Commuter Childhood

Compared to my own childhood, our children had a stable and predictable life, sleeping in the same bed every night, going to school from the same house in the morning. And the next generation of children enjoys a life where home is the same place every night. What we all have in common, all of the generations, is that the parents defined what home was. The parents are there in the night and the next morning.

From my earliest memories, we commuted from one home/bed to the next. We lived in DC in a rowhouse and we also lived in various rustic dwellings on various farms in the Virginia suburbs. Our parents piled us into the back of one vehicle or another and took us from farm to town, late at night usually.

I remember sitting with Lani in the little pocket that was behind the back seat of the VW Bug. It was a cargo space about the size of a small suitcase and it was lined with carpeting. The road I remember the most is the George Washington Parkway – at the time there was either Canal Road or the GW Parkway that would get us from DC to Virginia. Even 60 years ago, there were long traffic jams leaving town in the evening.

The first farm was in McLean, about 12 miles from the house on Q Street. It was The Corn Place – 40 acres of sweet corn. There was a run-down farmhouse where the one employee lived, and we also used that house as one of our home bases for the first few years, from when I was about 3 to about 6 years old. By the time I was six, there were four kids to move around.

No car seats, probably no seat belts. My father saw that they needed a way to move the baby from one place to the next without waking her up.  He modified a wooden crate, taking off one end and putting a fabric end on it so our feet could stick out as we got longer. We could sleep in the box, get moved around, and never need anything different. It was called the Newcomb Baby Box.

Most of the time, they knew where we were. One memorable time, they went back to Q St in two separate vehicles. Lani was 18 months old, so she was in the Baby Box. I was 3 and had been sitting on top of the ice machine, watching them pack corn in the night, for delivery to a supermarket. When they got back to Q St, they discovered they had left me asleep on the ice machine. They called Jerry, the employee, and he took me back inside to spend the night. No one was lost, just misplaced. The story is that I was not rattled, and we had oatmeal for breakfast the next day before they picked me up.

When our parents bought a wooded five acre property (1966: I was 6 years old), we shifted our camping/sleeping from The Corn Place to The New Place. This new place was within walking distance of our grandparents’ house.  Through all of this, our grandparents were the stable force in our lives. They too had a house in DC and a house in Virginia. They too traveled between the two houses (“the office” at 2015 N St and “the country” on Beulah Road) and they often helped us to commute between Virginia and DC.

The complexity boggles the mind but it explains so much about how our farm came to be the way it is. We had beds to sleep in at Grandma’s house, in the Tractor Shed at the New Place, at Q St and on the farm in Southern Maryland.  We had beds at the office on N St too.  When Lani and I went to Green Acres School in Rockville, the complexity deepened because we had to get to Rockville and back again every day. Either back to DC or back to Virginia. It was a puzzle that needed solving constantly – would we catch the bus at Holton Arms on River Road, or would we get on with Annie Morse at her house off Nebraska Ave or would we spend the night at our parents’ friends’ house and catch the bus in Cleveland Park?  People accommodated our parents’ needs every day.

Sometimes Grandpa and Grandma retrieved me at The Corn Place after I finished driving the tractor for a corn pick , bringing a hairbrush for the ride to school. Sometimes a British lady named Miss Horsey, who worked at Green Acres, brought us back as far as the front gate of Holton Arms and waited with us for our parents.

I don’t remember finding any of this noteworthy or troublesome. Our parents were doing all the arranging, and we just followed instructions. Our grandparents were the most worried and they did their best to make sure we were well cared for.

Yesterday I made breakfast for my own grandchildren and I remembered my grandmother and how she made our breakfast when Lani and I spent the night at the office on N St. This was in the days when we were going to Oyster School, so we had to ride the L4 instead of the L2 bus to get to Grandma’s work, and we would wait for her to finish teaching (the receptionist would give us tasks to keep us busy, like making little notepads out of stacks of scrap paper, with glue… this was before Post It notes were invented).  Our grandfather’s office was on the first floor of the small rowhouse and the apartment was on the second floor. The breakfasts she made were enough to feed a man who did hard physical labor all day – she started with half a grapefruit, then a bowl of oatmeal, toast and a soft-boiled egg. Lani and I dutifully at our breakfast, but it seemed like a lot to eat before school.

Looking back, I now see how much organizing our parents’ life choices demanded, and how much support they got from friends and family. Life was not random. We were on the move, but only in this small sphere – farm, school, town, Grandma, sometimes Cleveland Park.  Now I am amazed that our parents ever made it to any of our school plays.

