Wednesday, January 4, 2023

2022 A Year of Risk and Renewal

Most lives are punctuated by periods of time in which personal growth (usually accompanied by big change) is accelerated. 2022 has been that kind of time for our family.

Janelle did, as planned, end her involvement with EMU's Center for Justice and Peacebuilding in January. That change was the single biggest factor in launching and enabling our year of growth; while we still stayed plenty busy, the relentlessness of demand for time and attention was keyed down enough to let her/us focus much more generous attention to some longstanding personal needs: connection time with the kids and each other, self-love, nurturing the paradigm shifts away from moralizing food/exercise philosophies, rest.

We come out of the year feeling more whole, less panicked, more ready to engage. After Janelle finished with a small flurry of births she'd signed up to accompany (she got her Birth Doula certification this year), she still felt pretty exhausted and the notion of promising her help to anyone else still felt like too much. So she took the rest of the year without saying yes to any fall 2022 due dates. But I took it as a good sign that near the end of 2022, when a few more referrals (and friends' pregnancies!) came knocking with 2023 due dates, she quietly started saying yes, while being careful to not consent to due dates too close together so she can recover from one accompaniment marathon before the next comes around and so it's less likely that two labors will coincide. Goodness knows she's spent enough of her life feeling like she needs to be in two places at once!

One of the births she did attend was with our dear friends and neighbors (chosen family, really) Jonathan McRay and Christen Peters, when their son Luca was born in February. Janelle had been anticipating the arrival of the little one feverishly, and could hardly wait to get her hands on him. Unfortunately we all had to wait longer than we wanted at first, as some scary symptoms got him spirited away to UVA for monitoring. But all is well with the tyke now, and one of Janelle's deepest joys has been getting to spend much of most Thursdays with him. She is avidly joined by her three daughters in caring for him. They unabashedly practice deceit, trickery, cajoling, and other kinds of foul play on each other to get the next chance to hold him. I like him, too. I am pretty sure he thinks I'm o.k., but he doesn't reach for me and cling like he does to Janelle...she has been a loving presence in his life since his first breaths of earth's precious, wounded atmosphere. (And as the person putting in the photos here, I could NOT narrow down my favorites to any less than these and that was using a great amount of discretion. Janelle)
My year involved its own version of accompaniment as I did my best imitation of the good listener and supportive companion I aspire to be for Janelle while she navigated getting treatment for anxiety and migraines (both have largely subsided and/or been successfully treated) and as she came to new realization after new realization through the steady stream of podcast-binging, online course-taking, and book-reading she has been absorbing*. As has so frequently been true for our relationship, I have so much to thank her for as she determinedly pursues the righting of wrongs and the building of wholeness in her/our world. I learn so much from what she's learning, but equally as much from how she learns it.

That paragraph made me look pretty good. It's not all peaches and cream for my reputation, though...her/our most recent foray into personal transformation comes by way of the book Fair Play, by Eve Rodsky, which tackles the notion of gender inequity in executive function within households in relatable, kinda ouchy clarity (we watched the documentary, didn't read the book). Why is it, Eve asks, that it takes so little for a man to be thought of as a super dad, and it takes so little for a woman to be thought of as a sh---y mom? Many of us who are men in heterosexual marriages (especially with kids) can tend to think we're sharing the load by showing up and asking how we can help, or even just by consenting to do tasks we're asked to do. But we often don't stay aware of the constant grinding that one partner often ends up doing from day break to day end just to keep on top of things. It's a lot of responsibility, it takes a lot of mental space and energy, and in our culture it usually falls to the women. And that's not equitable. There is actually nothing about a female or male brain that make them more or less naturally capable of "multi-tasking," or other executive functions. It's easier for women because they have had more practice and a ton of social conditioning. 

Now, anyone who knows us in a regular kind of way has made plans with us. Or rather, has made plans with Janelle in order to spend time with us. Most of you know you would not want to rely on me to follow through with those logistics. Whether that's a nature or nurture dynamic is open to question, but probably it's both. Folks will also recognize that our concept of "home" is larger than our house and our family needs and activities, and I carry a lot of executive responsibility in our planting and productivity calendar. But our consciences tell us that we've both been complicit in carrying these inequitable cultural expectations forward into our partnership to some extent, and that that has contributed to much of Janelle's overwhelm over the years. 

