Radical Home Making

Editor’s note: This article originally appeared in The Peasantry School Newsletter.

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Greetings Friends, Neighbors and Strangers,

The Sheep Flock, who number over fifty, are grazing in the high field along the road, the only one visible to passers-by.  Lambs attract a lot of attention—think stopped cars, flashing cameras, conversation at the hardware store, that sort of thing.  You don’t see many sheep around these parts anymore; they simply aren’t profitable given the current market conditions.  We began with two Ewes back in 2018—Glenys and Beatrice—purchased with the notion that nothing from them would be sold.  We called them the Gift Flock to help us remember.  The book I am writing tells the story of the unruly magic that has come to pass since that day.  But money was required to purchase Glenys and Beatrice initially, and I had earned that money selling the bread that I baked. 

The bakery was a pretty good gig, as far as small businesses go.  I purchased Wheat, Rye and Corn from three local farmers, ground those whole grains into fresh flour, and then baked about four hundred loaves each week which I delivered around to about seven small grocery stores.  The bakery’s weekly gross sales averaged around two thousand dollars.  I could complete my bakery chores in just under forty hours a week, which left another thirty for grazing the Sheep and Cows, gardening, and giving food away at the monthly Gratitude Feast we had begun hosting at the local town hall just down the road in that narrow valley in Vermont.  Then the Virus arrived. 

I haven’t sold anything since the day the Plague rolled into town.  Not a thing.  The bakery would have done just fine in a pandemic landscape.  It wasn’t that people didn’t want to buy the bread.  It was that I couldn’t bring myself to sell it any more.  I had been ruined on selling things by the neighborly beauty that was emerging in the wake of my decision a few years prior to discontinue farming for business.  That, and I can be terribly stubborn.  I was no longer willing to defend myself against the assumed ungenerosity of others.  In other words, I was simply too heartbroken to continue living in a constant state of self-defense.  Having a self to look after all the time had become increasingly untenable. 

Since that day I have tried to grow, glean, bake and give away as much food as I have energy left in my arms and legs, or battery power in my headlamp.  I have asked people for a whole lot of help, including those who read these weekly missives.  That “help” has included money, but by any measure that wasn’t the bulk of it.  We called that project-plea Brush Brook Community Farm.  Imagine a town-wide food fight, but instead of flinging meatballs in the dining hall people of all ages were growing and giving food to one another as gifts, all through the depths of lockdown.  Once you see something like that, you can’t un-see it. 

About twenty months into the pandemic, when it became clear that I needed to move the bakery and my small cabin on a trailer, a neighbor stepped forward and offered to buy this Farm to allow me to deepen that work, a half-million-dollar gift that included some “starter monies.”  Unruly magic. Those monies will be gone by year’s end, so I will have to begin asking for financial assistance again come Fall—to pay property taxes and the electric bill, to cover medicines and supplies for the Sheep, Cows and gardens, to buy the imported organic black tea that I haven’t yet figured out how to live without.  Over the years, I have tried to describe the practice of giving food away with many different combinations of words.  It happens to be very difficult to capture magic with words.  The book will attempt as much.  Here are some of those harmonic phrases: voluntary impoverishment, radical hospitality, and reckless generosity. 

Early inspiration for the work came as I watched the way nonhumans interact with one another.  From what I can tell, they proceed as if their wellbeing amounts to the sum health of their relations.  Their rainy-day fund is the fecundity of the landscape in which they are enmeshed, the landscape that furnishes the calories that sustain them—a practice of home-making.  I am smiling as I learn that the word furniture originally meant the action of furnishing, or provisioning.  The presence of furniture is a sure sign of a home.  This notion of landscape-as-home—or even landscape-as-bed, -sofa or -table—is remarkably radical for modern humans, yours truly included.  The sundering of people from place has been thorough, and devastating, and the resulting psychic homelessness can be measured in accelerating rates of social and ecological decline. 

But practices are different from solutions, quick-fixes, silver bullets.  Practicing radical home-making doesn’t re-weave the culture cloth in a week, year, or even a generation.  In a time of great urgency, practicing might seem painfully slow, even, dare I say, impractical.  But I am stubbornly committed to practicing as method for making culture—and the central practice here at the Farm is that nothing is for sale.  It’s not a way forward so much as a way back—a way of blowing on the old coals of memory.  From what I have seen, practices function only partially as training sessions; perhaps the bulk of their efficacy comes from the abstinence they entail.  An hour practicing something is necessarily an hour less engaged in the habitual, the comfortable, the predictable—the safe.  Practice and ritual are joined at the hip.  An hour spent practicing neighborly entanglement is necessarily an hour less practicing lonely self-reliance.  This week I offer a simple story about what stubbornly not selling anything looked like on the ground here at the Farm this week.  But first, the invitations and requests:

Invitations:

June Gratitude Feast: First Sunday (June 4^th) at 4pm.  Mark your calendars and please join us if you can.  There will be opportunities to help with cooking and setup on Friday, Saturday and Sunday.  Look for those details here next week.   

