10 Oct 2008 10 Comments
Hard Times
It’s a song and a sigh of the weary.
Hard times, hard times, come again no more.
Many days you have lingered around my cabin door.
Hard times, come again no more.
Stephen Foster
It’s been awhile since I’ve posted– I apologize. I meant to continue with reports on the Greek trip, and I do intend to get back to that, but I am most motivated to write here when there’s something I need to say. As I watch the stock market tumble and my savings diminish, the chorus of the Stephen Foster song keeps echoing in my head, I always thought that was a Depression song, but it goes back to the 19th century. Hard times come in every era, and eventually good times return. The trick is to make it from one era to the other.
Those of us who were raised by parents who grew up during the Depression already have a clue about how to survive. For those of you whose parents grew up during the 50′s and 60′s, here are a few thoughts on the subject.
Of course, today, Global Warming and the Energy crisis complicate the issue. Or do they?
The more I think about it, the more it seems to me that the remedies may be complementary. Whether we are trying to save money or the environment, we need to make the most efficient use of resources that we can, and support our local communities. Buying locally not only cuts down on the carbon load, it keeps the money circulating here. Given a choice, buy from companies that have not outsourced all their jobs.
But an even more basic strategy is to cut down on consumption across the board.
Instead of replacing appliances and other useful items, retain, recycle, re-use, repair. We can use our communication resources, such as LJ and chat lists, to find people who do need the things we can no longer use. People who know how to fix things are about to become very popular. Let us know who you are. We can decrease our dependence on the cash economy by trading skills.
The same energy- and resource-saving moves we were already making for the sake of the environment will also lower living costs. Getting more of our protein from vegetables and learning creative uses for leftovers will lower the grocery bills. Rather than driving somewhere to go hiking, I want to do more shopping by walking to the local grocery, which will support local business, save gas, and give me some needed exercise. Trade clothes instead of buying new. Repair and remodel – would anyone be interested in a class on mending?
I am currently being inspired in this quest by the discovery of a new goddess, or rather a new path of a Power I already knew about, Oshun Ibu Kolé. This is the path of Oshun whose peacock plumage was burned into that of a vulture when she flew up to beg Olodumare to lift the drought with which he had punished everyone for thinking they could do without him. She appears as an old woman by a muddy river, also associated with sewers and toilets. She is the one whose white dress yellowed because she washed it so many times. Her name, depending on the translation, means “Spirit of the River who Transforms”, or “the one who takes out and brings back the trash and dust”. In other words, she’s the perfect deity to invoke for recycling.
The other day she and I had an interesting exchange. I was going to get a new piece of cloth to wear when I danced for her, but somehow, I couldn’t quite make up my mind to buy it. It occurred to me that I ought to ask her what she wanted. The information I got was that I should recycle some other garment, like the fringed scarf I inherited from my nephew David, who just passed away, and add a little decoration. When we had finished that part of the discussion, she told me to go down and empty the garbage.
What I didn’t know was that the refrigerator repairman had arrived to try to fix the freezer so we wouldn’t have to buy a new one, and my son had taken out all the packages of food that had been freezing and thawing for variable amounts of time. Including quite a lot of meat. So when I got downstairs I was presented with a bucket full of such packages. These days, the Berkeley recycling system allows us to put food scraps in with the yard trimmings. Thus, the immediate sequel to my conversation with Ibu Kolé was to hand over several pounds of spoiled meat for composting. I cannot imagine a better offering for the Oshun the Vulture! Sometimes the gods make themselves very clear.
Vulture beak, vulture beak,
Doing what you must,
Takin’ out the trash, recycling our sorrows,
Beauty from the dust.
Burning wing, burning wing,
Fly and bring the rain.
Old witch woman, by the muddy water,
Give us hope again.
Oct 11, 2008 @ 01:11:19
Oh no! I did not know the news about David – David Bradley?
Oct 11, 2008 @ 17:08:39
Yes–Ian and I found his body on Ian’s birthday (urk). David had died in his sleep of heart failure.
– Lorrie
Oct 11, 2008 @ 17:50:04
Oh gods, that’s awful.
**Sends love**
I really liked David and wish I had gotten to know him more.
