Category Archives: Recession

Bright Pink Lipstick

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I’ve spent the last several years writing blog posts about the Recession. Here’s how it started: an old friend of mine got ahold of me. It turns out he was an editor for a website about the new economy, and he wanted me to write my story. This is a familiar sort of occurrence among people of A Certain Age: thanks to the wild accessibility of really pretty much everyone through Facebook, we are all reconnecting with folks we were too drunk or too careless to keep in contact with. For some time now, I’ve been ludicrously rewarded for decades of bad behavior. Turns out that all of my exes and a whole bunch of lost friends are excellent people, which makes me feel a whole lot better about my taste, but even worse about my carelessness and the time I lost.

Which brings me to: carlessness. My word processing program doesn’t want to even acknowledge it’s a word; it’s just a snippet of the zeitgeist and that takes longer to integrate. It’s too close to carelessness, and maybe that resemblance is a bad thing. You see, outside of places like Portland and maybe New York City, not having a car–especially when you are the suburban mother of three–is a sign and symbol of having Blown It Big Time. But we are without a car. It was an easy decision at the time: we couldn’t pay the rent. What we had was a paid-for, valuable hunk of metal parked in the driveway and a roof we preferred to keep over our heads. Some people make another choice: to move in with family, perhaps. “Temporarily,” of course. But it was no accident that we had found ourselves in Northern California, far away from both of our parents’ households in Texas. We had severed the ropes of that safety net and had no regrets. You see, there are some sorts of safety that are so fraught with danger and damage that calling upon them feels like a sort of suicide.

So we carry on, working menial jobs and trying to shake money from trees. We take our children on errands in our bike trailers, pedaling in the sweltering heat or in downpours, faces held in caricature expressions of grim determination. It’s been an adventure. A noble experiment. So many others around us are in similar straits, so this whole thing–newfound poverty–has an air of camaraderie to it, and whole new ways of doing things have taken root. We’ve done it all: bartered, gotten backyard chickens, grown a vegetable garden. I’ve written so many essays about the New Simplicity that I’ve started to think of my style as “Chicken Soup for the Recessionista’s Soul.” This ghetto for my writing is eye-rolling in its tendency to put a positive spin on things but still keeps my work out there, in front of appreciative eyes.

But something horrible has happened to me this year, and I don’t know what to do. At some point–was it after the hundredth “no?” The thousandth? Was it day number 1350 of not having enough, or maybe day 1351? But somewhere along the line I realized this is not going away, and that struggling to pay the utilities is a monthly reality with no end in sight. That making Top Ramen for dinner had stopped being an amusing indulgence in crappiness, and has become–at times–economic necessity. I look at my children and I want to say, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry you’re having to wear this need and pretend it’s okay, I’m sorry there are no birthdays at pizza parlors or dance lessons. I’m sorry I can’t send you with a handful of change that I don’t have so you can get a candy bar at the corner store. I’m sorry you notice what other families enjoy–simple things, a drive to the country and a weekend of camping–and you notice the difference and have to ask me why. I’m so sorry I cannot provide for you the things that were provided for me. I’m sorry that a simple trip to the doctor to check for pinkeye has to be a negotiation based on the twenty bucks in co-pay expense versus what may be curable with time and the hive mind of online medical care advice. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

I wear bright pink lipstick and have my cruiser bike decorated like a parade float. I let my children dress with hippie freedom. We played by the rules and we lost everything that offered us safety and security, so to hell with the rules, I teach them. You will get screwed-over six ways to Sunday, so find the hidden magic, I say. Do you see that smooth brown stone? Pick it up and shift it towards the light, and you will see small bits of glitter like tiny stars. I try to tout this lifestyle as one we would have chosen back when we were flush with income and silly material wants, and YES: there are lessons we’ve learned. Yes, you can be a band of hobos in satin and velvet castoffs, and yes, there are blackberries that grow wild all over this town.

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But I’m done. The truth is that I’m toiling for not a lot over minimum wage, and those chickens in the back yard have come home to roost. There’s only so long you can go on before all your resources are tapped, and the barrel you’re scraping has well and truly reached bottom. I know we are required to be  grateful for what we have: no one in the family has chronic health issues, we have good public schools for our kids to attend, and we live in a patch of paradise that makes living without a vehicle or air conditioning a tolerable option. We have–praise ye gods!–health insurance from my husband’s soul-sucking, low-paying retail job. We have a marriage where our struggles manifest themselves in silent regret and disappointment (and a lot of space between us in our marital bed) versus thrown fists or addictions. But no amount of health-insurance-provided antidepressants can prop me up forever, and it’s me who has to keep this ship afloat. It’s doubtless my lifelong sense of entitlement that has probably contributed to my lack of ability to turn things around and make something from nothing, which is probably a story for another day. I’m forty-two years old. I have three children. I pull them where they need to go. I look at my husband while we sit on the porch and the hand I reach out to him is conciliatory. Apologetic.

