Bread Today

Today's Weather in Northeast Georgia
70F, rainy, cloudy, and sunny
Wind: SW 7mph
Humidity: 56%
Moon: waxing, 99% full!

M just took her new and "experimental" loaves from the oven. Made with honey and butter, they look and smell amazing. Perhaps she'll post her recipe.

I'm moving ahead with plans for a doctoral dissertation on the writings of Helen and Scott Nearing (e.g., Living the Good Life, 1954), and the modern homesteading movement's relationship to these texts. How, for instance, do homesteaders that come after the Nearings think about the portrait and standards the Nearings established? There's more to write about as well. I'm interested, for instance, in what women homesteaders emphasize relative to men. Perhaps most of all, I'm interested in the ways in which homesteaders ritualize their time and space in search of a calm, peaceful, orderly, and healthy world.

Recently, M and I have been thinking about the metro-Atlanta properties would work best for further developing our homesteading practices, the Pine Lake property we mentioned earlier, or the property we currently rent, a good bit farther out from the Emory and GSU, were we currently study and (I) work. She's started vegetable and flower seeds for this year's Spring/Summer garden. And I'm looking for a period of time in which I'm well-rested and able to get the old and new garden areas ready for plants. So far, not much happening there, and this term;s schedule is very full up through early May, and then it's time to prepare for summer courses I'm teaching beginning in mid-May. Hmmmmmmm, time for a highly pragmatic plan. Still, if I can carve out/come upon just one well-rested day, starting early in the morning when it;s still cool, I could prepare beds in the new garden (an in-ground swimming pool we filled in a few years back).

Thinking ahead

Today's weather:
Sunny, warmer, and less breezy than yesterday
Temperature: currently 54 at 7:40am, with a high of 81
Wind: NW 7mph
Humidity: 88%

We're starting to think, talk, and plan, for purchasing our own property, one that would be suitable for homesteading and that also makes sense given the other dimensions of our lives, for instance, is reasonably close to our graduate programs and places of employment. One location that is receiving serious attention is the small "city" of Pine Lake, which, in the 1940s, was a quick country get-a-way for downtown Atlanta types, and now represents an odd, quiet, little community of bungalows tucked around a small lake, where properties are still affordable and little to no "development" seems to be indicated.

We want a home that is comfortable to live in (we're nowhere ready to build or even renovate anything ourselves), with yard and sun enough to sustain a garden that could supply all of our vegetables, a blueberry patch, and some fruit trees. Ideally, I would like a wooded lot adjacent to or at least nearby, as well. While we want to retain central heating, AC, electricity and Internet, etc., I would like to add-in a number of dual systems, such as cast-iron wood-burning cooking stoves, and ultimately solar panels and a composting toilet. First thing's first, though, we've got to make some progress on purchasing a property, whether in Pine Lake or elsewhere.

One property we're interested in is below, as it's likely attainable at a reasonable price (we hope) and there is at least one lot (maybe two) adjacent to it for sale also. If you would, please keep us and a great homesteading property like this in your mind!

New Options

Today's weather were we live:
Temperature: 73, alternating sunny and big clouds
Wind: NW at 14 mph; it seems very cool and breezy
Humidity: 29%

As I consider various dissertation topics for the PhD program I'm currently working my way through (just now at the end of year 2 in a 5 year program), I'm giving serious thought to modern homesteading as a research topic. Rebecca Kneale Gould's book, At Home in Nature, offers some superb historical and theoretical resources, as she writes about "homesteading" from Thoreau to Wendel Berry, with special emphasis upon the Nearings.

More, a dissertation (basically, a book-length project that takes three-years to complete and that ideally becomes an actual book) focused, for instance, upon the writings of Scott and Helen Nearing and the ways in which these writings are selectively and creatively taken up, applied, argued with, rejected, and so forth, by later generations of homesteaders, would bring together personal and academic aspects of my own life, making room in my mind for a life that integrated homesteading and public intellectual practices.

So, this blog is back. I'll leave all of our previous posts up so that later readers might see clearly the crazy (and indeed embarrassing) ups and downs, in and utter outs, of homesteading we've been through. As read more in Gould's book, I see that we're hardly alone in this, and that the full, complete, and successful switch over to a homesteading life is a radical re-writing of our cultural programming affecting virtually every activity. In the entries that follow, I'll be writing about my research, our attempts to re-imagine "homesteading" in ways that allow us to do everything that we want to do (e.g., have a blog, which requires computers, electricity, an Internet connection), and our efforts aimed at re-creating some basic homesteading elements here at a suburban property we rent.

Thus far, we've been collecting our compostable garbage in a bowl each day and I'm taking it out to the old compost bin each evening. I'll need to do some work with leaves and soil and straw - adding them to the bin - here soon. It's not very ambitious, but with so much other work required of us, graduate programs and jobs, it's the best we can do toward a natural, organic (i.e., not forced) approach to re-beginning.

a voice from the future...

So, it's been three years since our last post. For good or bad, we've done very little gardening and set aside entirely any thoughts of serious urban homesteading. Instead, M has refied her expertise in the field of labor and delivery, has made it about half-way through a master's program in public health, and seems to be on the verge of significant professional breakthroughs. I've completed a second masters degree (in religious studies) and entered the doctoral program in American religious cultures at Emory University. I'm currently about 2/5 of the way through, figuring out my dissertation topic and preparing for comprehensive exams while completing coursework. Since our last post, our wonderful dog Helen has passed away. Arjuna (the cat) is older and larger but well. And we have a new dog, Jackpot, adopted from a lovely family nearby.

Today, in the beautiful afternoon sun, I took down much of the garden assembled back in 2007. Over the last two years, as our gardening efforts gradually faded, the garden became severely overgrown, the untreated-bentwood fencing falling down, etc. At least for this winter, we'll have no more than a very modest herb garden, a 5'X15' bricked-in section that was within the formerly fenced-in garden. Perhaps in Spring 2012 we'll plant additional herbs and who knows, maybe something more ambitious as well.

With all the tearing down today, I'm wondering aboyt the place of serious homesteading and even modest gardening in the lives of ordinary people. When it was our sole focus, I loved it, could get or do enough regarding it. But when something else became our sole focus, that which was of ultimate concern, my interest and energy was impossible to maintain. To be this kind of person has serious advantages and disadvantages.

"Locavores?"

Well, it's been over a year since we've done anything with St. Fiacre's, but we're considering a rather bold plan: one year eating only locally grown/produced food, i.e., becoming "locavores." Since largely abandoning our urban homesteading principles (which seemed necessary with M working fulltime and my returning to the university as both instructor and postgraduate student), we've noticed a tendency toward unchecked, undisciplined, self-distructive, headonism in our diet and lifestyle. Not that we have become crack-addicts, but that, without an "organizing principle" that says otherwise, we find ourselves all too frequently sitting in front of the TV eating pizza and candy and drinking soda!

We need a much better organizing principle, and badly. Of course, we've kept up our garden, eaten many of M's great home-cooked meals, and been shopping at local farmer's markets from May - October. But we need something with a sharper edge, so to speak. We need, in academic-speak, a mythology capable of truly informing our beliefs and actions around something intensely intimate, our food.