Locally, In Season

The Herby Guys are now five. We've added Roman Chamomile, Rosemary, and French Thyme to the windowsill garden.

I'm reading "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle," Barbara Kingsolver's book about her family's year of keeping a vow to eat only locally grown foods in and around their little farm in Virginia. They began their year in April, when about the only thing the Earth was producing was asparagus (were it me, I would never have seen May), but then came strawberries and rhubarb, so that's certainly all right. She got a bunch of baby turkeys to raise for meat the following winter and her younger daughter got chicks for a laying flock, and then came to terms with the fact that there would be too many roosters in a batch of unsexed chicks and maybe some of her birds would be sold for meat. She's going to save her money for a horse.

And, of course, they were surrounded by people who had cows and sheep and pigs and chickens, and whatever the regular farmer's markets could offer. And as the summer goes along, there are greens and tomatoes and so forth, and it all sounds so 'attuned' as a lifestyle, like inhaling and exhaling right along with the Earth. Still, to me (just learning to really COOK and use herbs and seasonings and try new things) it sounded a little constricted, until we get to Barbara's (may I call you "Barbara?" "Why, of course!") Barbara's 50th birthday, for 150 of her closest friends.

She hesitated. What was she going to feed all these people? Maybe she should get a caterer, just for this one night, and do the usual, expected, sort of fare. Then she thought again -- she and her family felt good about the way they were living and didn't want to do otherwise. She got a local woman who cooks for a living to help her and started going round to see what the neighbors had a lot of. Here's how the party turned out:

"Guests began to trickle in on Friday: extended family from Kentucky, old college friends from South Carolina, our musician friends John, Carrie, and Robert. I was bowled over by the simultaneous presence of so many people I care about, from as far away as Tucson and as near as next door. We made all the beds and couches and pitched tents. We walked in the garden and visited. All those under age twelve melded into a pack and ran around like wild things...

"We set up a sound system on the back patio, dragged bales of straw into benches, and eyed the sky, which threatened rain all day Saturday but by late afternoon had not delivered. We carried a horse trough out of the barn and filled it with ice to chill our Virginia Chambourcin and Misty River wines, and beer from a nearby microbrewery. The lamb kabobs on the grill made all our mouths water for an hour while Kate and her helpers worked their mojo in our kitchen. The food, when it came out, was applauded: the summer rolls were saucy, the lamb succulent, the frittata puffy and light. The strawberry-rhubarb crisp vanished into thin air. Here's what we didn't have: the shrimp arranged in a ring like pink poker chips; those rock-hard broccoli wedges and lathed carrots surrounding the ubiquitous white dip; the pile of pineapple and melon chunks on a platter. Nobody seemed too disappointed.

"Some of us were in fact sticking our fingers into the rhubarb-crisp pans to lick up crumbs when the music started. The three-year-olds were the first ones out onto the flagstone dance floor, of course, followed closely by my seventy-five-year-old parents, the teenagers, the elders, and the middle-aged, recklessly dancing across age cagtegories. And it still didn't rain. Nobody fell in the creek, nobody went hungry, and nobody's husband refused to dance. When the night chilled us we built a huge bonfire, and nobody fell into that either. Midnight found me belting out backup harmonies with my cousin Linda to 'You Can't Always Get What You Want' by the Rolling Stones. The over-fifty crowd stayed on its feet until two in the morning. You get what you need."

A part of me can feel that evening as vividly as if I'd been there. More than kinda makes me want to get off where we can garden and and have chickens and where we can know our neighbors, and of course I hope that's going to come. I think it is. In the meantime, I have Herby Guys to raise and learn to use for something besides window greenery.