Tag Archives: sharing

I Learned the Secret to Everything In Aunt Nancy’s Basement

(Some assembly required)

Aunt Nancy’s small farm house had a basement. Our cookie cutter suburban tract home had no basement. Maybe this is why I spent so many hours each summer exploring the dark crannies and nooks of this mysterious underground room.

This wasn’t the spooky basement that popular culture had prepared me for. Aunt Nancy’s basement was neat and orderly. A magical place where glittering canning jars with jewel-tone contents were stacked to the ceiling on strong wooden shelves. A place where bunches of onions and braids of garlic were tacked onto the supports for those shelves. Along the bottom, crates of winter squashes, apples, and potatoes lay nestled in protective nests of shredded newspaper and straw.

In one corner a scrap of carpet covered the floor, and atop it sat a few broken down armchairs and an old sagging couch. Stacks of board games and old magazines sat on a shelf. Dubbed “Twister Corner” by my auntie’s family, this was where we all went when funnel clouds threatened. It was also where my cousins and I played when it was too dark or too rainy to go outside.

One set of shelves in Twister Corner held something different, though.

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I Paint My Poverty In Beauty

By doing so, we become rich

I am grateful to love old things. Corners worn smooth through years of love and use. Patches and mending threads give proof of adoration to well-worn garments. Repairs and mending are nothing more nor less than a bandage on a loved one’s knee, a kiss and a promise that all will be well again soon.

Old things, like you and I, are perfect in their imperfection.

All I can do is imagine the dissatisfaction and unhappiness for those that depend on the new and shiny, the unobtainably trendy, to bring them joy. Especially when their income is as paltry as ours. It must be painful to covet clean lines, Pottery Barn dreams, and the plastic haberdashery of the finest modern design.

Loving old things lends us the privilege of genteel poverty. Castoffs from a century ago, sometimes less and sometimes more, feel luxurious compared to particle board knock-offs of modern designs.

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Let’s Defund the Billionaires

I’m robbing them of my life energy, and you can, too!

You have heard it said before: if you don’t know what they are selling, then the product is you. Your attention, your custom, your life energy.

Does the Zuck care if you are there for pictures of your nephew or to find out about community happenings? No. The point is to get your eyes on the screen, your fingers scrolling, your brain reeling with things to buy or to believe or to fund.

Angry, sad, dissatisfied? Good, the easier it is to sell you and sell your wallet to the highest bidder.

Does Walmart and Kroger care that you simply want to feed your family a wholesome meal? No, they want your life energy to come to them via impulse buys, in store or in app, and they will tempt you with corn syrup, sugar, and bright colors so that you buy, buy, buy until you die, die, die.

As far as I can tell, we only get this one life. I want it to be my own, to live and to share with those that love me back. Not to sell, unknowing and unwilling, to a billionaire class that can never have enough until they learn what it is like to have too little.

Greed is nothing more than addiction under a different name, and none are greedier than a would-be oligarch that is rarely told no.

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Our Food Choices Can Define Our Resilience

A recipe for community and self reliance

By 6 am my feet are always on the ground. Mornings are my siren song, and I begin my day with the birds — sometimes earlier in the winter months. When I was younger, this was a burden. Now, in my middle years, it is a delight.

On this late September morning summer has finally come to a crashing halt. The sound of rain against the window announces the arrival of fall more surely than the yellowing bigleaf maples.

The bronze orbs of ripening Asian pears catch my attention from my neighbors yard. We share 12 acres with our neighbor. In his yard is a small fruit orchard featuring pears, plums, and two apple trees that need a bit more TLC to produce well. An orchard he doesn’t harvest or care for, so he has granted us permission to treat it as our own.

I thank him with apple cakes and plum preserves.

Taking the day in hand, I glance at my phone. There is a message alert from the Buy Nothing app. My request to pick apples has been answered by someone with an apple tree in their yard but no need for the fruit. Their house is on the same street as one of my gardening clients, so stopping to pick a bucket or two won’t detract much time from my day.

In fact, it takes far less time than driving to the grocery store and buying apples. Even less time than earning the money that would otherwise be needed to purchase apples.

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The Day I Spared Peter Rabbit

Beneath dead earth new life arises

Photo by Davies Designs Studio on Unsplash

I was wading knee deep through the fallen soldiers in a wasteland of death. The skeletal remains of heather, a sword fern, and countless other shrubs and perennials that could no longer be identified crunched underfoot.

Someone, in the not-too-distant past, had tried to eradicate a horsetail problem by dousing the entire garden border with a broad-spectrum herbicide. The only living things that remained were the prehistoric green fronds of the horsetails themselves.

I levered my spade underneath one of the heather remains and pushed it upward. A frantic squeaking accompanied the severing of the plant’s roots. I quickly stepped back and surveyed the scene before me.

With the heather gone, I could clearly see a small burrow with a lining of soft brown and white fur sticking out.

Oh no. Bunny nest.

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