Moving to Villa Villekulla

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This piece  first appeared on my blog at shareable.net.

We were moving from Texas to northern California, under economic duress. There is something about driving long distances (as opposed to flying) that makes it easier handle the change from one environment to a vastly different one. In the course of your journey you can see the land swell and flatten, observe the terrain and climate change from curving mountainous roads to vast swathes of desert, and note the commensurate architectural adaptations. These are microhabitats, with each community and household navigating a different course.

We were leaving an exurban planned community that had seemed as desolate and unwelcoming as the lunar surface. When we arrived in the house we had chosen and rented by proxy, what was immediately surprising and thrilling to me was how urban it felt. Railroad tracks were a few hundred yards away from our small one-way street, and the corner strip of businesses included a mortuary, pawn shop, donut shop, and a narrow convenience store with two small aisles stacked high with Mexican pastries and cheap wine.

My positive reaction was short-lived. Although our house had a lovely rock facade, a deep and cozy front porch, and an apple tree whose blossoms were in full flower, when we went in, our economic downturn took a shift to the visceral. The walls were cheaply paneled, the aged carpeting was a matted and mottled light brown, the appliances were vintage early-eighties, and the windows either had rotten and water-logged wooden sills or cheap metal frames.

We sat on the decrepit spiral staircase (which looked hand-built by a carpenter of dubious abilities) and snapped a family portrait. Day One. Our faces in this photo are tired and apprehensive, the kids in a weary cluster at our knees.

Your home is wherever your bed is, and that very first night, we were all tucked into clean linens in our strange, new, small and oddly shaped rooms. But in the light of day, we still saw the funky junky-ness of this new dwelling of ours. There was a moist quality to the air, and a noticeable whiff of Dogs Who Had Come Before. Where once a balcony had been, there was plywood attached with foam goo forming a new “wall.” The backyard was shabby, with one side of the privacy fence leaning at a near forty-five degree pitch.

There had been a beige luxury to the house we lived in during affluent times. The carpet was so plush, you left perfect footprints squished into its thickness as you made your way (barefoot, naturally) across the room. There was a garden tub with large corner windows inside an expansive master bathroom, quietly humming central heat and air, and appliances with a heavy luster to them. The walls and ceilings met at right angles, with no softness or crumble to the plaster and drywall. Just the crisp reliability of a brand-new home and the suburban neighborhood in which it sat–gated, landscaped, predictable.

In the new/old house, creaky as a wooden ship, you can drop a marble in the farthest interior corner, and it will take a hilariously random path through the rooms, down invisible slopes and channels, until it finally clicks to a stop in the corner that tips deepest into the earth. And there’s even a basement, which is unusual in California. There are Christmas lights swinging from dusty cords down there, and the walls smell like soil and wet concrete.

One room is too small for furniture. But it is not a closet. It HAS a closet.

We added the magic little-by-little, as we went through this transformative journey from the comforts of what we had back then, and into our new, low-income recession life. Like the marble in the corner, we slid down . . . over . . . and through until we came to a stop and stayed. And that was when we painted the walls yellow–an acid citron, like the world’s ugliest crayon, because that’s the best kind of pretty. Against that went aqua furniture, and pink fabric in great swaths over the windows that don’t quite close. Red shag rugs, lamps from thrift stores, a multicolor dollhouse we rebuilt as a family. Silk monarch butterfly ornaments hang from mirrors and door frames, and cuckoo clocks from my husband’s German childhood occupy much of the wall space.

The man who owns this house is mostly a name on an envelope I mail every month. He has a beard and his eyes twinkle when he smiles. He remembers raising his sons in this house, twenty years ago. They kept rabbits in the backyard, and chickens like we do now. We eat oranges, pears, and apples from the same trees that they harvested and turned into jams and sauces.

Wild Bill watches over everything on our block. He’s the big, bald tattoo artist across the street, and a minor celebrity in this town. He leaves gifts on our porch: a fruit-picker, a pint of leftover soup, a wagon for the kids.

When everything is rough and ragged, the logical course is to festoon it with as much multicolor madness as you can muster. At least that’s my instinct. There was an untouchable sterility to the perfection of “success,” like if you made too sudden a movement, you’d disrupt the delicate balance that held it all together. The beige walls stayed beige, all rooms were regulation size, there were no chickens anywhere nearby, and a dropped marble made a small spiral and sat, solemn and as still as a stone on the kitchen floor.

