Moose, Wolves, and Snow

Just a short mostly-picture post as an ode to our second try at a Forest Service cabin (we had so much fun on our last adventure), this time at Stoney Cabin in the Deerlodge-Beaverhead National Forest beside Rock Creek. We had a few great meals, some time to read, hike, and explore AND we just happened across a lone moose in addition to a couple of wolves (at a distance, of course). On the way home, we also passed some cattle ranches nestled in the valleys, covered (like everything else) in snow.

Oishi desu!

That's Japanese for "delicious", a nod to the oldest posts on this blog and my days as an English teacher in Okinawa.

CAUTION: Images below not for weak stomachs.

So, we have a half chest freezer. We filled it up pretty well with preserved produce from my summer of farming and gardening (lots of kale, basil pesto, plums, huckleberries, you know), but it was missing something. Meat.

John has (unsuccessfully, sorry friend) gone bow hunting the last few years. Over Christmas break, after spending some time in the Twin Cities with our families, we headed up to Aunt Karen and Uncle Tim's in Puposky for some R&R. I visited Grandma, who is now at the assisted living home in Blackduck, and hung out with Aunt Karen. John went out to the woods (and/or the edges of last season's corn/alfalfa fields at a distant relation's farm) with Uncle Tim to see if he couldn't assist with the freezer-filling duties.



Success! He and Uncle Tim (a.k.a. Uncle Pa) had some great time to bond and we got to skin, debone, and process the doe (which we actually got some practice with before our wedding with Timmy's buck back in November, but always under the tutelage of an excited mentor, Uncle Pa) before heading back to Montana with several pounds of protein in our Subaru.







We added it to a great several months of eating food we grew, harvested, shot with a bow and arrow, or otherwise had a strong hand in bringing from field to table (often served on plates we threw and cut on cutting boards we (or someone we know) carved beside glasses we blew and now wiped up with dishrags we knit--just this week!).

Let the Good Times Roll

So, I have a very good friend. We share Mabel responsibilities, a kitchen, love, excitement for life and traveling and learning and making and filling pretty much everything over the brim with goodness and funs.

We decided to celebrate that in the presence of our loved ones.

My friend gave me a gift certificate back during the week of Thanksgiving 2009 while we were staying in the small one room cabin we first visited in November 2006 (he didn't know, at the time, that it didn't have windows or wood to stoke the only piece of furniture inside--the woodstove) as a young, confused, couple giving it a go at that tenuous time when one is almost done or completely done with college, trying to figure current and future life out (not to mention from 3 hours away...the closest we lived for the first 2.5 years of our time together). The gift certificate was to make rings. We kept it hush hush until we finished crafting our rings and could show them to our family as a means of announcement. The artist who helped us create them was a smart man. He gave us the tools and materials we needed, and pointers along the way. A few sessions later, we had our sterling silver rings, decked out with a dark, warm patina and each other's fingerprints on the inside of each band (and some new knowledge of jewelry-making and metallurgy).


This all, coincidentally, took place in the space that used to be where by father would have his boots resoled in the town I grew up in. We decided we'd have a small family ceremony at my aunt and uncle's place the following Thanksgiving(where I spent every Thanksgiving and near where my grandmother and her twelve siblings were raised), and then a casual gathering of friends at the folk school I worked at back in winter 2008-2009. Which brings us to this most recent Thanksgiving. Almost.

First, I had to find some fabric in town and send it to my mother so she could make my dress. Second, I had to create invitations. Third, we had to plan, organize, and execute everything else, relying on the talents and interests of many of our closest friends and family members and John's crazy Excel skills.



We found the most affordable fabric we could at a little fabric shop in downtown Missoula and brought it up to be measured, cut, and sold to us. Turns out, it had been sitting in a woman's attic since her father brought it back from World War II. It was raw silk from Japan. But, we're supposing, because they invested no money into it, it was all profit, so it was less than 10 bucks a yard. With a Simplicity pattern, Marmy got on her sewing way.
And, using a block print design I had created earlier (on a card which John had actually given me the gift certificate in), we spent several evenings stamping all of the recycled cardstock invitations.

Come the craziness of my first semester of grad school + teaching, John's father and stepmother were a great help with decorations, my father and mother got food together for the party, Aunt Karen and Uncle Tim were prepared to host a slightly bigger Thanksgiving dinner (and build an arbor, several bonfires, etc), and so on.

The big day came, and our late fall wedding turned into a winter ceremony (almost a foot of snowfall plus subzero temperatures...thank goodness I packed the mukluks I made at North House two years earlier). My brother, with whom we drafted the ceremony, officiated (and did a swell job at that!). Our parents each read a quote, message, or passage they found meaningful and brought up to the arbor a stone we had collected from significant places in our lives we hope to build into our future home.
It was followed by a big family dinner and the annual football game out front.











That night, we stayed at the old cabin. Mabel loved running around the forest.



