Last Dog Days of Summer

These are the last dog days of summer. It has been clear and sunny and in the high 80s and 90s for the last several days in a row. The sky is blue. The sun is burning. The flowers are browning. The garden is drooping. The dogs are comatose under the furniture. The children are sweating in their school desks. We are packing up to leave and it is almost like L.A. is coming to get us!

My agricultural impulses chafe at me. I made pesto and froze it. I want to make more, but why? We leave in a week and it won’t be good by next year. I can’t ship it to myself in CA. I have a tree full of apples, and a foley food mill. I could can sauce. A pile of cukes ready for pickling. Tomatoes heavy on the vine for jars of marinara. But what am I going to do, spend probably a lot of money and fossil fuels shipping this food to myself for the winter in CA where oranges hang heavy on the trees and the markets are bursting year round? That isn’t very reasonable, thrifty or ecologically sound, which are some of the major factors in favor of the work involved in preserving your own food. Another is pleasure and another is pride. In this heat it wouldn’t be such a pleasure to stand over a hot stove canning anyway. I guess that just leaves pride. There’s my real problem, pride.

In my twenties when others were perhaps interning and career building and building an economic future I was traveling and having a good time and learning how to feed and prepare the soil, preserve the harvest, save the seeds and propagate the important heirloom varieties of food crops. It still burns me sometimes that I can’t fully use these skills in my life these days. Now I’m 33 and I can speak Spanish, play guitar, draw and run a small subsistence farm. But you can’t run a small subsistence farm in a split life on two coasts. And more than I need canned tomatoes these days I need to make a living. I haven’t figured out how to draw on these, my hard earned skills, and turn them into my career and economic future. I may have some ideas but I am not there yet. It kind of hurts my pride sometimes. Shouldn’t I have this stuff figured out by now? Ah well.

To use some farm terminology, this is what “gets my goat” about going back to Cali more than anything else. I need to put aside my farm girl self, the one that I made when I thought I knew what I was doing with my life. My comfortable, simple old farm girl self that I revisit in the summer. Back to the work of creating a place for myself in the big, strange world of L.A. No resting on any agricultural laurels, I’ve got so many more and different things left to figure out!

At least at this point, as opposed to a year ago, L.A. doesn’t feel so big nor so strange. I’ve got a home there, some neighbors, some friends. I’ll be slowly chipping away at the masters program again this fall and looking for part time work again. (Not going back to the English Café full of English fruitcakes, bless them.) I’ll build myself some new garden beds at the new house that we rent in Topanga. I have galleries and stores and places that I look forward to going. I’ll be so happy to see the beach, the wild parrots, the coyotes. It’s really not L.A. that I have a problem with, I know that now, it’s my concept of myself in it. I wonder when I will feel as at home there as I do in Maine and what will happen between now and then?