Greenstorm's Journal

It always starts out utilitarian.

I've approached something sideways. There's something I'd like in my life, to store excess pork, to see how something grows, to wear comfortable clothing that fits.

I can't really afford the easy solution: buy another freezer, hire a gardener or get fancy raised beds built full of groomed soil and irrigation systems, shell out for the kind of high-end clothing that both fits and suits my set of temperatures and activities.

I sit with the lack awhile and live, either in anticipation or in real time, with what happens if I keep on business as usual: half my carefully-loved pork goes bad, the meaning and connection in my life disappear, I don't want to get out of bed and am in varying degrees of discomfort when I do.

The pressure of the unsatisfactory situation builds until a spark manifests in the right place at the right time: an article on old-fashioned meat curing, a post on seed diversity and appropriate variety selection, an ad from somewhere I bought mask-lining fabric a couple years back.

It neither looks nor feels like an explosion. It's not really a spark. It's a seed crystal falling into supersaturated liquid. Is it saturated with discontent at my current situation? Is it saturated with my current knowledge and love of patterning? That's not what it feels like. It feels like I'm suddenly part of a structure, a part of humanity, that has always existed, that I'm being woven into the world one strand of knowledge at a time.

I click on a linked article. A strand of knowledge connects me. Another article is suggested and I read it too. Another piece of crystal forms, another stand in the web patterns me in. Maybe I search for a facebook group and join it. Facts, technologies, methods, approaches, new ways of playing, new ways of engaging with the world: some I see and they pass me by, but others click into my situation. They give me options other than my dissatisfaction.

I can't afford to kit out a charcuterie fridge but there are bags that help regulate humidity and can let a regular old hand-me-down fridge stand in for one. Pink salts (not the himalayan ones) prevent botulism, which grows in the absence of oxygen. Smoke can delay rancidity. It doesn't take much to buy one of those fancy bags and put some meat in it; once I've done that I might as well try a different cut of meat, a different set of spices, a different salt level.

I can't afford to make a conventional controlled garden but there are animals that can dig the soil, mulch that can smother the lawn I can't afford to have tilled under, varieties that will grow without the infrastructure of a greenhouse. If I put pigs on the lawn I can eat them later and their feed cost is basically just paying for fertilizing and rototilling and the eventual meat. Straw is cheap. If I assemble relatively inexpensive seeds from people who have similar environments and do selection on them and their offspring, I can get ripe tomatoes and squash from much more garden than I can afford to cover with greenhouse. Once I'm there I might as well use ducks and chickens for bug control, geese to mow the lawn, and I get such lovely nutrient-enriched straw from them. Once I'm there I might as well select not just for ability to ripen but for flavour and beauty and story since I can grow out so much on my land and don't need to expand greenhouses to do it.

I can't afford to buy expensive fancy fabric straight up but there are misprints, seconds available that have the same function, places that sell weird shapes and amounts and colours more cheaply. I can't afford to buy dozens of patterns and the highest end fabric but I can alter a pattern to accommodate the cheaper fabric, the one that has less stretch but equal warmth and softness so is a significantly less cost. I can't afford a ton of fabric but I can use every last bit of what I have, can make neck warmers and fingerless gloves. And I can sew scraps together, use different types of fabric in one garment so nothing goes to waste, and now I'm colour-blocking and using precious stretch fabric on side panels where I need the most movement and using bits of fabric for pockets on everything and planning out overlapping uses for each garment so I need the fewest different ones without doing too much laundry.

I'm curious, I have an outcome in mind, will I meet that outcome or will I learn something? Either way I get drawn in and meeting my utilitarian goal becomes a way of playing with the rules of the universe, and also of playing with the people who have come before and have worked and frolicked and built knowledge in this same pool. They talk about parallel play and in some ways this is it: people play and they write or video about it, and I take that and alter it and run with it and maybe write about it back. I almost never find people who want to do the thing close to me physically but there's an undeniable closeness from playing the same game as someone else, even if I'm playing it somewhere else.

And that play is pretty much where I find my joy.

I'm not consistent. I do charcuterie a few times a year, I garden a little more than half the year, maybe a little more than that if you count the spreadsheeting that always comes with my interests. And apparently I do sewing every six years or so.

My memories live in these activities and I access my past and future self through doing these things.

I remember my mom and brother helping me put the first batch of pork in cure, and they help me often enough with these things that my brother's handwriting is on a lot of my meat. I remember those first pigs, their noses peeking out of the little house. I remember the long wait to learn what was too salty, the way each spice sparks curiosity: what would juniper taste like in prosciuttini? What about madagascar peppercorn? Homemade absinthe? Berbere? I remember sharing things I'd made and trading them for my old boss's tinctures, opening the way to new explorations in a way that felt like an unobtrusive collaboration.

I remember the scent of the first plant I interacted with, fennel growing out of the paving stones in Las Angeles, and I remember harvesting Lunaria seeds in the side-garden a few years later, and hauling manure in a wheelbarrow up from the barn years after that and so I remember the barn and the texture of the side of the house as I put up nails to strong my tomatoes on. I remember my first greenhouse, built with Juggler, and I remember my first black tomato. I don't have to reach back far to remember the first time I saw hugely varied textures in tomato foliage. My downstairs is still a cornucopia of widely varied squash, one of which my cat hauled to his bed last night.

