Category Archives: Convivial Life

The Gathering

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I’m off the farm this weekend at an undisclosed location deep in the woods of Acadiana at the annual gathering of my male relatives.

Outside the cabin a couple of nephews are throwing a football. While inside, another nephew snoozes while on the TV over his head plays the Georgia vs. Florida game. One brother is off for a hike as the other reads by the fire. And a couple of other relatives are taking a late afternoon nap after lunching on boudin and mustard greens. The final nephew is firing up the grill for dinner while a pot of red beans and rice simmers on the stove. Blue skies and cold temperatures presage an ideal fall evening ahead.

Enjoy your weekend, I’ll catch up with you next week.

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Reading this weekend: The Bankrupt Bookseller (Darling)

Labor Day: The Bold and The Feckless

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Work: Pile work upon work upon work.

Some 2,800 hundred years ago, the Greek poet Hesiod wrote his didactic poem Works and Days. It is equal parts sibling admonition, theogony (old-school genealogy of the gods), and farming calendar (On the eighth day of the month castrate the boar and roaring bull). But it is the injunction to work that is the crux of the 800-line poem. The message is one that underlies many of the classic texts, not surprisingly, for without work, shame (if not starvation) would haunt our steps.

Even today, in our valley, people are often introduced in conversation as “a hard worker.” And those who don’t work, while not allowed to starve, are held in low esteem — indeed, disclaimed — by their neighbors, pronounced to be “as useless as teats on a boar.” Farming can be a brutally conservative enterprise, one in which animals are dispatched for failing to measure up; it is an occupation in which it is hard to conceal one’s inadequacies.

The nature of work and why we do it has been much on my mind this year. For reasons we won’t explore here, I am all too often witness to the refusal of work and a willingness by adults, mainly men, to reject advancement. As one of like gender, I find those instances in which a healthy man prefers to be idle and stay at home deeply offensive. To be offered work of worth and to instead choose the path of just getting by or, worse, relying wholly on the largess of others is frankly beyond my ken.

Misfortune can be caught in swarms, and easy. The road to it is smooth, and it lives so near.

This is not meant to be some sort of grim Puritan sermon I write, of suppression of desire, harnessed to a yoke until dropping in the traces. For I (as you will surely know by now) put a premium on conviviality with friends, family, and neighbors, on good conversation and laughter, on wine and food.

Then, O then let there be some rock-shadowed cool, some Bilbine wine, a milk-soaked cake and the goats’ last thick milk, the meat of a forest-graised heifer…. O drink the bright wine and relax in the shade with a heart’s fill of food, face tilted into the freshening westerlies.

All of these enjoyments go hand in hand with the work we do. Without the work, each gift (whether necessity or indulgence) would be gained only by throwing oneself at the mercy of community. To be clear, I am a firm believer in the need for a communal safety net; we all at times need a helping hand, for life does indeed break us down. Yet only our hard work allows us to take full satisfaction in the fruits of our labors. It is a pleasure deepened in the owning of the process, embracing it and asking for more, that allows us to claim community among our kith and kin. To expect reward without work is to break with the covenant.

For the granary won’t fill for the feckless.

I understand the tenuous relationship of modern employment to the employed, and I speak today not of that but of our older relationship to each other and our responsibilities to the same. Not all work is based on remuneration; often it is done simply for love, and that is when it is most satisfying.

I am at sea on a raft of frustration with the covenant breakers, whether they be the person who embraces the trappings of his position but spurns the intellectual rigor required to do the job well or the one who refuses an opportunity because “it sounds like too much work.” It is not seemly to enjoy the glass of wine without the earning, to expect honors without the requisite work of ambition.

And if you haven’t broken the bond, then May another year take good root beneath the soil.

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Reading this weekend: Hesiod’s Works and Days: A New Translation by Kimberly Johnson (2017).

Harvest Time

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the harvest from this morning

I sit at my desk, this mid-August afternoon, listening as a three-gallon carboy of perry mead gurgles in the corner of the library. The steady baloop of escaping carbon dioxide in the fermentation lock is as good a signal as any that it is harvest time on the farm. Pears and apples are at their peak in the orchard, bending their tree branches low. As each branch is picked clean of fruit, it springs back skyward. In the hoop-house, the crowder peas climbing the sunflowers mimic the orchard fruits and weigh down the sturdy stalks with their vines and pods. Meanwhile, one row over, the eggplants and peppers … well, nothing stops their magic until Jack Frost pays a visit, and the postcard from Mother Nature says his arrival is going to be delayed this year.

The scuppernongs and muscadines are clamoring to be harvested; already, there are easily a couple of hundred pounds of fruit waiting to be plucked. Figs are coming on and the chard and turnips need to go in the ground for fall and winter. As the produce piles up on the counters and the porch, our kitchen goes into overdrive. Chutneys (sweet and savory), hedgerow jellies and herbed jams or preserves, meads and wines, compotes and sauces, dried fruits and leathers — all will be made within the next week or two. More buckets of peas to shell, pack in bags, and store alongside the blanched slices of eggplant in the chest freezer.

So much to do, so much to eat. Harvest time remains for us a season of satisfaction and joy, even after two decades. All the pleasures of a robust household economy married with a bountiful table. Nothing really matches, does it?

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Reading this weekend: Letters From a Stoic: the 124 epistles of Seneca

Making Pimento Cheese and Duck Confit Sandwiches

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Just another farm dinner: shredded confit on crowders, tomato and cucumber salad, cabbage and carrot slaw.

