Vignette #2: Another Mighty Fortress

I rode my bike to my farmer’s house. It was a beautiful spring evening, the kind I dreamt about all winter. The sun was starting to set, and the shadows were elegant and long. The ride to the Allred’s home and farm is along the perimeter of Provo. And you know what I saw along the way?

Beautiful things.

Like wheat just beginning to grow.

Cows grazing on green green grass.

Family gardens with peas just starting to pop up.

Fields tilled into rich brown furrows.

And Dale, holding living proof that winter is over. A tomato plant.

A real, live, beautiful tomato plant.

I started in the safety of our mountains and watched the sun go down over our lake.

And I felt so safe.

This valley is a mighty fortress.

It is perfectly capable of sustaining us and protecting us.

We live in confusing times, I feel. I am an optimist from the inside out, so I feel no need to enumerate the ways in which our systems are failing us because we’re winning in so many ways, too. But the point is this: some of the food we buy at the grocery store is grown with poison. And some of it was shipped from far away. And some of it will cost more than money. And what we eat is not always good for us.

But this land is capable of taking care of us and defending us, like a good mighty fortress does.

Vignette #1: A Mighty Fortress

It took a complete day and a half to fix the chicken coup.

Being responsible for things that depend on you for their happiness as well as their physical safety and the longevity of their lives is weighty.

When my chickens died last week, I lost 4 sweet pets, and I felt the gravity of my responsibility in the matter.

Before fixing what was broken, I felt a little angry and a little guilty, and a fierce determination to protect my little chickens.

After stapling and reinforcing, covering and mending, drilling and hammering, I felt exonerated.

I've done everything I can think of to keep them protected and secure.

A Mighty Fortress.

I bought 4 new baby chicks who are tiny and delicate, and who will be safe in the structure I've built.

Philosophies and Dead Chickens

I have a philosophy about meat.

Well, at least I think I do.

The philosophy is that if I can eat meat, I should be able to kill it.

In theory, this makes pretty good sense – I should be responsible for the food I eat.

I plant a garden and bake my own bread and try to make other responsible food choices.

If I can participate so directly in growing my vegetables, I should be at least willing to be just as involved in the other things I eat.

I got chickens a month ago.

I wanted fresh eggs, and thought chickens would be a fun adventure.

When you get baby chicks there’s no real guarantee that they will turn out to be female, and I’ve said from the very beginning that if one of the ladies was actually a rooster, I’d kill it and make a soup.

It sounds terrible, but it’s all a part of my philosophy of responsibility – chicken from the store was killed by someone.

It was.

It’s not something we really have to think about because it’s all clean and featherless and gutless and still and cold. But I should be responsible for the things I eat, and that includes planting seeds and kneading bread and, theoretically, killing chickens.

Tonight, however, I failed the test.

My chicken coup was raided by dogs and 4 of the six pretty ladies were killed. Two managed to survive, and I’m just hoping they make it through the night.

I literally cried the entire afternoon.

As pathetic as it sounds, I’m devastated that my sweet clumsy fugly chickens are dead.

And I’ve come to realize that I could never, ever kill one.

So much for my philosophy.

Handshakes and Art

This week I met an old friend of my roommates.

You know what, that’s too strong of a word. She was an acquaintance. One who didn’t know that my roommate has been living in Utah for a year. Acquaintance might even be a little too strong.

But when I met her, I did what I do: I shook her hand. This is almost always a mistake. It’s such a formal gesture, it’s so often uncalled for. I’m saying, when I see someone in the vegetable aisle at the grocery store that I know even vaguely, or meet a stranger at a ball game, I will shake their hand. It’s an impulse, a knee jerk reaction, something I can’t refrain from doing no matter how hard I try.

It reminds me of my father. It makes me think of my rural heritage and the formal friendliness of country etiquette.

