Recipes for Trouble

I admit, some of my posts have been a little bleak lately.

The end of August, blurring with the beginning of the academic year makes me cranky. As do neighbourhood propane explosions and the epidemic of cancer.

So last Friday I hopped on a Go Bus, paid $8.50, and ended up in the lovely little town of Uxbridge where a woman named Elizabeth picked me up and took me to Willo’ Wind Farm. I was staying there for a couple of nights in order to get some more writing done on my new manuscript, but I have to say that this trip also gave me back a sense of hope I’ve been needing for awhile.

Snuggled amid gentle rolling hills, this is a small, multi-purpose farm devoted to organic farming. Chickens, hens, roosters and geese stroll around companionably, while a pig snores volubely in a pile of hay.

We found they live longer when they’re allowed out of the pens, explains Elizabeth as she serves me a breakfast of farm fresh eggs my first morning there. They always come back, she adds, with a smile. Farming and hosting a bed and breakfast is more than a commercial exercise for these folks. People from the city need the smells, and the memories, of a farm, she tells me, her blue eyes glowing.

Indeed, though I’ve told her I’m a city person through and through, I can’t help but be reminded of my mother’s village in Ukraine, where geese rule the roads and small handcrafted cottages abut onto fields of potatoes, presided over by weather worn matriarchs wielding hoes.

From time to time, Willo’Wind hosts weekend retreats for teens, whose philosophy is inspired by the Catholic Worker Movement. The kids are asked to leave their I-Pods, MP3 players and cellphones on the school bus, and made to think about food, where it comes from, who has it and who doesn’t, as they walk through the farm. Elizabeth quotes one kid who said The. Only. Walking. I. Usually. Do. Is. From. The. Car. To.The. Mall.

I suspect there’s a not-so-hidden agenda in this incredibly affordable and welcoming place - hospitality and generosity, laced through the food and the ambience, are bound to make guests more aware of the relationship of food to market and table, and its potent mixture of hard work and love. As I write, I see Elizabeth and her son Adrian through the window, picking vegetables under a gold, lingering sun. Just like Ukraine, where long summer nights meant longer hours, keeping ahead of the weeds and bringing the harvest in.

Elizabeth encourages me to walk through hers and the neighbouring farm, and so, between bouts of writing, I do. Hovering rain clouds paint the sky with watercolour wash one evening; the next afternoon sees wide, expressive blue skies and billowing cumulus overseeing whispering cornfields and groomed shady paths bordered by apple trees. The onerous, clashing agendas of my coming semester - pedagogy; writing; filmmaking; community - begin to find some harmony in my mind.

On my last morning at Willo’Wind I’m fed homemade scones still warm from the oven. Elizabeth shows me a book she’s reading, Silences, by Tillie Olsen. We zoom out of the farm and back to Uxbridge, where I drop by the Uxbridge farmer’s market before catching the bus home.

Adrian and his friends stand proudly behind their leeks, carrots, beets, kale, chard, beans, potatoes and pickled eggs. I notice they’re the only organic booth at the market and realize what a brave, necessary and hopeful enterprise this is.

There was an environmental disaster in north Toronto on the weekend. 12,000 people were evacuated from their homes due to an explosion at a propane plant.

Except that I never heard the words ‘environmental’ or ‘disaster’. I heard ‘evacuation’. I heard the kindly patronizing voices of police and Salvation Army workers.

I heard about a lady in her seventies who woke up to a huge blast outside her window, and shattered glass on her bed.

The poem below, by Ukrainian poet Oksana Zabuzhko may have been inspired by the after-effects of Chernobyl, but it resonates for me in a time of extreme environmental hazard and change.

What does this have to do with food? Does it make it more or less important to buy local organic food? Does it make a difference? How do we make change?

Letter From the Summer House
Translated by Douglas Smith

Dear_______,
The land’s rusty again.
Acid rain: our blackened cucumber wines
Jut from the earth like scorched wire.
And I’m not sure about the orchard this year.
It nees a good cleaning up,
But I’m scared of those trees. When I walk
Among them, it feels like I’m going to step
On some carcass rotting in the tall grass,
Something crawling with worms, something smiling
Sickly in the hot sun.
And I get nervous over the sounds:
The day before yesterday, in the thicket, meowing,
The monotonous creaking of a tree,
The suppressed cackling of geese - all constantly
Straining for the same note. Do you remember
The dry elm, the one lightning turned
Into a giant charred bone last summer?
Sometimes I thing it lords
Over the whole garden, infecting everything with rabid madness.
How do mad trees act?
Maybe they run amok like derailed streetcars. Anyway,
I keep an axe by the bed, just in case.
At least the butterflies are mating: we’ll have
Caterpillars soon. Oh yes, the neighbour’s daughter
Gave birth - a boy, a bit overdue. He had hair and teeth
Already, and could be a mutant,
Because yesterday, only nine days old, he shouted,
“Turn off the sky!”, and hasn’t said a word since.
Otherwise, he’s a healthy baby.
So, there it is. If you can get away
For the weekend, bring me something to read,
Preferably in the language I don’t know.
The ones I call mine are exhausted.

