The Dirty Life

The Dirty Life: On Farming, Food, and Love by Kristin Kimball
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Someone lent this book to Jeremy to read a long time ago. One technique I'm using for de-cluttering my house is returning things from my home that don't belong to me back to their actual owners. (Obvious, right?) So I finally sat down to read this so we could return it.

The author tells her story of "city-girl-mets-hippy-farm-boy." Interviewing him on his sustainable farm, and becoming interested in him and his "manly work", eventually hooking up with him and moving to a new area to start a larger farm, and finally get married.

Her boyfriend's vision was a whole-diet farm. So where some local farms will offer the community weekly or bi-weekly baskets of produce for their membership, he wanted to provide everything for the whole diet: milk, meat, eggs, fat, and something sweet like maple syrup, along with a basket of produce. Along with that goal he wanted to run his farm sustainably through using draft horses and renewable energy sources. The author does a good job of not glossing over the tough aspects of starting up a farm from scratch--which are plentiful--without sounding too whiny. And it was interesting to see the progress of how they went about trying to create this farm.

(On a side note, there were two sentences in the book I had a problem with because of their sexual nature, one sentence describing an intimate moment, and one retelling a dirty joke. I really had to ask why they were necessary. Sometimes it really feels like people are trying to prove something through including unnecessary lines like those.)

In terms of philosophy, although I respect the idea of the whole diet-farm, I wonder if it is actually counter-productive to some of the ideals her husband believes in. The cost of the yearly membership to Essex Farm is $3700 for an adult (I looked up their website) and $3300 for a second adult. And for children it is $120 per year of their current age. So for a membership my family would have to pay $8,920 for the year. And yes, it is meant to supply all our food needs, and they let you take all you want to can and preserve extras for the winter etc, but that is $743 dollars a month to feed my family, and next year with the boys a year older it would be an additional $40 dollars a month, or $783 a month.

Where is that money supposed to come from? I'm not saying the food is not worth that much, I believe in paying farmers a good wage, but I'm asking where it is supposed to come from. He detests commercialism, and consumerism, and "the man", and electricity, but for people to afford buying his food they have to go out into the economic world that he claims to be against in order to earn the cash to buy from him. He requires that by the very nature of being a whole diet farm. He leaves no way for people to offset the costs of their membership in a natural, sustainable way. For example, I can't be a dairy farmer, or an orchardist, and earn money from that and just go to his farm for my other produce needs or my meat. I have to go to him for everything, and he wouldn't even be interested in bartering or trading with me, because he does it all. So he requires that all the members have the type of job that pays large amounts of cash in order to support his "sustainable farm".

And along with that he is monopolizing the business from any other small farm farmers in the region. If he offers only one type of membership--a whole diet--and requires such a large fee to do so, then his members will not have money or need, after picking up their food from his farm, to go support any other regional farmers that sell, just eggs and chickens, or similar. Instead, he employs ten full-time farmers working for him on his farm. It seems if he were really so against the commercial system (he only buys second-hand clothes, etc.) that he would be more encouraging of similar choices in others. In which case it would make more sense to perhaps support and be a part of a local network of a number of small farmers in order to provide the whole diet for a membership in the network, rather than just supporting his farm.

Simply, in our family, we raise our own chickens for our egg needs and some of our meat needs, and we keep bees to provide for a major amount of our yearly sweetner-usage. We also do gardening that supplies small amounts of produce for our family. We do these things naturally and chemical-free. We do it because we think it is good for the earth, and it offsets some of our food costs. However, a membership at Essex Farm would be a discouragement from our doing those things since they would be redundant to our farm membership benefits, and increase our yearly food budget even more. Ultimately, if multiple people stopped their small-scale home efforts to just use the farm membership benefits, I feel that is a net loss both to the earth, and the type of sustainability and stewardship mentality that farmers like her husband are trying to promote.

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These is My Words

These Is My Words by Nancy E. Turner
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"These is My Words" is a historical novel of a girl growing into woman, as a settler in the Arizona Territories. I loved imagining life in my Arizona way back then. And definitely loved the love story of the book. The book is not all roses, however, showing many or the real and heart-breaking struggles of the people of those days.

Some of my favorite quotes:

Sarah referring to her mother said, "She says a move is a time for lightening your load and starting things new." (3) That one just stood out to help motivate me to declutter for our upcoming move!

"Taking up marriage is a good excuse for taking up cursing I think." (248) Sounded good to me, though most of the ladies at book club added, "or having children!"

"Children are a burden to a mother, but not the way a heavy box is to a mule. Our children weigh hard on my heart, and thinking about them growing up honest and healthy, or just living to grow up at all, makes a load in my chest that is bigger than the safe at the bank, and more valuable to me than all the gold inside it." (303) This quote just went along nicely with a train of thought I've been having lately about children being both a blessing and a burden. I was so sad for Sarah, when she talked of her baby girl just crying nonstop, for years.

"It seems there is always a road with bends and forks to choose, and taking one path means you can never take another one. There's no starting over nor undoing the steps I've taken." (309) Sometimes it's hard to look back and wonder what might have turned out differently with different choices, though that type of thinking leads right into the last quote I marked.

"Mama told me to make a special point to remember the best times of my life. There are so many hard things to live through, and latching on to the good things will give you strength to endure, she says." (327) And that is a good enough lesson for all of us.

