Tuesday, January 1, 2008

City vs. Country

May 24, 2007

I can be pretty fickle sometimes, especially when it comes to deciding which I like best, living in the country or the city. One week I love living in Boone County, and the next I lament the loss of my old life in St. Louis. I’ll miss my friends, my favorite restaurants, and having Forest Park as a nearby neighbor. Our recent family vacation to Seattle reinforced this city loving side of me.
Pike Place Market, a gigantic open-air market with everything from fresh seafood and produce to home décor and souvenirs, lured us in our first day in town, and we drank in its pleasures almost every day of our trip. Riding public transportation made me feel like an urban warrior, conserving energy while bumping elbows with people from all over the globe. The hustle and bustle of the city felt invigorating. In fact, the entire family seemed energized, with my eight-year old son pushing the baby in his stroller for miles and miles each day. With giant blooming rhododendrons, out-of-this-world seafood, and sparkling water views all within walking distance from our hotel, the beauty and charms of The Emerald City in May seemed endless.
Well before the end of the trip, I began thinking of how good it could be to live in Seattle. My ears had already become numb to much of the noise pollution; surely I could learn to live with that part of city life again. Homeless people stood, sat, or slept on every street we traveled, but I felt oddly comforted that they weren’t shunted away from the rest of us so that we might be made more comfortable by their invisibility. The only real concern, I thought, was the lack of sunlight during the winter months.
However, immediately upon arriving home from vacation, I remembered why Kyle and I had fallen in love with our new home just south of the airport. We stepped out of the car, and the midnight silence was like a balm to our ears, and the brilliance of the stars seemed to whisper, “Welcome home.” The following morning I went out to check on the garden, which had been seeded just before leaving on vacation. Diverse bird song and a variety of veggie sprouts greeted me, a sort of nature-based welcome wagon.
But it wasn’t just the beauty of nature that welcomed me back. It was attending my oldest son’s soccer game, doing some community gardening, and getting a hug from a friend. It was a visit to Heartland Family Nursery, a place with delightful owners, a friendly dog, and a wonderful selection of herbs, peppers, and heirloom tomatoes. I realized that, whereas during the winter I had felt isolated and lonely at times, my life in Ashland is now growing full. Friendly acquaintances abound, and I even have a couple of good friends who help me feel connected to this place. The anniversary of our move to Boone County is approaching, and the scales are tipped once more in favor of country living. And if I should forget how nice the peace and quiet is, I have a daily dose of noise pollution—the deafening roar of the 6 a.m. plane overhead—to remind me.

Waiting for Peaches in mid-Missouri

March 13, 2007

Alice Waters, the famous restaurateur and advocate for local food systems, works everyday to increase the availability of locally grown food in her neighborhood. She works to catalyze what she calls a “Delicious Revolution” by seducing people with the outstanding flavor of food that is locally grown. This food is so delicious that citizens become loyal to local foods for the flavor and fun as much as because of their social conscience. I have been seduced by the Columbia farmers’ markets, which delight my taste buds and stoke my passion for supporting the local foods movement. Last summer, I bit into the juiciest, tastiest Red Haven peach, and I knew why Saturday is Farmers’ Market Day at my house and why I love the local food systems movement…it truly is a delicious revolution.

There are so many reasons to frequent a farmers’ market. Most obvious, it supports local farmers and local economies, helping them stay afloat in the age of international agribusiness. Plus, it’s nice to put a face to the food; if I’m concerned about the way my food is grown, I know who to ask. Buying locally grown food also contributes to cleaner air by reducing the number of miles food travels from farm to table. This should not be overlooked. In this country, food travels an average of 1300 miles from farm to table, and the transportation sector, which moves food and other goods, now surpasses industry in carbon emissions. A reduction in air pollution is positive for all of us, but could particularly be so for our neighbors in urban centers who live with the chronic health problems caused by poor air quality. In cities like St. Louis, which still have a high degree of racial segregation, African-Americans are the most likely to live in neighborhoods with poor air quality (like those along highway corridors) and are thus most likely to suffer from chronic asthma. In southern Boone County, where most of us are white, we can act against this environmental racism, this unequal burden of befouled air, by buying locally-grown food.

This idea is absurd if we consider only our personal trips to the farmers’ market. But let’s consider our collective impact. According to the USDA, the demand for local food is currently so great that over one billion dollars were spent at farmers’ markets in 2005; this is up 7% from the year before. In Missouri alone, the number of farmers’ markets has doubled in the past decade, going from 53 in 1997 to over 113 today. I don’t know how many pounds of carbon were not released into the air because of farmers’ market sales, but I do think these markets must be making an impact on urban air quality and public health.