Craigslist and Other Intimacies

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reprinted from my blog about surviving the recession at shareable.net

This is what people love to call a first world issue. I’m sitting at a cafe, trying to write with the vague promise of money for my efforts on the horizon, while my under-employed husband plays with and tends to our two youngest (healthy, brilliant, and adorable) children. My dream is that sometime soon, my memoir will be published, and I will be a real, professional writer, and we might not be quite so financially strapped.

Again I assert that I know my troubles aren’t Real Troubles. They’re Spoiled White Girl troubles. To use the parlance of the Californian New-Agers that surround me, I’m wondering when I’m allowed to “own” my struggles and stop sheepishly apologizing for them, as though by virtue of the things I have been given over my relatively easy life, I am not permitted to acknowledge my current suffering. I’m wondering: does it have to be, that I take a bus back and forth to a minimum-wage job in a dangerous part of the city to say I’ve truly “tried everything?” Nothing is beneath me; I will clean port-a-potties, I just don’t want to disappear far away from my life and my children day after day for the kind of money that wouldn’t ultimately make much difference for us.

I sold a bicycle my oldest had outgrown, a few days before Christmas. Craigslist is strange and wonderful. It’s so intimate. It’s like this complicated and nuanced Recession marketplace, and we’re each other’s saviors sometimes. A woman wanted a Christmas present for her school-age daughter, and I needed money for our holiday grocery purchases. I sent her photos of the fork, the derailleur, the pedals that could be adjusted as, like mine, her daughter’s limbs grew suddenly long and lanky.

We met on my porch. It was only seven or so, but dark enough that the dangling strand of half-lit, half burnt-out Christmas lights hanging from the leaf gutter provided the only illumination. I was glad for the forgiving darkness; maybe she wouldn’t mind the scratches so much. I knew they would buff out with minimal effort, and I doubted her daughter would mind. But then my words stumbled over themselves getting out, and I heard myself trying to give her an excuse to not buy it. “I understand if it’s not what you’re looking for. It’s not perfect, maybe not perfect enough for a gift? I could negotiate on the price, I understand.”

She eyed the bike, silently. “It’s not a problem if you need to change your mind. I understand.” I stopped the flow of words at last, and let her look without my interfering. I tried not to think about what the $125 would mean to us, and what it would mean if we didn’t get it after all. I didn’t want to wear that need.

The other day at the park, I spent hours chatting with another mom from the kindergarten, who is aerobicized and pony-tailed, yoga pants in a Lincoln Navigator. We had much pleasant conversation, and I was happy to open up to her and her world and see where we could connect. She had funny things to say about her twins, about how one of them is so tender and empathetic that he cries when he sees someone else get hurt. How she looked down at her own hands grabbing the rails of her hospital bed when she went into sudden, dangerous, early labor with them, and about how that’s her most vivid memory of that time: how her hands looked. She commented supportively about my son’s shoulder-length hair, and complimented my thrift-store dress. It was only later, when talking about the house they rent in Tahoe and the ski boots she bought for the boys, that she spoke haltingly, embarrassed. She talked about discounts, about Groupon, about her car and her life and the decisions she makes. She mentioned being poor as a child and how that’s not what matters, that it’s not what she remembers and that it’s not what my children will remember.

I can be abrasive, and when younger, I wore my convictions with a blazing cloak of righteousness. I’m still a person who doesn’t know when to shut up, but I’m hoping that in my dotage (!) that I am less judgmental and more approachable. I had not wanted this other woman, this mother like myself–familiar with the same set of vulnerabilities, hardships, and smelly clean-ups–to feel anything but at ease with me. But still, there was this chasm between us, of needs and not-needs, and she filled it with her own embarrassed rationales. I sat, smiled and nodded, full of sympathetic head tilts and raised eyebrows. I touched her arm, made dismissive noises, reassured her. This would have been me, had the Recession not hit us so hard and so relentlessly.

The other day, my husband’s employer told him that due to ongoing financial struggles, they would be reducing his hours from forty to thirty-two a week, for the indefinite–but, we’re told, absolutely temporary–future. This is confusing news. It allows me more time to write, which right now is the only (potentially positive) variable in income flow for us. There is the fact that we have our (much-needed) healthcare coverage still, and that against all odds, he remains steadily employed. There is also the opportunity to pull our heads out of our ostrich holes (do ostriches really do that? anyway . . . ) and see what other options are out there.

The woman bought the bike. She hurriedly and awkwardly passed me some folded bills, and I thanked her quickly and put the money in my pocket without counting it. It’s a business transaction, but the intimacy of it makes it feel like a social one, as well. We worked together to fit the bike into the back seat of her sedan, negotiating the position of the bicycle by micro-amounts to allow closing of both doors. It was the kind of thing you do with family when you’re loading a moving van, or wedging an oversized purchase from IKEA into your car in the parking lot. Eye contact, very little words, body language conveying the small adjustments that need to be made. I was struck with the urge to hug her goodbye before she drove away; my already loose boundaries are becoming even looser as these emotionally-challenging times continue. Also there aren’t established rules-of-etiquette for Craigslist business, at least none that I’ve thus far integrated.