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My Side of the Mountain

My Side of the Mountain/On the Far Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Just finished reading aloud with Owen. I remember reading it in 5th or 6th grade by myself and loving it. This is a great story about self-reliance, and learning to live off the land. As a child I was fascinated and dreamed of going away to live in my own secret place, eating plants and making my own nature home. I definitely enjoyed reading this book again with Owen, and he enjoyed it as well.

At one point while reading we were looking on the store shelves for a car-washing chamois (shammy) called for in Owen's Wizard Craft book for making a coin pouch. (He's simultaneously been reading Harry Potter.) The chamois at the store was much larger than we needed and therefore more expensive, and so I went to explain to Owen what we might try instead. I said, "What the instructions want is some fabric that looks like leather, so do you know what we could do instead?"

"Kill a deer?!" He said.

So I about died. "Yes, kill a deer." How can I argue with that? If what he learned from this story is that when he needs some leather he can go kill a deer then I am a happy person. Good bye "Made in China", Hello self-reliance!

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Atlas Shrugged

How to even begin a review of a book that is over 1100 pages long?!

This book book follows a young female railroad tycoon, Dagny, as she operates the nation's largest railroad.  She and some of the other main characters who work in industry are seen as greedy and selfish when what they are really trying to do is follow their passions, see their job done "right", and in many cases work in  innovative new ways to improve their industry and the world around them

The story shows her struggles trying to succeed in a country where the social/political atmosphere seeks to shame and work against her and others like her simply because of their success.  The politicians and public think the industrialists should show more concern for "the people", stressing things like equal share and equal opportunity, even though the services they provide are, themselves, providing for the good of the people.

As politicians, and less-motivated industrialists, pass regulations to "even the playing field" a little, for fairness, and "most importantly" to help the good of "the people"--discouraged businesspeople begin simply vanishing--closing up shop and leaving without a trace.

Dagny begins to feel that there is an actual destroyer working against her efforts to succeed--someone coming along collecting the last of the competent and intelligent people left in the country, leaving her with a greater and greater burden to carry on her own to keep the ever-more fragile country running, and eventually posing her with the question of whether or not she is fighting on the right side of the conflict.

This book was fascinating.  It showed how quickly our country can be changed for the worse, by constantly operating in the present and in reactionary attitudes, and most-importantly by punishing those who can help things change for the better.  It was actually a book that I felt pretty "somber" while reading.  There is just so much that goes on that was so frustrating, and discouraging (particularly the things that rang true to the state of our nation right now).

This book had a sub-theme of sexuality that ran through it (written in the 50's, it was pretty mild there were, I think, two paragraphs where I skipped to the end).  But the theme of sexuality was important in the way it was a metaphor for the contradictions existing in the general values and morality of the society as a whole.  This was demonstrated  through their different relationships which served to give a concrete example of the product of their values. This string of quotes between two characters helps describe this view of sexuality. 

"We are those who do not disconnect the values of their minds from the actions of their bodies. . . You knew that the physical desire I was damning as our mutual shame, is neither physical nor an expression of one's body, but the expression of one's mind's deepest values. . . I love you, my dearest, with the deepest passion of my body which comes from the clearest perception of my mind.(pp 859-860)"

This discussion was of a "good" relationship, but these same ideas were shown through a few "bad" relationships as well--that the physical was a manifestation of the person's truest inner values. 

I'm coming to believe that I really appreciate a cognitive discussion on healthy sexuality simply to counteract all the immorality that we are exposed to so frequently.  So I really appreciated the quote of sexuality being "the deepest passion of my body which comes from the clearest perception of my mind".  I really believe that to be true, and what a different view than the worldly idea of sexuality being involuntary physical lusts!

In the end I'll put this book on my "to read again" at some point list.  I enjoyed it and would love to pull out some more quotes from it--the philosophy is fascinating--but that task just seemed a little too daunting the first read through.  

Understood Betsy

Understood Betsy is a children's novel written in 1916, but I had never heard about it before.  I learned about it in home education circles, and read it aloud with Owen. I'd say that it's of equal or higher caliber than the beloved Little House in the Big Woods. 

In the story, young orphan Elizabeth Ann lives with her aunt and her aunts mother.  Her aunt takes care of her every need and shelters her from anything unpleasant, and prides herself in truly "understanding" the needs of Elizabeth Ann in a way she was never understood as a child.  When her aunts mother gets ill and needs to move somewhere where she can get well again, her aunt sends her to go live with the Putney cousins, whom Elizabeth Ann had always overheard are undesirable people--who don't understand children at all and make them to do horrible things called chores.

With the Putneys, Elizabeth Anne, becomes known as Betsy, and is exposed to a manner of living she's never seen before.  However, as "terrifying" responsibilities (like walking herself to school) are placed on her shoulders, she comes to realize that she is equal to the task, and capable of far more than she ever knew. 

This story contains quite a lot of the explanations of interesting daily tasks that are so fascinating to us these days, like in the Little House books, but there is so much more depth to this story.  I was amazed by the moral lessons that were woven throughout, and I struggled wile reading aloud to choke back tears through a few parts.  I had never heard of this book before, but I'm glad I found such a true classic while my boys are still young so I'll have the chance to share it with all of them.