No Electricity Day -- Why, Exactly?

 

When my siblings and I were between about 8 and 13 years old, our Dad started to implement some unusual lifestyle ideas that interested him. Since we were still kids living with our parents, it was not so likely that we would push back much. Or we picked our battles, and this wasn’t one that we decided to fight. He must have made it sound fun. He was a persuasive person when he thought something sounded fun.

Sugar rationing.  At some point our parents decided that Charles was eating way too much honey. That was the only sweetener we had in the house, besides sorghum.  So they decided to issue each of us our own pound of honey at the beginning of the month. It was ours to eat however we wanted, but we wouldn’t get more until the next month.  This was truly an exercise in watching how differently each of us dealt with scarcity.  Charles ate his up quickly and just lived without it. The rest of us rationed our honey and had some left at the end of the month. Dad had one use for his honey – he used a quarter teaspoon every morning in his instant coffee.  Charles was a big consumer of peanut butter and honey and raisin sandwiches.

We had No Electricity Day and No Vehicle Day and Raw Foods Day. I am pretty sure that the days of specific types of deprivation did not all fall in the same week – we would do six weeks of one and then switch to another (this memory is vague).It feels like they always fell on a Tuesday or a Wednesday. Certainly Raw Foods Day was on a Tuesday, and that one lasted the longest. No Vehicle Day was a flash in the pan. There weren’t many weeks that we could manage that one. Maybe that one was only for winter.

Raw Foods Day was a whole day, every week, of eating nothing cooked. We had raw granola, orange juice, raw milk, cole slaw, milk shakes with raw eggs, nuts, fruit, other salads.  It seems like this special tradition went on for a really long time, and when I went to Oberlin, I kept it up and shared the weekly practice with roommates and fellow co-opers. 

I do remember being shocked when one of the other farmers who lived in the cottage next door put her foot down and refused to participate in No Electricity Day. As I say, it hadn’t occurred to us that we could say no, and I think we even judged her for not doing it.  She said it was stupid and she didn’t see why her family should have to do it just because Dad said so. (She was not wrong.) As I recall, they turned on the lights and went on about their normal business.

When we did ask Dad why we were doing these feats of deprivation, he said it was good training. It was good for us to know that we could live without certain things. Some day we might need to find ways to survive without something that seemed so essential – like electricity or a car or sugar or cooking. He liked the exercise of it, finding creative ways to do without, one day at a time, not every day.

As it turned out, he was tragically prescient. He was the first one who had to learn to live without things that seemed essential and dependable. He is the one who got a mysterious respiratory illness and found himself suddenly a patient without a diagnosis for months. And then when he did finally learn what was wrong, nothing was ever the same again. And it is possible that he was more ready than he might have been, having practiced these self-imposed disciplines. He used to try to imagine life without ice cream. Now he was living without reliable taste buds, without good sleep, without an appetite.

It is not clear that it is important to have practice living without things. But practice does make it possible that you will not feel so sad about the deprivation if it occurs. You will take it in stride, like people in other cultures and economic situations do, not always by choice. We who live with so many resources, we may need to be ready for having much less.  We also may not have a choice.

Of course, any observant Jew would immediately recognize the idea of Shabbat in these practices. The idea of changing your patterns, deliberately, in order to allow other creative and meaningful qualities of life to emerge. That's nothing new. But most of us don't actually do that, most of us are not that rigorous about our observance of any rituals that force us to do without.

As an immediate and overwhelming example – the pandemic has been hard on everyone, for myriad reasons, and we have learned to live without so much.  Now we have No Theater Day, and No Restaurant Day, and No Hugging Day – all on the same day, every day.  Those who are fortunate enough to have good alternatives to all these losses, we are the ones who are not suffering as much. It does seem like the people who have changed their expectations, not spending so much thought on what is lost, those are the people who are weathering this with the least pain (not thinking about the sick and dying people, or the ones who don’t have work or food– that pain is not creatively avoidable). 

I am pretty sure that there is no actual relationship between the skills learned from Raw Foods Day and coping with the deprivations of COVID – that’s too big a leap. But I do think that the practice we had in our family, learning to live without, was a useful lesson that stayed with us.  We didn’t fully understand the lesson but that is so often true in moment.  There is much to be said for all kinds of resilience.