If the previous two paragraphs make your head spin a tad and raise a little embarrassment or discomfort, or even seismically rumble your foundations, welcome to the ethos of our 2022! Through it all we've held each other with grace and compassion and fondness, believing in each other's deep intentions and doing our best to offer our former and current selves what we offer each other.

Now, the whole year was not focused on personal improvement...we had to keep up with the gardens and animals and firewood and excess milk from the neighbor's farm, and we discovered a major, widespread, chronic roof leak on most of the house that ended up costing over $30,000 to repair. After spending many months thinking the insurance wouldn't cover it and that we'd be spending more than a year's income on something that seemed to be absolutely not our fault, one more reach-out to the insurance resulted in them reversing course and covering the repair almost entirely.

This was a relief to all of us, and seeing the repair wrapped up successfully surely contributed to Mom and Dad's feeling--growing throughout the year--that this now really is home, and despite missing their beloved West Virginia mountains and climate, they are really coming to love this place, too. Having grandchildren at their fingertips aids that feeling, too. We sure are glad to have them here! But with COVID subsiding a little, they have been traveling more again, giving us the opportunity to host a few special guests in their quarters: visitors from out of town or just friends or relatives who love to be here from time to time. At one point in the year we even had 4 generations under our roof when Janelle's great-aunt Eleanor was with us. We can't mention all of you dear to us who graced our home with your presence this year, but those were some of the biggest highlights of 2022!

Oh, by the way, I started a business, Sassafras Enterprises LLC. Small home repairs and such. It's been fine, and easy to find plenty of work without advertising at all. Pays the bills working away from home about half time, which allows enough time to keep up with some of the farming and ag. development work I was put on this earth to do, and which I would do full time if a way can be crafted for that to meet our family's financial needs more fully.

Speaking of which, the chicken and plant breeding work continues apace. It doesn't pay like the construction work, but I have been able to pick up a few workshop gigs, we gorge ourselves on the spoils of the experiments, and we get enough value from the eggs alone to more than cover the feed costs. The meat, then, is gravy (!). This past winter/spring I built a Seed Sanctuary, which is a locust-wood frame covered in 1/4" hardware cloth buried a foot deep all around the perimeter. It is intended as a rodent- and bird-proof growing space for small amounts of precious seeds to generate enough seed volume to make larger plantings in other parts of the gardens. Or it houses particularly critter-vulnerable seed stocks, like the turnips, which the finches always seem to find just before they are ready to collect.

A few of the plant breeding projects continue to amaze us in their development: 

We now have a consistent red flour corn established (a stabilized cross between six different strains) that makes delicious baked goods that are hard to tell from wheat products. Except if yeast is involved. Janelle tried that once. The attempted rolls were stiff, pasty biscuits that we could only enjoy by dousing them with chili. Ya win some, ya lose some. 

The girls each have their corn "pop"-ulations going, and continue to refine their goals and the genetic profiles to match. Kali has the most years into it, and her corn is now consistently tender, poppable, and delicious, as well as lovely to look at. Now she's working on growth habit, productivity, and easy shelling. The younger two are right on her heels! These kids have little concept that they are some of the few young humans in their entire context who will emerge from family life with an expertise in plant breeding that feels as natural to them as choosing their outfit for the day. Who can put a number on the value of that?

Our winter spinach is a little shocking in its cold tolerance. We had single-digit temps a few weeks back with no snow cover. The plants are growing in the open with no row cover or mulch. Very few of the leaves even yellowed, and during the recent warm stretch Janelle picked enough for a lovely salad. Win! Two local farmers are trialing our spinach seed along with their usual spinach plantings this winter.

Thanks to our dear friend Craig, we have several exciting cultivars/populations of barley and wheat in various patches in the garden, and we hope to emerge from the intended chaos in a few years with genetically diverse populations of locally adapted winter bread wheat and winter hulless barley firmly in order and in hand. We recently ate our first 100% whole wheat bread made entirely from the wheat we'd grown and ground ourselves and it was SUPERB!
Thanks to our friends at Oak Spring Garden Foundation, we have a start of a new-to-us variety of dual-purpose sorghum (syrup and grain) that looks more promising for our locale than any other we've tried. It is a family variety from the Shelton family in the Piedmont area of VA, I believe, so thanks also to that family for stewarding an excellent, productive plant. We take inspiration from these kinds of examples, and gladly benefit from the cultivars and populations they yield for us all.

