Wednesday, October 8th, 2008
I’ve spent most of my life looking closely at, and enjoying, commonplace things. Now I’ve spent a year writing about them, and circumstances have decreed that that’s enough. Other activities are making a heavy claim on my time, and I must, regretfully, break away from blogging.
You may be interested to hear that when I first discussed the idea of mundanedaily with friends and family, nobody was positive about it. “Like you need another thing to do,” is what I heard. And, “The website costs what?” And “You’ve never even had a writing course.” And perhaps most trenchant, “Mundanedaily is a tautology!” I agreed with it all, except that last one, which missed the very reason for mundanedaily’s existence. “The mundane is merely available daily,” I explained. “It is also almost universally ignored.”
So with camera and keyboard I set about putting a magnifying glass on small things, hoping to expose all that common, unseen beauty. Things did not turn out exactly as I had planned. It soon became very apparent that mundanedaily readers already knew all about common beauty. They already appreciated the little things; already found delight and charm in whatever happened to pass by their window. (Also, not incidentally, in understanding mundanedaily’s underpinnings, they were happy now and then to click in for a visit.) Others, well, they couldn’t care less, and why should they, in a world chock full of great stories about shark bites and spacemen and movie stars?
So mundanedaily became less an instructor, and more a quiet conversation with friends. How wonderful that has been! (How difficult to let go such a splendid companion to my interests!)
And now, last but hopefully not least…
Pictured above is a section of woven wire fence, at least 50 years old, that marked the edge of a once defunct, but now revived, pasture on our hillside. The fence appealed to me because of the simple but effective method used to connect the wires, and because it is old.
Not only is the fence itself interesting, but the fence line as well, because it holds many reference points—evidences—of farmers’ work done long ago. It marks, for example, where the big trees begin, since those were left to stand outside the pasture. It is where the most stones are found, for farmers clearing ground for pasture carried stones no farther than necessary. And it delineates the angle of the land, for the hillside on the other side of the fence is too steep to make effective pasture. Lovely and edifying signs and signals, like all things mundane.
Farewell for now.
Dave
Tuesday, October 7th, 2008
So we’re into it again, this time canning pumpkin and processing grape juice, and the kitchen is a mess and everyone is tired and the last thing anyone is thinking about is cooking supper, and uh-oh, no leftovers. Time for a bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich, which is a bonus for me because I like bacon very well.
Bacon makes frequent appearances on my plate. White pizza, spaghetti (carbonara, traditionally with un-smoked bacon but just as good with the regular stuff), salads, eggs of course, and any other spot when a little smoky, salty flavor accent might fit.
Before I saw the nutritional light I stayed away from bacon, which may actually have been a good idea back then since the grocery store pork I was eating was a dreadful product from equally dreadful farming systems. But now our pork is pastured, purchased on the hoof, raised and butchered locally. It’s full-flavored, clean, and tarnishes neither conscience nor health.
Monday, October 6th, 2008
The garden is supposedly finished, but it seems we can’t get it fully emptied. Tonight, on threat of freeze, we ran out there just before bedtime, and in the light of the car’s headlights found, to our surprise, twenty watermelons, a dozen pumpkins, and a couple of straggler squash.
Now it may seem odd that we could be taken unaware by the volume of food left in our garden, but the work in putting up this year’s massive harvest has been so time consuming, so tiring, that we seem to have shut down our vision. I guess we’re afraid that another late-night canning marathon might just put us over the edge.
Of this carload, we will process and freeze one pumpkin, eat one or two melons, and then, as all gardeners do, give the rest away.
Saturday, October 4th, 2008
Hardware “trail mix” is the mechanic’s lifeguard—invaluable provision for the farm or anywhere that unpredictable and assorted repairs are made.
The best trail mix follows no organizational rules. All the “extra” hardware that inevitably accumulates around the shop is simply tossed into a container. Time spent in qualitative analysis of what should stay or go makes only needless complication, and in the end diminishes a mix’s value. (The only useful variation on the standard can-of-stuff version of trail mix that I’ve ever seen is to keep it on a tray, like an old cookie sheet, to facilitate fingertip perusing. But trays take up more room on the shelf, so depending one’s own particular shelf architecture, that may not be much of an improvement.)
Trail mix saves countless trips to the hardware store, prevents repair delays, and most important, dissolves the frustration of being almost done with an essential repair.
Friday, October 3rd, 2008
Brushes are one of the few ultra-simple tools still in high demand in this overtly technological world.
This particular brush is about fifty years old. It offered its first service to humanity as a tent sweeper, carried along on camping trips, rolled into a four-man canvas tent. When the tent reached the end of its useful life the brush immigrated to the garage, reassigned to General Labor, where it has been employed to wonderful effectiveness countless times.
