I participate in an online group with a young British journalist who asks a question a week (shades of Storyworth!) This past week she wrote about the joys of being self reliant, making your own bread, sewing your own clothes, etc., etc…. I thought about her article and this is my response.
Whew, your articles are always thought-provoking! They arrive in my inbox at about 6:00 am my time, just as I am awakening to another day of quiet in this sleepy Arizona town—what shall I do today, nothing really happening, it never does…. (The lyrics to an old song called “Moody Manitoba Morning” by The Bells are running through my head.)
There are a lot of things I am capable of and some that I choose to be incapable of because, well, I’m not interested. I did learn to sew when I was young, it was mandatory in my parochial school. But I never enjoyed it, it stressed me out trying to sew the perfect line or cut the perfect pattern. And nothing ever turned out well, unlike your curtains. A memory of a beautiful Vogue pattern for a dress, beautiful satiny material, floral, and a resulting dress that made me look like Aunt B from The Andy Griffith Show (I was 22).
I can knit however and, actually, I have been thinking about starting to knit mittens for our school kids. You’d be surprised at how Arizona weather lulls kids (and their parents) into thinking that they can turn up for school in the winter months in shorts and t-shirts, sometimes a thin hoodie. My mother was famous for knitting mittens from odds and ends so that no two mittens were ever alike. The idea of doing that has been niggling at me and now here’s your column—serendipity?
I used to bake bread every Sunday when my now 43 year old daughter was small. But now, well, if I baked it I and/or my husband would probably overeat it and we are already fighting the battle of the bulge.
Growing up in a city in a family who were newly white collar, where my mother was excited about affording fancy prepared and canned food, excited about going out to restaurants, food self-reliance wasn’t a “thing”. My father was an excellent carpenter, made most of the fittings in our house but was also very traditional when it came to women and never taught his daughters his skills. I felt I was doing well in my 30s when I put together the furniture I bought from IKEA and now I am proud of myself if I can figure out how to reprogram my laptop, figure out a new app on my cellphone or the car’s audio system.
I’m proud of other skills though. I am an excellent and critical (positive critical, not negative critical) reader. I wrote a memoir this past year for my family. I am an excellent substitute teacher, I can figure out a teacher’s lesson plan, even those that are badly written and expand on it. I am an excellent (if wordy) storyteller. I am reliable, I don’t let other people down (letting myself down is something I am working on.)
I try to be available to my family and friends as a listener, I try to limit “advice” to things I have experienced, trying always to couch it in “well, this was my experience but….”
I support local causes, I had one rescue dog for 9 years and currently have another. I am working on buying less not because I am making it myself but because I simply want to buy less. I don’t need a lot of things anymore. I buy books, both printed and e-books, because I want to support both good writing and those who provide books. Having been a bookseller for several years, it’s a very hard business. If we only had libraries, well, soon we’d run out of new books because they’d become too expensive and difficult to obtain; publishers would cut their runs, writers with small audiences would find it difficult to subsist on their earnings…. And if we only had bookstores, well, not everyone would be able to buy books. (The Canadian book publishing industry was fascinating as a lesson in subsidization.)
If we only grew our own fresh food for ourselves, didn’t buy others’ products then those who couldn’t because they lived in apartments or because they don’t have the energy (takes a lot of energy to maintain a garden) might find it difficult to obtain fresh food because there wasn’t enough surplus. We may rail against large grocery stores but we learned their value during the pandemic. There may have been less on the shelves but, at least in my experience, there was sufficient available so we didn’t go hungry. And people bought and donated to food banks too—they still are. My own great grandparents had to move off their farm plot in Ireland into town when their family grew too large. Thankfully there was somewhere for them to move to; when we think of halcyon “living off the land”, well, living off the land was and still is danged difficult.
Yes, sometimes it’s lovely to think of going back to communities that were self-sustaining—waving fields of grain, small herds, fresh eggs, milk and butter—but it wasn’t like that for so many people and I, for one, appreciate mod cons when my back hurts and my fingers ache. And, yes the pandemic taught us about the insecurity about relying on others—people having to raise prices because the crop didn’t do well, the stuff that we can’t grow didn’t arrive, the bread flour wasn’t available, etc., etc…. People sliding into poverty when their skills weren’t required. I have a friend who raises chickens--she also is in her 40s and has three helpful children--but has had to raise her prices to $8/dozen. I don't begrudge her at all but I am also not going to eat a lot of eggs at that price.
Dreaming of becoming more self-reliant isn’t really an answer to a lot of problems, at least not on a macro level. I somehow can’t envision my neighborhood with chickens in every yard, rows of legumes planted and tilled by 70 and 80 something’s.
I guess what I am long-windedly trying to say is that we are diverse and as a result we live in a diverse society. I agree with so much of what you say about self-reliance and it is definitely good for us to think about what self-reliance means to us, where we are being lazy rather than mindful about our needs vs wants and what’s happening in our community.
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