Turnips have been a recent obsession. There is something about kicking a rock-hard vegetable out of frozen soil, thawing it back out, slicing it up and crunching down its spicy sweetness that makes me feel reassured that we might just be fine. This year we had a series of events that led to us sowing our turnips early in one patch of rich soil, and after years of selecting from scraggly, late-sown populations in challenging soils, the results of that planting were shocking! We had all the turnips we and our friends could eat, and still managed to replant many massive specimens in the seed sanctuary, as well as taste-testing a bunch of the lesser ones (we sliced off a portion and divvied it up) and planting only the tastiest. Of those we couldn't cram into our fridge or give away before the hard freeze hit, many are totally killed, some are deeply compromised, and a few were unaffected (!?!). The survivors will join their compatriots in the seed sanctuary to lend their frost resistance to next year's seed supply. Our ancestors owed a lot to the resilience of turnips, and we think we owe it to our descendants to leave them a robust seed resource. 

Of course, not all of our breeding is going well...our onion crop was a near complete failure, our carrots keep getting eaten off by invertebrates, the wet weather was hard on the flavor of melons and Delicata squash. Plenty more work to be done!

I won't bore you with more plant talk, and won't ply you either with info about the state of affairs in our chicken breeding. Stop by or give a ring for in-depth conversation or a start of seeds or hatching eggs! Suffice it to say that we're having bundles of fun, a lot of overwhelm, and a little frustration, we always want more time and resources to push these projects forward (and adopt many, many more), and my biggest discipline is reining in my enthusiasm. The fascination drives me/us positively, but there is also a more ominous motivation, as climate change models now predict that within 30 short years the global climate will have destabilized to the point where the raising of industrial-scale commodity crops as we know them will no longer be possible. Having genetically diverse and resilient populations of essential crops on the ground and working to support us is, while a fascinating discipline, deadly serious work.

Enough shop talk; you want the news from the kids:

