Starting from scratch

It strikes me that the most common denominator in my various writings this month has been a sense of fatigue. Tonight is no exception. I slept badly and woke up early. I was on my feet literally from about 7 a.m. until now, and think that I shouldn't be surprised that at 10:15 p.m. I can barely keep my eyes open.

What is the source of the fatigue? One possible answer that occurs to me is history. Our pasts, our experiences, our great moments, our trials, our follies, our errors. It seems even though we invoke such phrases as beginning anew, reinventing ourselves, a fresh start, the history we sowed eventually comes back to bear fruit. Many times this isn't so bad. If we did certain things well, the past serves us nicely. But it seems that those difficult moments that we all experience never go away entirely. They waft back at the most inopportune moments, causing us to think about whether we've accomplished anything at all.

On the theme of Starting from Scratch, it's year four of the Squashville Farm Experience. My husband Jim and I hesitate to call ourselves experts, or even intermediates on this road to sustaining ourselves with as much food as we can manage to raise in our backyard. But looking out onto our fields tonight as we ate a meal that included potatoes, beets, carrots, chives, asparagus, and baby bok choi grown entirely by us, I did feel confident enough to refer to ourselves as "farmers".

"We are building a beautiful life," Jim said.

"We are," I replied, "and I think we're coming to a point where we're going to need to start thinking about getting some help."

The last words fell out of my mouth almost involuntarily. I never thought I would ever hear myself uttering such a thing. But there it was. This was no longer a hobby or a garden. It was a venture, a life, a cultural practice that the two of us now need to find a way not only to sustain but also to spread to others.

The idea of "getting some help" actually stems from a matter occurring in my immediate family. My mother had an emergency surgery on May 5, and has been in the hospital for about two weeks. She probably will remain there for at least another week, and while she is recovering well and is in good spirits, one possible reality has been sinking in. She might not ever go back to being her "old self" -- in the physical sense, at least. She might have difficulty moving about, walking and performing routine tasks, and she might not be able to do these things again at all. On one level, I think this situation is okay as long as she is okay with it because she will have an opportunity at age seventy-seven to build a beautiful life by living a different kind of life. On another level, I find myself feeling that I don't want her and my dad to be alone with this life. I want to be there with them, supporting them and living the life with them.

Fatigue kicks in as I consider the odds of being able to be there. What I would give up. The burden I would impose upon them because leaving the beautiful life that Jim describes would mean starting from scratch again.

"Is it easier to grow vegetables or raise animals?" I asked Jim.

He wondered what caused me to ask the question. The question itself also was of an involuntary nature. It came out before I realized the topic was even on my mind. So as I tried to explain I talked about the importance of continuing things that had been created from scratch alongside the value of anticipating more frequent and longer trips to the Midwest (where both of our parents live) in the future. I didn't make the connection then, but in reflection, I realized that in both cases I was talking about sustaining things that had been created from scratch: relationships between parents and their adult children, food grown on farms. Both are vital components of life, and both entail a starting over of some sort. But can we start over? Or do we always carry the traces of our past?