The next day we headed off to northeastern Minnesota to get North House ready for one hundred guests. I can't say enough how much hard work family and friends put into clearing ice, hanging lights, setting out luminaries, and stoking the wood-fired brick pizza oven on the shore of Lake Superior. By Saturday, we were ready. It was great. Everyone made and consumed their own pizzas (for toppings, we went potluck style and had everything from bear to artichoke hearts), ate ice cream and cupcakes (deliciously pumpkin and made by friends), drank homebrew (some we had brewed ourselves, a bunch from friends), danced a contra (called by John's former soils professor), and partied 'til the wee hours of the morning. I cannot be thankful enough.







It was a great way to celebrate our shared time together and the centrality of family, friends, and a handmade life.

Click here to see a slideshow of more photos from the ceremony and celebration.
*click on the orange "view photobook" button and then "full screen" (in the upper right) if you like

Also, it turns out that our superanniversary (when Thansgiving falls on November 25th) will align every 11 years, so look out for a big party in 2021 (with some luck, we'll have those stones built into a cozy home and lots of land to dance on by then).

2010's Autumnal Detectability

Fall is my favorite season. We (friends in and attached to the graduate program) have regular potlucks, and one of them this fall had a theme centering around the "unappreciated art of stuffed food" as well as turning thirty, which several friends did...quite well, I might add. Squashed filled with stuffing, mushrooms full of cheese, desserts crammed with more desserty things. You get the idea. It was delicious. It was also how the last few months of the year felt, hence the dearth of blog updates. I loved the classes I took, delving deeper into topics and crafts that I was already interested in and familiar with but had not the time nor expertise to jump deeper into and explore on my own, practicing skills within the presence of experienced and dedicated thinkers, writers, and doers. I also found great joy in teaching my own freshman composition class once all was said and done and it was clear that we all learned a lot throughout the semester. Not to mention neat school trips, which I will mention below, and celebrating my partners-for-life status with a small cadre of friends and family. Jam-packed. Like chocolate stuffed pastries.

So let's reach back all the way to mid-October when I joined a handful of other classmates on a trip to central Montana, where we met with ranchers, miners, and other hardworking people we would not otherwise usually have access to in the heart of big sky country:









The weekend before, I was in Minnesota reading in cousin Amy's wedding, where I had the chance to briefly see much of my family for the first time since moving out to Montana, one of whom has since left us and another who is having trouble staying with us:



The following weekend, I was at the AERO Conference in Helena, where most discussions surrounded the subject of the conference's title "Perennial Roots: Reimagining Our Energy & Agricultural Future" and I heard Wes Jackson speak for the second time in as many months:

You Can Believe it is Butter

In my Politics of Food course, my classmates and I were given an assignment to "understand the relationship among actors and activities involved in creating goods and services - in this case, food" through a commodity chain analysis.

I chose to study two familiar butters: Lifeline, from the fine folks over at Lifeline Farm (with their dairy and creamery), whose original business partners I visited at Lifeline Produce last May, and Land O' Lakes, whose butter I grew up eating and whose corporate headquarters resides in the same town I took my driver's license test nearly ten years ago. Both have had a place in my life (and my stomach). I was curious to learn how the processes the two products went through differed, considering how relatively simple the butter making process is, as well as how complicated the industrial food system is.

In the following video/presentation you will learn what I learned.
1. Click the play button with your mouse.
2. To move through the steps manually, press the forward and back arrow on your keyboard to move through the journey. You can use the little scroll wheel on top of your mouse to zoom in and out.
3. If you prefer the presentation to move through the steps automatically, put your cursor in the lower right corner of the video/presentation window over the word "more" and select "autoplay".
3. For fullscreen, put your cursor in the lower right corner and select "fullscreen".
4. Consider the sense of scale the final image gives you.

You CAN Believe it IS Butter on Prezi

In the end, which product would you choose?

Grand Finale

Remember that winery/vineyard I mentioned that was just up the way? Well, we made sure to squeeze in a few more visits and I helped with the grape harvest after the first full frost!







It's been a very busy few months, between teaching, learning, and traveling.

Autumn Harvest

It's no secret. I love fall.


Deer around the Rattlesnake are not shy. Mabel and I encountered 12 of them on one short walk. She has a hard time not eating them all. As do I.


We're harvesting the final few crops on the farm:








Apple cider grinding and pressing!







Random Extra Photo of the Day:

Best missing cat poster ever. Hope you find her!

A few days on "The Land"

We are killing ourselves. I'm not kidding.

Every day, with some of our most mundane practices (driving cars, running refrigerators, buying "cheap" food at a supermarket chain), we are ensuring the ruin of mountain tops (for coal), the water cycle (well, everything...now hydrofracking, too), and the health of ourselves, the natural systems in which we operate (even when we build walls that physically and conceptually obfuscate the truth), and ALL FUTURE GENERATIONS.

