Let’s get this party started with a photo:
The idea of place has been kicked around a lot in my eensy little corner of the blogosphere lately - in real life, too. I have friends who don’t like where they are; I have friends who think where they live is fantastic; I have friends who like where they are but still wish they could be elsewhere. Here, people generally yearn for geographical attributes that are nonexistent in this part of Illinois - they pine for places where there are mountains (lakes/hills/cliffs/oceans/Trader Joe’s). Nothing wrong with that - it’s
damn flat here and it’s not exactly the land of ANY lakes, much less 10,000. We always want what we can’t have; in my case, it’s water.
I’ve heard there are a lot of people
where I live who were brought here against their will (kidding!) by spouses/partners pursuing advanced degrees. I imagine that happens a lot in a college town, that being thrust into a new environment that in no way resembles the one you came from. In our case, if you come into town the wrong way at the wrong time of year, it can scar you for the duration of your stay here. Seriously.
Do not come into C-U via South Neil in February.
Chuck D was here a few years ago, lecturing on campus, and while he said a great many interesting and profound things, he also said something very simple that really struck me, given my situation at the time -
it’s not where you are, it’s where you’re at. I think of those words often, for I’m a Total Townie ™, I’ve been here for almost 12 years, and I’m mostly OK with that.
That’s right, y’all! I’ve been here for 12 years this coming June.
See, I left Chicago for Urbana in 1996 to live with Jim and Cody in some goddamn peace and quiet. I was going to grow food in my yard in
dark lipstick and boots! I was going to wow the natives with my CHGO savvy whilst turning out dishes from some
Moosewood Cafe cookbook I’d come into! This was not going to be
Green Acres - far from it! I was going to successfully remain City Mouse with my black
Todd Oldham skinny pants and platinum hair while concurrently going all Country Mouse with the gardening and the home cooking and… and… stuff. Of course, I’d never grown a thing in my life (Me help out in my parents’ gardens? As if), and the only cooking I was familiar with was the kind you do when you come home from the bar at 2 AM and you put some pasta on to boil and when it’s done you top it with a jar of Ragu belonging to your housemate. That kind. But it didn’t matter, my lack of experience, because I was going to force the City/Country hybrid concept on myself. And Urbana.
I won’t bore you with all the details, but there were many, many kitchen failures that first year, and since our landlord wouldn’t let us have a garden (
you mean, not everyone has a garden here? How do you eat without Whole Foods?), I tried growing basil plants in a window box, resulting in their deaths. I embarrassed myself regularly at the Farmer’s Market, but the worst (best?) time was when I threw an entire bag of salad greens away, certain that some crazy-tasting weed had found its way in. I mentioned it to the grower, who assured me that, in fact, the greens I was eating were of the highest quality, so I tried them again and
again with the crazy-tasting “weed”. Needless to say, I decided to quit buying greens from THAT guy.*
When I arrived here, I worked in the music business and had next to no appreciation for food or what goes into the production or preparation of food -
how hard could it be?
Last night, I attended two events. The first was
my food co-op’s 33rd birthday bash, which was a potluck of the highest quality; no one creates vegetarian/vegan fare made from local ingredients like the co-oppers. There was music and dancing and little kids. Dinner conversation was lively and meaningful and often hilarious. It was an especially awesome occasion, because the co-op was close to death a few years ago; not only is it thriving, it’s expanding to a new location sometime in the next year. Nope, C-U doesn’t have Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s, but we do have Common Ground, and I wouldn’t trade the conviviality for anything - I’ve met people who do massage, keep bees, have mastered the baguette, know how to install skylights and tankless water heaters, are experts in homeopathy and commodities trading, host websites (like this one)… and they can all COOK. I owe my past employment at the co-op to my dear friend
Jeanne the Wise, and I continue to work with Common Ground as a board member.
I then went home and grabbed 2/3 of my family and made them go with me out to
Prairie Fruits Farm, who was hosting a farewell party for Eric The Menz. I wrote about Eric several years ago on one of my other blogs - I discovered his 4 beautiful chickens in an alley coop when I was walking to the library one day:
We were walking down the street today when Lilly spied a chicken coop down a little alley. Further (and furtive) investigation resulted in the discovery of four young hens very comfortably ensconced in a most divine little coop with accompanying cute house. It was all so clean and petite and so visibly doable in so little space. It was inspiring.
I went back later and had a nice chat with the owner, a very nice man who had actually attended the informal chicken seminar Janna and Ed had given this past winter. The coop is of his own design (though loosely based on the chicken tractor model) and is made of both scavved and new materials. All told, he said, the entire endeavor cost about $70. The nesting boxes… are in the chicken house and were constructed from old office furniture.
Meeting and talking with him made me realize that chickens were possible in smaller numbers and smaller spaces and getting to know him helped me decide that I wanted chickens, for real. We became friends over time. His 4-chicken hobby turned into a several hundred-chickens business, and he sold his eggs to the co-op and other people interested in locally-sourced food. He eventually got out of eggs, but continued to work at Prairie Fruits, where he’d kept the birds. As an aside, he’s also a hell of a softball coach - when he invited me to play on the team he was coaching, I had no idea how crazy into it he was, and when he showed up wearing batting gloves and barking orders, I was like,
oh, shit, he’s really serious. I had to quit because of a bad shoulder. Thank God. Heh. No, really, I do have a bad shoulder.
Anyway. Eric’s getting a farm in his home state of Iowa and his farewell party was last night. When we showed up and went into the barn, I was immediately surrounded by almost every local food producer within a 50-mile radius of Urbana, people I’ve gotten to know, some of them well, over the years once I got over myself. All the food was local, the meat was tremendous (-smelling - I was too full to eat), and the keg was Goose Island. The
Corn Desert Ramblers played, little kids danced. It was friendly and comfortable and… safe? There was a bonfire outside and a fantastic 360-degree view of the nighttime prairie. It was cold. It’s November, and I usually loathe midwest November, but I came home last night feeling pretty good about where I live.
I still like lipstick:
Almost as much as I love locally-grown eggs, goat cheese, and spinach:
Everyone eats. So simple, so complicated, and my life’s work. I would never have figured that out had I not come to
Shampoo-Banana.
*The “weed” was arugula (which I now grow in my own garden), and Jon, the grower, has been a good friend of mine for years.