We could have ended up as anxious children but we didn’t. It was instead another way of learning to be ready for whatever came next, and to be fine with camping.

Mother's Day

I just wrote this and sent it to my kids, but it might be days or weeks before they read it, so maybe someone else will get to read it and think about their own response to Mother's Day.

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We don't celebrate Mother's Day, mostly because my mother turned up her nose at such a thing, but I think maybe mothers are supposed to take note of their children on this day, even if only fleetingly, as a sort of check-up.

Thalia is on the floor entertaining herself for a few minutes, in a good mood. I have a few seconds.

People always say: you must be so proud of your children. I mean, of course. But I always think that is a funny way to think about it. I am so pleased with the choices you have been able to make, the way that you all have become better versions of everything than Dad and I have become (as we would hope), and that you all seem to be responsible for your happiness and also the happiness of others. I feel very lucky to have such emotionally healthy children, that's for sure.

Alissa sent me a podcast which I finally finished listening to this morning, a Modern Love episode with Isabel Allende who exchanged letters with her mother EVERY day for decades. This is a lost art and I doubt any of us would have been able to pull it off, even for a year, but what stuck with me is that she said that when she stopped writing to her mother or her daughter every day, she stopped noticing things so much because she didn't need to report so often. This sticks with me because I think like that too, that reporting is part of the way I live. So I want to report to you that you three are by far the part of my life that makes me the proudest, feel the most accomplished, the most amazed.  That, in combination with being married to Dad for all these years -- another accomplishment that pleases me and makes me glad.

Thalia is starting to squeal so we need to go outside. I just wanted to say that you three are the best and everything you end up doing is an expression of how we helped you grow up, and that you are all doing a great job.

Oh, and of course it is true that being a grandmother is a gift that some people never get and I am eternally grateful to be a grandmother. Being a mother was all good and being a grandmother is like a chance to revisit all the best parts.

Smooches and hugs to three people who make Dad and me look really good.

A Well-Stocked Kitchen

Yesterday I finally had free time, an empty house, a few baskets of pretty gnarly but ripe and delicious tomatoes, and the will to do something. It was time to make the wonderful tomato soup that I have made every year since Alissa was born, practically. 

I went out onto the porch and found the pot that hasn't been used in a year -- the one with the colander insert so you can lift out a lot of parboiled tomatoes without any effort. I associate this pot with Mrs. Beall. I think she gave it to me a million years ago. Then I realized I didn't have any celery. Dang. But wait, they just picked enough cutting celery to add some to each herb crate for market for the first time this season!  I got on my golf cart and zoomed to the stand, collected up some lovely long red seconds onions and two bunches of incredibly flavorful celery.

And just like that, I was ready to go. Usually it takes some amount of preparation, mental and practical, to be ready to do a big cooking project. But our kitchen is so ready for anything now (mostly thanks to Jon who can't help buying everything he wants when it comes to the kitchen) that you can start the water boiling without thinking through all that you will need by the end.

Started the water boiling and chopped the onions and celery. Heated up a big cast iron pot. Filled the sink halfway with cold water and added some ice. Dragged a stool over to the stove so I wouldn't have to bend over for any reason and I wouldn't drip gross juice all over the floor. Put the basket of lumpy, holey, a little bit rotten tomatoes on the stool and got started. Each batch of tomatoes takes one minute, so you have time in between to do things like peel the last ones, put the vegetables in the pot, stir. I cycled between the stove and the sink and the counter and realized that since I was really the only one here, I had control over the airwaves. That never happens. It is so rare that I don't even really know what I like to listen to, so I just listen to the same things as always -- old music like Graceland and the Pentatonics singing Hallelujah and Arlo Guthrie with his goofy, whiny voice.

It was a delicious 90 minutes. I got all the tomatoes into the pot, seasoned them, and then had to go to a meeting. When Jon came home, he turned the soup back on so it could turn into soup.  The only verb that I have ever come up with for that action, the melding/blending -- is "to soup." There is no soup that can be truly ready without having time to soup.  

This morning after I got back from loading the trucks, I added a new twist to my soup recipe. Usually I use the immersion blender but lately I haven't been liking that texture so much. Since the soup was cool, it was painless to blend it in batches, and I got to use the measuring cup that I love because it reminds me of Fairchild Co-op. It is a cute, tiny little one quart version of the gallon measuring cups that we used to use. I stole it from Lani when I helped her move out of her house about 20 years ago (I told her and she didn't care).