A cheap, functional, long-lasting object like this runs high on the value scale (Utility X Duration / Cost = Value). No matter at all that it’s a bit rough around the edges now, since function is what it’s all about (although as it gets older the brush does seem to acquire ever more decorative value as well). I’ll certainly miss it when it’s gone, should I outlast it.
Thursday, October 2nd, 2008
Admittedly this grinder is not tight enough to put an edge on a fine knife or chisel, but most of my cutting tools are “rough duty” so it gets a lot of use anyway, touching up ax and adz heads, mower blades, and knock-around cutters. It’s pedal-powered, so I can pop on an edge in a few seconds, and never have to search for an extension cord or an unused outlet.
I bought the grinder from a local antique shop. As I loaded it into the car the seller asked where I intended to put it, which sounded like an odd question until I realized she considered it only a decorative item. When I told her the grinder would be put to use sharpening things, she was surprised, and also very pleased. Up to that point she had not suspected what the grinder could do, which seemed kind of a shame since she obviously appreciated the tool’s plain, mechanical beauty, and would probably have used it herself had she understood its function, and would certainly have seen and enjoyed even more beauty in its operation.
Wednesday, October 1st, 2008
Pictured is the engine compartment of my car—a 1985 diesel Jetta. I bought it almost in desperation, sick and tired of opening the hoods of newer vehicles to see a relatively uniform block of plastic and metal, virtually none of it identifiable.
In modern-car terms, the Jetta has few parts, and they tend to stand up simply and undisguised. I lift the hood and there, by God, I see an exhaust manifold, and an alternator, and a valve cover, and look, a fuel pump! How about that!
The Jetta offers good-natured relief from the complexities of modern life. Its primary parts are all understandable (if with a little study) and many of those parts are repairable by a devoted do-it-yourselfer. Meanwhile, countless other devices that daily cross our paths leave us irrevocably in the engineering dust. Calculators, cameras, telephones, and radios are imminently common and incomprehensibly complex. Credit card swipers, bar code readers, entry door motion-sensors, monitors, detectors, and controls are everywhere, and entirely impenetrable. Who knows even how a modern furnace works, or a microwave oven, or a fluorescent light?
The trend toward creating ever more intellectual distance between our machines and us is, in my view, not good. Complicated machinery at minimum makes us slaves to expensive repairmen (who are often not really repairmen at all, but technicians mere microns closer to understanding than the average Joe, plugging in pricey replacement modules according to automatic error codes.) But there’s a bigger and more insidious problem lurking underneath all that. Complexity has stolen our self sufficiency. The tools of our daily lives, the devices we use each and every day, have disconnected us from the foundation of competency that fosters independence. Worse, the ubiquity of unknowable machines has desensitized us to the overly complex in all things, muting what ought to be a natural suspicion of the labyrinthine operations that today characterize our massive and still growing government and business systems.
Give me a simple machine any day, or at very least, a simpler version of a complicated machine. Give me a one-on-one relationship, a plain and apprehendable device. Give me a system of human scale. Give me, for instance, a 1985 Jetta.
Tuesday, September 30th, 2008
This is what happens when you’re loaded with wild apples that ripen exactly when the garden is in peak harvest. Limited time being the most effective mother of stark, unjaundiced prioritization, putting up garden vegetables wins out over a few gallons of wild apple cider every time.
We lose quite a number of wild apples to the ground every year, but this this year charted a new record. Earlier-than-usual apple-ripening colliding with an overwhelming abundance in the garden left no time for our traditional fall cider pressing. So, fulfilling a piece of God’s perfect recycling plan, the deer and the bear and the bugs, and most important, the soil microbes, will have them all.
Monday, September 29th, 2008
This is the sort of weather that sets an off-duty pasture back to work. For weeks the grass has been in suspended animation, the cow has been grubbing for tiny scraps of green, and I’ve been reluctantly feeding some of this coming winters’ hay store to fill the gap. But now rain has arrived, blessedly, in these pleasantly warm days and cool nights of early fall, creating the perfect conditions for growing grass.
36 hours earlier the rain-filled weather report sent us rushing outdoors to fling new pasture seed onto our long-dry ground, with hopes for a landscape like that pictured—sultry, full, and saturated. So it came, and if the rain holds and the dry trend reverses for just a week or two, we will enjoy not only a productive fall grazing season, but a jump-started spring pasture as well.
Saturday, September 27th, 2008
The Dexter calf (on the left) is our future family dairy cow; the Jersey (on the right) is our beef steer. They are like pets, which is by design, since a micro farm like ours depends on well-behaved and compliant animals rather than special cattle-handling equipment, like squeeze chutes and head gates. We invest quite a bit of handling time getting them to the point of no-chore-to-handle.
Some days all that calf attention seems like a great big pain, especially when it’s rainy or cold, or when the animals are in an annoying two-year-old-child-bouncing-off-the-walls mood. But each visit to the calf pen also provides a pleasant reward. The calves are cute, interesting, innocent, and more important, interested, in us and everything else. New-puppy fun.