Weekly Farm Frolic:  Every other Sunday of the month at 3pm.  This Sunday we will be planting in the gardens and beginning to clean out the old garage—full of treasures and junk that came with the Farm—to make room for a proper farm shop.  Frolic Family Supper at 6pm:  All are invited to join.  We will serve a main dish and welcome additions of sides, desserts, etc. 

Requests: 

Garden Starts:  At Sunday’s Frolic we prepared many garden beds that are now ready to receive transplants.  If you have started seeds and have more plants(veggies or flowers) than garden space, including perennial herbs and fruits to divide (Rhubarb, Berries, etc.) we can likely find a spot for them here.  Our thanks go out to our neighbors at Mace Chasm farm who sent seven baby Plum Trees over here as gift.  They are in the ground and watered in. 

Place Settings for the Feasts:  Several folks have found treasure stashes at their local dump or thrift store.  If you’re headed to one of these places in the coming week with an eye for treasure, here is a list of useful items:

• Bowls for soup/stew/desserts.

• Small plates for desserts

• Larger round or oval serving platters for the tables (round platters 15" max as the tables are narrow)

• Water glasses(not mugs) could be plastic or glass

• Serving utensils (ladels, large spoons, and especially metal tongs)

STORY:  Why won’t you sell me a Lamb?

The phone rings.  It’s my neighbor Steve.  Last name Baer, not to be confused with Bear.

“Adam, are you around?  I don’t see you.”

“Hi Steve, I am just down the road at the Creamery.  I can meet you there in two minutes.  Can you wait for me?”

“Yes, I’ll wait.”

The Farm drive is actually an abandoned town road, and so the Farmhouse sits back a couple of hundred feet from the tar road on the crest of the land, the barns beyond and down the hill.  Large Maples line the dirt-track-driveway, and when they are in leaf you can barely see the buildings from the road.  The layout of the farm compounds the modern aversion to stopping by unannounced, and so I have had a hard time convincing people that they are welcome any time.  I stop by Steve and his wife Andrea’s house fairly often for various reasons.  Andrea played a significant role in helping me to prepare the food for the May Feast.  Initially, we visited on the porch when I stopped over.  Now when I knock, they insist that I come in and sit down. 

I can tell by the tone of Steve’s voice on the phone that he wants to talk to me about something important, so I hurry back.

As is the custom, we exchange a minute or two of small talk before getting into it.  He says, “So Adam, what are you going to do with all of those Ram Lambs?”  Ram Lamb is the term for the boy Lambs born this Spring, now a month grown.

“We will slaughter them and serve them at the Feasts through the Winter and Spring.”

Steve keeps a couple of Ewes at his place, and likes to butcher a couple of yearling Lambs each Spring for his family’s freezer.  For some reason he doesn’t explain, he doesn’t have the right animals in the hopper for next Spring.

“Can I buy one from you?” he asks.

“Remember, I don’t sell anything.  We had twenty-six Lambs born last month and four Beef to slaughter this year, so there will be plenty of meat for your family.  If you come over on one of the butchering days you can wrap and take home as much lamb as you’d like.”

I can see he’s working that one over by the furrow in his brow. 

“But how are you going to pay the bills?” he asks.

“There’s still about fifteen thousand in the account right now, which will pay the August tax bill and the other expenses through year’s end.  I’m working on a budget for the Farm for next year and, once it is ready, I will invite people to consider whether the work seems worthwhile.”

My answer has done nothing to un-furrow his brow. 

“I guess I am just kind of old-fashioned,” he says. 

Then there is a fairly long silence.  The day is warming quickly as we stand in the middle of the Farm drive, in front of the old farmhouse that will need hundreds of thousands of dollars of renovations—or the equivalent in neighborly labors—to be livable again.  Steve tells me that I’m lucky to have well-grown white Lilacs.  He’s had a hard time getting them established at his place.  Then more silence.

Brow still furrowed, he says to me, “Who is going to mow the farmhouse lawn?” 

“I haven’t figured that out yet,” I respond.

“Why don’t I mow it for you?  I’ll be over tomorrow at 9am.”

Last summer I didn’t keep the farmhouse lawn mowed.  It was my first year here, a year of quiet sabbatical.  But now the Farm is set to host weekly events, and an un-mowed front lawn is not a good way to impress the old-timers. 

There’s no sign of that furrowed brow the next morning when Steve rolls up the driveway on his rider mower.  I walk the lawn collecting winter blow-downs, including a couple of large stems of that White Lilac snapped off by heavy March Snow. 

Before he leaves, I thank him profusely, saying, “Can you see why I don’t sell anything? This is so much more fun.” 

Steve is smiling now. 

And I am smiling writing the story down.  That, and the Farm’s annual maintenance budget will be lower now that Steve has taken to mowing the lawn.  If you bump into him in town, and you’ve got a grateful feeling, don’t hesitate to thank him. 

Many thanks to you for reading.

With great care,

Adam

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Editor’s note: The Peasantry School Newsletter can be found here.: The Peasantry School Newsletter | Adam Wilson | Substack