So many “remarkable blessings” in this post, Adam. I love that your heart is open to the old ways, the old ones who carried their hard-earned wisdom forward to those who have eyes to see.
I live in a town dotted by old farm buildings and farm land once built and worked by my ancestors, buildings that are now either crumbling into the ground or remodeled beyond recognition by the new money that now owns them. Each time I pass, my thoughts travel back—I yearn to go in, find the old kitchen, sit near the hearth, where the marble bed warmers are warming, and hear the stories, learn the ways of these long-gone ancestors. I have a few stories from my grandmother…the names of all the cows in her grandfather’s barn, and the horse that pulled the buggy she drove her grandma around in, just as I drove her, in her old Ford. How my great, great grandfather would try to sneak down the cellar stairs into the cool of the marble-walled cellar where the cider keg was stored. “Egbert, don’t you break my blue willow pitcher,” great-great grandmother Anne would holler.
How grateful I am for mornings spent making cheese in Grandma’s kitchen from an old recipe she had from her grandmother.
I remember the huge crocks of dark brown sweet clove, and green bread-and-butter pickles she made every summer from the over-ripe yellow cucumbers, and stored in the root cellar.
I once had a Jersey cow, Flower, whose milk I cooled in a tiny, floor-less milk house built over a spring on an old hill farm.
The little milk house is still there, the old galvanized tub I cooled jars of filtered milk in is now rusted and bottomless, unused since I sold my cow, decades ago. The spring still runs, but its course has changed, and it now runs next to, not through the milkhouse.
For all these encounters and experiences—anachronisms in my life, familiar to my granny, handed down from my farming ancestors, I am so grateful for. Because I can see how one could live, and live well, without the modern amenities we think we need. That gives me hope. Your work gives me hope.
One positive trend I have seen in science is the talk of a socio-ecological niche for farming. This is the understanding that social and cultural conditions determine the niche for a farm system as much as the ecology/geology does and that the ecology and the social are intertwined inseparably - interacting synergistically and mutually (and sadly in our day and age, sometimes antagonistically when an industrial culture prevails.)
So, I think your distillation of the fictional conversation between Bly and Berry, Adam, that "a healthy culture leads to a healthy land" (and vice versa) is spot on.
So many “remarkable blessings” in this post, Adam. I love that your heart is open to the old ways, the old ones who carried their hard-earned wisdom forward to those who have eyes to see.
I live in a town dotted by old farm buildings and farm land once built and worked by my ancestors, buildings that are now either crumbling into the ground or remodeled beyond recognition by the new money that now owns them. Each time I pass, my thoughts travel back—I yearn to go in, find the old kitchen, sit near the hearth, where the marble bed warmers are warming, and hear the stories, learn the ways of these long-gone ancestors. I have a few stories from my grandmother…the names of all the cows in her grandfather’s barn, and the horse that pulled the buggy she drove her grandma around in, just as I drove her, in her old Ford. How my great, great grandfather would try to sneak down the cellar stairs into the cool of the marble-walled cellar where the cider keg was stored. “Egbert, don’t you break my blue willow pitcher,” great-great grandmother Anne would holler.
How grateful I am for mornings spent making cheese in Grandma’s kitchen from an old recipe she had from her grandmother.
I remember the huge crocks of dark brown sweet clove, and green bread-and-butter pickles she made every summer from the over-ripe yellow cucumbers, and stored in the root cellar.
I once had a Jersey cow, Flower, whose milk I cooled in a tiny, floor-less milk house built over a spring on an old hill farm.
The little milk house is still there, the old galvanized tub I cooled jars of filtered milk in is now rusted and bottomless, unused since I sold my cow, decades ago. The spring still runs, but its course has changed, and it now runs next to, not through the milkhouse.
For all these encounters and experiences—anachronisms in my life, familiar to my granny, handed down from my farming ancestors, I am so grateful for. Because I can see how one could live, and live well, without the modern amenities we think we need. That gives me hope. Your work gives me hope.
Thank you.
I love the people who love the dead. Thank you for bringing them into this story.
One positive trend I have seen in science is the talk of a socio-ecological niche for farming. This is the understanding that social and cultural conditions determine the niche for a farm system as much as the ecology/geology does and that the ecology and the social are intertwined inseparably - interacting synergistically and mutually (and sadly in our day and age, sometimes antagonistically when an industrial culture prevails.)
So, I think your distillation of the fictional conversation between Bly and Berry, Adam, that "a healthy culture leads to a healthy land" (and vice versa) is spot on.