The following blog entry is "guest posted" by myself, Jason:
Tonight was our second Family Night of the year. Janelle was the Decider this time (move over, W!), and she didn't think she could top my family night from January which was ice skating at the Bridgewater Generations park, so she decided we'd just take a walk, eat supper, play a game, and read a book together (the book was my idea). Actually, the ice skating was her suggestion, so let's give credit where it's due. But this was not an ordinary walk--oh, no--it was mighty unusual in that it was a walk with ground rules: no talking about schedules or logistics or the to-do list...the only topics of conversation that were allowed were things we observed in the world around us.
This was much harder than expected. Any time lady nature failed to dazzle us with some unusual tree shape or a swollen stream or beautiful cloud or whatnot it was all too easy to fall straight back into using the time to hammer out some detail of our lives. Kali was our referee, but she broke the rule a time or two also and had to be called on the carpet. Alida had the easiest time with it. O.k,, I guess Terah was the only one with a perfect score, but she was asleep for most if not all of it, so she is disqualified. What a good activity! Hopefully by the time we hit the driveway entrance again we had gotten a bit of a taste of what it could be like to develop a family practice of mindfulness, and had gained a realization of how far from that we often are.
By the time we got back to the house, shutting in the ducks and chickens on the way in, we were all pretty hungry and ready for Kali's very fancy "S" meal. Everything on the menu had to be prepared by Kali (her Monday night tradition) and had to start with "S". So we had a Scrumptious Supper of Spaghetti Squash with Sauteed venison and Sauce, with Soybeans to the side. Also a person could add Seasoning (including grated Romano, thankfully). Yummers.
While we were baking squash, we decided to try something new. I had discovered earlier in the day that our prize Tromboncino from this past year--all 50 inches of which has been displayed on the buffet throughout the fall and winter--had a secret bad spot developing on the back side. That was a side effect, I suspect, of enduring the high moisture and temperature of the indoor human environment since early October; it gets a pass. At Janelle's suggestion I started a gallon of winter squash ferment with the top half (it was still almost completely firm and juicy, by the way), then after considering together we decided to bake the rest of it along with the spaghetti and stripetti squashes for supper, scraping out the flesh of the tromboncino to cook down for pumpkin butter. We had made some nice pumpkin butter earlier in the week from a PA Dutch squash that was boiled and pureed; it seemed reasonable that baking it would eliminate the need for steaming off all the excess boiling liquid in the reduction process, saving substantial time and energy. The jury is officially still out, but it looked really promising as I spooned rich, relatively dry baked squash flesh into the crock pot and then quickly mashed it with a potato masher. I had to be quick because everyone was starting to snitch the yummy stuff! Do we grow the sweetest squash I ever met or am I just off of sugar?
Part of the joy of evenings like this is the family culture that is developing around our habits and activities. I took special note of one aspect of that this evening while we ate the squashes together and decided which we wanted to save the seeds from: "I guess it must be pretty rare," I observed, "for a family to get so much fun and joy out of evaluating and developing the varieties of plants and animals that they depend on year after year to meet their needs." Janelle thought perhaps it is only rare in our time and place, and I suppose that could be so. In fact I feel rather ignorant of the methods folks use and have used around the world and through time as they engage the selection process in their domesticated varieties. But I suspect that usually it is not so much a family hobby as it has been for us (though maybe for some families it has been). My suspicion is that often it has been the work of one or two members of the family to take on the selection task, or that it would be more a matter of selection being incorporated into the agricultural portion of their culture, consciously or unconsciously, and perhaps with changes in traits occurring imperceptibly over long periods of time. Likely it looks vastly different in different times, places, species, and cultures. I suspect also that global connectivity has delivered to us an unprecedented access to genetic diversity of plants, even though the total number of varieties worldwide is in sharp decline.
In any case we get a real kick out of it, and I am so excited to see what the next five to ten years brings in terms of the plants and animals we work with becoming ever more at home in our context--making our home their home, I suppose--and meeting our needs and desires ever more capably. There is much to be said for finding a variety that does the job reliably and sticking with it (i.e., keep ordering that seed every year). But why not take it a step further and use that variety or varieties as a starting point and take some initiative to hone that fit until it's so dexterously meeting your family's needs that you would sooner give up your TV or your favorite toothpaste or maybe even a juicy opportunity in another state than part with that strain of organism providing for your needs from the land you love? Does anyone else want that kind of relationship with their sustenance? Does anyone else want to love their seeds that much? Man, I sure do. It makes harvest time about doubly joyful and interesting...'Look what the crop looks like THIS year!' From popcorn testing to squash evaluation (we are tough customers, let me tell you) to admiring each year's batch of chickens as they range in the yard to holding our spinach to a rigorous standard, this family has a burgeoning love affair with breeding domesticated organisms. It feels like what will develop as a result may be something pretty special. Our preference would be that just as my passion for this topic seems to have infected the whole bunch of us, we might begin to be surrounded by other families who take some of the same satisfactions in their own homes. To me that would signify the possible beginning, at long last, of the true homecoming of our society; the establishment of an enduring stability; the making of peace with and in this land. Once your eyes have been opened by this process, I will hazard that you will begin to see the human condition as I often do: in our self-perceived impoverishment we blunder our way through a world positively dripping with potential. Maybe this is some of what Fukuoka (The One Straw Revolution...highly recommended) meant when he held a piece of rice straw in his hand and asserted that if we really understood the potential in that one piece of straw, it would cause a total revolution in our way of being in the world.
But back to our evening. After supper we settled into a lively round of The Marble Game (a homemade board game much like Sorry and Trouble). Alida won, which made for an easy transition to tooth brushing and then starting in on a family out-loud reading of James Herriot's All Creatures Great and Small, during which Alida almost immediately fell asleep on my lap despite my giggles at Mr. Herriot's word choices.
On evenings like this it feels to me that if it weren't for money and climate change my life would be more or less perfect. On the other hand, perhaps it is a reaction against the excesses of the money economy and the environmental crisis that has pushed us so clearly in these directions...so maybe we owe more to these than we usually think we do.
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