So I’m writing this in a cafe, having had the ongoing good fortune to peel two rumpled single dollars out of my wallet to get a cup of drip coffee and use their Internet on a near-daily basis. Today, our monthly food budget resets, and we can finally fill in the gaping holes in the refrigerator. The children don’t suffer from want for anything, but there’s an unfair amount of pasta dinners during the last week of the month, which I know isn’t an experience unique to my family. I’m determined to write our story for as long as people want to read it, and for this time–one day in the far future–to be a time that brought us many great and surprising changes. I also hope, though, that I don’t have to decide which bill we can pay in a given month, and which we can put off for awhile longer. There is no romance in that, I don’t care what people try to tell me. But this morning, as I slept for the last precious hour or so before waking, I dreamed of eating bacon and lo! when I awakened, there was bacon.

Dreams come true.

I’m Too Lazy to Write This Piece

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reposted from my blog at shareable.net

I don’t know how we’re going to keep paying the rent, and we’re going to have to make some more tough decisions in 2012. The crisis has reached a secondary level, and for everyone I know it’s the “new normal” now. But I see inertia creeping in, and I wonder if we are conditioning ourselves to less effort, and using the extended economic downturn as an excuse.

“Now Mom, I’m going to have you sit on the floor in front of the hearth. Sisters, can you sit on either side of your mom? Put your hand on her shoulder, there . . . that’s it. Dad, can you hold Brother in your lap? Okay, hold that smile, perfect!” Five matching white shirts in a row, before an artificial fire.

That was a small moment, an attempt to mimic relaxation and family togetherness for the sake of a Christmas card. Now, five years hence, I’m fearful that we may be becoming too relaxed, this time in front of our wall heater on shabby carpet, no professional photos for the last several years, and wondering: is this recession making us soft?

The one unforgivable crime in my family culture when I was growing up was laziness. When I was an adolescent, struck with exhaustion from newly-active hormones and lengthening limbs and longing to sleep late on the weekends, I was routinely strongly encouraged to get out of bed at eight to go mow the lawn or otherwise be of service. My ancestors’ work ethic gained near-mythological status in our family’s oral history. Solid Midwesterners and Southern Protestants, of vague northern European background, stalwart and duty-bound. My grandparents were of that generation that could do no wrong, who suffered through the Great Depression as children and World War II as young adults, and handled both with noble aplomb.

My husband and I used to spend a lot of time preparing for the Christmas toy-buying season. It’s one of the opportunities of sanctioned shopping, and no one looks askance as you whip out your credit card time after time. No one wants to see the children get shortchanged, right? Writing long lists to Santa is a treasured childhood ritual. Missing any of the components—all the way down to the bulging stockings hanging from the mantle—is just downright unsporting. I don’t know how we determined the gift-quantity-to-child ratio, but it was generous. We would get fat catalogs stuffed in our mailbox every day, and it was no wonder, as we were probably on every marketer’s mailing list as affluent, profligate spenders. We weren’t really living beyond our means, as we had a year’s worth of savings when we lost everything. And before the holiday season arrived, we made sure to go through the toys in the playroom with each child and fill big garbage bags with donations.

But this year marked our third Christmas season of living below the poverty line. Each child gets one carefully-chosen “big” present, and my husband and I put things on layaway in order to afford them. I know that it is easily morally defensible to live in this more austere fashion. This year, though, I’ve been having an inner struggle, trying to reconcile the choices I’ve made with the values I was raised with. I know for a fact that most of my (estranged) family would respect me more if I were taking a bus to an overnight fast-food job an hour away for example, rather than do what I am doing, writing and working here-and-there when something comes up, while my husband suffers underemployment at a punch-the-clock low-paying job. Honestly, I don’t know what I’m doing or how and when it’s going to change. The first couple years of the recession left us struck dumb, all of us holding the bag and wondering what would come next. Our family made some dramatic decisions that allowed us to cling to the edge of the survival cliff, but it’s not cute anymore. We downgraded our lives, moved out of our tame and tidy suburban comfort, sold our only car, and learned to live without some of the more obvious luxuries. At the time, and for a while after, people respected our choices. Now, though, I see that inertia creeping in, and I wonder if we are conditioning ourselves to less effort, and using the extended economic downturn as an excuse.

Could I be doing more to provide for my children? Is it time to get back on the fast-moving train of ambition? I can’t even remember how to do that, and I don’t know if my bicycle will take me there.

