D.G. Reid

I’d heard about the Coventry Farmer’s Market here and there over the years but never managed to make it up for a visit. Then a couple of weekends ago I got a notice that my favorite cupcake truck was going to be at the market the same day we were going to be visiting the eldest at college in the same corner of the state. How could we not go?

Visiting Cassie at school is always a double-edged sword. We all miss her terribly and it’s difficult to only see her occasionally and for summers. New era of life and major changes and all. It’s great when we arrive but both Sofie and I get rather melancholy when it’s time to leave her there. I’m also a wee bit jealous that she gets to go away to school and hole up in her room and do nothing but learn and study and figure out who she wants to be. But I’m so very thankful that she gets this opportunity that just wasn’t in my reach.

Yes, I went to college. First in my family to get an undergraduate degree let alone a Master’s. But my experience of college started several years after the traditional age so I always felt like an oddity on campus. College also involved having to live somewhere I really didn’t want to be in order to afford it and working as many hours as I could squeeze in around my classes.  I didn’t have time to do extracurricular activities that might have drawn me into campus life.  It was almost impossible to keep up with my friends, most of whom were not in school and therefore had very different schedules and lives.

I don’t remember sleeping much those four years.

At the end of every semester I would be sick for at least a week.  My body worn out and this was its own special way of telling me to slow down, at least for a moment.

My focus  was always on scraping together enough to pay the bills and buy my books, always looking ahead to the next semester so I could graduate as quickly as possible, move out and get on with my life.  It was a very rushed experience.  No time to dawdle and reflect or question the nature of the universe and my role in it.

Then there’s my life experiences in the years before college. By Cassie’s age I’d already had two alcohol induced blackouts and dabbled with other sorts of illicit substances.  My high school sweetheart died in an unfortunate accident (“Free Spirit Dies in the Night” is the newspaper headline burned into my memory) while we were on the outs.  Never going to be able to make amends. After graduating high school I’d been kicked out of my natal home.  “Find alternate living arrangements” were the specific words used. My heart had been broken numerous times and I was living with a bad boy who had more psychological issues then I did. That’s saying something considering the steamer trunks I was lugging around.

She hasn’t experienced any of that.

yay

Her life has had its share of sorrows and difficulties but hopefully the joys outweigh them. If nothing else, she knows she has a family who loves her beyond all reason and that we’re all here in whatever way she needs us. I wish I had the same, especially at her age.

She’s doing good in school. She’s happy with her life and plans for the future, which are well thought out and have her on the path to a decent, useful life. One down and two more to successfully launch but they too are on a good trajectory. This has not been a given in my experience, both personally and for those around me.

Life is rather fraught with all sorts of pitfalls and traps, some self-induced and some just from what life tends to randomly throw around like monkeys in a cage flinging poo.  At least I’ve been able to help my three avoid stepping in the biggest piles and getting sucked down into the morass.

What more could I ask for?

By market day we hadn’t seen Cassie since we’d dropped her off at college. She was thrilled to get off campus and we were happy to see her and hear about the new semester. We took a Sunday drive on a beautiful autumn day through the country to the fair. Even went down Pleasant Valley at one point which amused me to no end. We had a delicious lunch, wandered among the vendors, had some of the best cannoli I’ve ever been lucky enough to eat and Cassie found some yarn to add to her stash like a squirrel getting ready for winter.

We tuckered each other out in the most wonderful way running around that day. We don’t get to do that often. As I said in my MacDowell application, time and money are equally tight.  For once we didn’t have to worry.

We were together.

We had fun.

It was a beautiful day.

Can you ever have too much of that?

We got kettle corn at the fair. I’d never had it before but the very smart vendor had samples out and after one taste you’re hooked. I’ve discovered caramel corn in the past year or so and plan on making a batch as soon as the humidity levels drop low enough. I loved Screaming Yellow Zonkers as a teenager. Ate so many that I had a line of empty boxes pinned to the wall in my bedroom, like a hunter displaying pelts, in a strip that went from floor to ceiling.

All very different variations on the theme of salty, crunchy, sweet.  Each has their own merits.

Sy and I are working our way through the first season of S.H.I.E.L.D. and noshing on the remnants of the kettle corn. Another long day of work but it was a good day of getting lots of stuff done and hopefully more of the same tomorrow. It’s days like these that remind me of how much I love what I do for a living.

There’s a chill in the air to remind us of the upcoming season. I love that crispy tang so much.

I’ve decided that popcorn is a good snack for summer and caramel corn is for winter. Zebra caramel corn is for blizzards and special occasions. We now have kettle corn for the seasonal transitions.

