Last Days WWOOFing

It’s the feel of the ordinary things I’ll remember most about this summer.  I’ll remember tonight.  Claire was packing her bag and listening to a podcast about knitting that was really about abortion.  I never catch her doing just one thing.  The glow of the kitchen lights was odd on her hair - the lopsided ponytail, the stray baby-hairs curling out of control in the humidity. ...
Read More

Eating

More and more I’m thinking about food, not just as something that ends up on my plate but as a part of an intricate - and precarious - system.  We know about agribusiness; we know about the factory farms.  We know that, among other things, these farms are fundamentally unsustainable.  If there was no mental divorce between what we eat and how its made, we would be too queasy to...
Read More

Northern Normandy

Sallie left and, the last night in Paris, Claire and I tore the map in half and we wandered with map halves, finding our way surprisingly well.  Now we are settled in near Dieppe at a place that is not in fact a farm, but a bed-and-breakfast that has a little garden in the back. Roses everywhere - When we run out of work we clip the dead ones and Claire has suggested that soon ...
Read More

On Maybe Being a Tourist

Sometimes it’s not only acceptable, but good to steal. For example, when you have been riding your bike up a hill for two hours and there is something wrong with the derailleur and it click-click-clicks, and you stop about two hundred times to put the chain back on, and there is nothing in your body except day-old bread and allergy medicine...then, when suddenly the landscape s...
Read More

First Days in France

This summer, I am WWOOFing (volunteering at an organic farm) in France. I flew into Marseille a few days ago to meet Claire and Sallie.  I was too dazed to decide if I liked the city or not.  My body thought breakfast was dinner and daytime was nightime, so I spent the day sleepwalking through the streets.  I laughed everytime I saw a striped shirt and a baguette.  Red geran...
Read More