Value
Where I start with a sweet small-town snack metaphor and then blast some f-bombs and fire breath about capitalism...
I went to buy some meat the other day from one of my best friend's (1989-present) family’s farm. Inside the timber frame barn there is hay and some tools and depending on the season, baby lambs or baby goats and a slightly out-of-tune piano available for banging or twinkling. Across from the piano is the door to what is essentially a ‘store’ consisting of a chest freezer full of meat wrapped in thick white paper and a counter stacked high with cartoned eggs. It is all an honor system presented via cash box and mini yellow legal pad. Actually, it is two separate side-by-side honor systems, one for the meat, one for the eggs. Don’t mix the accounts or Eleanor, my friend’s aunt who’s in charge of the eggs, will get kerfuffled. I love knowing this— an egg all of its own to be handled carefully. Before I wrote my name and my purchases on the respective pads and slipped my money into the cash boxes, I looked to see who had come before me. There were a few first and last names, some of whom I recognized, but just above mine on both pads, all it said was PAUL. Paul got ground beef and pork loin chops, 2 dozen eggs. I know with 100% certainty that this Paul was my 6th grade math teacher. He’s also a cartoonist and the hand-writing is a dead give-away. I wondered if it was Paul’s wife Marsha who asked him to get the chops or if it was because their daughter Nora would be coming for dinner—it doesn’t matter. But to be allowed into such a system, to be held in orbit with people who’ve known you since you were small, to share systems and trust, freezers, food, histories and agreements—the intimacy of this is both tender and rich. All of the delicate layers of knowing, folded together into a little croissant of small-town comfort.
On the way out of the barn, there are chicken coops flanking you on both sides. It’s in the little grassy triangle between the two that we often nestled in the depths of year 1 COVID, my first fall and winter living back on this island in nearly 2 decades. Juna was not even a year old, homemade cloth masks were still obscuring our smiles, but there we were, some dear friends and our babes packed into endless layers, snacks into baskets, distancing our blankets and not our hearts, the chickens frantically gobbling handfuls of grass as quickly as tiny toddler hands could grip and fling them. Doing our flipping best to be together and not break into a million shards of cold, couchless, snot icicles.
It’s been a strange chapter, but I do feel like I’ve had a resurgent fling with this place over the last 2 years. Reacquainting myself with these small comforts along with the curves and contours of the island’s shores and paths. The minutiae of local news and the depth of community care. There’s a hold and a magic working on me once again, an allure of what could be, in the longest-longshot scenario- where we find permanent housing and Juna’s roots could unfurl from the container that is this seasonal rental house (we move out in June, can’t return until September) and spread and stretch and entwine in the same sandy soil as my own. But there’s this lurking sense that like an old first love that you always knew likely wasn’t the one, I can’t see where this is actually going. I’m not all in, but I’m struggling to let it go.
It’s so damn expensive here for starters, for me and for so many others, and it has me thinking a lot about value which usually ends with a fiery pit in my stomach where I conclude again and again and again that I hate capitalism and wish I better knew how to extract myself from its wretched grip. I can’t stand that we use the same word to describe the monetary worth of something as we do to describe the belief systems that give meaning and substance and purpose to our lives. What do you value most…what is your value system… American values…family values. I mean, I really fucking value the love and care and fairy effort my mom makes—rain or shine—to put a little note or treasure in a niche in a tree for Juna to find on the mornings that I walk her through the woods from our house to my childhood home, to be cared for by her grandparents. But I don’t want that perfect, loving ritual entangled with the conversation about the funky fixer upper valued at $950,000 and what it would require of a person, a family–to afford that.
I really value a mindset and a lifestyle that prioritizes being with my kid as she grows up, showing up for friends, making handmade gifts as an artform, writing, teaching, saving piles of lumber from jobs even though it takes time to back the nails out and stack it and plane it and sand it and tend to it, to remember its value and see its worth underneath the slime of age, all of the potential for new life and creations, all of the embodied energy and effort it already holds now rescued from the landfill (until June rolls around and I haven’t had the time to make it through all of the piles and we have to move out again…) But to determine what is a valuable use of my time, especially the hours in which I now have childcare- those precious Work Hours where the big, booming voice saying Hustle! is so loud some days, reminding me that at some point I should do like grown-ups do and get my shit together, step up, bank the dough, get a “good job” so someone can say “she does really well” or at the very least to figure out how to scheme a life where I don’t completely silence my value system in exchange for the oversize monetary value of a home and some decent quality food and pants. To exist in this system and to balance all the things, first without oppressing others and then without burning yourself up, out, down…call me, if you’ve got it figured out.
Ok, simmering back down. I know there is a lot of moving-on energy pulsing out in the world right now and I am trying to embrace it as much as I feel I can. But having a baby at the start of a pandemic, uprooting from the only place I’ve really been a grownup, to move across the country and return to the place I spent my childhood, the grief of COVID isolation coupled with new parenthood, the relief (and privilege) of returning to this beautiful place and having the company of my family and some extremely dear friends, the absolute sorrow of leaving so much in California before I was ready- and the continual state of havoc and injustice in the world at large, I am spinning and dizzy (bizzy as Juna would say) as I attempt to move forward and evaluate our next steps. Or maybe, hopefully, it’s not bizziness so much as a metamorphic goo-state like a caterpillar (maybe we are all there right now?) and I might as well just appreciate what a gift it’s been to be cocooned here and hope that on the other side of the goo, we find a house or some cool wings or at least some sticky little feet so I could just live in that niche in the tree and call it a day.
***
In place of the Tool Box lesson, here is a beautiful pile of my most recently hoarded old boards that will:
a)turn into something sweet and/or useful, making me believe in the magic of transformation and the value of my choices!
or
b) rot further in our driveway as well as in the back of my mind.
Stay tuned!
xo
Your words wind a rope and the sentences heave a bucket of stored up tears out of the pit of my soul - where my gut feelings live. <3
Hi Kate! I'm grateful to receive this newsletter experiment and am enjoying your good writing and thoughts. I feel you on so much of it (love parenthood, hate capitalism - check) and wish it wasn't so damn hard to live a good life. I hope yall find the right spot. Sending love your way.