Today we rode our bikes in the winter cold, eleven miles round trip, to enjoy a special and rare meal out at a favorite restaurant. We don’t make things too easy for ourselves, and the self-immolator in me likes that. I don’t want to wander down the garden path unless there’s some discreet auto-flagellation happening as well; it’s how I was raised. Our resources are drawing thin, though, and it’s happening everywhere. People are losing their extended unemployment, relatives and friends can’t be supportive forever, and the bottom of the barrel we’ve been scraping is really and truly turning up empty.

I can’t feel unhappy about my life. There is the joyous jangle of the sort of freedom that “fuck-it” buys you, and the color and clatter of our chaotic existence now gives me more pleasure than my corporate affluence ever did. It has to be an evolutionary imperative, doesn’t it, that we let some of the stress recede when it’s been suffered in perpetuity? My Scandinavian and Scottish ancestors populated Oklahoma Territory, and my Cherokee relatives endured the Trail of Tears and joined with them, relocated against their will to an inhospitable annexation. That land, that time, and the people that embraced these challenges mark each snarl of sinew and synapse of myself, and I struggle with my stasis now.

I don’t know how we’re going to keep paying the rent, and we’re going to have to make some more tough decisions in 2012. The crisis has reached a secondary level, and for everyone I know it’s the “new normal” now. For me, I just need to concentrate on the map inscribed at a cellular level and dig up the strength and capability to lift my family up and carry us through this.

How I Stopped Worrying and Learned How to Love the Dumpster

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(reprinted with gratitude from my blog at shareable.net)

Would you climb into this? What if there’s good, organic food for your family within?

Today, I pulled some bags out of a dumpster and dug through them for food, and I plan to do it again. There’s lots of goodness going to waste, and getting what we can use from the castoffs makes a difference for my family while we struggle to cover our grocery bills. And although it marginalizes me, I would rather root through these dumpsters than buy my family the kind of processed, low-quality food that better conforms to our budget.

Two years ago, I was staying in hotels that were so fancy they had subtle “signature fragrance” wafting gently from the air vents. I strode purposefully through airport terminals with my high heels clicking, and pulled my carry-on bag while holding four-dollar coffee drinks. I admired leafy lobbies from glass elevators, and shook hands firmly with company presidents. My fingernails were expertly groomed, my hair elegantly highlighted and bobbed. I could get macadamia nuts and a mimosa from the mini-bar, on company dime. I resisted that most of the time.

The first month of the Great Recession, my commissions from working as a salesperson in the natural products industry were reduced by about two-thirds.  Within six months, I was making one-tenth of my typical income, and ultimately, the companies I represented abandoned the independently-contracted sales rep business model altogether. I scrambled and took what I could get to bring something—anything—into the bank account, but for almost a year, we were forced to live on our savings while we reconfigured.

Some of the skills that served me in my professional incarnation have translated well to a life living on the economic edge: cheerfulness, ability to network, persistence, and being willing to turn over every rock to find the treasure. And surprisingly, it has been a natural evolution to this thing that I’m doing, this sifting through what is rejected as imperfect, in order to take care of my family.

I’ve gotten tips from those who have gone before me: check on the legality of dumpster diving in your town. Bring a box-cutter with you. Tuck your pants into your socks. Try to befriend a store employee for insider information, and you may have to be patient in your searching, as dumpsters that “give” are hard to find. Bring a partner to provide lookout, and a long stick for dragging out treasures. Don’t go behind a closed fence to access a dumpster, leave everything neater than when you arrived, and leave graciously if requested to by a store employee or a cop. Also, you can just ask at most places for day-old bread, no diving required.

Other things to look for in addition to bruised and imperfect produce are just slightly out-of-date packaged foods. Much has been made about the arbitrariness of these expiration dates, and indeed, they are unregulated by the federal government. Terminology is so inconsistent as to be troubling: “best if used by . . . ?”  “sell by . . . ?”  The best rule of thumb is to refrigerate perishables as soon as possible, and utilize your common sense as well as your other senses in order to assess whether something is good to eat. Much of the risk is in deterioration of the quality of the nutrients in food, and less about true acute risk of illness.

Peering through a bag of rejected broccoli from the garbage for signs of brown or yellow patches is something I couldn’t have imagined doing just a few short years ago. Before my work got downsized, I was the kind of consumer who shopped with an eye for quality alone, without much thought to price at all. Back when I made an embarrassingly-good living, my view was that food is underpriced and undervalued in our culture, and that since I could afford it, buying the best was not only good for my family, but good for the farmers and manufacturers. I joined the Facebook page: “I’d Rather Spend More Than Shop at Wal-Mart.” Food, Inc. was my manifesto, and Michael Pollan and Morgan Spurlock my high priests. Nothing entered the house that wasn’t free-trade, free-range, sustainable, grass-fed, organic, or ethically-produced.  Oh, and of course, local if possible. If it could have been blessed by Tibetan monks, I’d probably have opted for that, too.

