The Worst Kind of Fool

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(reprinted from my blog about surviving the Great Recession at shareable.net, with deep gratitude to Jeremy and Neal)

Earlier this week I wrote a self-pitying blog post for shareable.net. I’m happy to say that it didn’t get published before I had a chance to review it and revise it. Below are excerpts, which I’m embarrassed to share, but shame is sometimes an important emotion to feel, I think. It’s corrective, like guilt. The key is not to let the guilt and shame overwhelm your ability to improve yourself and your behavior. Let’s call this an exorcism:

I keep forgetting we didn’t do this last winter. We lost our car in March, and even though the dual-season monsoon climate of California still held us in its wet weather grips at that point, were nearing the end of that onslaught. Every week was a little drier, a little sunnier, a little more forgiving than the week before. Now there’s the relentless moving toward darker, colder, wetter days, and even at two p.m. the shadows are long . . .

It’s hard to engage in my sanity-savers, so my sanity is not being saved. My alone time used to be in the jealously-guarded evening hours, when I would put on my earplugs and listen to music on my long bike ride to the gym, through the rough neighborhood near the rail yard, where families sit on couches on the front porch, and there is shouting and tricycles and the smell of dinner cooking. Afterward I might find any excuse to wander through some store or other, maybe on a banana-obtaining excursion to Trader Joe’s . . .

What do I do, now? It’s dark, and it’s cold. It’s often raining, that wind-driven sideways kind of rain. I’m supposed to be bearing up, but I’m not bearing up. There’s not enough French toast in the world for this kind of bone chill and boredom. I can’t remember what I might have done back when we had disposable income and a vehicle or two. Did I find a reason to go to Target? Or Bed, Bath, and Beyond? Were there maybe more purchasing expeditions, outings that were diverting enough to alleviate the tendency to flop around the house in frustration, sighing, while the kids bicker and the dirty dishes accumulate in the sink? Is that why they invented Christmas—to give us all something to DO?

Pity me! Pity me!—right? Woe is me, I can’t go to the gym or idly shop at big box stores. I will say that the mood had a legitimate genesis though, and I can trace it back to a couple of events that happened over the past week.

One evening, my oldest, Rainer, had a choir performance and it was cold and raining hard. In order to be there to see her and support her, we had to bundle three little children (our two younger kids, plus a sweet little guy whose parents were paying us to babysit,) hitch up the bikes to the trailers, attempt to create waterproof cocoons for them, and bicycle hard against the clock, mostly uphill about 2.5 miles (not far by our usual standards) in freezing rain and wind. By the time we arrived, my skirt was clinging to my legs, soaked, my cold ears throbbing painfully in time with my heartbeat. The babies were warm and calm, so I left my husband to deal with finding shelter for the bikes and offloading everyone while I ran full bore to where the choir was supposed to perform in a minute or so. After shouldering through the crowd, all carrying umbrellas and posing for pictures in front of a giant outdoor Christmas tree, I finally found the choir director. They had already performed. They were trying to beat the worst of the weather, so they had started earlier than planned.

I kept calling and texting my ex to try and track Rainer down. Finally, I was told they were having dinner with a group of friends in a restaurant nearby. At that point, bitter disappointment and grief led to tears that I couldn’t seem to stop. I was soaked, freezing cold, and so ashamed that I didn’t have the resources or ability to get to where I was supposed to be, for my daughter. I couldn’t go into the restaurant like that. Instead, I stood outside the restaurant window while my ex sent Rainer out so I could hug her, at least. And apologize. The thing that hurt the most was her confusion and concern; I don’t think she understood my visceral sadness. I had to leave her behind to return to that warm, golden room, and go back and pick up the pieces so we could make our way home in the storm.

At this point, my self pity was getting a nice, running start.

Credit: In Her Image Photography

A few days later, I went to a grocery store to buy our Thanksgiving dinner ingredients. Things were going to be slim this year for sure, but we would be together in our house, relatively healthy, safe, intact and grateful for it. I spent a lot of time in the crowded market, making small talk with other shoppers, joking about my skills in the kitchen, getting advice from store employees, and planning our first home-cooked Thanksgiving meal. I went to the checkout with a cart full of groceries. When it came time to pay, my card didn’t work. That’s when I lost it.

We weren’t going to be able to pay. I didn’t know how, but I had miscalculated everything. There’d be no taking home these groceries, and it looked like we weren’t going to have any sort of traditional Thanksgiving dinner. Now let me be clear: we always have enough, and with the dried beans and grains, canned soups, tomato sauce and pasta, and assorted nuts and seeds in the larder, our family will not go hungry in the near future. It was just that this was going to be the first year that we couldn’t provide the traditional trappings, and that was the just last brick on a pile that was sitting on my chest. I cried right there at the checkout. Hard. I think I might have begged a little, telling them to please try the card again, and again. I remember making quite a spectacle of myself, and things progressed from there, involving getting escorted out by a man in a uniform, but I’ll just leave it at that. Hours later, I had been driven home by a friend, and my head was aching from the crying. No one in the family was able to sleep until the wee hours of the morning. It had been a hard night with lessons learned about expectations, and humility, and gratitude.

