October: Community and Harvest

October was a busy month, it whizzed by in patterns of dark and light, rain and sun, cold and warmth. Today, the beauty of this place is like a shout, like a hurrah, it is so bright and astonishing. Dark royal-blue lake, gold leaves, smoky blue air,
The whole month’s events blurred and melded into one another. Partly because I have my head down now, seriously pulling the plow, teaching and trying to write.
And oddly, whenever I do get seriously into writing, the farm, the house, my life seems to disintegrate around me. I wake up to dog puke on the rug and piles of paper fluttering to the floor and dust and dying plants even though I have only been ‘gone’ a couple of hours and not really gone at all…just my mind and spirit and perhaps some form of energy that animates the farm and keeps it functioning turned away. I’ve noticed this before; how much the farm is like a live creature, a creature of spirit and energy and how, when my father finally got old and discouraged, some feeling that used to animate the farm and connect it together faded and almost disappeared. The more people and energy there are about the place, the more alive it becomes. So then I think I can either be a writer, or I can be a farmer but stubbornly and idiotically, I persist in both. And stubbornly and idiotically, it does work, most of the time. Just far more slowly than I would like.
I have been thinking this month a lot about that strange word, community, mostly because Maa Press is going to put out a book on community and I would like to write something about it. It seems odd to me that the idea or discussion of community mostly arises in times of crisis, when, indeed, people are often magnificent in their caring for one another. But it is more the day-to-day arising and dissipating of community that interests me, although it isn’t dramatic but mundane, - conversations over coffee, meetings, concern, information about someone in need or what can be done.
Or, as happens, at the farm. Some days, especially in the fall, the farm is a very busy place. Inadvertently, the government has done us an odd favour by making it illegal for us to kill our animals and sell the meat to our neighbours. This means that legally, people have to come and ‘help’ kill the animal that we have sold to them while it was alive. Most people these days have never participated in killing anything. There is always an initial yuck factor. And then they come and the pig which was alive and smiling and eating apples is soon a carcass hung up and scraped clean and emptied of guts and ready to be taken to the butchers and hung and smoked and made into bacon and ham and pork chops.
I usually stay in the house and produce coffee and cake and soup and juice. People come tramping in, wash the blood and mud off themselves, sit down, eat and drink, full of the energy produced by physically hard work done well. My hands are too crippled to scrape the pigs. I like the traditional role as long as it’s an occasional choice. But one day this month, it got a bit overwhelming; 7 or 8 people doing pigs, 4 people pressing apples for juice, a couple of young men splitting and stacking wood. I had made a banana cake but clearly that wasn’t going to be enough. And one iron-clad rule of rural life is that people who come to help, are fed.
So my lovely friend of 35 years now, Yvette, looked in the dying garden and found leeks and potatoes and made soup; I had buns and sausages in the freezer. And I found time, (while doing the prep work and marking for my UBC classes) to make cookies. We sat on the porch in the late October dusk and ate and drank and were done for the day. The conversation was about gardens and dogs and weather and the pigs and community news.

Meanwhile as I harvest and teach and write and read, the world creeps on, getting stranger and stranger. People cheer the Olympics torch while the government chops money from funding for kids and seniors and arts and libraries and heath care. In the US, the banks announce bigger and bigger bonuses for their employees while unemployment creeps up and up – more and more people go hungry world wide, scientists get increasingly urgent in their messages about global warming, the price of oil creeps up and up, and in Vancouver, the streets are choked with cars, the restaurants and malls choked with people, the Olympics are coming and if a few civil rights have to be given up and a few homeless people booted out of doorways, not many people protest.
Someone asked me the other day if I wasn’t pleased by the number of people standing on bridges on November 26 yelling about 350 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the air as a good number to aim at. No, I wasn’t. It’s going to take a lot more than a few people on bridges to slow down global warming. It’s going to take a lot more than a few valiant protestors standing on street corners to disrupt the corporate Olympics ‘show.’ Everyone supports the athletes and their ideas but that is far different than supporting the corporate mishmash boondoggle that the Olympics has become.

And me, I wander about the farm on mornings like this and wonder why the beauty of this world and the abundance and wonder and amazing diversity of animals and plants and clouds and weather and gold and blue October mountains isn’t enough for this world.