everyone got a seat at the table, the big table

Unless they proved to be a dick then they got sent to eat outside. Our last week on the farm in the US.

Maintaining hope this week has felt like maintaining a bank account with a gambling husband. It makes me sigh

This post would have come out earlier today but I had a sudden urge to make raisin scones in the wood stove, so that is what I did.

Life runs in cycles. With twists and turns but we always bring the essence of ourselves.

We have to believe in those cycles of luck and action. We seldom stay where we are put. I was in a cycle of poverty once. Like - staying home because I could not afford tampons for the flooding days - poor. Yeah, that poor. I worked three jobs to raise my kids. It was not ideal. I never ever bought new clothes so I designed an entirely wild black wardrobe all bought from second hand shops. Mixing and matching. Invisible mending. Ridiculously high heels. Always with a kid on my hip. Smoking hot. Wild. But brittle and right on the edge of failing.

But then as the kids grew I was offered a big old farmhouse to rent. It was on an orchard and I never felt poor again, it had high ceilings and huge windows and was freezing cold in the winters but it lifted me somehow. The farm house on the edge of an orchard with a glorious big garden. You have heard me talk about this house before.

You should have seen it.

Wait!

Here is an excerpt from one of the stories that came out of that farmhouse as a young mum. (I have searched and searched to make sure I have not brought this story to you here before. But I think it is new to you).

This will give you a better idea of that house.

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excerpt from “The Table, the Cat and Kids with Balls”

It was a late summer sunny day in Hawkes Bay, New Zealand. The farm house was cool inside, with the high ceilings drawing the heat up and enormous sash windows wide open, the windows sat high in the walls of the house. There are no fly screens closing New Zealand windows but the children were forbidden from climbing through the windows because the ropes and weights and pulleys that helped raise and drop the windows were dreadfully ancient, and those windows were so heavy, I would tell the kids that if the little rope that held up the weight broke and the window fell it would chop their heads right off. (Mothers; got to love ’em.) That they were never to even stand on the window sills.

It was school holidays. The boys were outside, literally screaming with joy around the yard, these lanky little blonde boys their legs browned and lean, inventing as they went along and arguing about the rules they had made up 5 minutes earlier. I was inside, by the window, at one end of the table writing in my book. The baby (Beautiful Daughter -a toddler) was sitting at her end of the big table, actually on the table, painting on her paper, probably painting the big table actually. But she was quiet and happy, why interrupt. Everything washes in the end. Or not.

Thinly sliced potatoes were in the big flat bottomed wok, frying gently in late summer butter, (late summer butter is always paler than spring butter) sizzling with onions, sliced sausage and parsley, soon I would whisk the eggs and chop the tomatoes, add it to the potatoes and make an omelettey frittata for lunch. Serving it in wedges with home made bread. It was cheap. I grew most of it. Peace lay softly into the room.

The big table was always called the Big Table as long as I could remember. It was solid oak (still is actually as it lives with Fourth Son now) and could seat sixteen hungry bodies if all the little kids were jammed into an old church pew that ran along one end. It was a wide long table. My dad had extended it lengthways using two old oak wardrobe doors, and strengthened it with steel girders. Mum matched the oaks panels by staining it with walnuts from our tree.

When I was first married I visited home with my children often. If Mum was well enough to come upstairs to eat with the whole family, the big table bulging with people and noise, her cat would come too. He was huge and fluffy and very grand. He stalked behind Mum with his tail straight up and poised. He had a special stool that was placed beside Mum’s chair at the big table. With studied disdain this cat would glide up through the air and land exactly where he meant to, no skidding, just a precise landing, lower his furry bottom to the wooden stool, arrange his tail with a flick and there he would sit all through dinner just watching, tidy and ever so genteel but definitely superior. Every now and then Mum would place a small piece of meat on the stool before his paws. He would ignore this offering for quite some time as any cat-god would. He would narrow his eyes gazing around the table daring anyone to comment. Then he would reach his large wooly head down to his motionless feet and it would be gone without even the trace of a swallow. As though maybe he was inspecting his beautiful foot, or nudging the stool testing for cleanliness, his nose an imaginary white glove.