Supporting local farmers, cleaning up the environment, even caring about distant neighbors: I can’t remember which of these reasons compelled me to first visit a farmers’ market, but I do know why I go back, week after week during the growing season. It really is the taste. There truly may be nothing quite as seductive on a hot summer day as a locally-grown peach, with so much juice that it drips down your arm as you eat it. The area farmers’ markets are now opening and I look forward to seeing you there (see below for area market information). In the meantime, let’s keep our fingers crossed that the late freeze didn’t wipe out all the peaches.


Boone County Farmers’ Market
I-70 at exit 125, in Columbia
256-1999
Sa 9a-1p (open now) MW 4p-6p (beginning May)

Columbia Farmers’ Market
Next to the ARC recreation center, corner of Ash and Clinkscale Streets
449-4769
Sa 8a-12p (open now) MW 4p-6p (beginning May)

Jefferson City Farmers’ Market
427 Monroe Street, Washington Park Vivion Field parking lot
634-6482
TF 4p-6p (beginning May)

Cole County Farmers’ Market
Hwy 50 to Jefferson City, exit Highway 179, one block south to Missouri Blvd, east to K-Mart parking lot
392-3088
Sa 2:30p-4:30p TF 4p-6p (beginning May)

Jefferson City Downtown Farmers’ Market
On High Street between Jefferson and Monroe, one block from State Capitol
536-2712
W 4p-7p (beginning May)

More MO farmers’ market information: http://agebb.missouri.edu/fmktdir/index.htm

New Home, New Baby, Long Winter

Feb. 25, 2007

Winter is finally almost over. It’s been good…and not so good. The baby came in the fall, and I floated through the fog of sleep deprivation until I woke up in full winter to a rip-roaring blizzard culminating in more than 15 inches of snow. My husband was unable to get to his new job; even if the snow had been shallow enough, we had somehow lost our snow shovels in the move from city to country. Oops. Thankfully, one of our few neighbors was nice enough to clear our driveway with his snow plow, and he didn’t even ridicule us about our lack of snow shovels. (Well, at least not to our faces.) Back when a quiet winter in the country was still a novelty, I was most impressed with the behemoth green machine that re-opened the world to us, and did not yet feel the isolation of our new place in the world. But as one winter storm rolled into another, and nights remained a blur of endless feedings for the baby, the grays and browns of the landscape seeped into my psyche and left me feeling, at times, abysmally lonely.

Throughout the winter, I viewed the new baby with a variety of emotions. Most often, it was incredulous joy—how did we get so lucky? We have a beautiful, healthy baby. And when Evan, my oldest, holding his new brother, looked up at me with tears in his eyes and love for his brother on his lips, I thought life couldn’t get any better. Sometimes, though, I felt despair, wondering why little Jackson wouldn’t sleep and if he ever would. And then there was the ugly mother-guilt I’d feel when fresh snow would close the schools and I couldn’t take my oldest son outside to play: we couldn’t count on the baby to sleep long enough to pile on the layers required for outdoor fun. I admit, on the really trying days I wondered why we wanted to do the baby thing again. There is a 7 ½ year gap between oldest and youngest, and either I don’t remember the difficulty of sleep-deprived days, or my body and brain don’t bounce back as easily in my thirties as in my twenties.

Over the course of the winter, a season of new motherhood and stillness and waiting—waiting for spring, for opportunities to make friends, for my husband to get home from work, and most of all for a good night’s sleep—I forgot why I had ever wanted to move to mid-Missouri. Oh, there were times when I’d catch a glimpse, like the night that Evan and I took our sleds outside our front door to slip and slide by the light of the moon, or the day balmy enough to take a brand new baby out to greet a few of the neighbor’s horses. But too often these moments were overshadowed by the pervasiveness of the waiting, and it dragged me into a deeper and deeper funk until I spent a weekend drifting through seed catalogues, dreaming of my biggest and best garden ever. Oh, yes! Every seed packet I ordered lifted my spirits and sent a shiver of excitement through this city girl hoping to make it out here in the country. I would last until spring, after all.

The seeds have now arrived in the mail, a grow light has been installed to give my garden a head start, and I am eagerly awaiting the heady days of early spring. Last week, the weather even warmed enough for a bit of nighttime stargazing, a magical part of this new rural lifestyle. Here, at the tail end of winter in my new home, I am doing okay. I’m still waiting for spring, and I’m still waiting for my husband to get home, but the baby is doing okay in the sleep department. Not great, but I’ll take it. Spring is just around the corner, and things are looking up.