I am writing these words on Thanksgiving. Unexpectedly, a friend picked me up this morning, and drove me to the one grocery store that was open today. We had some money left on a food stamp card after all. Now I can smell turkey cooking, and along with the other most fortunate Americans we’ll be having the canned cranberry gel, the mashed potatoes and stuffing, some corn and peas, some pumpkin pie. About the only complaint today is that I forgot the whipped cream.

Fall and winter are always a time of reckoning, not just for me but for lots of people, I think. Short days mean long hours spent at home with your thoughts. The sun encourages extroversion; the lack of it turns your thoughts inward. Holidays bring joy to many, but for lots of us they are emotionally complicated, full of memories and some sadness. It’s a time of extraordinary parental pressures to provide abundance and tradition to the children.

This holiday season had a rocky start for me. This is the first time we’re doing it without a car, and without any money to provide the kind of comforts that the long, dark cold time takes away. But we have a pink Christmas tree, and if you have that, you can’t be hurting too much. A single strand of multicolored lights turns our porch into a warm welcome home in the darkness, and you don’t even need to squint to make it look beautiful. I was the worst kind of fool for not realizing we have absolutely everything we need.

Blackberries Are Free

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(a version of this appeared in my ongoing diary of recession living over at shareable.net)

And then there’s the foraging we are able to do when we’re communing so close to the neighborhood flora. Blackberry bramble grows wild all over our town, and many consider it a menace. It’s invasive, and it will choke everything out and take your fence down in the process. It’s easy to identify, with spreading thorn-covered vines and broad elliptical leaves. Sometime in the late spring, it’s covered with white blossoms that eventually turn into tight, chartreuse clusters that mature until they become soft, darkly purple berries by July or August. It’s hard to buy blackberries: they’re fragile, and so expensive. You pay a king’s ransom for a half-pint container, and by the time you get home, the bottom layer has burst and run with juice, and maybe you’ll find one with a faint moldy fur that quickly overtakes the rest.

I’m not sure why more people don’t pick them. It’s true, you have to keep your eye on them so you don’t miss the window of time after they’re no longer too sour and before the summer sun has finally had its way with them and they’ve become hard, shriveled black husks. There are micro-climates, like the broad swath of shade underneath the highway where they ripen more slowly but in far larger numbers, you need to notice that. You also have to be prepared to wrangle with the thorns. It’s not like roses (to which they’re related,) where you can clearly identify the spikes and avoid them if you’re careful: blackberry bramble has those big visible spines too, but they also have a more insidious, fine and imperceptible brand of prickles that seem soft until they’ve covered your forearms with itchy misery.

So what I’m saying is, you have to be observant and you have to protect yourself. We kept watch on them every time we’d pass a patch on foot or on our bikes. Over and over, we’d come across new thickets of them hidden along roadsides or beside the trails. You can really get good at spotting them if you know what you’re looking for, and in the spring when they’re blanketed with blossoms, it’s like a patch of melted snow where the sun hasn’t quite reached. We watched, made note, and shouted to each other about what we saw: there’s more here, we need to remember this spot. There’s some pink on the berries now. When the time had come, we piled the kids into the big orange gardening wagon and set off for some of the closer thickets, just to start. We brought jelly jars, but not big ones—big ones would mean too much weight on the bottom layers. Larry and I traded wagon-pulling duty with Rainer, who moaned and complained. It was hot, and we were wearing long-sleeved shirts as armor against the thorns.

When we got to the best, most abundant spot, we propped a long wide plank up against the bramble to give access to the higher areas. Everyone had a jar, and we wore layers of latex surgical gloves and stripped them off as they became shredded. We worked quietly, some happy buzzing but mostly just commenting on finding a good one or avoiding a bee. Molly worked too. Everyone ate about one for every three picked, which was the tax we exacted for our labor. We talked a little about what we’d do with them: Rainer wanted to freeze a few quart bags for smoothies. Molly does most of the chicken chores, so she wanted them to have the ones that weren’t quite ready. “Dan’s got peaches ripening,” Larry said. “I’ll bring a few jars to trade.”

Some teenage boys passed us on the other side of the busy street. They asked us what we were picking, and then if they could come join us. I glanced over at Rainer to search for embarrassment and found none, so I handed them some gloves and a jar. I asked them, “Did you grow up here?” and was surprised when one said yes, they had. I wondered: do their parents not care about blackberries? Because you’d have to actively not care. Here were blackberries! So cherished that they cost about the same as caviar. They’re available for such a short time, and specific to this part of the country. There aren’t many places on earth where something so succulent comes at such low cost: the only price you pay is in scratched up hands and stained fingertips. The new pickers took awhile to get the appropriate technique down, and Molly warned them against the ones that have “too many red bubbles,” as they are too tart and not yet sweet and juicy.

