I dream of larders.
I dream of a house with deep larders. Row after row of shelves with full jewel-colored Ball or Le Parfait snugly-wired jars, jams and marmalades and pestos and tomatoes winking out. Bins with root vegetables and sacks of flours, bunches of dried herbs hanging from twine. A deep freezer full of meat, and veggies grown and raised by us. A niche of climate control with aging cheeses and ciders and beers. A pantry closet of battered and loved bakeware, a board for kneading dough, old beloved aprons. A chicken coop for eggs, a beehive for honey, an orchard for fruit, nut trees abounding. A milk cow.
I feel like the act of feeding myself, and attempting to understand all its complexities, has taught me much retroactive appreciation for my childhood and the lessons of my mother and grandmother. I still hate weeding but I loved sitting on the porch swing shelling fresh sweet peas, and helping my mom blanch corn and pack it neatly into freezer bags. I love canning because it makes me feel close to the women in my family. We've specialized and outsourced in order to free up our time to do other, supposedly more important things, but in the process we've lost these rituals, the import of Putting Food By, and the appreciation of how close to the edge of survival we can still be.
***
I feel like the act of feeding myself, and attempting to understand all its complexities, has taught me much retroactive appreciation for my childhood and the lessons of my mother and grandmother. I still hate weeding but I loved sitting on the porch swing shelling fresh sweet peas, and helping my mom blanch corn and pack it neatly into freezer bags. I love canning because it makes me feel close to the women in my family. We've specialized and outsourced in order to free up our time to do other, supposedly more important things, but in the process we've lost these rituals, the import of Putting Food By, and the appreciation of how close to the edge of survival we can still be.
***