The Yellow House

I’m on the board of directors of a local start-up food co-op. We live in a small, rural, not-very-densely populated community. We have no grocery store.

Despite some recent efforts on our town to lure in commercial activity, the big chain stores just won’t come here. When they plug our income and population numbers into their algorithm, they don’t project that our area could make them the profit that they need. We’re not talking fancy, high-end grocery stores here: my town can’t even seal the deal on a Kroger.

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I think I speak for most East Coast people when I say THANK GOD. The time for tiny green sprouting things is upon us. I spend a lot of time silently cheering for those bold enough to be popping up their heads and blooming.

Spring at a new house: Ben and I have acres to our names all of a sudden, which is a bit paralyzing. I am a very amateurish gardener at best, but I think what I’ve learned most about growing food (well, about growing anything really) is that the planting is the easy part. Seeds know what to do, all bound up in their tiny package, just waiting for the right conditions. Knowing where to put them, knowing the dynamic of the place you live, knowing the places that soak up heat during the day and give it off at night: these are the tougher pieces of the puzzle.

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You’re lying on your back on the hard floor of an empty house. The ancient furnace in the basement rumbles to life. It’s an unfamiliar noise, and the sound reverberating off the walls is disconcerting. Kind of like the basement is about to explode. Before you know it, it’ll be comforting, Ben told you. Right.

Yesterday, you signed papers to make the house yours. Yours, second person plural. Well, yours in trust of the bank. Yours, asterisked with a very large debt that is meant to be paid off over a span of time longer than the years you have actually lived on the green earth.

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After a few weeks of work in Indonesia last month, I was lucky enough to have Ben join me. (Ever tried getting someone who grows perennials for a living to come on vacation? It takes some prodding.)

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“Moreover to light a fire is the instinctive and resistant act of man when, at the winter ingress, the curfew is sounded throughout Nature. It indicates a spontaneous, Promethean rebelliousness against the fiat that this recurrent season shall bring foul times, cold darkness, misery and death.”
—Thomas Hardy

It’s difficult to explain about the bonfires. It started five years ago, right about the time I returned from living in Tanzania, just a few months before I created this site. Most people know about Guy Fawkes Day from the movie V for Vendetta. If this is your only acquaintance with the day, you probably picture eerie masks and explosions.

If you don’t know anything about Guy Fawkes Day, here’s your primer: on November 5th, 1605, a group of Catholic extremists in England tried to blow up the House of Lords and kill King James I. They were thwarted, and a man named Guy Fawkes was arrested. People lit a bunch of bonfires to celebrate and hated on Catholics. Like everything in England from Henry VIII on, it was about Catholics versus Protestants. Bonfire Night (a.k.a. “Gunpowder Treason Night”) caught on.

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