What? Blogging? Me?

      Today you might say I have entered the modern world. Or rather, as friends, daughters and former bosses might say, I have been dragged there, kicking and screaming. Perhaps the best way to explain this is the weather: lingering at best in the 20s for most of the reviewable past, and dipping as low as -4 at night. This is February, and in New England, it isn't really fair (never mind productive) to complain about the three feet of snow blocking the way from here to the orchard, or the way branches cut like the wood was already dead and the wound would never heal. That's what winter is in the Northern U.S. Even so, it is truly and really too cold to garden outdoors, and a bit too soon to start the earliest seeds inside. So here I sit at the computer screen inside, trying to create a future for my winterbound world. Better to blog my way into that future than to pace at the kitchen window? Perhaps.
     This blog is a new adventure for me. I am not a reader of blogs, or a follower of Facebook, or a Twitterer. In fact, I have a flip phone my eighteen-year-old daughter gave me a year ago, so I could be in touch while at work out in the farm fields. I used it for a couple weeks during a vacation trip; now it sits (undoubtedly uncharged and certainly bereft of Available Minutes) on the kitchen countertop, a few feet from the lovely, wall-mounted, circa 1950s rotary phone I use every day. I'm not a Luddite by any formal profession. But the old ways have always, largely, worked better for me than the rapidly changing, increasingly complex, easily broken and unrepairable modern ways. On my way to becoming a crank about the whole thing, I'm going to make tees for myself and my mom (who has one of the other two working analog models East of the Mississippi) that say "I Like My Rotary Phone." 
    But on the subject of favored slogans, I've always admired "Subvert the Corporate Paradigm." Even as the hippest segments of technology are co-opted and then absorbed by the corporate world, it seems that tech continues to provide the best avenue for subversion outside of being a Luddite, which I've found to be a pretty solitary version of subversion. So here's my revolutionary baby step: create a space to write about some of what matters most to me. 
     Of course there is irony in the fact that the smell of the soil and the quality of moisture in the morning air, or the connection between the tangible world of a row of beans and the intangible one it inspires me to glimpse, cannot have any real connection to my clean white desk and nearly clean white keyboard. Dirt and electronics don't mix. Thoreau, who found this same connection between soil and spirit in his own beans almost two hundred years ago, apparently did much of his writing inside, even though a few dirt smudges didn't matter as much on his media of choice.  I read Thoreau in High School, in the mid-1980s, and felt such an intense and immediate connection to his point of view, it was as if I had acquired not only an extra father figure, but a whole extra world view and century to place over my own. Looking back, it was amusing to note that this was the very same year I studied touch typing. We were led into a room of four big Apple Computers, shown how to turn on the power, and how to boot up the typing program. "If any of you want to learn more about computers," our instructor said, "you're free to come back after school. Some of you might use a computer someday in your job." 
      I didn't go back. I preferred to spend my time hiking, cross-country skiing and foraging for wild foods on our 80-acre farmette. Why did I want to sit in with those humming white boxes? I didn't want a job that used computers. My choices seemed far more relevant to my future. I wanted a life where I would have rich soil to plant things, a place to walk without asking someone else's permission, a dog (and some children) of my own to accompany me (eventually): essentially, the same adult life as my mother. Also, I wanted to be a writer. Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte had done this by writing long and clever manuscripts inspired by daily life, popping them in the post, and astonishing everyone by progressing on to brilliant literary careers. 
     See? Even then, my career plans were total Luddite. So, while my friends and classmates were paying attention to the switchover from analog to digital, were learning Basic and first trying their hand at that newfangled "mouse" that translated tiny hand motions onto a screen a foot away, and setting up accounts with America Online, I was learning how to drain the unexpectedly boggy front yard of my first home; how to set posts with a baby strapped to my back; how to keep chickens happy without letting them loose to wreak havoc in the vegetable garden; how to make the young fruit trees I planted bear a crop of edible fruit without needing a chemical dousing. My closest friend and fellow mom used to joke with me (via rotary phone—that's where the third one E. of the M. is: my former home) that we were "Suburban Homesteaders." A familiar term? No one had used it yet. People wanted to know when I was planning to "go back to work." 
    I did go back to paid employment... just as "Every mother is a working mother" and "No Farms, No Food" bumper stickers began to crop up on Volvos around my wealthy New England town. As the new wave of back-to-the-landers ("backyard homesteaders") arrived around me in suburbia with chicken tractors and boxes of canning jars, I was back at "real"work, paying back the debt I felt I owed my spouse for years of "not working" while I tried my hand at the Five Acres and Independence dream I've had since infancy. He had drawn a steady paycheck; I had not gone "back to work." Once more, I began doing something to draw a yearly W-2 form proving my real and actual contribution to things. It became "cool" to drop out: to become a small farmer, to live a life of voluntary simplicity. ...just about the time I was trying to re-learn touch typing and how to rebalance work and family. I'd gotten back on the '80's bus. Except it was 2006. 
        Where is the moral of this admittedly rambling and perhaps self-pitying tale? The way life goes, the most important lessons can't be passed on. We have to learn them by experiencing them. Somewhere in the time I was trying to figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up, I had children, led a life, raised ducks and vegetables and lawn grass and persimmons (almost), worked as an editor and journalist, got divorced, regrouped, remarried... Now I've pretty much decided what to do with my life, and I realize that my two daughters, aged 13 and 18, are at the place in their life where I still so completely feel myself to be. Time has passed. It keeps passing. Mortality, which always sat pretty comfortably in my sensibilties, seems suddenly more real and not a little frightening. It's time to get on with "It" —now that I almost know what "It" is.
      The comfort comes in knowing I'm also not the first one to come to this same pass. If you are out there, reading this, and you are approaching real middle age (whether that hits you at 35 or 55), you know the point at which I've arrived. 
      Some people use it to buy a red sports car. I'm afraid I might use it to buy farmland. I have the advantage of being married to a very calm, sensible man who has come through the fledging-children-and-sports-car  phase, and while he can't teach me any wisdom I don't have to acquire by undergoing life for myself, he can at least talk some sense into me vis-a-vis arable land purchased with daughters' college savings. So here's what I will do: Enter the strange new world (okay, it's old now. Possibly obsolete. But FREE) of blogging. Here, maybe, I can subvert the corporate paradigm of a fickle and very closed publishing market. I can write about the things I love, and am doing in my life: planting things in soil, working as a farmer, walking in places where I don't need to ask permission to walk (sometimes with a dog or a child of my own to accompany me). And writing. Being What I Want When I Grow Up hasn't looked like what I expected it to, and perhaps for this reason, I haven't recognized my very dreams even as they've come to pass. Here's hoping that this blog will be an example of that: an opportunity to live what I love, to write about it, to be heard and understood. From here forth, it will be much more along the lines of those endeavors. Maybe there's a spot for me in the modern world after all.