Returns

I love the picture above for several reasons. The first, but glancing reason is that it reminds me of that old photograph/poster that I've seen several times, I believe called 'Dream' (I've tried to find a pic on the net but unsuccessfully), a black and white photo of an old car beside the road; I believe the road sign had 'Dream' on it).

The second and most pertinent reason is that it's the gate of my grandparent Taylor's old seventy acre farmstead in Mississippi. For the entire time I was growing up in the small town, the road you see was a county maintained gravel road. Through the fence (which was put up after the farmhouse had basically collapsed and the road was used for dumping trash) was a small one lane dirt road, proceeding down a hill and over a small creek, a trickle most of the time but during rainy seasons all-but impassable -- and often we had to leave the family car up on the road. Finally, heading slightly back up out of the hollow,  and about a half mile in, it would wind up to the small unpainted country farmhouse.

It was a hard life they lived, at least as it seems from our perspective now: a cistern beside the house with a windy series of culverts from the roof directing water to it (I remember leaning over the stone parapet, which I could barely reach, and gazing into the dark, seemingly fathomless well) and a hand pump in the kitchen; the outdoor toilet, always an olfactory adventure; and the single line of electricity powering the mournful  radio up in the corner, and a couple of light bulbs, bare, here and there, but mostly using kerosene lanterns.  To live in  such a way was not all that unusual but now, even in recounting it, seems like another world --which it was in a way. They were almost entirely self-sufficient, cobbling together whatever needed to be repaired (no ipods, islates, pcs!) in the blacksmith shop out back. It wasn't Snuffy Smith but for kids now it would be I suppose: raggedy, a little ramshackle, it's own distinct odor of earth, chickens, sweat, and all the other emanations that comes from hard work, sunup to sundown. But you have to say that it was an environment that was all-of-a-piece, very little room for what they would perhaps have seen as a self indulgent alienation.  But the vegetables were fresh, most likely picked that day, as were the eggs and the chicken Sunday dinner, often inviting the minister (or rather: preacher). It was quite something to see my grandmother grab a chicken with a long pole with a hok onthe end, drag it in like a weird beached fishchicken and at the end of the drag, wring it's neck, have it on  the chopping block with its head off in just a few sesconds.

With the ideals of modernity -- basically a product of and reflection of the city -- everyone couldn't wait to move away, break the perennial cycle which land plus weather plus a shovel and plow give you...satisfying in many ways -- there's nothing like sitting on the porch at sundown on a late spring or summer day, hearing nothing but the faint tinkle of a cow's bell and then Bobwhites and Whipporwhills as the evening chill would come on and the fireflies came out.

Most  folks now prefer the exciting tension of waiting in traffic, or the nightly homicide reports, or perhasp the mind numbing sameness and push of an image-intensive culture, apparently trying to remake us into something that doesn't exist. (And let's face it, county life can be intensely conservative and stultifying to many who have gone through the image training of modernism -- which is basically everyone now).

How pitiful that small remnant that's left for us, the 'garden'.....necessary perhaps but  certainly not sufficient, a mere vestige, a ghostly revenant of that vast, slow vegetative wave from which we emerged and make every attempt to eradicate even as we suffer the by-now predictable occasional bouts of food poisoning from a highly mechanized and centralized food producing machine.
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Well, I fear I've nattered on too long about all this but it is a somewhat depressing and scary time in America right now. After seeing FOOD INC. it is apparent that the woeful state of the 'Garden', in its most gneralized form is at the heart of much of the disorder which surrounds us.

A recent passage from blogger James Kuntsler puts the fork in the road ahead (how far? Can things possibly go on as they've been?) thusly in his most recent blog:

"We can't maintain our way of life at its current scale and we have to severely rearrange and rebuild the infrastructure of it if we expect to continue being civilized. We have to get the hell out of suburbia, shrink our hypertrophic metroplexes, re-activate our small towns and small cities, reorganize the way we grow our food, phase out the big box retail (and phase in the rehabilitated Main Streets), start making some of our own household goods, and hook up the far-flung reaches of this continental nation with a public transit system probably in the form of railroads."

I don't know. To try to proceed on as we always have is almost always -- except under periods of extreme crisis and threatened deprivation of many kinds both civic and physical needs -- what we most fervently wish to happen. We seem to love the purgatory that cities have held for many people and the breath of 'breathing the air of freedom' and opportunity that the city has always promised. But maybe some compromise with the contryside and technology is possible now, given the nature of theelectronic soup we now live in.

But one thing is for sure: in some form the garden, writ large or small, would be at the heart of it all -- at least until they day they can devise a gene that will allow us to photosynthesize food from our skin.

But don't hold your breath...apparently, 'the economy' has the potential of trumping everything, even common sense. Which is turning out not to be as common as we once thought I suppose.