I grew up in cities. Thoroughly. Living in cities, visiting cities, moving through, and traveling among them. From the first, I honed urban sensibilities and sensitivities. My ears were tuned to the loud closeness of city sounds. My eyes learned to scan skyscapes trimmed by buildings – surroundings dominated by human creatures. My body is used to shoulder-to-shoulderness. City bred, as a child, I imagined that I would live a city future.
For the most part, my childhood knowledge of farming and food production came from fictions or romanticized representations of rural places. The Little House on the Prairie stories for which my name was given. A German jigsaw puzzle that was somehow too easy to assemble – a verdant fenceless realm in which snow-white sheep dozed at the feet of placid, wooly-headed cows. Classroom songs about simple-minded farmers with uncomplicated lives. A sense of unreality and innocent distance hung around it all.
But there were encounters with land, too, and over time, these memories came to shine with surprising brightness from my past. I discovered that I could recall with fine detail rare visits to family friends who lived ‘away.’ Their old rambly home. The long dusty drive that led through untamed trees to their door. The way the dog seemed an instinctive chicken guardian. The freshness of the meals. How our car always felt suffocating on the way home – where the yard seemed small and our dog seemed lonely. There was a tourists’ tour of a dairy and creamery once. Eating ice cream while looking over a field of grazing cattle, then other food tasting unsettlingly mysterious for a while. Also, a weekend at a farmhouse bed and breakfast and sneaking off to mud bathe in what I didn’t know to recognize as manure.
During my first years away from my parents’ home, I assumed that these adventures had such a fierce pull on me because rarity made them precious by default. Exoticism. I felt guilty over how sentimental they could make me – aware of how easy and dangerous it can be to idealize what is other. The grass isn’t greener… that sort of thing.
Only, that after some wandering and pondering I feel pretty sure that in some places the grass is (even literally) greener. At least in some places, there is much more of it than in others. For some time now I have been trying to make a home in this kind of place. Where I live, grass blankets hills and makes a valley flush green in season. A show of life that is chiefly about nourishment, not lawn care. Although the land here is not, of course, honoured as sacred by all, the abundance of the grass is itself a symbol of hope.
Slowly, I feel that I am discovering how to belong to a place like this – a rural agricultural community that is deeply unlike most of the places I have known so far. I am learning to apply my senses in new ways and to let them teach me about who and where and when I am. I am finding that, for me, there is an essential harmony between my agrarian politics, my wild spirituality, and this part of the world where I am putting down roots. To value the rural and resist the bigotry that treats it as marginal feels urgent and rich.
More often than is comfortable, I make awkward, unintended displays of being a city girl. Sometimes, I long for proximity to a numberless throng of anonymous others who might read books that I love, sing songs that I hum, or laugh when I laugh at the movies. Occasionally, I fear that I will never be able to legitimately call any place home.
But too many of my neighbours are friends who either share these experiences or embrace the former urbanites who are settling here as gracefully as we can. Lots of us are younger people trying to take seriously a call to be radical ‘home-makers’ – nurturers of place-based community who care for people and planet.
It is a call that holds all the potential of revolution and redemption. I am trying to answer it as a Kootenay-dweller, a writer, an aspiring farmer, and now as a Young Agrarians coordinator (!!!), alongside my life partner. The chance to help network a group connected through conviction to create and celebrate agriCULTURE feels about good as it gets.
Nigel Francis and I started as YA Coordinators for the Kootenay bio-region at the beginning of this month. We hope that Koot farm and food folk will reach out and help us to see that YA does what it can for us all. We can be reached at kootenays@youngagrarians.org.