We worked for a few hours, long enough that the teens who joined us eventually mounted their skateboards, leaned back, and rolled off with lackadaisical efficiency. They didn’t say goodbye, but it was a benevolent parting, and it was clear we had earned a little of their admiration. After that, we got quieter and more focused as it became harder to find worthy berries. Rainer looked up at me and said something after awhile; I was busy and lost in thought, and I couldn’t be sure I heard her right. I had her repeat it: “I love our life,” she said. “I’m so glad we’re doing this.” And I am glad that she won’t have to grow up in northern California without ever having learned about picking blackberries.

Chaos Strawberry Farm! Marathon Bike Trip, Part Two

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Corbyn Hightower decided to take a two day bike trip to a wedding with her friend K., both towing their kids behind them. This is part two of what happened.

We decided to take our time the next morning. We had thirty-seven miles to ride on that day, but the weather was cool and we wouldn’t be able to get access to the hotel until late afternoon, anyway. We couldn’t have predicted that the day would go so completely, horribly wrong, and that we wouldn’t arrive at our next resting spot until after seven that evening.

I sure got tired of looking at K's rear.

So with the bliss that ignorance brings, and with our thermoses full of local, organic, blessed by fairy dust Davis coffee, we set off for Fairfield. Pretty quickly out of town, we entered the kind of regimented pattern of grids that defines an agricultural landscape. We came upon a belching little factory that turned out to be a Campbell’s Tomato Soup tomato processing plant, and got lost right around there because we were trusting Google’s suggested bike route.

K.’s kids were bickering in her trailer. I rode behind her past the miles of cornfields, watching the boxing match from behind, fists poking the nylon sides and top. My little ones were docile but started asking “are we there yet?” alarmingly early in the ride. This part of the journey was comfortably flat, but time seemed to slow for everybody, and what felt like hours turned out to be less than one. We figured it was the barbaric wind that seemed to be pressing us backwards as we pedaled.

Utter chaos!

There was a sign ahead of us, we could see it from a distance, but until we got too close to make any sort of change, we read: PAVEMENT ENDS. Pavement *ends*?! This could be bad. We advanced with caution into what turned out to be thickly-laid gravel, that also had a wavelike pattern of crests and troughs, making it feel like we were biking through sand while also waterskiing over choppy waters. It was dispiriting. K. allowed one of her girls to stand and ride backwards, arms out–it was all she could do to gain respite from the shrieking and fisticuffs. And there was the wind, the wind.

K. informed me that we were only moving at five- to eight miles per hour. I was slow and steady, but K. was struggling. The gravel had a purplish-gray cast, and to either side were acres of obscenely large sunflowers, their heavy heads bowing with seeds. An opalescent turquoise dragonfly darted beside me and seemed to stay with me for awhile, and the sky was cloudless and still. The sun was bright but it wasn’t hot; this could be far worse, I thought aloud. K. struggled on, complaining in a way that was uncharacteristic. We reassured ourselves that with the absence of hills and traffic, this would be an easy ride once we were on pavement again. Well, if not for that wind.

We started running a little low on water, and everyone needed a pit stop. Like magic—magic, I tell you!—an oasis appeared in the form of Yoon Chao’s Pick-Your-Own Strawberry Farm. They were in possession of the world’s cleanest porta-potty, and the door slammed open over and over as the wind took it. We bought everyone their own pint of strawberries (we didn’t Pick Our Own,) and stayed there so long that the man at the farm stand looked out at us, confused. They didn’t have any water, which was curious. Not even a stray garden hose. The wind was so strong it took our words away before we could hear each other, so after a few shouted conversations we just took to being quiet.

We set off again. We were now on asphalt, but our newest obstacle was a very narrow shoulder and a lot more traffic. Fast traffic. K. started to ease over onto the brush, and I followed her off-road as it seemed the only sane thing to do. I was struggling horribly now. Could the wind have gotten worse? Was our siesta at the strawberry patch too long? Something was wrong. I could barely move. My butt and thighs were screaming at the effort. And then I knew. I looked back and saw that one of my trailer wheels was flat. And then I saw that my front bike tire was flat as well. I shouted at K. just as she was shouting back at me; she had a flat, too.

There were a string of curse words issued forth by both of us that were lost in the wind and thusly, shan’t be printed here. It was when we investigated more closely that we realized exactly how completely hopeless the situation was. Apparently, when we made our small forays off-road, we encountered our new nemesis: the Star Thistle. Centaurea Solstitialis. It’s a beautiful plant in a modern, mid-century Sputnik sort of way, and certainly noticeable in the landscape but not necessarily recognized as the merciless adversary that it was. And each of our tires had several dozen of the spines deeply embedded, making tube repairs utterly impossible. The tires themselves would need replacing, even.