And now, for the last two years, we’ve been living far below the federal poverty level. We sold our family car, canceled the cable and Internet, and stripped ourselves to the bare minimum of comforts to ride out these tough times. Even with that, we still rely on food stamps and the WIC program to bridge the chasm between our grocery budget and what is actually required to fill the larder. Until our youngest two are in school and I can find some sort of work that’s biking distance, this is our lifeline. Still, it’s nowhere near enough. Food stamps are only sufficient if you feed your kids ramen noodles bought in bulk quantities, cheap meat, Doritos, and non-organic milk. Giant, cheap crates of cereal, not those precious little boxes of flax flakes they sell at Whole Foods. The WIC program allows for a couple of organic and vegan choices, which is astounding progress. However, it’s all just a drop in the bucket for the needs of your average family.

What was once the territory of gutter punks and urban squatters, dumpster diving has become less-taboo for the parental set. One young woman I talked to says she dumpster dives with her mother; it’s become, for them, just another family resource for living a healthy lifestyle. And it’s not just about the free food, it’s about living in a way that’s in harmony with your values—saying “no more” to our culture of conspicuous waste. “I do it in Berkeley,” one diver tells me. “There’s a dumpster here that’s like diving into a big salad.” She took up juicing and eating a mostly raw diet to keep up with the cycle of abundance, not too bad for being “poor.” Others have a cooperative of sorts, where certain gatherers do the diving and then distribute. “Because it needs to be secret,” says Jessica R., “people only share information with close friends and those with whom they share food. I once lived in a household that survived largely off a weekly ‘delivery’ from a nearby store. But only the people who actually went to pick up the food knew where it was, and they wouldn’t tell the rest of us.”

Dumpster diving is just one of the ways the New Poor are trying to survive. There’s also growing your own vegetable garden (food stamps pay for seeds,) and sharing information with your neighbors about local fruit trees (called “gleaning.”) You can trade harvests with each other, and many trees are even on public property. Some communities have informal groups on meetup or craigslist where they share information about local micro-crops. In our Northern California region, you could probably live on blackberries alone in late summer. And I have plucked pomegranates and grapefruit on walks to the park with the babies more times than I can count. We’ve registered our fruit trees at neighborhoodfruit.com, so that our harvest is available to share, and so that we might reap part of someone else’s.

I search for deals on healthy food. I spend a lot more time searching through Costco, where you can get a gargantuan box of organic raw spinach for three bucks or so, as well as apocalypse-sized bags of organic brown rice and steel-cut oats. It’s easy to preach against big-box stores and faux-organic agri-business when your family has plenty of food money, but when times are very lean, you have to make some hard choices. Though we used to get CSA delivery, we had to give it up due to the precipitous cost and the fact that we couldn’t use our food stamps to pay for it. We were also practicing vegans for awhile, but have let that go as well, in favor of what we can get more cheaply. My rationale is that, at least, most of what we bring in is fairly wholesome and minimally-processed. Well, okay, except for the Cheerios and government cheese.

There is a strange sort of shame in wanting the best when you have so little allotted for your family’s needs. I’ve talked to so many moms who’ve suffered reproving looks or even disparaging comments when they’re buying organic, high-quality food using a food stamp card. The judgment being made is this: how dare you opt for quality over quantity? How dare you want better food even if it means less food for your family? I think a lot of people want to see us cliché Whole Foods snobs get our comeuppance, now that the economic downturn has leveled the living standards playing field. They want to witness us realize that the way we’ve been eating is an elitist luxury, and that, indeed, it’s not feasible for a family that’s struggling financially to make these ecological, ethical, and political choices with our grocery shopping. I know that I was raised by parents who roll their eyes at what they perceive as organic snobbery, and that my years as a strict vegetarian were seen as youthful arrogance.

And I’m late to this party: there are communities, websites, and documentaries on the subject: notably, Dive! by filmmaker Jeremy Seifert, which has won accolades in scores of film fests and green events. Jeremy says, “Experience that initial rush, shame, fear, and exhilaration of ‘stealing’ trash and eating it will change you in good ways.” In an NPR interview, Seifert asserts, “if you Dumpster dive and actually eat trash, it becomes normal for you.” Waste is built into the food chain at all levels, so there is a connection to issues related to pollution, soil depletion, pesticide abuse, and utilization of fossil fuels. Put it all together, and, says Seifert, “the devastation to the environment is immense.” In a short, entertaining forty-five minutes, Dive! also points out some hard realities regarding the shameful waste of over 96 billion pounds of food every year in the US, while so many families go hungry in our communities.

