Another month digging the grassroots movement,
doing our best to ignore the ringmasters promising top-down change.
BEFORE THE FROST
First principle of self-reliance: grow food! Noticing we were due for the first heavy frost of the season, Bob pulled in peppers, turmeric, ginger, and potatoes from our garden. Camille freezes the ginger and turmeric in tablespoons-sized balls to use in immune-boosting tea and golden milk, curry, soup, and stir fry.
YELLOW FINGERS
Camille’s fingertips represent five pounds of processed turmeric.
SO MUCH FOR THE FIGS
There weren’t many leaves left on the fig tree after the frost. Interestingly, the fruit continued ripening, turning sweet as it dried.
LUKE AND JASON’S LATEST PROJECT
Bob delivered several tons of bagged concrete to Jason and Luke where they are building a boardwalk across a pond. Luke’s business, Branches Ecological Landscapes specializes in edible and regenerative landscape design.
THANKSGIVING DAM WALK
Nothing like a walk at Jordan Lake Dam to top off a perfect day. Much cheaper than health insurance, psychoanalysis, or gym memberships,.
WELL, WOULD YOU LOOK AT THAT
“See that there? That’s a stick-out.” We are aging according to schedule, one year older, one year closer to making shit up.
OUR LITTLE HOME
A thirty-year-old manufactured home on a couple of acres, Trouts Farm suits us to a tee. There’s nowhere we’d rather be as we amble towards our dotage.
OUR LITTLE GRANDSON
Young Nolan turned one year old November 19th. One day he’ll inherit whatever kind of world we leave behind.
All we do, we do for his generation, the next, and the next.
HAPPY TURK’Y DAY!
Chestnut/sausage (gimme lean) stuffing, courtesy of Lyle’s chestnut trees, roasted carrots, onion, garlic and sweet potatoes (Edible Earthscapes), peas (Food Lion), mashed potatoes and gravy, roasted Quorn Turk’y, and cranberry sauce – the traditional Thanksgiving meal from our childhood, recreated with locally grown, plant-based ingredients.
STAFFING UP
A gift from our friend Shirley, two uniquely beautiful staffs hand painted by our other friend, Fred. Here’s a link to a photo of the four of us from last month’s photo album with our other friend, Cathi (boy, we have a lot of friends!).
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THIS MONTH’S QUOTES:
“I had not realized until I spent some time there how cruel it was that so many American companies had fled the South for other countries and taken the jobs with them; that the American philanthropists and charities, benevolently concerned with poverty and deficiencies elsewhere, had traveled halfway around the world to bring teachers to Africa and food to India and medicine elsewhere…they had allowed the poor in the South, a growing peasant class, to die for lack of health care, and many to remain uneducated and illiterate and poorly housed, and some to starve. Though America in its greatness is singular, it resembles the rest of the world in its failures.”
– Paul Theroux in “Deep South”
“You don’t always have to chop with the sword of truth. You can point with it too.” – Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird
“Standing nearby was Chuck Johnson, the self-proclaimed investigative journalist and proud internet troll, who offered a variety of slogans and predictions. “The trolls won,” he said, calling this election, “the comment section against the article.” “We memed the president into the Oval Office,” he said, referring to the viral images he and his online allies manufactured and disseminated across the Internet. Johnson, headphones around his neck, touted the election as proof of the power of the ‘cracker coalition.’”
– Ben Schreckinger, Politico.com
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