A man in the grocery store check-out line said to me, when I was buying the ten-pound bag of sugar I hadn’t been able to find the week before, “That’s the biggest bag of sugar I’ve ever seen.” Now if I was my friend Mary I might think the guy was coming on to me, 
but I don’t think that way, and if he had been coming on to me, why I must be sending out the most inexplicable signals of approachability as the fellow was haggard, mostly toothless, and the shade of yellow that indicates either liver disease or habitual cigarette smoking.
I was bewildered. This guy, who had to be at least in his sixties, had never seen a ten-pound bag of sugar! My epiphanies tend to be of the prosaic sort, and this was definitely one of them. I said, “I do a lot of baking.” It wasn’t an apology, but stern defiance. Yes, I am a contemporary woman, and I do a lot of baking. My pies are particularly renown, and I have one mild friend whose anger is leoninely fierce if I tell him of the pies I’ve baked, as he lives far away and can only remember their pleasures. Now if the fellow had been sixteen, I would have understood the comment (and certainly even my friend Mary wouldn’t have thought it was a pick-up line).
For my aforementioned pie-loving friend is in his forties, and author of the statement “I thought green beans somehow grew ‘French cut,’” one of my earliest prosaic epiphanies about the difference between my rural upbringing and that of the majority of my peers, raised as they were in suburbia where green beans came either from Green Giant cans or Birds Eye frozen packages, not the truck garden. (For those of you in Rio Linda, as Rush Limbaugh is fond of saying, a truck garden is a large garden from which you sell as well as subsist.)
but I don’t think that way, and if he had been coming on to me, why I must be sending out the most inexplicable signals of approachability as the fellow was haggard, mostly toothless, and the shade of yellow that indicates either liver disease or habitual cigarette smoking.
I was bewildered. This guy, who had to be at least in his sixties, had never seen a ten-pound bag of sugar! My epiphanies tend to be of the prosaic sort, and this was definitely one of them. I said, “I do a lot of baking.” It wasn’t an apology, but stern defiance. Yes, I am a contemporary woman, and I do a lot of baking. My pies are particularly renown, and I have one mild friend whose anger is leoninely fierce if I tell him of the pies I’ve baked, as he lives far away and can only remember their pleasures. Now if the fellow had been sixteen, I would have understood the comment (and certainly even my friend Mary wouldn’t have thought it was a pick-up line).
For my aforementioned pie-loving friend is in his forties, and author of the statement “I thought green beans somehow grew ‘French cut,’” one of my earliest prosaic epiphanies about the difference between my rural upbringing and that of the majority of my peers, raised as they were in suburbia where green beans came either from Green Giant cans or Birds Eye frozen packages, not the truck garden. (For those of you in Rio Linda, as Rush Limbaugh is fond of saying, a truck garden is a large garden from which you sell as well as subsist.)
When I was much younger and had more frequent paranoid episodes about the imminence of nuclear holocaust which I of course imagined myself as surviving, I found solace in the notion that I would be able to continue to
survive because I knew husbandry and horticulture. That was when I was still naïve enough to think the rest of the survivors would leave me alone to tend my goats and raise my corn. Now I realize these skills are useful mostly to sadden myself when reminding myself how few people possess them and all the implications that flow from that fact. The thing that really sold me on the brilliance of Sacha Baron Cohen was that Borat carries live chickens on his American journey of discovery. Yes, I think, that’s so right-on! And then I remember another epiphany I had, this one also cinematic in nature, after seeing the animated film “Chicken Run.” One of my favorite expressions used to be “scarcer than hen’s teeth,” but in the wake of the toothy chickens that populated this movie, I abandoned it. I’m sure most people under twenty these days think chickens do have teeth. This black thought was affirmed the other day when I watched “March of the Penguins.” The ‘baby penguins’ or 'children’ (not chicks) were ‘born’ (not hatched). And so on. I’m sorry, being expelled violently out of another’s body in the form of an egg is one thing, being expelled violently out of another’s body as a creature is quite another, even if you are hardly past, as happens with possums and kangaroos, the zygote stage.
I was listening to the Laura Ingraham show the day before Thanksgiving as she had promised hours and hours of Thanksgiving horror stories. She, or rather her listeners, delivered. Many were of the “I thought we’d show the kids how it used to be done” stories wherein the male adult raised a turkey and then was faced with slaughtering it. Laura knew enough to correct one fellow who used the term 'butcher' when describing his efforts, but then was stymied by the description of the post-head-removal (horribly botched of course) placing of the bird in boiling water. “What, it’s not a lobster!" she exclaimed. The fellow had to explain you dip them in boiling water in order to remove the feathers. Oh, right. But then I suppose most people don’t need to think about how the feathers came off the turkey they are enjoying for Thanksgiving or Christmas. Maybe, I think, they are using this time to figure out how to vote for candidates that aren’t dead, felled by strokes, or demonstrably corrupt, which people in the old days weren’t able to do because they had to fill their brains with how to compost manure, cure bacon, raise potatoes, can succotash (just look it up you guys in Rio Linda), and yes, butcher a steer. Oh, wrong again.
My family raised turkeys once or twice until we realized they were insanely inbredly stupid and thus utterly untenable farm animals. If you have a subsistence farm, you’ve got to rely on your animals not to be so
utterly incapable of taking care of themselves that you have to spend hours and hours making sure they are all right. That’s why we gave up on Rhode Island Reds, who couldn’t figure out where to roost so the raccoons and owls wouldn’t get them, in favor of banties, and particularly liked goats and pigs. These animals were not only
completely capable of taking care of themselves, they absolutely enjoyed doing so. I swear the pigs held nightly meetings, a la Animal Farm but without the political underpinnings, in which they schemed up things to do to bother us humans, like unlock their gate, nudge it open, and then sit in their sty waiting for us to show up to witness them bolting out of it. Wouldn’t be much fun escaping when no one was looking.
But then, perhaps things aren’t as bad as I am often wont to believe when I observe the rapid receding of the natural world into a sanitized, sentimental, utterly inaccurate memory. For recently, when walking the crazy dog, I saw posted pleas for the safe return of a lost ferret. “Don’t Be Afraid to Touch Him!” exhorted the poster. “He’s really friendly.” It briefly gladdened my heart to think that my fellow Chicagoans might still hold their instinctual reticence to reach out and stroke a weasel. Then the local election results came in. Darn, wrong again!
More later,
Lynne.
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