I remember the month in college (was it more than a month?) where whenever I left home not in a work uniform I had to leave it in a newly-sewn outfit because I couldn't tolerate anything I already owned. I remember the florescent-lit basement of the cheap fabric store where the extra-cheap seconds were. I remember scoring the full rolls of "athletic fabric" I still use for mock-ups, and my skirt, strap-vest, and veiled top-hat ensemble I put together for an event that now escapes me. I remember laying out patterns on Josh's floor before our winter backpacking trip, measuring and checking and measuring and checking to make pairs of pants that would work for me. I remember learning about fabric structures and I remember the sound of my friend the sewing machine and my body remembers how to swoop the thread down and sideways and up and around and down again to settle it into its guides. I still have a few tattered garments that don't set my body off, that don't send pain and electricity down my legs, that don't raise hives on the front of my thighs or the tops of my hips, that let me get out of bed in a cold environment and move freely through it.

The next situations of dissatisfaction are an inability to afford new snowboots (could I really make boots?!) and my inability to afford fresh vegetables (when lettuce is $8/head, hydroponics does seem to be the answer, and that's what kratky was designed for).

All this is to say that I have pork jowls in my freezer that need to go into cure; seeds I crossed this summer in all manner of ways from controlled to insect-and-crossed-fingers and it's good. Then, after spreadsheeting and fabric buying and pattern cutting, last night for the first time in years I felt the clatter of my cheap little sewing machine and the silky hum of Josh's antique Singer. It was, as is everything I do, utilitarian to serve a purpose I could not otherwise afford. I even paused a moment and thought - what would I do with my time if I could just buy these clothes? Would I talk to friends? Spend evenings watching TV and lazily chatting? Take up jigsaw puzzles?

So I'm not writing all this to say it isn't work, and that it doesn't come at many kinds of opportunity cost of time, thought, knowledge acquisition, and energy.

I am writing it to say that this way that I accommodate myself in this world also feels like coming home within it.

I'm halfway through training for a half marathon I mysteriously signed up for that'll take place in February. I didn't think I'd ever be a runner, mostly because mom is one, and I still don't think I *am* a runner... but this sort of exercise regime suits me down to the ground. In building physical capability the basic idea is to do low level stuff for awhile to build a "fitness base" or basic capability, then to add intensity for while (in my case, distance) in small increments. So I got through the part where I built a base by running and walking various proportions of 2-4 miles for awhile, now I'm maintaining the base by running 4 miles twice a week and adding distance by running a long run every weekend.

Every weekend I add 1 mile to the distance I ran last weekend. A half marathon is 13 miles. My previous longest distance run ever was just under 5 miles.

So right now, every weekend, I run further than I ever have before in my life.

This is amazing and motivating to me. I may try to keep running as a sometimes-hobby-thing, not at this level of intensity, but I don't really like running. I do like something where I top my personal best once a week in easy-to-understand numbers (5 miles! 6 miles! 7 miles!). It's great.

Semester has also started; I'm two days in today. I don't know how it's going to turn out, but a couple of my classes seem to be going better than expected from the weird start-up stuff around them. We had a lab today that was tromping around the botanical garden looking at plants and I don't think the instructor thought much of me (I didn't need to look at a hemlock, I can ID it at all scales from a distance) but before I could feel too antagonistic towards him he mentioned that he has ghost tree moments on campus -- moments when he'll be in the middle of a building, or a road, and be aware of how not too long ago there were huge silent forests there, maybe a tree on that very spot. I feel that all the time, and I haven't met anyone else with that awareness, so it's hard to be antagonistic now, isn't it?

I also have a class that's four or five people, mostly masters students I think, and we're going to sit around and talk about the politics of land tenure in forestry and its effect on the environment and especially on different groups and also about the history of it. How great is that?

So we will see. I'm definitely too busy, but my first-ever student loan is coming in to fix that (I think) and I'm starting to get a handle on how my time will flow this year. I'm applying for summer jobs far and away, and making bits of time here and there to be social, and that's about it right now.

It's not perfect, but it is pretty good.

I've been beset by flashes of an odd feeling lately: not quite at loose ends, not quite bored, but waiting. I have a million things I'd like to do, that I would quite enjoy, but instead of actually doing them I find activities to kill time (and no, not just the internet). I wonder if it's just my organizing-mind burnt out from work and extra-busy scheduling, so I have no energy left over to schedule my solo time?

I had a truly lovely weekend surrounded by all sorts of folks. Now I feel the need for quality time with myself, not just waiting but doing unconstrained by the thousand subtle pieces of compromise and sharing that happen when others are around. I need to put myself in experimental space, to stretch, to challenge. I don't do that with people much except maybe with climbing. I do it alone, subject only to my own judgements.

What does my list of desirable things look like? Perhaps just writing it down is the first step.

o fix pottery wheel & get clay
o brewing 8 top up kousa wine & rack *apple-juniper wine (or cider, for Dec 7 party?) *sweet mead *another (stronger?) batch of graff to be ready for Dec 7 party?
o sewing *stripy skirts *bloomers *stretch long tops
o knitting *cast on in the round (armwarmers)
o biking *scout a 10k loop from my house
o foraging *find a chickweed patch by my home *chestnuts?
o body *I want to climb, actually, but it's annoying to do so before I move. Running? Yoga?
o costuming for Andrew's memorial & wine & cheese

Hm. I'm noticing my enthusiasm for cooking is waning again, and I'm really not up for gardening much right now, though design is fun. I'm probably pretty burnt out in general. It seems like there are some changes afoot at work but it's hard to see how that will fall out in the longer term. My bosses really, really want to keep me, it seems.

Oh well. Take your changes a few at a time, Greenie. Don't look too far down that road.