Can Do

Hold onto yer britches, I'm a-comin'! I'm just wiping down the counter. I put by twenty pounds of broccoli, or maybe thirty, I'd have to put my cheaters on to tell for sure. It was nothing! Just a little can-do Sunday activity. Pick, cut, clean, blanch, cool, dry, freeze. The broccoli? Just the four plants, and no, I didn't start them from last year's seed this time. I've never done that, actually, because they come all ready to go in a plastic four-pack at the garden store down the way. Real good crop so far. Real good, and still coming on. Come on in, set a spell. I'll see can I fetch us some sarsaparillas.

It is a little close in here, isn't it? Picked the hottest day of the summer so far to be b'iling water but you can't argue with a harvest. Leave 'em another day and they'd be fixing to bloom. Just look at all that bounty! Why, pop me in calico and slap my fanny. It's that round squishy bit right there below the bow of my flour-sack apron, and I don't mind if you do.

It's no big deal. It's just a matter of self-reliance, and Lord knows we could use a lot more of that these days, if you don't mind me saying so. People these days aren't willing to put in the work. Expect other people to take care of them. They're going to be lost some day without the thrift and know-how that I personally demonstrated by putting by all that broccoli.

There's nothing to it. You just make do, you fend for yourself. How did I know what to do, you ask? I come from good Norwegian stock, farmers they were. It's in my blood.

Also, I looked it up on the youtubes to be sure.

I mean, no reason not to be modern. You don't want to rely on such a thing, but it's nice. Still have to use your common sense. Oh, and another little tip of the bonnet to our chest freezer and stovetop and all that hydropower. Well there's some hydropower for sure, the mighty Columbia River, and sorry to all the salmon, but if they were sturdy self-sufficient sorts they wouldn'ta been hatched when we was trying to make electricity out of the very substance they need to live. They'll adapt. Maybe 99% of them will die but one of them will love hot shallow water and slicey turbines and that baby's gonna thrive. Anyway. A little nod to the hydropower, plus the buttload of coal plants up north that also apparently figure into our power. Okay, mostly it's coal plants. But water too. And speaking of water, thanks also to all that water that come right out of the tap because of the good people that dammed up our natural reservoirs at Bull Run--it's a mighty slick system. It's so slick we flush poop with it.

Oh, I'd like to give a little shout-out to that Salad Spinner too. Of course, I could have put my broccoli in a bit of cheesecloth and whipped it around my head, but the Salad Spinner is so much easier, and maybe it'll take a few thousand years to degrade, but I only had to buy it once.

Sure, I could've gone to the grocery store, three of which are in walking distance, and bought plastic bags of frozen broccoli, but I take care of myself. I don't depend on other people. The store is for buying animals someone else has jammed into a pen and slaughtered and scraped the fur and feathers off of and wrapped in plastic. Not frozen broccoli, because I can do that myself. Because I am a can-do person.

I'm self-sufficient.

Twenty-Five Pounds Of Oats To The Good

The other day I realized that the 25-pound bag of oats that I bought for $19 has lasted me almost a year, and I eat oatmeal every day. I add blueberries I grew myself, which also last all year. When I heft my next new bag of oats, it will feel heavy with virtue.  It will feel as though Grandma, now around 200 years old, is smiling right behind me, her floury hands on her hips and her root cellar fully potatoed for the winter. I will feel like a woman acquainted with the thuck of Mason jar lids sealing shut. A woman with a good pickling brine. A woman who can take care of herself.

I am not.

And that's not good. We have this gigantic earthquake penciled in for these parts, and we have been advised to be prepared with anywhere from three weeks' to a year's worth of water and food, depending on whom you ask. We're told no one is going to come feed us or tape up our scratches or anything else for a good long time, because even the rescue personnel are planning to be buried in rubble. Electricity and gas will be a fond memory. We'll be back in the 18th century without the manual.

So that's a problem. Every critter on the planet knows how to go about feeding and watering itself, and humans have been no exception, until about a hundred years ago. Then we went stupid. And now, even though we tend to think of ourselves as pretty clever, with all the wisdom of the world on a little pocket doohickey, most of us are basically screwed if we can't drive to the grocery store.

Come the quake, your average dude will be able to glean Cheez Doodles from the sofa cushions for about a day. He might be able to Second-Amendment someone out of their food stash, but then he's out of options. We're the first species to have evolved past our own survival skills.

My own life strategy has been to make myself appealing to people who know how to cook, but if push came to shove I could probably cope until the cupboard ran dry. I'm just a little ahead of that large contingent that doesn't know how asparagus grows, or thinks turnips hang from turnip vines. But if you throw me in the woods to fend for myself, I'm in a world of hurt. I can recognize a few berries, but unless I can manage to whack a chipmunk and toast it over someone's broken gas line, I'm going to be very hungry very fast.

M.A. scouting big game.

My friend Mary Ann will not. Give her two sticks and a patch of forest floor, and she'll weave herself a basket and fill it with edibles and conjure fish out of the stream and serve you fourteen members of the insect family in all stages of personal development and make you think it's risotto. Give her another week and she'll have relieved enough mammals of their fat stores and pounded nuts and berries into them that she and three of her closest friends will be sitting pretty through a snowy winter, with plenty of time to play Scrabble. She'll make bon-bons out of bark. She'll negotiate with bears.

My new strategy is to hope that when the earthquake comes it will push my little piece of the crust close to Mary Ann. I further plan to be appealing.