I made pumpkin bread tonight. Homemade, mostly-whole-wheat pumpkin bread made with homegrown mashed pumpkin left over from making a pumpkin pie and milk solids left over from making ghee. That ought to be worth a good six Oosewife points, no? That said, I have a long way to go. If I were really one of the cool kids I’d have sprouted the grain and ground it myself, used a sourdough starter instead of dry yeast, and I certainly wouldn’t have poured the pumpkin cooking water callously down the sink; I’d have used it as the liquid.
As I was chastising myself for the latter, it got me thinking. Of recent years I have slowly come to aspire to a life which is interconnected. That is to say, natural, overlapping, organic… sort of a-hygienic. For example, my ultimate dream (in theory) is to live on a homestead as self-sufficient as possible. Which involves all sorts of bodily, germy, wild yeasty, fermenty processes - Perelandra rather than Malacandra, if you will. Bread which is made from a living thing that needs to be fed every so often; a lawn that is “mown” by a cow who fertilizes the veggie garden and gives milk for cheese and yoghurt and (if I ever reach that height of coolness) kefir; vegetables which survive on rotting matter; bone broth made from boiling bits of beast; and so on. It would have made me nervy a few years back; now I think it’s sort of weirdly wonderful. Life as ecosystem. Perhaps sharing breastmilk with a baby has helped me get over the bodily fluids thing to some extent!
But in other moments I think, who am I kidding? I have a long way to go: I can’t stand most of the beetles and bugs I should appreciate for their vital role in said ecosystem, I really can’t see myself cooking up chicken feet (which make excellent broth, apparently) or organ meats; and if we were to rely on our veggie garden in its current state to sustain us I’d be prosecuted for neglect. And the thought of not being able to leave the house for fear of upsetting the goat/tomato plants/sourdough is a stifling one.
Which is ironic, because how often do Helpdesk Man and I up and flit to Vegas as it is? Never, is what. And not just because we have a baby, which is pretty much the ultimate in interconnectedness. We just don’t. We are, in fact, pretty good examples of what Gerald Durrell was talking about when he said that man values freedom as a concept, but rarely uses it in practice. If we were in a cage the size of Hamilton I wouldn’t have a clue.
Anyway… it’s an interesting thing to ponder. Of course it’s possible that I’m only embracing the fertile, fermenting, wild nurturing world we live in as a subconscious way of reconciling myself to the state of the bathroom ceiling. Will keep you apprised.