Yesterday I read some parts of an article, or maybe just the introductory blurb, about why stuff matters. Our stuff gives us meaning and identity. Having no stuff would be disorienting because your past is represented by the stuff you keep. Without a past and a memory, who are you anyway.  That's what I got out of the few sentences. And that is how I was feeling as I was putting this soup together. Every pot, every piece of equipment, even the kinds of burners we have on the stove (Jon has a gas burner, an induction burner, plus this modern but substandard glass top electric burner thing) -- it all adds up to what we care about, what we do, how we cook, who we are.

I hope you all get to taste this soup this winter. That's why I make it. For all the people who love tomato soup. This is a good batch.

July Is the Worst

I mean to write at least once a month, but July was a month to be endured, and there was no room on the edges for thinking new thoughts. We just had to put our heads down and tough it out. I really don't like  July. 

The only reason to have this month is that's when the tomatoes come in. I would be willing to wait until August for tomatoes if we could just rip July out of the calendar. 

When I retire, I want to be able to leave the mid-Atlantic in July. I want to go somewhere where there are beaches and ponds and lakes and I can just float in the water and sleep in the shade. 

This July was not excruciatingly hot. It was horribly soggy, and that made the heat hotter. It rained often, the air was a sponge filled with water all day long, and the nights did not get below the mid 70s.  At 6 AM the humidity was 99% and by the middle of the day it had dropped all the way to 94%. 

I change my clothes for the first time about two hours after I first put them on. The best way to avoid nasty rashes and fungal fires in all the places that rub and overlap is to strip down and take off every single dripping wet article of clothing, wait until you stop sweating, then put on another linen shirt, another set of underwear, a dry pair of shorts and a nice brand new pair of socks. These days I store all of my clothes on the first floor. Who wants to climb those stairs four times a day? I don't know how other people survive without multiple costume changes.

Anyway, we were working in a hot yoga studio, pulling onions and picking zinnias and loading and unloading truck after truck for the last week of June and every week of July, and I could only write farm notes for workers and customers. Could not think of anything but how to drink enough water to keep up with the sweating.

Moving on. So far August is DELICIOUS.

Peter Pan Pig Spa, Continued

We have reached the point where pigs are an essential part of our lives, except in the winter when they would be so sad here. When we don't have pigs, we just end up feeding the crows and the squirrels -- not nearly as satisfying. They just pick out the bits they want from the compost pile and leave a big, spread out mess.  We are trained never to throw away kitchen scraps or outdated food, and the pigs are enthusiastic about their role in waste management.

It all started maybe 20 years ago when I decided I wanted a few pigs.  My father never wanted to keep pigs because they are so smart, and it hurt his heart to keep them in a pen and treat them like they weren't that smart. None of us ever had an issue with eating animals if they were part of our lives, but somehow he drew the line at offering pigs a life that was less than they deserved.

I guess all animals deserve to be allowed to run around and forage -- like deer and groundhogs and rabbits and all the other creatures that are the bane of my existence.  But there is certainly a category of animals who live within fences or in pens in order to be the ones that we eventually eat. 

Our pigs only come to visit. They come as recently-weaned piglets and they stay for a season of digging in the mud, eating mountains of vegetables,receiving lots of visits from friends and neighbors bringing kitchen scraps, and wholesome grain every day. I called it the Peter Pan Pig Spa because they never grow old here. They live a charmed life. Well, if it rains too much, the charm wears off because their pen gets very muddy and it takes a long time to dry out.

This spring we got two pigs that were more mature than usual, but Bev (the pig farmer) brought them because they were extremely friendly and they seemed just right for us. They were brothers and he wanted them to grow up with good habits, not turning into competitive, nasty boars because he wanted them to be breeders. Like all the pigs he brings, they had never seen a vegetable. They had lived in straw, on concrete, and they didn't know anything about Swiss chard or fruit. They had never dug up a compost pile with their snouts.

It always takes the pigs a few days to learn about their new opportunities. They do start to dig and root as soon as they get out of the trailer, which is kind of amazing. Bev switched out the pigs a couple of days ago, bringing some smaller cuties, and they put their snouts down into the dirt immediately. This is an essential activity for pigs. Bev is trying to breed a more environmentally friendly pig with a shorter snout and less capacity for digging up trees -- they like to live in the shade in the woods. For years he was working on a lean pig with a long snout but he has changed his priorities and the pigs are stubby and short, like overgrown guinea pigs now.