Kali (19) finally made it to the Philippines, heading home with Tala who had come back for a stay after attending a U.N. Indigenous Peoples' conference in the Southwest (it was so good to have "our dash" back with us for awhile). Kali's visit lasted two months, and she experienced more new things than she can even remember. She would have to be the one to name any highlights, but it was fun to see videos of her visiting idyllic jungle waterfalls, sampling tropical fruits, trying her hand at being a fair-trade coffee barista, swimming in warm oceans, attending community events, and hiking into decidedly non-touristy backcountry with her warm and welcoming hosts at Peacebuilders Community Inc. (Tala's professional and living community). Her open and warm demeanor with all she met endeared her to many. She managed to get up early many of those mornings, and upon flying home all by her lonesome across the world (successfully navigating 4 airports), she arrived home to our grateful arms and immediately went back to sleeping until mid-morning (unless woken). Kali has picked up a few more responsibilities around here, and is quickly becoming our go-to tech problem solver. She has some ambitions towards taking college classes and finding a job in 2023, which will be made easier by the fact that she now holds a driver's license! I was a little stunned this week when she decided to make her holiday-tradition gingerbread house a replica of our portion of the Tangly Woods house. She got out a ruler and protractor and her geometry textbook, drew some models correctly on the first try, cut out templates correctly on the first try, cut gingerbread correctly on the first try, decorated the panels to look highly evocative of the original on the first try, and assembled it successfully on the first try. She was proud of herself, but I don't think she knows the talent she just pulled out of nowhere. What else does she have up her sleeve?
Alida (11) has been hard at work adding body tissue to her person. She has grown several inches, and is getting tired of me exclaiming about her long femurs. This only makes me want to do it more, because teasing and pranks and anything that can devolve into a wrestling match are her favorite pastimes. She has been sporadically producing a Tangly Woods News newspaper for family and friends (who wish to receive it) with interviews, jokes, and a column ("One of the Things I Did Not Expect About Parenting") by yours truly. She continues to love outdoor play with Terah or friends (including chicken and piglet friends), spending plenty of time setting up rustic seating and kitchen facilities in their play fort, in which the main activity seems to be smashing walnuts and acorns on flat chert rocks selected and imported from the surrounding woods for the purpose. She is also taking an increasing interest in actual cooking, and is not far off from being more or less independent in the kitchen for certain types of cooking, though she still feels better with a little guidance. Alida is drawn to life's drama: mostly the happy, fun, daring kind, but also sometimes the despondent or anxious. As her parents, we feel it is our job to support and make room for her to experience her full range of emotions safely and in the context of unconditional love (thanks, Dr. Becky!), as opposed to trying to solve everything for her or teach her to ignore the unpleasant stuff. As the year has worn on she seems to be growing in her resilience and self-possession. We can't wait to see what her quick mind, quick wit, and quick hands will get her into next! Alida is getting interested in some of the traditional academic pursuits, recently fulfilling her drive to master long division and wanting to bone up on history. All the same, when we wonder where she's gotten to we don't yet look to see if she's picked up the math textbook...we see if she's curled up with a novel somewhere or traipse upstairs to see if she has joined Grandma for puzzles or a baking project or Grandpa for a round of teasing and pen stealing.
Terah (7...NOT 6!) is blossoming into a full-service spunky kid! Just as likely to be found upstairs as Alida, and for the same reasons plus the pursuit of a bowl of Cheerios, Terah is growing like her own little weed. She is just now picking up reading more solidly...the culmination of a long- and fondly-held wish of hers. She still claims she can't read, but I've sat with her and a book, and I know better. She can't fool me any more! Terah's physical energy pours out of her, taking her away from the table before she's full, bouncing her around the room, dressing her up in an endless variety of clever outfits, idly turning her upside down on the futon with her feet waving in the air. She, of all of our kids, is the one to dare to try something new with her body before she really has thought it through, so little bumps and nicks are common, though she gets cautious in more serious situations. The result is a greater body sense than the others had at her age. I think any sport or other movement that requires coordination and balance will be fun for her. This talent extends to her fingertips, such that art is a special skill of hers. Her sense of proportion in drawing is a little uncanny, and she is FAST at it. As an art-focused kid myself in my day, it is fun to see her take this up. It is strange to think that Terah can hardly remember a world without COVID. It has worried us that her opportunities for socializing with peers have been so limited (given our homeschooling decisions and unusual level of COVID caution), but having cousin Ivy to chum around with every week and having high quality family relationships seems to be mostly adequate; when chances come to get to know new kids or continue the less-frequent friend play sessions she is ready to make and maintain those connections with appropriate skill and enthusiasm, and adapts very well to whatever distancing or masking precautions the situation calls for.
All the same, we have had to recognize the draining effect maintaining an unusually cautious COVID protocol has had on our family, and we do wonder sometimes whether we'll look back and think we missed some opportunities for connection unnecessarily. Don't get me wrong, we'd MUCH RATHER NOT get this disease whose long-term effects will not be known for another few years at the earliest. But life is more about weighing risks than about eliminating risk, and as this year draws to a close we feel that a window is also closing for us in which we've been able to lean more into the "abundance of caution" mode and postpone deep engagement with that risk-balancing dance. We know that most people in our context have more or less moved on from any COVID precautions at all, choosing to ignore scientific recommendations for public masking and that the bivalent booster has been taken advantage of by less than half of us. Our family's caution (and our life's circumstances allowing that level of caution) places us in a small minority, but even within our own families, to say nothing of close friends and chosen family, we have such a wide divergence of protocol.

In a way this is a blessing in deep disguise, because it causes us to release our grip on our often too narrow concepts of health and wellness, and open ourselves to joining the awkward choreography where risk, compromise, and both/and thinking find their balances. These are crucial steps on the road to wholeness. Our lives are (or are intended to be) a mosaic of duty and inspiration, risk and security, boredom and thrill, giving and taking, individualism and collectivism, the new and the old, passive and active, knowledge and ignorance, pleasure and discomfort, creation and destruction, treasuring and discarding. There is no right or perfect way, so it's up to us to find the joyful way of curiosity, acceptance, compassion, and love. We've been learning the paradoxical truth that the path to more and better love for others is through unconditional love and acceptance of self.

So in this year when political tensions here on our continent still threaten to destabilize the trust we need to function, when imperial ambitions in Europe unleash pointless horror, when ignored conflicts on the African continent make life a trial for many, when governments come together to solve climate conundrums and largely fail, and when disease continues its quiet destruction, we take a dance step towards gratitude also (not instead); gratitude for this good soil that feeds us, for our relatively stable and safe context, for every day we get to live in pleasure on this earth, and for the renewal we have begun to find.

P.S. For more detailed news, explore the rest of our family scrapbook blog entries above at your leisure (and let us know if you want emailed notices whenever a 2023 post goes up).

*For a small sampling of the brilliant minds and tender hearts that have been part of Janelle's learning, unlearning, and deep healing journey this year, that is ongoing, see below:
We kept up the tradition of taking a family photo on the first of each month, but as you can see our numbers and the family around Tangly Woods on the 1st of each month varied more this year than in years past!
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