Today I was thwarted in my searching through a usually abundant dumpster by the addition of landscape compost on top of the normal refuse. This particular dumpster is beyond disgusting, make no mistake. It takes psychological coaching to overcome the streaks of grunge and rust that coats the walls. I wear gloves and change clothes the moment I get home, leave my boots outside, and scrub my hands thoroughly.

For me, there was a gradual shift to what I found embarrassing as I went from being affluent to being poor. Of course there’s the waiting in government offices and applying for food programs, taking the bus, and shopping only at thrift stores. Many of us are sharing these experiences as we slide down through this Great Recession (oh, wait, isn’t it supposed to be over?)  But still, obtaining food from a dumpster is a radicalizing act, and I was excited to take that step. Our family has used this time to reassess our values, and I think we’ve been doing a better job teaching our kids to question our culture of waste and over-consumption. Much of the last two years has been about regaining perspective on our own family’s wasteful habits, and at how we took abundance for granted. You can make all kinds of politically-correct choices with what you choose to buy, but it’s the buying itself that is such a big part of the problem. Feeling hungry has been motivating, and humbling. Having the chance to learn about and talk with “freegans” made me more comfortable with crossing the taboo of scavenging for food.

My favorite dumpster today yielded a small haul: organic, fresh basil in a sealed package, and a bag of organic gala apples that was open at the top, but otherwise in perfect shape. I pull it out and head for home. I keep a brown paper grocery bag with me for hauling it in my bicycle basket. I investigate everything for evidence of bugs, mold, or spoilage. I arrange the produce in an attractive pile in the refrigerator crisper.

I’m hoping that, ultimately, I can gather enough extra food to donate some to the homeless people who frequent our neighborhood.  We live in a little square of paradise bordered by the rail yards, a large shady park with welcoming benches, a greenbelt that runs along a creek with well-concealed homeless encampments, and a Salvation Army that provides food bank groceries, showers, and hot meals for those who are down-on-their-luck.  But what I’ve seen from this nearby food bank is all highly-processed, nutrient-poor, low quality boxed and canned goods.  We have pear-, apple-, and orange trees in our yard, and I bring bags of extras to the park; sometimes I leave them the grass near a sleeping body. There’s just so much.

Why can’t we gather and redistribute to those around us? Grocers should be taken to task for throwing anything fresh or high-quality into the dumpster. The Good Samaritan Food Donation Act that President Clinton signed into law in 1996 was designed to relieve grocers of liability for any incidental harm that may come from sharing their food waste. I’ve printed a copy of it, I’m carrying it with me from now on, and I’m tempted to gently confront store management if I start noticing abundance in the dumpsters near us. I feel like I just might be waking up to true food activism: beyond the “locavore” movement, past Monsanto’s crimes and the battles for organic standards, there is the reality that our garbage cans are full of good food, while people—families, children—go hungry.

It’s been a long, humbling road from driving my gorgeous, silver, piously “fuel-efficient” SUV with the leather seats and satellite radio, parking at fancy grocery stores and spending three hundred dollars on a cart full of provisions, the most exalted groceries money can buy. I’d toss in ingredients to make the world’s most rarified smoothie out of acai and goji berries, frozen wheatgrass juice, hemp seeds, a three-dollar organic peach, and raw cacao nibs. I thought I was voting with my dollar. I’m starting to realize that taking the dollar out of the equation altogether might be a better solution. Now I bike around to the back of those stores, and pull out from their trash what we can make use of. What might be useable to someone else, I take out and carefully place it alongside the dumpster. I have to be alert so as not to run into a raccoon or an angry store employee. And I pedal back home to my family.

All That Glitters

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reposted from my blog about surviving the Great Recession over at shareable.net

I am a happy poor person. There are many things I have had to give up and get adjusted to, going from a comfortably middle-class, corporate-suburban existence to living a lifestyle far below the poverty line. But make no mistake: I’m happy. Extraordinarily so. More than I have ever been. I’m not sure I talk about that enough. It’s time to rhapsodize.

We live in a neighborhood that is not as safe as it could be, not pristine, not the suburban enclave we once enjoyed, but it’s filled with joyous secrets. There’s the hot pink fire hydrant at the base of the hill covered in volunteer daisies and ivy, the giant, bald tattoo artist in the well-manicured house across the street, the Russian family that comes over to cheerfully pluck apples from our tree. There’s the trail head that you can see from our backyard, which leads to patches of blackberry bramble, glens of lichen-covered oaks, and pebble-covered beaches where the kids can frolic and wade in the clear, bubbling water. We take that trail for miles and miles; without a car in our lives, its narrow curving path has become our major thoroughfare for pretty much anywhere we have to go.

