Victory gardens, living off the land, sustainable living, I’ve lived through them all. I’m of an age where everything seems familiar. The terms “sustainable living” and “sustainable gardening” are thrown around today but are déjà vu to many of us “mature adults”. For those of us who took to the hills in the 60’s, it has a remarkably familiar ring.
There I was, a young women with young children, living on a couple of acres thirty miles north of San Francisco. We grew fruits and vegetables, picked wild blackberries, had chickens and ducks and a milk goat for dairy products. I made all of our bread, got fresh water for drinking from a nearby spring, ate trout from a nearby stream and striped bass from the S.F. Bay. We occasionally killed and skinned a deer and had fresh venison as a beef substitute.
I remember thinking at the time that there was something weird about prepared foods and for a few lean years we did not touch it. Not only did it taste odd, we couldn’t afford it. There we were, self-reliant and relishing our sustainable lifestyle. We were “living off the land”.
When I returned to teaching, it became increasingly difficult to maintain a lifestyle where one had to chop our own wood, keep woodstoves going for warmth, and continue to live off the land. Things changed, we moved closer to town and we let go of some of our sustainable ways.
Now we’re retired. Time has brought us full circle. Growing our own is once again a passion. Sustainable today means something different than it did 40 years ago. Sustainable today means buying close to home, growing and preserving as much food as possible, minimizing waste, and being a conscious consumer. We’ve got chickens once again, I compost everything I can get my hands on (including coffee grounds from a local coffee shop), and we frequent the local farmers market and local garage sales. I try to limit my shopping trip to town (30 miles away) to once a week. Hey guys, I gotta get out once in a while!
We are not desperate in our efforts to conserve. We don’t turn off lights every time we leave a room or huddle around the T.V. in the dark. My husband hated carpooling and throughout his career, refused to participate in one (something about privacy), and we love a weekly hamburger from the Main Street Grill (regardless of where the beef comes from). But overall our life is lived in a way that could not be considered wasteful or thoughtless. We are doing what we can to live close to the earth and still enjoy the pleasures of this particular stage of life. Excuse me; I’ve got to go turn up the thermostat.