I would like to say that this trouble was a surprise, and it certainly was in terms of how it manifested, but I felt a sort of peaceful resignation that things had, indeed, gone horribly wrong. There must be a pessimist buried deep inside my blindly optimistic exterior, and anyway, people had said we were crazy to attempt this. So here it was, mission aborted halfway through. We made the appropriate cell phone calls, sent out distress signals, and settled in to wait for whatever form rescue might take. Only problem was, we were still on what had been the most dangerous section of the ride so far, and we had preschoolers who were restless. Cars zipped by with startling speed and disregard. We got a little panicky and decided we would try to walk our bikes the last eight miles, Star Thistle-be-damned. There was no happy solution, and there was the wind and the sun and water bottles that were reaching bottom.

I have never felt so patriotic as I did when a big ol’ honkin’ extended-cab pick up truck pulled up across the street, and an airman in battle camo got out and stood at parade rest, looking at us. Travis Air Force Base! I remembered gratefully, and I’m not ashamed to say I began to do jumping jacks in order to subtly transmit our S.O.S. He looped back around and parked in the shoulder. We barely made introductions, and we didn’t even offer him a way out of helping us. We were determined, and we managed to get both bikes and trailers into his truck bed, while we identified the closest bicycle repair place.

He stayed with us longer than he had to. Zeke whispered to me, “can you believe this isn’t a dream?” as he shyly eyed our rescuer from behind my thigh. The bike repair employees laughed and took pictures of our ravaged tires. We stayed there for hours, camped in the corner and eating Cliff Bars while we charged our phones. The kids sat on tables and watched the repairs being done. We washed wind-driven soot from our faces and chests, and started to see the other attack we had suffered: K. and I were horribly sunburned. It had been a long day under a big sky. The babes had all been shaded in their trailers, and yes we had used good zinc sunscreen, but didn’t repeat application.

I don’t want to write the rest right now. Suffice to say, we had more hours of riding ahead of us. When we arrived at the hotel at near sunset, I think I can honestly say I had never been so happy to arrive anywhere, ever. We donned swimsuits and plunged our sorry selves into the frigid pool in the courtyard, and steam rose from our red shoulders. Oh–and the beds were rreally very good, and the room was twice the size as the one the previous night. We were in the middle of nowhere, and it felt fantastic to just be in those cool sheets.

The take-home message for our day? Apparently, if you get assaulted by a hundred or so Star Thistles, they send the U.S. Air Force out to rescue you.

Dude, Where’s Our Car?

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reviously published on shareable.net

Corbyn Hightower with her husband and two of her three children. Credit: In Her Image Photography

It’s our last day with a car. The recession forced our hand, and though we’ve been talking about it for months, it still feels shocking and disorienting having the time come upon us. We’ve had a tough two years. I was a sales rep in an industry that took a huge hit that fairly quickly reduced my income by about ninety percent. A few months later I was downsized altogether. In the interim, my husband Larry took a low-paying retail job after having been a stay-at-home dad for three years.

Sheepishly, I admit to lingering vestiges of better times. We have a beautiful washer and dryer. There’s a fancy elliptical machine in my office, which is the only piece of equipment that gets any use in there. My laptop has been clicked shut and slid into its case ever since the Internet service got turned off. The fax is silent due to a lack of an incoming phone line. I am typing this on my iPhone, a fact which makes me blush furiously, but is the one thing I think I’ll keep.

We were never good with money, my husband and I. Before we met and after we combined forces, too. Still, times were so abundant for several years there that we did manage to save a fair amount of dough in addition to obtaining some trappings of a more abundant lifestyle. I look back now, and I feel grateful for not having bought a house. We already feel like the poster children for the recession; a foreclosure sign in our front yard would have put the final rubber stamp of cliché on our tale.

The money we saved cushioned us enough to pay the difference between our cost-of-living and our new poverty-level income. Meanwhile, we began sifting through anything we could sell on eBay. We had the big-daddy of all garage sales. It took us a couple months to accept that the following non-essentials had to go: spring water bottle delivery, gym membership, health insurance, purchasing books, our CSA box, cable TV, and Internet connectivity.

Oddly, the day the wifi and cable TV were shut off felt like a liberation. No more of my husband playing Castle Age while eating dinner on his lap while I played Mafia Wars or Farmville in my office and ate solo as well. Where were the kids during that time? In the living room, using the coffee table as a dinner table and watching Sponge Bob. Now, we eat together every night.

Things the recession taught me: keeping your thermostat at 63 degrees in the winter and at 85 in the summer is uncomfortable but not fatal. Lesson two? You are not using your library enough. Do you know you can take out as many books as you want? And that they have free storytimes and craft lessons for kids? And that you can check out DVDs? Thankfully, my community has well-funded, thriving libraries. And parks. Parks are free. Another lesson: you can eat cheaply without resorting to Top Ramen. You don’t *need* meat. Beans and grains will take you far. Another lesson: foodstamps are like a god descending from a cloud and telling you it’s going to be all right.