Have I told you about the library? It’s designed like a hobbit fortress, with a vaulted ceiling twenty feet high topped with stained glass. So cool and dark in there, and there are hot days when we stay for hours and hours, away from our intolerably hot house. The librarians know the children, and don’t comment on their bare feet and rowdy ways. Over an arched and ancient footbridge, there is a playground that is canopied by old-growth trees, so much so that it’s ten- to twenty degrees cooler there on a hot summer day. There’s a painted dolphin statue and a turtle, too, and kids can climb them. There’s a tennis court in this wooded park, and casual players shout smack at each other on the cracked asphalt ground while the balls go Thock! Thock! Mexican families have birthday parties on the long rows of aluminum picnic tables; there is always a piñata and a radio plugged into the street light pole.

Our street is short and zoned partially commercial, but there is the childless couple next door who never show up at our house without four cold bottles of beer in hand. The day we moved in, the wife shouted, “Hey! Do you need help?” And before we could answer, she had pushed the sleeves up of her corporate casual and proceeded to give us two or three hours of grueling labor. And we didn’t even get her name ‘til halfway through, she was too busy hauling. Now, they give me monthly rides to Costco, and we repay them with mismatched dozens of eggs in a bright pink crate, when the hens are productive.

If a neighbor sees a rogue chicken, they will run and catch it and bring it home to us.

When our internet was shut off, we had more than one offer to hitch a ride on a neighbor’s Wifi when needed. I sat on someone else’s porch with my creaky laptop, paying bills and responding to emails. We share tools and harvests with the neighbors, too. As a group, we all erected and planted raised garden beds in the front of our house, on the driveway concrete pad that hadn’t had a car parked on it for the year since we sold ours. There was a big hill of soil dropped off from the nursery, and we all had shovels. We would stop for beer breaks and watch the children climb up and down the loamy pile.

The other night after the babies went to sleep and I was alone, curled on the couch and reading, I heard shouts and happy laughter out front. Then I heard apples falling—lots of them, all at once. I suddenly remembered a neighbor whose wife works at a garden supply store had told me he was going to cull the early apples to support the future harvest. I looked out between the blinds and saw him in a crook of the trunk, shaking the branches with all his might, while the tattoo-artist guy shoveled loads of tart, tiny green apples into the compost bin. The wives were there, too, helping, shouting encouragement, gathering the bigger apples that might be good to eat. All of this in the dark of a late summer evening, under a clear night sky with a cool delta breeze blowing just enough to break the heat of the long June day.

I lost my wallet at the grocery store, and a stranger bought our small bag’s worth of groceries while I wiped away tears of frustration and desperate gratitude.

There is the giant, somewhat-dilapidated old rental house that is our creaking ship in these recession-rocked seas, complete with sails made of patchwork quilts. We’ve painted every room a different color, and the spiral staircase is wrapped with fairy lights. No longer do we live in the fancy new suburban home with the balcony, but in this place the children can wrestle and climb, erect forts, and raise up baby chicks under a warming light without us having to be concerned. This is a house in which you can ride tricycles.

Getting everywhere by riding bikes and walking—exclusively—means you might notice the patch of strawberries growing on the curb outside the Goodwill parking lot, or the smell of the night-blooming jasmine as you bike back from a late evening concert, or the blackberries as they begin to ripen on the trail. What would be a quick weekend errand by car ends up being a day of adventure and, sometimes, travail. But then you have a story to relive: “Remember that day? We must have walked for miles, and we never found it. . . . ” More things happen by accident, like the day we ran out of water waiting for a bus that never came, and ended up playing in the sprinklers outside an office building, drinking from a broken, bubbling pipe. We went home muddy, pink, so happy and tired.

Everything takes an extraordinarily long time to get done, but I look back and wonder what I was in a hurry to do when everything could be accomplished with money. It was as though fun and happiness were something that required planning, provisions, and car seats, whereas now it just happens on the walk to the grocery store. And they know all the kids because we go there to escape the heat, too.

There is noticing the red glitter shoe-cubby shelf left on the curb, there is the energy and time to bring it home. There is the excitement of finding just the perfect glorious castoff versus the twinge of guilt that comes after spending at the big store. Sometimes there is wanting, when making-do becomes a struggle, and the electronics are wheezing and dying one by one. But the cost exacted to acquire, replace, keep up, and obtain is too dear. The thrift store is so much more fun than the mall.

I was so afraid to lose what I had when we were making good money and “living well.” The panic of  what if: “What if I lose my job and can’t make the car payment? What if we have to move from this safe neighborhood? The kids will miss the pool! The school is so good . . . “

Now, I feel peace and joy while we ride the rocky waves. The crests are so much higher than I thought they’d be, and the troughs are filled with other people, treading water and holding out a hand.