When my mother died, and after a year our Dad married again which I never forgave him for, the table was winched down over the second story verandah at the beach and onto the back of a truck and brought out to me in my farm house. It had twelve high backed oak chairs that did not match, I loved that they did not match. I added more mismatched chairs to fit more people.

In our rented farmhouse that day, me by then a single motherless mum, the windows were propped wide open, it was warm. Gentle.

And then quite out of the blue, everything just shifted down a gear, it was a clear change, the sun felt warmer, the air calmed, my head tilted as I listened to the sounds of my children, I was thinking about Mum and her cat, watching the cat across the past. The sounds muted, the past receded and the fear that had sat in my gut every waking moment for years now was gone. And you have to know all of what I have just told you to understand how this gear shift was a wonderful thing, our world was whole in that disconnected truest of moments, you know that feeling, like rare shafts of golden transient light. A bell tolled in the soundtrack in my head calling out twelve noon and all is well. I sat at the big table inside that lovely transient bubble of sublime, drifting away from my writing, one ear on the children, just watching that cat across those years and knowing with a knowledge as small as a mote of dust as it drifted past, that we were going to be alright. On our journey through life. Peace was there. Ebbing and flowing.

Then I heard a shout and then the rattle of a ball bouncing across the roof of the house. I heard Senior Son shouting orders, then a scuffle below the window. Then I saw Third Son suddenly appear at the open window beside me, he on the outside - me on the inside, he was climbing up off Senior Sons shoulders onto the window sill, then he reached down and Senior Son appeared to run up his back like a monkey and take his place on Third Sons shoulders leaning up to the guttering. Third Son then very, very carefully stretched his long arm and grabbed my little boy Fourth Son who was probably about four years old, by his bouncing outstretched hand and flung him like a frisbee up to Senior Son who caught him and richcheted him like a basket ball up onto the roof. You can imagine the lift in my eyebrows, popping out of my transparent bubble of happy, as I saw my youngest son flying vertically past the window. This was all done you understand in one fluid series of movements. It took seconds. Like those little Russian circus performers who make pyramids of themselves with the Hup and the Hup, punctuating each landing on each shoulder with a sound. So there was a son on the forbidden sill, a son standing on his shoulders and another son being catapulted from one to the other through the air and up onto the roof.

I woke from my daydream with a start and before I could shout - put that baby down! Fourth Son had landed on the roof with a confident thump, run across the hot tin, retrieved the ball, thrown it down and they did the whole thing in reverse. One by one, throwing each other down then leaping off the sill into the garden with the crack of small plants, slap of bare feet and grunts of satisfaction. Then full of laughter they just ran off, resuming the game without pause.

Now, I thought, as I put down my pen, and stood to go to the stove to turn the potatoes, ‘how often have they done that?’

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It is this kind of summer I am thinking of today…

as I struggled with writing this newsletter about hope and care and nurture and veering wildly off in all directions.

I think back to another summer.

It was the summer the bishop said it was ok to steal if you were hungry (which was great as I was an incorrigible thief of toilet paper and pens) and that a big messy Sunday dinner for all the people was a good as Sunday mass.

I took the bishop at his word (though I had long since lost the mass), and when I was in the mood for company and food was getting scarce, I drift-netted - calling people and inviting everyone I ran into that day. Everyone -that was the drift-net rule. And I would invite them to a potluck dinner on Sunday. We called it a gathering.

I invited all the best-looking guys from the gallery. Friends who owned restaurants or fish shops. My fellow waitresses and models and teachers and dump truck drivers and dog catchers. Local artists. Lots of artists. Orchardists. Musicians. Farmers. Writers. Stay-at-home single mums who gardened. Old, drunk, washed-up writers with all the best stories. Surfers. Young filmmakers. The old lady with the gold tooth who lived across the road. Chefs.

Oh, and a winemaker for a season—now, he was a really handsome dude, but that is another story.

All my children and my children’s friends set to tidying up and we put a pot of potatoes on the stove.