Which brings me to The Recession Diet. I’ve lost thirty pounds this way! The secret? Not having enough to eat. Or, rather, not being willing to buy the high-calorie cheap kind of food that would keep us fat and calm, bellies full and minds softly-starved and docile. I always raised my kids to say “poison!” when we pass the Golden Arches. They know we don’t eat strawberries until sunny spring days. We have always gardened and supported our local CSA. In better times, we bought raw milk from an organic farm.

We live, as I mentioned, on beans and grains, along with in-season vegetables and fruit. Thankfully, we have room for a decent vegetable garden (foodstamps pay for seeds,) and we have a street that’s almost pornographic in its abundant fruit trees. Our orange tree has been so productive that its branches dip, groaning, to the ground. Our giant apple tree will grant us her gifts late this summer, and the pear tree shortly thereafter. We have an unofficial trading club with neighbors, some of whom have apricots, lemons, peaches, plums, blackberries, and cherries. The fact that we live in the fertile and temperate land of Northern California central valley is an incredible gift during these lean times.

Another recession lesson? Almost all durable goods can be gotten at thrift stores. Not Goodwill. Goodwill is waayy too expensive.

The month has finally arrived where we cannot pay the rent. We’ve long-since downgraded from a pristine rental with an elegant balcony and professionally-landscaped yard in a desireable suburb to a rickety, rambling old house in downtown, a stone’s throw from the train tracks and the homeless shelter. Even so, with our savings gone and having reduced our expenses to near-zero, we still can’t cover our nut. We need to infuse our bank account with a chunk of cash, preferably enough to make up for the difference between our income and out-go until our two younger children could enroll in public school, at which point I would be able to take a job–any job.

Finally, there is the car. We’ve been holding onto our car for practical and emotional reasons. Our pristine silver Honda SUV has been a vestige of another life. Even as everything is falling down around us, we still have our car. It struck the right tone with us–a handsome compromise between luxurious and sensible. It felt comforting driving my children around in it, as it had enough airbags to allow it to moonlight as a bouncy-house. The smell of the leather seats, the sturdy low-toned “chink” the doors made when they shut, the seat warmers on cold winter mornings.

And it’s PAID OFF. Several years old, but paid for. One small and tasteful liberal bumpersticker and a hula girl stuck to the dash with poster putty, but otherwise impeccably maintained and in wonderful shape. We thought we’d own this car until we “ran it into the ground.” It was the first new car I had ever bought, and I allowed myself that pride of ownership. Never until time for resale have I ever so appreciated the fact that it’s a Honda, a brand that holds its value better than almost any other.

The new neighborhood allowed us to even consider this an option. We moved away from a suburban, planned community landlocked by busy highways. We could walk and walk for the pleasure and exercise of it through the residential streets, but walking or biking outside the perimeter was foolhardy and probably dangerous. The first week we lived there, I had saddled up my younger two in the double-stroller and headed out to the post office on foot. Cars blasted by us at sixty miles an hour as I pushed the kids through the weeds and high grasses on the shoulder-less thoroughfare.

The Hightower family goes birthday shopping without a car.

Now, though, we live in as densely-commercial as you can get while still being considered suburban. We mapped it all out, and truly, everything we need is within four miles. And yes, climate helps. We discussed it seriously for a few weeks, and then just like that, we’d written our craigslist ad and put signs on our car windows.

After a panicky few days where we worried if it would sell at all we finally got a serious offer from a young family. Tonight, they hand us a cashier’s check and drive off in our last asset, so that we may keep our family afloat. I am sad, and yes I am a little jealous of this handsome couple that have weathered these tough years better than we have. They will enjoy the spoils of my success. They’ll slide over the leather seats, crank the music, open the sunroof, drive down a road to adventures.

We briefly considered replacing our ’06 Honda with a low-priced, older car. That thought depressed us. We’d still have the expenses of gas and insurance, plus the added unknown of maintenance and repairs. Then there was the morale-killer of letting go of our glittering silver chariot and replacing it with something like a dented Dodge Neon with over a hundred thousand miles.

I was half-joking when I suggested dumping the car-ownership idea altogether and instead spend some money on good, reliable bikes, trailers to tow cargo and kids, good locks and helmets and weather gear. The joke gained seriousness when we reasoned that it might actually work. It might feel good. It might feel like the right thing to do.

So, where do you go, here in the suburbs, with three kids… on the last day with a car? Turns out, we’re not going to go anywhere. There isn’t anything we need. And we have already begun to let go.

Credit: In Her Image Photography

Dude, Where’s Our Car? Part II

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Dude, Where’s Our Car?–part II

(previously published on shareable.net)

The Hightower family goes birthday shopping without a car.

Part of a continuing diary of how Corbyn’s Hightower’s family of five is surviving the Great Recession. In the first installment, “Dude, Where’s Our Car?” Corbyn describes how the family was forced to sell their car in order to make the rent. Now, she describes their first week carfree.

