The Cloudy Side of Sunnyside

Three brief points as preface:

1. The trouble with trying to write persuasively, is that, as you work, you usually feel that you have to leave the unpersuasive stuff out. 
2. This a concern if and only if, in addition to persuading, you also want to tell the truth. 
3. As it happens I do want to tell the truth.

There was a moment a few weeks ago when my wife and I were in the middle of canning peaches. It wasn't particularly pleasant work. No, to tell the truth it was actively unpleasant. It was hot in that kitchen. The floor-tile was sticky underfoot with syrup--which just no matter what seems to insist on spilling itself on the floor, and I mean no matter how hard you try to be careful. The two of us had been working for maybe two hours and had probably another hour's work to go: sterilizing, parboiling, slicing, hot-packing, boiling the packed jars. So to buck us up, I said something that turned out to be somewhat fatuous; something about how much I liked the way we were living. My wife replied, calmly and politely, nevertheless firmly:

"Yes well let's talk about that later sometime."

Now this was not a moment of snark. It was her way of asking: "Um just how honest are you being with yourself here? Are you really paying attention to what's going on around you?  Because after all, this is really hard work." 

And she was right. This was where the rubber meets the road. Where the talk that we used to engage in (in the future tense and passive voice) about the troubles of the planet--"something at some point really has to be done,"--was being translated into real action verbs in the present progressive--"I'm digging, I'm planting, I'm biking, I'm canning." And here's the thing: it's in that painful, active space of change that we might do best just to let the slogans be. Not pick them up at all. Not pretend the way is straight and plain, when in fact it's crooked and hard. No sentimentalizing the labor, no exaggerating the benefits, no denying the costs. No. Just quietly do the work.

So in the spirit of that call to truth (while my wife and I canned peaches) here's a little honest list of current costs at Sunny-side. Call it the cloudy side of Sunny-side.

Let's start with a minor pain: Oh, take the fruit flies for instance. Fruit flies, to tell the truth, are a part of our life at Sunny-side right now. They're always around at harvest and canning time. We're not talking clouds: just a few here and there, but they are annoying. There are of course strategies: you can begin by covering all new produce brought into the house with tightly woven cloth. You can set out a bottle trap or two, baited with cider vinegar and a drop of dish-soap. And after every meal it's best to clean up spic and span from sink to table. But of course the fruit flies have their own ways of winning. For instance they have sex a lot, which has a way of producing more fruit flies, not all of which end up in bottle traps. And it irks me that the sex for them has to be more fun than tightly woven towels and bottle traps and cleaning up after dinner are for us.

But to enumerate a cost less seasonal:

To tell the truth, Sunnyside under the current regime doesn't look as neat and clean as it did in the past, when we didn't think of the home as a place of daily industry. Every home sewing project means threads and scraps of material here and there and everywhere on the floors. And the work of canning involves a whole bevy of jars and lids and tools, all of which need a place to be and tend to travel in traffic jams to get there. Gardening has its tools too as well as its associated dirt brought in on freshly dug vegetables, shoe soles, and trouser legs. Furthermore, the house is comparatively small, so that every room has to be given at least two uses--one for industry and one for the attested primary use. My own writing studio (the sun porch) houses all our vegetable seedlings in the winter, and there are a lot of them. The dining room holds the piano and doubles as a musical practice space (another home industry). Our son's old bedroom doubles now as the sewing room. The point is that since our home is not just about rest and relaxation, but a workshop too and maybe primarily so, it'll never be clear and clean in the same organized and minimalist way that my wife and I once considered the ideal. Is this important? Well, put it this way: sometimes it feels like a loss.

Then there's the matter of minimizing travel, which has been one of the more painful changes for me. Because my wife and I take the effects of carbon pollution very seriously, we travel as little as possible. We do not fly, and we limit our driving (errands included) to three thousand miles a year on the one car. But the loss here is pretty palpable. Both of us have enough experience with travel to class it as a wonderful means of entertainment and enchantment. I miss the pursuit. I miss the innocence of thinking that the only cost of travel was the money for the ticket and the price of accommodations and food. On the other hand, this beautiful planet is so damaged already that I just can't bear the thought of damaging it more. Especially when it comes to natural places, I want to involve myself as little as possible in the irony of harming (by means of the ecological costs of carbon) the very sights I go to see.

Again, none of this is intended as complaint. Nor is it intended to evoke sympathy or pity. I have seen enough of the world to know that, in terms of wealth and opportunity, a middle class American like me is privileged beyond imagining. I have really precisely nothing to complain about. Even my hardships are chosen!

No, what I have written is intended as truth-telling, a sort of caveat emptor, a buyer beware: to anyone who wishes to go this way--the more local life, the more hand made life--I promise there are many many rewards! And yet, to say it again, some costs are just honest costs. Some work is just hard work. You do the work anyway. You bear the costs anyway. Because where, in the whole world, is there a thing worth having, or doing, or being able to do, that costs us nothing? And the beauty of the earth and justice for the poor and the sanity of a spirit not focused on consumption are worth a great deal indeed!

Until Saturday the 12th!

HB