Digging Through the Junk Mail Box

Yesterday we opened up the CSA to registrations for this coming season, which is an event every February. It takes some weeks before February 1 to work out the kinks, figure out how to make everything as mistake-proof as possible, and create a process that people will actually be able to finish without just giving up. 

Becky and I spent the whole day at our computers, answering relatively easy questions and also trying to fix the issues that popped up. Becky described it as a full day "squall."  I thought it was more of a rockslide. Our job is much more complicated than it was a few years ago because we are trying to deal with a team of "support" folks at a software company that manages our CSA data, and their systems confound us sometimes.  We get our hands slapped for sending our support tickets to the wrong box frequently. Our policy is to never get flustered, never express our exasperation, take the high road. But Becky and I complain back and forth to each other by text, constantly. There must be a strict company policy over there that they never, ever take responsibility for making a mistake. Ever. 

And then when it was just about time to get out of our chairs and go to bed, Becky figured out that for the last few weeks or months, all of the inquiries that were coming through our website (during a quiet time of year) had been going straight to her junk mail box.  So she started to dig through those because we really try to be responsive to anything that is asked.  We are the virtual customer service department (which is pretty funny because both of us are often snarky and impatient in person, but super smooth and helpful at the keyboard). 

At first, they seemed pretty run-of-the-mill.  People want to volunteer, they want to be out in the fields, they don't know anything but they are hard workers, they are fast learners, they have two weekends a month. Often we can respond positively to some of these, but now I just turn everyone away because we can't have random people coming in and out of our work group. It's just too complicated with covid.

Then there were the people who need help finding soil amendments for their garden that they will feel good about.  No details about where they are or what their goals are. Just tell me where to go where I will like what I get. I didn't like the last place.

There was a request for a donation to a local preschool. Those are common. We often give something, partly because I used to solicit donations for silent auctions for schools for many years. But I also know how few businesses ever write back, so I don't feel bad if I don't give something away every single time someone asks.

Then there was someone who has a food waste disposal service who wants to drop off a regular supply of food waste on our farm, at no cost to us.  No thank you. And another one who wants to haul manure from a zoo and dump it at our farm, two or three times a month, at no cost to us. This one I considered for a bit, but decided that lion poop sounds an awful lot like dog poop and that just wouldn't be appropriate for our compost.  But wouldn't it be fun to have a mix of fancy bird poop, and zebra, and snake droppings?  It would be such an interesting experiment. Oh well, never mind. Those animals probably take a lot of Xanax and that has not been approved for our compost recipe.

Someone wants to find an egg source from chickens who eat no soy or corn, available biweekly in Vienna. I tried to come up with some ideas but that it too many boxes to check. I wanted to say, maybe you should just not eat eggs.

This one was a first:  Ted Britt Chevrolet wants to let us know that they have recently featured our farm as a great place to pick your own fruits and vegetables in the Sterling area. "We're always happy to let our customers know about great places in the area! As your local Sterling Chevrolet dealership, we'd love a link back to your website mentioning you were in our blog. "   Umm.. First of all, we don't do pick your own. Second, why would you do that?  Third, who goes to a car dealership to find out about great fruits and vegetables?  I didn't even want to answer that one, but I told them not to do that.

And here is one that I wanted to just delete, but it was from someone who drives past our farm every day and looks at our fields, so I felt like I should answer her.  She said, I have read a book and watched a documentary about tillage and how it destroys the soil. Essentially she then said, "Discuss."  Now, she is not wrong. There is plenty of scientific and empirical data showing that tillage is a destructive activity. (Tillage is turning over the soil, with a shovel or a plow or a spader. Just turning it over somehow.) And so I wrote her a brief, even-handed response saying that this is a complicated issue, you are right to be concerned, and people are working hard on finding solutions to the problem. At this point, there are very few farmers who are growing sustainable vegetable crops at the scale that we do, without tillage. We all want to know how to do better.  In the meantime, we do this and this and this to maintain our soil health.  

It just feels like people are sitting in their houses, thinking about stuff, and sending out random messages that may or may not require a response, but since we are a business that thinks it is important to be responsive, we do our best. Usually the questions are more spread out and I don't notice how bizarre they are, as a collection.

If anyone needs contact info for Zoofari poop, just let me know.