Our first week without a car in suburbia tested our mettle. First there was the challenge of aquiring the supplies, cake, balloons, and gifts for a child’s birthday before we were able to buy a bike trailer (note: bought five helium balloons; lost two to the mysteries of high-traffic bike maneuvers). The cake slid and arrived destroyed, but we were able to poke candles into the pile, and it tasted just as good.

The next trial came when my husband cycled four miles to take our son to swim class, and only discovered he’d forgotten the suit and towels after getting to the pool. Thankfully, he had left plenty of time for error. In the end, it was about sixteen miles all-told for that Saturday morning journey. This raises the question: are we going to just trade gas expenses for extra food expenses? Luckily, I have fat to spare. For once, my body’s predilection towards saving fat for times of famine may actually come in handy.

After a week of riding around on my ancient, barely-functioning Schwinn, I was glad that my workhorse, entry-price cruiser finally arrived and had been assembled at the bike store (at left). And just in time as the Schwinn finally broke beyond repair, and I was supposed to take the toddlers to an Easter party the next morning. The problem? The bike was delivered to the wrong location, ten miles away. I made my way there (bus system? Fail. Resorted to a painfully-expensive cab ride,) and rode home the ten hilly, high traffic ten miles in a downpour with high winds. Got some concerned looks, but arrived home with no permanent damage to my body or spirit.

Interesting lesson has been that the things I thought would be challenges (weather, motivation) turned out to be minor hurdles. What has been hard is forgetting important components of the planned activity. Every trip requires advanced planning. Your car functions not just as a vehicle, but also as a rolling purse or suitcase. For example, if you are trying to return library books, drop off clothing to charity, and go to the pool, you have to figure what order makes sense based solely on how much stuff you have to schlep in wherever you go, as there’s nowhere safe to leave your things.

I never see any other families on bikes in our town, unless it’s a weekend or holiday, and then they are in the park or at the trail, Having Fun, not simply doing errands or bringing the kids to the library or community center. On nice days, I feel lucky to be living this way. It gives me the feeling of childhood, of summer, of time off. All integrated into the chores and routines of daily living.

I’ve bedecked the new cruiser and trailer with masses of cheap fake flowers, intertwined through the frame, basket, and handlebars. I wrap the children in colorful quilts when they’re in the trailer; we sing and shout and comment on what we see. Sometimes they fight, cramped in the small space, and I feel like I’m dragging Punch and Judy snarling in a nylon bag, while passing cars see fists flying and wonder why this woman is pulling her children along in the pouring rain in the narrow bike lane of a busy thoroughfare.

A surprising response to our lot is this: when casual strangers discover we are living car-free, they become quick to defend their lives and their driving. I’m thinking of wearing a sign: Not Holier Than Thou. I feel guilty taking moral credit for this sacrifice. This is not my environmental “statement.” I was as addicted to my car as all of you. This was a choice driven by hardship, though people are awarding us a medal for our green lifestyle.

Daughter Rainer’s new bike.

Many close family members made concerned noises when we sold the Honda. What about the kids, they asked, wringing their hands. What about emergencies? Isn’t it irresponsible to raise your family in the suburbs without a vehicle? No, what is irresponsible is keeping a car when you can’t afford it. What is hard to explain is that we needed to do this. Responding this way, stepping forward to meet this challenge, took the sting out of our financial predicament. It made us feel like we were embarking on a great adventure, and helping the environment as well. Emergencies? 911. Bad weather? Stay at home and keep cozy if possible, or suit up and soldier on.

I am grateful for our neighbors, who have offered use of their cars in a pinch. In general, our neighbors have really banded together to support each other through this Great Recession. We all share the same old-fashioned push mower, to save gas costs. We have not gotten organized about it, but many of us have gardens and productive fruit trees, and there is a lot of informal trading of produce that goes on. I’ve heard of communities that post maps of fruit trees that are on public property, or on the land of tolerant homeowners. It’s like the old hobo practice of sketching a drawing of a cat, shorthand for “a kind-hearted woman lives here.”

I wonder if worrying about our weight or blood pressure has become a thing of the past. I am allowing myself to enjoy the choices we are making. I won’t get puffed-up with pride, as it took hardship to get us out of our car and away from our computers. It took the realities of poverty to get us out in the garden and onto the porches of our neighbors. I pretty much keep my bicycle helmet on most of the time now. It’s a great helmet–big like one that football players wear, and covered with swirling rainbow stripes. It’s comfortable, and I wear it like armor.

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.

When Life Gives You Crabapples, Make Something Somewhat Palatable

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

Start with a dilapidated but cheap house. Move there under duress perhaps, maybe because it’s cheaper or because you need safe haven from things that are harming you. Make sure the tree is there, in front where it can greet you with low branches, and soften the sun’s glare with its canopy. It must be really big and full of blossoms when you pull up with your moving trucks containing everything you value. It has to have been there awhile, it must have witnessed families come and go before yours.

