Quarter Year

Didier, the father, said, “I don’t want any part of this modern world,” which was amazing to hear because it’s almost a direct quote from Claude, the proprietor of the last farm we were on. I guess we find people who have something in common. He believes that when every Jew accepts Jesus as the lord, he’ll come back and create a heaven on earth for the believers. I think I got that right. For him it was like Christmas to have a Jew show up at his house who was eager to learn and listened to every word he said, even taking notes. A lot of people have a knee-jerk reaction to call people like him crazy, but I think that our job as travelers is not to paint with broad strokes, but to listen, to try to understand what are the core values of the people we meet and how do those values shape their lives. To them, their lives are consistent with their values. Everyone looks crazy to someone else. Frankly, I don’t see how their beliefs are any crazier than – say – someone buying their food at Safeway. :)

Enough of that.

We stayed in a little house on their property that’s reserved for guests, so we had an awesome bedroom, fireplace and kitchen, then a bathroom that didn’t have running water. We collected all the water we used doing dishes and used that to flush the toilet. To wash, we boiled some water and added it to a basin, then mixed cold water. I loved washing (my upper half) outside in the morning with the sun coming up through their olive trees, the guinea fowl squawking everywhere, the water steaming in the sunlight… I don’t think I got very clean, but whatever, I don’t have to smell myself. It was a wonderful way to start the day.

There’s so much to write about…

One day Gabriel, the 17 year-old, fired up the tractor and loaded five of us (me, Azure and three girls) and the family dog in the bucket. He drove us high into the hills. We hopped out, followed a path between bushes and up some rocks, then found what we’d come to collect: a wild-growing weed called Rocayrol – I believe it’s Shepherd’s Purse – that grew between the rocks on the south-facing slope. We each took butter knives and dug them up by their roots and tossed the whole plants into a basket. It was sunny, there was a breeze and there were old stone walls crossing the hillside. The girls sang songs from Church with tunes that reminded me of serious medieval music. The girls braid each other’s hair and wear ankle-length skirts.

We filled a basket with the salad then headed down the hill in the bucket of the tractor. On the way we passed a pine tree and the 11-year-old grabbed a branch and ate the little pine cones growing at the tips. We copied her : they were sweet but full of resin. At the bottom of the hill we got out and picked more wild greens that went into the salad, another plant that I wrote in my notes (which aren’t at hand now).

It’s a polyculture farm, which means that they grow many different things. This is opposed to monoculture, which is what you see on large for-profit farms. Their primary purpose in farming is to feed themselves, and they only sell something if there’s a surplus. He said several times, “We farm to be free.” They also practice permaculture, which is the idea that each thing they grow has multiple purposes and everything supports everything else. For example, the chickens are for eggs, their poop is for compost for the potatoes, the leftover potatoes are fed to the pigs and chickens, and so on. Of course everything is completely free from artificial pesticides and herbicides.

Each night Azure started the fire with old grape vines that had been pulled up and are sitting in heaps around the property (many vineyards here are switching crops because the wine prices are dropping). She’s a skilled fire starter – most nights she managed to start a full roaring fire with a strong core without even using matches or a lighter, just the leftover coals and some branches. At the same time I’d walk down to the garden and collect greens to flavor the salad – spectacular wild celery leaves (people: our whole lives we’ve been lied to about celery), tender fennel fronds, peppermint, lemon balm, lima bean leaves, thyme, comfry, cauliflower leaf, spinach, chard and so on. None of these were actually growing in the beds – they were the “voluntary” plants that grew between the beds.

We decided not to use any electricity at night, so we often found ourselves putting together the end of the meal by candle light. We sat on the couch in front of the fire in the dark, we read and wrote by candlelight and we went to sleep around 10pm – 9pm their time (they don’t change their clocks on the farm).

There are so many other interesting stories…. An older son (from another marriage) fell on his head from 25 feet and had to be airlifted out by helicopter; we killed guinea fowl for the market; we went to the cathedral on Sunday for Mass; we had a traditional Cassoulet; they sang before every meal… and so on.

Anyway, Azure has uploaded a bunch of pictures from this week – at our Flickr account.