The reason we can't live without pigs is they are so important to our kitchen and farm. We don't have to throw anything away anymore. They eat almost everything, with gusto. They prefer cooked foods for sure, and people food is their favorite. They stomp all over things that they are tired of or don't want (the last pigs would not even take a bite of an uncooked summer squash), but they learn to eat whatever is in season. There is a limit to how  many tomatoes they will happily eat, but if they get hungry enough between snacks, they eventually clean their plate. It is so deeply satisfying to take outdated leftovers out of the fridge and take them to the piggies. It is hard to describe how disorienting it is to be without pigs, when they have to go home in late November. Throwing away food feels so terrible. How do most people exist without pigs?

People always ask us what the names are. We used to name them, but after 20-plus years of little pigs, it seems unnecessary. They have personalities, they are unique and delightful, but they don't actually need names since they are going home in a few months. Everyone names them whatever they want. Kids love to name them.

Our goal is to socialize these little pigs enough that they are eligible to be bred, rather than raising them to be eaten. They are still part of the meat-producing process, but our pigs have the chance to have a longer and more interesting life. Bev sends me pictures of the baby pigs when we successfully produce mama pigs.

Bev freaks out if they get out, and there was one memorable adventure (described in July 2023 in this blog). The reason he gets so upset is that once pigs learn that they can get out, they have new information and they will never stop trying to figure out how to get out again. He came and whisked away the renegades within days. He didn't like it that someone called the police when pigs were seen walking along the side of the highway. Fair.

Rebecca has said for years that I like the pigs more than my own children. There is no comparison. Just because I make sure the pigs are fed everyday and I delight in their antics -- they are definitely not my children. Rebecca is just jealous because she thinks I am more attentive to the pigs than I was as a mother. So untrue. But I am very aware of the hazards of letting the pigs get too hungry. Bad things can happen. When my kids got hungry, they could just solve their own problems. 

I don't know of anyone else who has a program like this, but it is worth replicating. I always think that every neighborhood or sprawling development should have a couple of little pigs so that everyone can be part of this satisfying system. You don't ever have to eat them, you don't have to name them, you just get to feed them and see how happy they are to eat whatever you have. There could be pig farmers who switch out the pigs every few months so no one has to deal with the 300 pound version. That is a whole different game, and not the one I like to play.

Moving the Piano

Sometime in March, I was driving home from my piano lesson and I don't know what came over me, but an idea just popped into my head. The way they do. It seemed so right, I just had to go straight to my mother's house and tell her.  

I think we inherited my mother's piano in 2002 when her house was being renovated. Alissa was a piano student who practiced regularly, so we traded the Groisser spinet for my mother's baby grand. It felt special to have this heirloom in our house. We stuck it into the corner of the living room and over the years it got a lot of use while the top of it got buried in papers. Underneath the piano we stored a collection of things that didn't have a better spot. When Alissa left for college in 2007, I started to take lessons so it wouldn't be a big piece of furniture that never got used.

Then last fall, my mother's husband had an idea -- he asked Mom if she might want to take piano lessons. She hadn't had a lesson in 66 years. She said that could be interesting. I asked my piano teacher if she would take on an unusual student -- 89 years old, an accomplished pianist, memory loss happening, an excellent sight reader. Claudia was intrigued and said yes. So my mom has been taking lessons for months now, and practicing for hours at a time.

One day I heard her practicing on the spinet and I thought, that is a terrible piano. I can't believe she plays that for hours at a time. And that's why this idea popped up suddenly as I was cruising down Lawyers Road. I said, "Mom, do you want your piano back?" And without missing a beat, she said, "Yes." 

It took maybe a month to let her husband get used to the idea of a baby grand invading their space, and for me to assemble the right crew to move the piano. I enlisted my brother because he understands the importance of this particular piano and he isn't afraid of a big task. He lives in Denver, so we had to wait until he was here.

We set the time for 7 AM on Saturday morning, the morning of our big anniversary party. That's when there were plenty of bodies around, and it's the only time we had unscheduled that weekend. It was a little bit rainy, but I brought the Sprinter van to the front steps, with a slightly muddy dolly from the stand (it had been used an hour ago, in the rain, to load market trucks). A sleepy but willing group of guests assembled -- Tillie's boyfriend, Alissa's boyfriend, nephew Hugh, brother Charles, Benjamin.  

I had cleared the piano and a path to the front door. Our house was in chaos, as a result, with crates of junk stacked in the middle of the living room. Luckily we weren't having the party here and we could just leave everything in a big cluttered tower for the weekend. Our closest friends and family ignored the disaster zone and visited anyway, sitting on couches that are always kept clear -- sacred space.

The piano was really heavy. It is over a 100 years old (according to one piano tuner who told me it was not worth tuning anymore, it had run its course) and made of some heavy materials. They were very careful, every staggering step of the way.  The dolly was useful, leaving a muddy track in the hallway. Getting down the front steps was the most precarious, with people at the bottom trying to keep everything steady while people at the top tried not to drop it. Once they got it into the truck, I knew the project was a success.