I should be outside mowing the lawn. Claiming that the mercury is climbing is really not an excuse or a reality. For it is a beautiful Saturday afternoon with highs in the mid-80s and lowish, for us, humidity. That the morning was productive — a gutter cleaning, the daily harvest of crowder peas, weed-eating around the day’s rotation of trees, vines, bushes, and outbuildings — seems to matter not. Through the open window my mower’s kin call gaily out to mine from up and down the valley, “Come out and play.”

Slamming the window on their siren song, I determine to focus my considerable energies on more fruitful projects. An hour later, a handful of computer chess game victories under my belt (All praise the Undo button!), I continue to wrestle with my work avoidance and open the refrigerator.

A little snack to fortify my willpower for the afternoon is called for in this moment. Before me, in a dish gifted by my 99-year-old aunt, lie salty duck legs buried in white glistening lard. Beautiful confit! (The result of another work avoidance project tackled earlier in the week when I should have been completing a memorandum for something or other.)

I reach past the various salads and grab a hunk of cheddar. In mere moments, it is turned into a lovely shredded mound. A few simple steps more: a bowl, a small jar of pimentos, drained, then tossed with the cheese, freshly ground pepper and a sprinkle of salt, a healthy dollop of Blue Plate mayonnaise, a wooden spoon to mix and mash and I’m done.

Now, if you are from regions less enlightened than the South, you may already have stopped reading. Good riddance! For it is truly depressing to the soul that there are depraved and deprived individuals who have never and will never eat a pimento cheese sandwich. So be it. I pledge, henceforth, to drop this messianic desire to convert. To never exalt in the blended perfection of extra-sharp cheddar and piquant pimento is a sad existence indeed. But it is yours — welcome to it.

There are moments in life, genius moments, that strike us all. Ford had his assembly line and Edison his lightbulb. It is in these moments that the gods hold their breath: “Will he???” With generations of can-do pioneers coursing through my veins, I answer with a resounding “Yes!” I will take that hill and scatter the naysayers. Give me that ceramic of confit and be quick about it, sires!

Two slices of sourdough, a heap of pimento cheese on top and shredded duck confit on bottom, assembled into one glorious sandwich. I stand out on the porch, my masterpiece in one hand and a cold beer in the other, and dare the world.

But wait, fortune smiles on me this Saturday afternoon. Do I see gathering clouds? They do look like they could carry rain, might even, in time, develop into dangerous thunderstorms. Should I dash out and mow and risk certain death … on the admittedly random chance of being struck with lightning?

Nay, I head back inside, unwilling to hazard depriving future generations of these awesome insights.

You are welcome.

Life Lessons in Killing a Hog

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The ideal: When you look at a diagram, you see that the proper placement of a killing shot is just off center of an X formed by two lines that run from each ear to the opposite eye. The reality: When you’re faced with a pen full of weanling pigs that never stand still for more than a moment as they jostle for feed, you discover that that perfectly executed shot of the drawing is nothing more than a pipe dream.

At only 65 pounds, the chosen pig of friends had been handed down a sentence of early termination, the result of an already grossly distended hernia that was growing larger by the day. On a pet or a human, repair would be a straightforward, albeit expensive procedure. On a hog destined for slaughter in another six months, it was a foregone decision to move the timetable forward.

Some years back, our farm had a 200-pound barrow that broke its back in a rugby scrum with its brethren. A friend came over and assisted me in the killing and butchering. The hog, located at the far end of a two-acre wooded lot, had to be dragged across the uneven ground to the scalding pot. “Dead weight” has never been such an apt description.

If you’ve never done it, dragging a dead animal is a most peculiar exercise. It rolls about and shifts weight without warning, the bulk animated and yet unliving. (The dead can be such hard work.) No matter how often I have to do it, manhandling a carcass still comes as a disquieting reminder, one that manages to be both alien and, with familiar elements of the personal, foreshadowing.

At our friend’s farm, with Cindy and Sabine looking on, Michael hit the mark on the second try. He and I both sprang on the now stunned animal. I plunged the sticking knife in above the sternum. Pushing against bone for leverage, I severed one of the carotid arteries. The pig bled out on the grass. The other weanlings showed no interest in his fate and continued instead to gorge on the corn we had spread as bait.

Over the next couple of hours, Michael and I cleaned, scalded, scraped, eviscerated, cut, and packaged the pig into smaller primal cuts. Our task finally completed, the table cleaned, and the offal bagged and removed, we then retired to the shade for a beer.

Butchering is never as tidy as the illustrations show. My clothes were blood-splattered, and spare bits of hair from the vigorous skin scraping adhered to the far parts of my anatomy. If I’d been stopped by a state trooper on my way home, a serious inquiry followed by a search of the truck would inevitably have ensued.

Some hours later, back at our farm, Cindy positioned the livestock trailer at the entrance of our wooded hog paddock. Three 300-pound animals that need to be loaded for a trip to the processor on Tuesday reside there. (Although advocates of self-sufficiency, we believe that such large-scale butchery is best left to a professional.)

Such are the cycles on the farm, as mirrored in life: beginnings and endings and beginnings again. As the long day closed, we found ourselves sitting quietly in the back yard, idly gazing out at the hill pasture. The soon-to-be-full moon was rising in the east with Jupiter in a slow-motion chase. The wind tossed the trees on the far Southern horizon, and it was some minutes later before the breeze found us. The last light in the sky, a soft lavender in the west, finally diminished. With some reluctance, not wanting to release the day, we got up and went inside to read for the closing hour before bedtime.

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Reading this week: The Whole Okra (Smith), Deep Work (Newport), Letters From Europe (Thomson). The latter is an account, through letters back home, of the author’s book-buying trip to Europe on behalf of Ohio Wesleyan University, published in 1856.