Everybody came to the old rented farmhouse, parking their dented cars between the rows in the orchard. They arrived with dishes of food and a bottle of wine and a flower from their garden for the table vase. We would cook and laugh and eat and laugh some more and sit around the big table together, sometimes I would drink too much and cry because being a single mum was so hard and I was grateful to have all these friends but usually I didn’t (get crying drunk) - we would yarn and tell stories into the night. And I would read to them from Winnie the Pooh (after reading the children to sleep with the same book) or tell them stories I was writing and they would jump in with additions and impossible endings. Sometimes we would go out and garden by moonlight because it was so stupid!

I hosted pot luck dinners in that house around that table for eight years. It was a period. We had a time. We were a scene. None of us had money - we all brought something real to the table. Everybody cooked. All were welcome.

And afterwards the kids would spirit food into containers, wash the dishes, return our guests their empty dishes and we had food in the freezer for weeks. One dinner I remember we had five lasagnas and the kids looked at each other in horror as they packed the leftovers knowing that we were eating lasagna forever!

Being poor was no reason to go hungry.

Here is what our ‘gatherings’ taught me.

You can fit up to six people in a tiny kitchen all cooking just make sure to move clockwise and talk the whole time!

The more varied the people the more spirited the conversation.

That things don’t last forever. Things change. But that big table crowded with friends will always be your kids best memory. The big table does not change.

That all these different people were all hauling arse trying to survive.

Include everyone; never say no to a new person at the table. We used the word diversity for food, living, books, plants and people. It was an informal rule in our set to give everyone a chance. We loved to have gatherings with such a wide range of people there needed to be multiple introductions. If someone ended up being a dick (there were children at the table after all) then I told them to eat outside - this became a bit of a joke but not a joke - you know what I mean - we passed plates to them through the window.

Though poor I was equal to everyone else. If you decide this and your people help you, being poor makes no difference. Once you know you are equal and your people accept you as equal, you walk differently. When welcomed and encouraged by our peers we become stronger - more capable - more purposeful.

We need to search out and include different people in our lives, don’t be afraid to go drift netting. Just find a really big table.

Don’t be afraid of people.

We had these gatherings here at the kitchens garden farm until covid with all my interns and piles of local young people.But things changed and they never really started again.

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BedTime Stories

This still feels like a new change in my landscape though we are in our second season.

Chapter EIGHT of Wind in the Willows.

Toads Adventure. Actually Toads great escape but we don’t want to give the show away!

Toad is just SO naughty.

To catch up on the older chapters: Go here.

Wind in the Willows (so far)

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The Farm

Big changes as I leave the farm for what could be 6 - 8 months or years. Oh the farm - we will miss the farm you and I - but there you are. It is very hard but imperative that we look after our people. A window has opened and I must step through it. I will not sit idly by while one of my people struggles.

But I will be managing the farm from afar which is not easy but I have a good team.

I am actually going back closer to the big table so - you know - cycles.

The Travel

I begin to travel this coming Friday. To California for a week with Third Son. Then on to New Zealand to visit Senior Son and Fourth Son (who has my big table) for a few weeks then I wash up in Melbourne to settle in with my Daughter to begin my role as doula and eventually nanny for my ‘single mum with a very good job daughter’ (we have a big table there too) It is there that amongst other things I will develop a City Garden with a Country Heart.

Cycles.

I am not going to pretend to miss the politics here in the US.

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That is the other change. The politics. A sticky wicket that walks next to us and cannot be ignored. The political explosion of changes. So many. In light of recent events - tariff taxes on Mexico, Canada and China - now is a good time to begin work towards your own food autonomy. Change the way we approach food. Think about ways to grow your own food. At least some of it. I will help you with that. So feel free to ask questions.

Find a good local supplier of seed. www.seedsavers.org. Is my fav. Tons of info. They are passionate about heirloom seeds and a non profit. They once sent me their book for free, to help me teach seed saving to my interns and it is a great book.

Please write your favorite seed company in the comments below.

If you have a question ask me. There are a pile of people here to help you grow your own food. And I am going to be showing you how to grow food in the city very shortly.

Find your local farmer. They will help too.

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If these tariffs do go through we will need to learn to be frugal here on the farm which will flow on to wherever I am. But Frugal is Elegant.

And remember - you are at my table - you are not alone.

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Take care and Talk soon

Celi