I don't mean to be a downer, but I'm here to make change and this is what I'm up against. Me, and lots of other, much smarter people. But it's an uphill battle.

Read this article by Derrick Jensen and you'll realize, like I did, that personal change is great, but it really won't matter. The vast majority of what ails us can only be solved at a much larger, more political scale (eww, young Grace would say...but now I know it's a fact of the matter and must be faced), because it is at that level that nearly all of issues are occurring. We've given big agriculture and industry 50-100 years to suck all that is good out of the world and we're being left with a toxic, dying shell. Downer.

I'm going to digress, but then you'll see, it's to bring us further along in the same conversation.

Alright, to be honest, I was worried about Wendell Berry. He is perhaps my hero insofar as his eloquence as a writer, thinker, and activist. His sheer intelligence, ability to craft complicated issues into clear problems with solutions, and creative use of poetry and prose to discuss the root causes of many societal and environmental ills, while continuing to advocate for change even in the face of collusion, greed, and incompetence, all give me hope and inspiration.
"Be joyful though you have considered all the facts," he writes in Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front.

And, it seems, others are also just a bit concerned. And with good reason. Berry has been fighting this battle for over half a century. He is not young. The feeling that I had, that I wanted to hear him speak with my own ears and interact in a community of thought that includes him, is shared by many other young people that I have talked to. "I want to see him in my lifetime [and his]," I've heard and thought more than once.

Good news. Berry is as determined, clever, and enthusiastic as ever!

When I heard that Berry would be appearing alongside like-minded writer/activists Wes Jackson, Scott Russel Sanders, and Sandra Steingraber (among others) at the annual Land Institute Prairie Festival, I couldn't help but ache to take part in the gathering. The land is what sustains us and is our hope for the future. Many environmental, social, and economic issues can be solved if we change the failed systems that support them and agriculture is a big player in all of this. Hence, my determination to incorporate it into my graduate studies.

The Land Institute researches Natural Systems Agriculture, a mimic of nature's ecosystems. Friends and supporters just call it, "The Land". It holds a weekend of barn dancing and barn conversing during harvest time every year. I was lucky enough to attend the 32nd annual assemblage of minds and hearts.





(Let me be clear, I'm still the same broke twenty-something I have been since entering my third decade on earth. Working for good causes often means volunteering, particularly during tough economic times. I have been able to scratch by because of the generosity of others and the ridiculous work ethic my father instilled upon me. My ability to get to Salina, KS without missing any classes was a product of my loved one's various education- and work-related travels, frequent flyer miles/credit card points, and said generosity. I did make sure he, too, could come, so I had someone to share the experience with.)



So, I had the pleasure to spend my weekend with a few hundred other people--often under the shelter of the big barn--as artists, economists, and scientists (I love that most of them were many of these things and I aspire to do the same juggling trick) shared their thoughts, fears, and hopes with us and we, in turn, continued the conversation with them and among ourselves. Several readings/lectures were interspersed with shared meals, music, dancing, bonfires, and tours of the new research building. We were giddy to be sharing time and space with people who cared about and understood the same issues overlooked by so many of the people we exist alongside every day, but we also understood that the lack of perceived time, education, and willingness to broach tough issues that we faced left us not optimistic, but still hopeful. We were abuzz because those of us engaged with making change were finally all in one place and had to use each other's energy to reignite and maintain the passion that drives us all to push against a broken system most people don't have the opportunity to even recognize.


We were a few feet from "stage," a simple podium with reading light attached against one side of the reclaimed-wood barn. Behind us, a few hundred attendees looked on attentively.

Beyond a member of "The Land" team (a cow), attendees line up to tour the new research building.


The barn was also host to several musicians.


The harvest moon rose behind the bonfire on our first night in Salina.


Who can say no to a barn dance?!

By participating in the system, we reinforce it. By removing ourselves from the system, we stand by and watch it continue to erode our environment and our communities. By actively supporting alternatives, we strengthen a market for positive invention. By communicating truth, advocating change, and demanding that our basic systems are realigned with reality and the vitality of human and environmental communities, we will assist with the transition from global and local peril to healthy, just communities.

It was a beautiful weekend. We camped out--alongside many others--on The Land's land. I was reinvigorated with the energy needed to keep learning about and working toward much-needed change (local, global, human, ecological, etc).

John summed up how small my niches is when he leaned over to me during a lull and whispered: "All of the people you idolize are here in a barn and 1000 people paid $10 to see them." :)

So....Wendell Berry is doing well, the world is in shambles, you can make a difference, but small changes won't get us very far. Systems must be transformed. Short-sighted economic and political interests cannot keep driving us into the ground.

I look forward to working with you.


Berry, giving the annual Strachan Donnelley Lecture on Restoration and Conservation Saturday (Sept. 25) morning, discussing "our constant vulnerability to unintended consequences," and some authentic reasons for hope, including: leadership from the bottom, actual conversation and discourse about the limits of our knowledge, and conservation as an integral part of living.