that the Methodist parson will pay you a visit. It is remarked in America, that these gentry are attracted by the squeaking of the pigs, as the fox is by the cackling of the hen. This may be called slander; but I will tell you what I did know to happen. A good honest careful fellow had a spare-rib, on which he intended to sup with his family after a long and hard day’s work at coppice-cutting. Home he came at dark with his two little boys, each with a nitch of wood that they had carried four miles, cheered with the thought of the repast that awaited them. In he went, found his wife, the Methodist parson, and a whole troop of the sisterhood, engaged in prayer, and on the table lay scattered the clean-polished bones of the spare-rib! Can any reasonable creature believe, that, to save the soul, God requires us to give up the food necessary to sustain the body? Did Saint Paul preach this? He, who, while he spread the gospel abroad, worked himself, in order to have it to give to those who were unable to work? Upon what, then, do these modern saints; these evangelical gentlemen, found their claim to live on the labour of others.

So, what are you reading this weekend?

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Reading this weekend: Cottage Economy (see above). And just finished up (thank you, Dan), Narrow Boats (L.T.C. Rolt), a lovely slim volume about the English canal system and the machine of industry destroying craft and identity.

I Scream, You Scream

On this beautiful Memorial Day Weekend, one from the archives.

Surely, among all the major accomplishments of our species, there, residing in companionable honor among the top 10, those giants that we can point to with pride when all else has crumbled into dust, will be ice cream.

While some men turned their talents to the dark side — inventing dynamite, improving the crossbow, or mixing gunpowder — another kindly and heroic soul determined to ameliorate the human summer condition. Oh, bore me not with your Persian ices, your frozen Indian rose waters; keep your gelatos and frozen yogurts to yourself, thank you. We are Americans, goddamnit, and Southerners to boot. Give us a full-fat frozen scoop of precious deliciousness, and be quick about it, man!

Locked in the scrapbook of my mind is the recollection of laboring with my brother Keith over the old manual ice cream maker in our garage on Sale Street. I would have been 4 years old. My father, insisting that we learn the manly arts, even at a tender age, had each of us take turns cranking the grinder as he added ice to the wooden tub. And then to partake in the reward: After the watermelon was eaten in the back yard, we indulged in a huge bowl of his uniquely vanilla ice cream. It’s a taste I can still conjure this half-century later.

My dad used to bring a tub of his magic concoction to the men’s ice cream socials at church. While others experimented with chocolate, peach, strawberry, and the many other flavor fads of the day, Dad stayed true to his simple, heavenly specialty. Those were glorious evenings, often staged in a large grove of live oaks, where displayed on long tables would be as many as 50 different ice creams to sample. For us kids (and I’m betting the same was true for the adults), the sermon by the pastor was ignored.

Eventually, he would be drowned out by the rumble of a few hundred stomachs and would be forced to cut short his Godly remarks. Finally, after the last prayer, we would stampede to the tables to sample the wares. What seemed to be an acre of ice cream is a pretty impressive sight, certainly to a boy.

So it really isn’t odd that ice cream is still associated with those memories of church. As kids, we used to leave our vacation bible school at Trinity Baptist and walk down Ryan Street to the Borden’s ice cream parlor and plant, each getting a fresh scoop before our return trip. Late in adolescence, we would skip the services completely and go straight for the reward. After all, a scoop of ice cream on a hot and muggy afternoon or evening is a pretty spiritual indulgence in itself.

Years later, until its ultimate demise, Cindy and I would seek out the old-fashioned Kay’s Ice Cream. There was the one up on Broadway in Knoxville, another down Chapman Highway, and one way out in the badlands of Maryville. With its 30-foot multicolored ice cream cone out front, it was easy to spot. Particularly when coming back from the mountains after a hike, our sugar and potassium levels dangerously depleted, a banana-chocolate malt was just the restorative required. (And yes, please, always use vanilla ice cream when constructing a chocolate malt.)

After we bought the farm and Kay’s had closed most of its locations, I toyed with buying one of those giant ice cream cone signs to mount on the barn roof. I still regret my failure to do so as some sort of moral weakness that will mark me in ways yet unknown.

Even now, on hot summer evenings we seek out the good stuff. Last night, after a day’s work filling the barn with freshly baled hay, weeding the garden, and completing the dozens of other chores that mark what we call “busy,” I got in my truck with Cindy and we drove the 15 miles to Loudon. It was 8 o’clock when we drove down the quiet main street, passed the still-packed community pool, and pulled up to the Tic Toc Ice Cream Parlor. There was a line to the door. A crowd filled the small park across the street by the fountain — men, women, and children, all eating their ice cream in view of the tall oaks and Confederate and other war memorials at the courthouse.

Cindy went inside and returned 20 minutes later with single scoops of homemade ice cream in cake cones. (For we are not heathens to be eating our ice cream in waffle cones like foreigners from Michigan or Florida.) Then we headed out with the truck windows down, licking off the drips as the sun set, and followed the country roads back to the farm.

 

Building on the Heights

“Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”—Edward Abbey

The lambing barn prior to the start of the season.

The lambing barn prior to the start of the season.

It shouldn’t be a surprise, this mania for growth and building, and it isn’t. It is, nonetheless, sad and appalling. A Saturday drive on a country road finds our landscape being filled in like a jigsaw puzzle on family game night, pieces slapped on the table in a frenzy to be done. Unfortunately, when you step back from the table, you discover that the finished product is more Dorian Gray than Currier and Ives, hideous and repulsive, with all sins exposed.

Why object? Growth, after all, is progress, right? Odd, though, how that word “progress” is often used simply to stop a discussion, prevent closer examination. As in “can’t stand in the way of….” To question the endless destruction, the paving over, the gluttony of the spreading belly of the city into the surrounding countryside, is as effective as the man who stands at the edge of an eight-lane highway holding a sign that warns the end is near. (He just might, as it turns out, speak the truth.)

For 22 years I have taken the drive from the farm through the mountains and down into North Georgia. The beauty and isolation of that area was always something to behold. Small, narrow valleys defined by creeks and rich bottom land, low ridges rising a few hundred feet on either side. Old farms and barns dotting the tidy and loved landscape. Yes, there were some newer homes, but they were modest, a mobile home or rancher. Not beautiful, but not pretentious. Structures that fit the economy of an ancient landscape.

The changes were slow in those early years, a few new houses constructed, usually built on the heights, tacky and out-of-place McMansions looking down on the pastoral landscape. But then the pace quickened. The ridges filled in with outsized monstrosities for undersized households. Even then the farm valleys remained somehow inviolate, left in a hopeful time. Until inevitably, with land prices, property taxes, or death, and no ridges left to colonize, the valleys filled in with clusters of behemoths to accommodate the malignancy that is Atlanta.

And now this new economy that allows many to do their job remotely has opened the last protective floodgate. What took decades in those North Georgia counties is taking less than 24 months in East Tennessee. This economy at rising tide doesn’t lift communities; it washes over them, destroying countryside and culture in its wake. And when it ebbs, what remains is a fractured landscape instead of topsoil. A debris field of trash and eroded gullies where once flourished fields, crops, and a rural people.

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Reading this weekend: South (E. Shackleton)