Sometime after my third or fourth loaf of banana bread, I stopped keeping track. (My camera roll from the beginning of lock down has a few pictures of banana breads from various recipes interspersed with no-knead focaccia, apple loaves, and ginger and chocolate chip cookies, before I suddenly stopped taking pictures.) I think it was routine fatigue, mixed with a veiling of sadness. The sirens were less constant, but the fear and worry weren’t. Every action an endangerment to others. Go to the store, kill someone. Answer the door, kill someone. Dodge your emails, kill someone. Even masked I felt an overwhelming guilt.
I kept baking banana bread, and other things, but the urge to catalog previously mundane behaviors waned as the death toll increased. I thought about sharing what I was up to, but it felt so banal. Really, who cares. Who cares now?
So, what then: After a year solitary quiet, I have a renewed interest in connecting with friends and strangers, but I still hate social media. Yet here I am, with a blog. Remember blogs? I’ve been fully vaccinated for a few weeks now, so I’m feeling less guilty about socializing and finally comfortable with looking forward and sharing outward. More comfortable with the banal. So I’m sharing—publicly, socially—with something that will keep me to regular account: a CSA.
I’m excited. This is one not just with vegetables, but fruits and flowers, herbs and heirloom tomatoes, and cider. One that forces me out of my culinary routines and introduces me to produce I would rarely consider if it required learning new recipes. So, now I’m learning. Plus I always wanted a house regularly filled with flowers.
My goal with this blog is to record what I’m doing with local, seasonal produce from the CSA (and from the farmers market) for my own posterity, and to share with you with hopes that you’ll share with me. I’ll be cooking and canning, trying things new to me and reinventing things old. If I start growing window herbs or tomatoes, I’ll be blogging those, too. Maybe I’ll blog some knitting, because I haven’t done that in a while. General vibes. Maybe some cool birds, too, we’ll see.
Comment, or join along. I miss hearing what everyone is up to, in a non-commercialized, non-branded, non-ephemeral, Web 1.0 sort of way. If you’re interested, I’d love to have a collaborative blog where we can share what we’re growing and making (music and art, too!) across regions and time zones. Maybe we can exchange CSA extras, canned goods, candies, hand-dyed yarns, plants clippings, whatever. I dunno, hit me up. Fuck capitalism I guess.
Rhubarb Season 