The house should get abundant shade from that tree. This must be a sort of house that is old and has no air conditioning, a house where you throw open the windows on the first hot day after you arrive and welcome the outdoors in, and even where there are no screens, you tolerate the bug visitors because you can smell your tree and feel the breeze and its comfort. There is no hum of a machine to cool you, only the shouts of neighbors and the bugs and this tree, and a wide open front door.The blossoms need to fall, the way blossoms do when the fruit is on its way, and you should probably feel surprised at the beauty of the carpet of petals that densely covers your porch and front walk. You remember the days that petals on your car would bother you in spring, the way they would cling to your window shield after a rain and get caught in the wipers and then rot. But these are petals, and they’re beautiful, and they’re causing you no problems, even when the children track them in on their shoes.

When the apples start to fall, they’re green and bitter and they get smashed on the street out front. Bees and flies flutter around the pulp, and neighbors kick the crushed ones back toward your yard with some irritation. This is the work, this is where it starts. The same irritable neighbors come over periodically and help you manage this early growth, irritation is softened, and you climb branches and shake the trunk and all of you laugh at the hail storm of new fruit when it hits the ground with a knocking sound and rolls around like ball bearings, making you stumble like you’re already drunk on its fermentation.

Create games on the fly. Start keeping score: who can pitch the most apples into the compost bin, without missing? Have a running tally with the guy across the street that goes on for days; shout your number with a challenging tone. Welcome the gardening couple who have no children and have time to read about what to do for the tree, let them help you prune and cull and fertilize with compost tea.

Provide beer. Sit on the porch and chat.

And when there have been some days when too many have fallen and there are too many frustrations, go gather. Make the kids do it when your back goes out. There’s always more. Pile what isn’t salvageable into baskets and dump it into the chickens’ feed bin, and stop and spend some time watching them bob their heads and dart their beaks into the crunchiest sections, leaving the mush for you to rinse out later.

What you have gathered is good but needs care. First there’s the washing—be thorough—and then of course much coring and chopping. Leave the peel on, and put the pieces through a juicer. There will be a lot of foam on the top, and it might be too tart for the children at first. Pour it through a strainer and sweeten it slightly with honey or maple syrup.

Then you must strain again. You need to rid yourself of the bitter foam and remember the delicate beauty of those blossoms when the tree greeted you. You need to do the work and make it right, make the sweetness linger on the tongue, soften the sharpness of too much disappointment that led to this bushel of fruit that must be processed in order to nourish you. You freeze some for the long winter that seems far away but that’s really right around the corner, when the tree is bare and scratching against gunmetal skies, relentlessly holding its arms out and waiting for the spark of light to return. Those are hard months and you will miss this sweetness.

It’s bound to be surprising, how many tart little apples it takes to make a quart of golden juice that makes the children smack their lips and stop what they’re doing to savor. You pour it out in measured doses so it’s not taken for granted. Each mouthful contains some small story of the year that’s passed.

 


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.

Tribal Initiation

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

Here’s how it happens: my oldest child—a preteen—is having a friend spend the night. This is kind of new, here in this house, in this neighborhood, for our family. Post-recession, I mean. I’m surprised how self-conscious I am on my daughter’s behalf. It’s really hot in our house these days, and we don’t have air conditioning. There are doors with no knobs, chickens have rendered the back yard unusable, and our driveway is now occupied with raised garden beds where the SUV used to be parked. Furniture is thrift-store ravaged and mismatched, but what we lack in decorum we make up for in freedom from too many rules about Things.

She says, “your house is colorful.” I look at this crumbling place and I see the salvation of its underpriced square-footage and prolific fruit trees. This has been safe harbor, even with the nearby train tracks and concomitant hoboes, and the soup kitchen lines that stretch through our alley. This cocoon makes me smile when I walk up to its rickety front porch. Thank you, House, for rocking us in your nest. I bite back apologetic explanations for the bicycles in the dining room and the cords from all the whirring fans that keep us from wilting in this destructive heat. (Even with the fans, I spend the hot afternoons listless as a lizard on a rock. Slow blink. Slow blink. Slow blink.)

I get nervous about the food we stock. I know we don’t have any of the teen-friendly fare of the sort that’s referred to as “EXTREME!” in the commercials. There is nothing for them to pour conveniently into their mouths while they play video games. We don’t have the kind of yogurt that comes with Amazing Color-Changing Sprinkle Topping. On this day, we’ve chopped pounds and pounds of squash from our own ample harvest, and that’s going to comprise the bulk of our dinner. My husband steams it, seasons it lightly with butter, salt, and pepper, and serves it with a pot of brown rice. Our young houseguest eats heartily and enthusiastically, then goes out to tend to the chickens and pick up fallen apples from the tree, a nightly chore. We package up two half-dozen containers of eggs for the neighbors, and pile the apples in a basket for the young family whose child we babysit.