Every time I eat it I’ll remember the day we went to market.

Simple pleasures.

My eldest and youngest have been lucky enough to attend camp over the years at Common Ground.  It’s a high school, a farm and runs the most wonderful camps and programs.  Check them out if you’re around or try to find something similar in your own area.  These photos were all taken on the Common Ground campus when I went to pick up Sofie the other day.

I have my gardens for food production here and there but these just blow me away.  I wish I had a quarter of this much space to work with.

I think it’s important for us all to know where our food comes from, how it’s grown and how to prepare it. Where I work we cover a bit of agricultural history in our educational programs.  These are intelligent, mostly middle class kids and I’m always stunned at their ignorance of where food comes from.  They barely associate meat with the animal slaughtered and don’t understand why spring was a hungry time for early settlers.  Then again, in a world where you can buy a strawberry in January, why would they know any better?

Every year Common Ground gets at least two piglets in the spring,  They are raised on the scraps of students and campers, slaughtered in the fall and then fed to those same students and campers who helped raise them.  It’s a wonderful series of teachable moments.  One year, when they were soliciting names for the piglets, Cassie suggested that they be named after herself and her sister.  The head of the camp called me, not because she found the suggestion disturbing, but merely to confirm that Cassie did indeed know what was going to happen to the pigs in the fall.  I confirmed that she did and they were named in my daughters honor.  They were indeed delicious but it was a bit odd to eat a creature that had been named after my babies.

Even if you hate to cook or don’t do it often, you should still know that meat comes from an animal and that apples ripen in the fall.  With our current food system it’s easy to lose the connections between seed and plate, farmer and eater, fowl and its crispy fried leg.  When you know where your food comes from and what it takes to get it there, I believe you’re more apt to cook it with care and maybe even waste less.  Could that possibly be a bad thing? People, in this country at least, don’t go to bed hungry because there isn’t enough food, but because we’re not efficiently using the food that’s being produced.

At Common Ground, depending on the program or the day of the week, campers spend their days in the gardens, helping out with the farm animals, playing in the woods or hiking up and down West Rock.  They come home dirty, happy and sleep really well at night.  Just like kids should in the summer.

My own childhood experience of summer day camp were less than idyllic.  That probably had more to do with family circumstances than with the camp itself but it’s still there in my memory as a sore spot. Going to camp was a solution to no one wanting to have to care for me during the summer.  It wasn’t for my enjoyment or enrichment, merely very expensive babysitting.  I don’t remember having any choice in the matter, just being dropped off one day in the New Hampshire woods and told to deal with it.

I don’t make friends easily so being thrust into a camp full of strangers was a nightmare.  I spent most of my time building cities out of pine needles in the woods or wandering by the lake shore trying to catch fish in the shallows, watching out for the ginormous snapping turtle rumored to live in the lake’s depths.

Camp swimming lessons were a bad combination of early mornings, a cold lake and needing to jump off the dock without holding my nose.  The Red Cross curriculum dictated that such a thing Must Be Done before I could go beyond the rope that contained the non-swimmers.  I was an adequate swimmer, I just didn’t like water up my nose. I didn’t understand what being able to dive in had to do with not drowning.  I still don’t.

I remember the tang of the Lestoil used to clean the brushes whenever we did arts and crafts.  It seemed to permeate the building after so many years.  I can’t recall a single thing I made, or any friends, but I do remember seeing my first penis, or at least the glimpse of one, at summer camp.  A counselor, who I had a wicked crush on, was rowing a group of us about the lake.  I remember just the tiniest bit of something peeking out the leg of his swim trunks.  I was rather intrigued by this mysterious member but had to wait a couple more years before becoming better acquainted with the species.

My kids know that my childhood was less than ideal.  They don’t know the gritty details but they know something is there, lurking just out of view. I don’t want them burdened by the weight of my issues so I often remain quiet about the past, rather than continue the generational dysfunction.  Camp is one of the few common childhood experiences we share, at least in the abstract.

As a parent, I’ve attempted to actually raise my children, as opposed to letting them raise themselves.  Part of it is a generational shift in what is considered acceptable.  In the 70’s, so many adults were busy getting their own heads on straight to bother with their younglings.  Today, it’s a more hands on approach.  Maybe too hands on for some, but that’s what camp is for.  Send them out into the woods.  Let them get dirty.  Let them have unstructured fun and get all tuckered out.  Hopefully they won’t see anything inappropriate, but even if they do, it just becomes part of the memories of summer camp.