I think I have a conflicted relationship with this gesture. I would prefer that new relationships or acquaintances begin with some form of physical contact. I like touching people and for them to touch me. Not in a creepy way. And yet the second my hand shoots out to know someone better, and for minutes thereafter, I usually blush and regret it. I regret that this is not something common among my peers, and that it’s perceived as so formal. Because really I just want to know you better, new friend.

So art.

Art is a symbolic gesture. It means more than just what it is.

It’s like a handshake.

It can be layered with meaning, and is different for different people. It changes with its setting, and inherently requires people to interact.

I think there’s something important about the structure that is created by etiquette – it provides healthy entrances into social interactions. It connects us briefly to each other, which in turn hooks us in to the greater network of community.

And it’s like practice – no matter how much you hate your neighbor or don’t want to speak to an acquaintance or just want to be left alone, social etiquette, like shaking hands or saying please and thank you or tipping your hat (this is something I miss) forces you to practice being kind and friendly and neighborly, even for just a few seconds.

Art is like this too.

It’s practice. A chance to act, however briefly, in different ways.

It’s a kind of structure that creates healthy and positive entrances for social interaction.

And I might possibly have an equally conflicted relationship with art as with hand shaking.

Sometimes I feel compelled to do it, and sometimes I just don’t know what it means.

Here is an artist that I adore. Mierle Laderman Ukeles. Truly, her art has been pivotal to my own.

Her work deals with issues of maintenance: all the things that go into maintaining a child and family, a home, a neighborhood, a city. She worked in the 60s and 70s when performance art was all the rage and did things like clean galleries and city sidewalks and accompanied sanitation workers on their routes.

One of her most well-known projects Touch Sanitation (1970-1980), involved shaking hands with more than 8,500 workers in the New York City Department of Sanitation while saying "Thank you for keeping New York City alive."

Her point was that we are all part of a network. We are directly involved in the lives of the people who pick up the trash, and directly responsible for the millions of pound of waste that are deposited in landfills every month.

And she shook 8,500 hands.

I think she is very cool.

Thanks, Mom

I love gardening almost more than I can say.

This is a gift from my mother.

There are so many reasons to plant a garden.

They are hard to enumerate.

It’s just so fun to be outside and dig in the dirt and feel the sun on your skin.

Plus all that digging and weeding and lifting and moving gives me big muscles. My favorite kind of sore is the after-gardening kind.

It’s heartwarming to watch something grow. It really is. I feel tenderly towards the plants in my home and garden. It may sound strange, but they’re living and growing and beautiful, and totally dependent on me to take care of them. It feels good to keep something happy and healthy.

Plus plants in gardens are just so pretty.

And even more, it feels good to get something for your efforts. Like a little present from the plant that appreciated your efforts. A beautiful, juicy, bright red tomato.

Thank you, Carlyn. Thank you so very much.

My pleasure, tomato plant.

Seriously.

Tomatoes off the vine are a pleasure beyond description. If you have never plucked a tomato from a plant and eaten it while it was still warm from the summer sun, then I’m telling you that you haven’t lived.

The satisfaction of eating something nurtured by your hands is almost as great as the flavor in fresh produce. And I don’t mean fresh from the grocery store.

(this image is from my friend's friend's farm Local Roots in Washington. Their blog is fabulous.)

Fruits and vegetables picked at the peak of ripeness and perfection are more delicious than almost anything else. There are also added nutritional benefits of eating this way – a tomato bought at the grocery store was picked while it was still green. Nutritionally it wasn’t ready. But the tomato or strawberry or apple picked just as it’s turned the right shade of red has been given the proper time to make all the vitamins and nutrients that it was meant to make. It’s full to bursting with all the things that make a tomato good for you. Including flavor.

And a tomato grown in your garden doesn’t have all the things in it that are NOT good for you: chemicals, pesticides, and genes modified to withstand the pesticides. This is a whole can of worms that I might open another time, but I’ll just say this: I don’t like to eat poison. It’s gross.