The next day, there is the creek. It’s just so hot, and our little waterway bubbles below the foot bridge and lures the children with the smell of the fennel that grows in great, fluffy drifts on its shores. My three break small green branches from the plants and chew them, casually, to the amazement of our visitor. We have to climb through the apocalyptic remnants of a concrete ditch, make our way under a bridge with lovers’ graffiti, and wade through the murky water to get to our beach made of smooth stones and small shells. Our visitor is cautious and wonders if it’s “against the law” to go into the creek, and I remind her that there are no signs, we mean no harm, and we’ll do no damage. Even the geese and ducks seem to welcome us, and come very close to investigate. It pleases me to share this world.

Our new friend gets a splinter on her foot on our adventures, her first badge of tribal initiation. At home, I make up a warm footbath with crushed lavender from the front yard, and my son tells her that the lavender will help with the splinter and with her emotions, too. “It’ll make you feel okay with having a splinter until it gets better. It will give you a peaceful feeling.” I smooth her hair down, kiss the top of her head, this sweet girl. She holds her foot up to me to investigate.

Life and Death in Car-Free Suburbia

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originally published as part of my blog on shareable.net,  about surviving the recession

We had been going the wrong way the whole time, that much was clear. I couldn’t get the map function on my phone to work. I don’t know exactly what the temperature was, but we were sucking hot air and our skin was growing noticeably red. My oldest child kept stopping us so we could take long pulls from our water bottles, and for once I didn’t show exasperation at that. I was wondering where we could refill them when they ran dry. We were in an area of town with endless office parks and grueling hills taking us up and over the intertwined highways and overpasses. I was artificially cheerful. My new role as a mother had been to become a chirpy spokesperson for optimism. The babies were in the trailer and had—alarmingly—become slumped and listless with the heat. I tried to convince myself it was just boredom, and tried to keep them engaged by pointing out the trees, the buildings, the big trucks that passed us. Talk to me, I’d say. What do you see? Are you sleeping? Wake up for me. Mama needs you to be awake. I was frightened for us, but only because of the heat, and I thought the water we were drinking was enough of a salve against that that we would be fine if we just endured. When I got to the top what ended up being the hardest, highest hill of our journey and realized I had turned us around and that it had all been for nothing, I tried to pretend I didn’t want to sob, and that I wasn’t so desperately out of breath. I felt my heart beating fast and strong in my cheeks, and I could see the miserable, resigned fatigue on my daughter’s face.

on a better day

Getting lost is altogether different when you’re not in a car. It becomes a burden of magnitude, involving weather and the need for food, water, a bathroom. Some simple miscalculations can mean a seemingly endless trek through inhospitable territory. Rail yards. Industrial areas with warehouses made of corrugated metal. Plans must be made, details attended to, and provisions packed. When we got home from this one, the worst of that first car-less summer, we fell into the house and lay still, on the carpeted living room floor. My husband scolded and fretted and brought us cold things, water. I had a strong wave of nausea but I fought it, laying as still as possible and raising upright for small sips. This needed to not happen again, not this way. I couldn’t allow it.

I needed to start planning things better. Forgetting something at home that is needed for the day’s errand might mean losing the entire afternoon, especially if appointment times must be met. A swimsuit left behind might mean a missed lesson, after miles have been pedalled. Again, chirpy optimism. It’s okay. We will ride back, we will get it. It will be fine. We can still make it for the last part.

we linger in thrift store air conditioning


There are buses, but you can’t utilize them for grocery shopping. In our town, the rules are, if you can’t hold it entirely in your lap, it’s not welcome aboard. The double-stroller doesn’t fold up small enough, and the trailer I have to pull the children in behind the bike means we can’t take advantage of the rack they have at the front bumper. The bus is for long, slow, easy days, days when we want the air conditioning it provides more than the transportation. It can take almost an hour to go just a few miles. Usually it’s more efficient to outfit ourselves appropriately for the weather, square our shoulders, and make our own way.

No distance is too far, not really, as long as there is enough time in the day. Once I looked up an address and figured I’d need to ride six hilly miles just to get to an appointment. It wasn’t until the end of the round-trip journey that I thought: I have become someone who doesn’t blink at riding a dozen miles or more when I need to. It satisfies me that I can make that effort, that things aren’t easy for us but we soldier on, that we’re not soft and self-pitying. I might feel some redemption in these punishing tasks.

Zeke

We are the only family I ever see who rides bikes to Costco, though, and when we did it during a downpour, drivers stared at us in the parking lot, nudged their passengers, smiled out at us, shaking their heads. It makes me feel a little defiant, a little proud. It’s just rain, we say to each other. We’re tough, aren’t we? the kids say. We bring insulated bags for frozen things. We only get one really bulky item each time, and we make use of every square inch of trailer space. The children hold things on their laps. We ride home on the trail and it’s like freedom. The last trip home meant spotting the goslings at the creek that had just recently hatched, so we stopped and climbed up the retaining wall, and watched for a long time.