Charles drove very slowly, with four people in the back, protecting the piano from falling or banging around. He backed up to my mom's front stoop and they skillfully unloaded it, like pros.  My mother's husband was a little taken aback by the punctuality of the project. It was still pretty early. Then it took about 4 tries of spinning the piano around until they found the correct orientation, at the far end of the living room. Perfect.

Then my mother sat down to play. Tears came to some of our eyes. It sounded so amazing. This is the piano that my parents bought when they were first married. It may not be the best piano anymore, but it is my mother's piano and it is back at home. 

I learned later from Nell that our piano teacher was uncomfortable with this whole plan. Why didn't we get piano movers? What were we thinking? It absolutely never occurred to me, not for a second. This is a do-it-yourself family and we have a lot of capacity. It just takes planning and execution, but we can do pretty much anything that we decide to do.

It took about a week to get our house back in order and we have so much more space. I now practice on a keyboard in the guest room, but this means I am not interrupting all the activities and naps that happen in this beehive (as my friend Laura describes our house). It's a win/win/win.

Holy Week, Holy Month, Holy Cover Crop

People around the world are getting ready to celebrate Holy Week.  A week before that, Passover starts.  All the weeks of this month are holy weeks, if you think about all the ways that April bursts into bloom. And you are not too particular about what “holy” means.  “Holy” is generally related to God or divinity, and April can be a whole month of divine experiences, just by walking around and looking up.

Last Friday at Shabbat services, the cantor led us through a brief meditation, asking us to remember each of the days of the week leading up to this Shabbat, and to breathe out and let go of the things we wanted to move on from, and to breathe in and hold onto the memories that we wanted to keep.  Amazingly, I could remember each day. And just as amazingly, I couldn’t think of anything that I wanted to forget or move away from. Each day had good memories.  We were supposed to be looking for the sacred, in amongst the mundane.

The thing about farming, or probably most work, there is a large amount of mundane every day and, if you turn it over and look at it from a different direction, there is a steady supply of sacred. It can be a sacred event, watching a tiny carrot stem emerge from under the soil, pushing and cracking the surface days before it appears.  The joy of smushing a solid root ball of lettuce down into soft, wet soil, then flicking the soil over the roots and just knowing that plant will grow – that feels sacred.

Cherry blossoms are breathy, airy glory – as are all the flowering trees that suddenly cascade into being, one after the other, faster and faster as the years pass. It used to be a more orderly succession: first bright yellow forsythia, then pink cherries, purple redbud, pink and puffy crabapples, elegant white dogwood, many colors of azaleas. Today on my walk I saw all of these at once, in various stages of arrival and departure. I even saw peonies, about two feet tall already. The mundane part of this is that it is worrisome to be living through climate change. The sacred part is that trees bloom. Period.

We live for eleven months of the year without all of this. It’s okay.  It would be mundane to have cherry blossoms every day. But from a different perspective -- in farming, we wallow in mundane dirt, day after day, and somehow that becomes a  sacred experience. There is so much beauty. Maybe not everyone would see it like this, but a green and lush field of rye, blowing in a stiff spring breeze, is just about the most gorgeous sight. And when the yellow flowers of overwintered kale pop through, or the thumb-shaped blooms of crimson clover appear in the mix, that is like a heavenly bouquet.  Cover crop as an expression of holiness.

I have been part of this cycle (walking on this hamster wheel, no that’s not right at all) for so long that it would be reasonable to have lost interest in the repetition of everything. But it is precisely the repetition that makes it interesting. You wait to see how it will all turn out. When will the soil be dry enough to spade, when will it be warm enough to germinate a seed, when will a field be wet enough to turn it again so the cover crop will get digested. When will it be time to plant a plant that can’t manage cold?  It is never the same. There is more to learn each time.

Also, it is normal, sacred work that fills the soul.  What else is normal these days?  So little. Most people do not have the luxury of planting broccoli into perfect soil on a clear, sunny day despite the cruelty and chaos that is crashing all around us. We farmers escape the politically profane and mundane. We keep planting, knowing that vegetables are normal and there is nothing that can change that. We all need to eat vegetables.

If you ever need a deep breath of sacred air, come into the greenhouse in early April. Since God created the first greenhouse, this has been the holiest place of all at this season.

This is still my favorite prayer, appropriate every day, abbreviated a bit: Blessed are You, Adonai, for giving us life, sustaining us and enabling us to reach this season.  (again)