Kisses, love, O.

I found this poem via a lovely blog - listed in my blogroll - sworn to lucidity

The road home was long and full of words and music and silences. There were farmhouses and cornfields and roadside diners. And there was lots of good food if you were willing to stop and try something new.

Just out of Wakefield, a smokehouse: “Boucanerie Chelsea”. They smoke everything here, from lobster to sturgeon to, of course, salmon. I wish I’d been more daring but I went for their maple smoked salmon since, if I had my way, everything would be smoked, dipped or marinated in maple syrup. It was sexy and delicious and I ate it all week.

We counted ten, or was it twelve, chip wagons between Wakefield and Toronto. Someday I’d like to try them all. But somehow we ended up at the same one I’d been to a year before, The Chip and Dale Chip Bus, fifteen minutes west of Kaladar.

There’s a very kindly woman who doles out your chip order like you’re the only person in the world (when in fact there was quite a crowd)…and check out the sign for homemade carrot cake, $2.50 per!

The poutine was the best I’d ever had, no shit. Cheese curds fresh from the nearby factory, and I’ll bet the spuds were local too.

You can get jam too: it’s one-stop-shopping at Chip & Dale’s.

Someone had recommended we check out Perth. I said to The Girlfriend: There’s. Something. About. These. Anglo. Ontario. Towns. Makes. My. Throat. Tighten. Up. There were lots of serious grey stone buildings, including one that housed Mexicali Rosa’s, doling out some pretty mediocre Mexican food but the restaurant itself was sweetly perched on a canal and somehow we enjoyed our kitschy salad with grilled chicken inside of a taco bowl.

All he way home, I longed to find a roadside stand selling fresh corn and finally, like a vision, it appeared. Brocolli, potatoes and zuchinni too, and an honour system for paying. The corn, when I cooked it later was exquisite, and happily lacking that sickly sweet candy flavour that store corn has.

We took the old highways again and so found a shady picnic table for our dinner, facing a river twinkling in the slow, gold twilight.

We watched the ducks wend their way home.

I’m sick of cancer.

Not my own. I don’t have it. Not yet, anyway. The stats in this country are 1 in 4. An epidemic, really. An environmental disease, I believe. What do I do? I eat broccolli. Quinoa. Blueberries. I take my vitamins. I drink wine, eat cake. I play the odds.

Too many of my friends, family, and friends-of-friends have been struck. I’m sick of cancer of the larynx, ovarian cancer, Hodgkin’s non- some-thing-or-other-lymphoma, and multiple myeloma, to be exact. Not to mention: breast cancer, breast cancer, breast cancer.

It’s always the same routine. They tell me over the phone, in a casual tone of voice best used to report a cavity. They’re trying to be kind, they don’t want to shock.

I choke up. They wait patiently for me to recover my composure. They are gentle with me, and yes, patient. They know what’s coming next.

I don’t cry. I ask: What stage. What’s next. And: Are. You. Doing. Complementary. Treatments. What. About. Nutrition.

They love that one. Like having to undergo chemo’s not bad enough, now they have to eat cruciferous vegetables and ground flax seed too.

Or, as my mother sometimes says before my visits. Here. Comes. Bootcamp.

I hang up the phone and cry my private tears. Then, I go online.

Yogurt. Broccolli. Garlic. Ginger. Tomatoes. Watermelon. Blueberries. Sunflower Seeds. Shitake mushrooms. Carrots.

Immune boosters. Anti-oxidants. Anti-inflammatories. I make a list, just for them and their cancer.

They humour me. They smile. They say: I’ll. Look. It. Over.. My mother allowed herself to be talked into a juicer. The Textile Artist let me cook for her. They’re still alive. The fact that they are strong, determined Slavic women with centuries of survival behind them didn’t hurt.

Another phone call, last night.

I grew up with this person. I was planning on getting old with this person in my life. This dear friend, who shrugs when I finally do cry and says, Hey, it’s like my ma likes to say. No. One. Gets. Out. Alive.

We laugh. We finish our breakfast and walk out into a soft gentle summer rain.

I’m not ready to lose this friend, not yet. Not. Yet. I chant to myself. Not yet. Not yet. Not yet.

Photos by Lydia.