Also, I love how little effort it takes to get the food from the plant to my mouth. I can just stand right there next to the plant and enjoy peaches and peas and pears without having to walk or drive anywhere. No trip to the grocery store. No standing in line. No 1000 mile drive from Mexico to my town in a truck that gets maybe 7 miles to the gallon and emits all sorts of greenhouse gases and other unpleasant particulates. Which means almost 0 carbon footprint. In fact, my little strawberry plant ate carbon dioxide for lunch, and gave off oxygen, which I happen to love.

I’m just not sure I can say enough good things about gardening.

Thanks, Mom.

Current Work

In a nutshell, I’m interested in doing three things: helping to develop a healthy food culture in Provo, bringing members of my community together in positive, authentic ways, and making art.

If I could work every day on these goals, I would live a happy life.

If I could accomplish these things, I would die happy.

For my MFA thesis show, I’m going to attempt to do these three things.

At the same time.

At the Provo Farmer’s Market.

I hope it works.

My plan follows thusly:

I will have a booth at the farmers market that I will man (I mean, that I will woman) every Saturday from May to October.

(link to Provo Farmers Market blog here)

At the booth, I will glean information from people who pass through.

On large scale maps, I will have people record information about local agriculture: where the food is, what they’re growing, and what resources are in their neighborhood. For instance, on one map I will record where all the farmers from the market grow their food. On another, people will mark where their own gardens are, and what they’re growing. Others will record resources like orchards, meats and dairy, nut trees, berry bushes, and the like.

This is what one map looks like.

We could even get crazy – we could start mapping where industrial farming equipment is made, or where water sources used to farm/garden are, or where you can find fertilizer. The possibilities are endless.

The information collected will be posted on a Google map for all to see.

And what we see will astound us, I think.

This is a vibrant, fertile, beautiful town full of equally wonderful food and brilliant people who grow it.

The asset mapping is an important part of this project, but that’s probably not the most important part.

What I really want with these maps is to give people the chance to position themselves within this framework. Contextualization is the order of the day.

We all eat food, and we all expend effort every day to finding that food. The maps will give people a visual reference: they can see where they live, and what resources are near them. They get to put themselves on the map, but in the process see that they are part of a larger system.

The hope is that it will stimulate some kind of action or change.

Instead of driving 7 blocks to the grocery store, why not drive 10 blocks to Clifford Family Farms to buy eggs?

(and seriously, with an image like that, who wouldn't want to go there? gorgeous!)

Or why not talk to that neighbor who has those plums down the street. Maybe she has extra, and besides, you’ve been meaning to meet her anyway.

Or maybe you realize that you don’t know what resources are available in your neighborhood, and you start paying attention. That would be a very, very good start.

But besides encouraging people to see where they fit in this community of food-eaters and food-producers, I have a hidden agenda.

You see, I’m convinced that when people start paying attention to where their food comes from, they immediately start paying attention to who grows it.

I’ll just tell you that I love Amy and Dale Allred. They grow the food that I will be rapturously enjoying this summer. And they have these great kids. And they made me delectable cherry zucchini bread delight for my birthday. And they’re completely wonderful.

And the Daily Herald wrote about them. Here's a link. (Keep an eye out for yours truly)

I ate one of their heirloom tomatoes at Pizzeria 712 last year, and it literally changed my life. It was delicious beyond description. And when I started asking questions about where this incredible food was coming from, I found that there were beautiful, wholesome people behind the whole thing.

So my hidden, or maybe completely public agenda at this point, is to encourage people to get to know each other better.

Every week I will post assignments. Once a teacher, always a teacher, I guess.

These assignments will be things like creating a meal with your neighbors made completely from food grown on your block. Or researching water purification methods and creating a diagram. Or going on a walk with at least 3 of your neighbors and mapping out the food that you find. Or eating a fruit or vegetable from the grocery store and then the same fruit or vegetable grown locally and writing a poem or descriptive paragraph about it. If you complete an assignment, I will blog about it. Just email me pictures and your words, and I’ll throw them up on the internet.

Easy as pie. Peach pie. Which I can’t wait to make this summer.

I am literally giddy with excitement for this project to start.