Oct 11, 2008 @ 01:17:17
I was blessed to have grown up visiting my great-grandmother who grew up on a farm in the late 1800s, and lived most of her life in Berkeley. She passed on to my mother an interest in gardening and preserving food. She canned food and made her own soap and had an enviable long pantry room in her old house on Regent st. near People’s Park. No idea if subsequent owners of the old house future-fitted it to get rid of that pantry, but if they did, what a shame.
Next year I might even get some chickens like we had growing up in our backyard.
Anyhoo…we’re growing fruit saplings down here, vegetable garden and I’m learning to can and pickle vegetables. Just got a pressure cooker and hope to learn to can some stews and chilis too.
Oct 11, 2008 @ 01:54:08
—Wait a Moment—*DAVID* is gone? Argo/Ardral/Dyan??? —I never heard—Wow…
(((Hugs))to the house….
Thank you. I will add him to my list of remembered dead at Samhain…
Oct 11, 2008 @ 17:09:55
Yes, I’m sorry you had to find out this way–he died of heart failure, in his sleep. Ian and I found his body when he didn’t turn up for Ian’s birthday party.
– Lorrie
Oct 11, 2008 @ 15:51:00
Good to see you posting again, here in Ireland most people are just getting on with things. The Celtic Tiger did produce a generation of clueless 20 somethings, but most people older than that grew up with gardens, fruit trees and the smell of burning turf.
Our garden was pretty much a washout this year (I got about 20 tomatoes, as in fruit not plants) but our neighbors had extra, so we have a big barrel of US sized potatoes. They were lucky as many farmers had their potatoes rot in the fields. We had the most rain every recorded during a Summer and most of it was hard rain, the sort of downpours you get in Dallas, not the traditional “soft” Irish rain that made Ireland and South-East UK places of early agriculture.
Everyone in the family has had stiff joints from the damp and my wooden kitchen fixtures were covered in green mold that look like dust, until you smelled it! We got that mostly cleaned up, and I was glad that we still have bleach etc.
Good to hear from you and I’m so sorry about David. I only met him a couple of times but he seemed like a very nice person.
Melodi in Ireland aka Disaster Cat
Oct 12, 2008 @ 00:03:30
Shit = Food
…this Oshun Ibu Kolé would understand.
I am back from the two-week residential Permaculture Design Course, playing harmony to the same melody that flows behind your message: it’s all true and necessary. I found a TV pinion feather while I was there in western Sonoma County: now I understand why! We learn that the Problem is the Solution, that our composted offal nourishes us through the food we grow, and thus ties us in to the microherds in the soil and the cycles of the land where we dwell. Terroir: the subtle nutrition, the flavors of place…
David had a crush on me once, and yes, I did flirt back, a bit. He was a sweetie, and I am saddemed to hear of his death. I will add his name to my Samhain altar, as well.
Oct 12, 2008 @ 05:15:55
This year
I need new winter clothes. I plan on invoking Ms Kole and shopping at the thrift stores, Crossroads and Buffalo Exchange, in order to see what I can muster, before I hit the department stores.
XO
T
Oct 24, 2008 @ 03:45:01
Hard Times
One of my great-uncles died of hunger, or possibly hypothermia, in Newfoundland in the 1930′s. He was the Anglican pastor in an outport [remote fishing village], and he’d given all his food and fuel away to families he considered more needy that winter. The neighbors got worried when there was no smoke coming out of his chimney and found him dead and frozen.
I don’t think things will get -that- bad.
Of course, even in ‘good’ times Newfoundland was ain’t-no-doubt-about-it-poor in the old days. My father can remember kids on the docks begging for cod tongues from dorymen bringing their catch back.
And when I met another of my great-uncles back when I was about 8, I can recall being tremendously impressed by the way he used to put his cigarettes out; he’d crush them against his palms. There was a thick layer of callus on them that was like cracked horn, yellow and hard, from hauling on nets and ropes at sea all his life.
He was in his seventies then and he still had a grip like a mechanical grab, terrifyingly strong; he’d been a windjammer sailor when he was a teenager, one of the last to go around the Horn under sail, and then a fisherman all the rest of his life, apart from taking part in the hunt out on the St. Lawrence pack ice most winters.
It was the sort of place where flipper pie was considered a delicacy, and where men still sang songs about women who could turn into seals themselves — that’s another thing my dad can remember from his childhood.
“In a leaking boat off Labrador
Aching hands on a freezing oar;
Hauling nets — hunting seal
To feed his family.”