Year: 2017

I’m a city girl, but I relish the country life.  I love making my own–whether it’s growing tomatoes, baking bread, brewing kombucha or sprouting seeds. Using what I have at home to provide for family needs brings a sense of simplicity and independence. It’s satisfying to assemble good ingredients or materials and combine them to create something wholesome and nourishing.

As a kid, I loved going to visit my cousins who lived in a tiny town in Michigan, closer to farm than city. My aunt sewed and canned and gardened. She is my mother’s sister, and the two of them called themselves the Country Mouse and the City Mouse. My mom was a good cook and created a lovely, inviting home, but she was a shopper rather than a do-it-herselfer; she was not a gardener or a seamstress, unless it was to decorate.

One summer when I went to visit my cousins, my mom wanted me to have nice new clothes for my Barbie doll because she knew I would be playing dolls with my cousins–two girls,  one a little older and one a little younger. I arrived proud of the plastic-sealed packages of fashions and accessories for Barbie that I had picked out, and excited to play with my cousins.

My aunt, who had a dry sense of humor, looked at them and teased me about how fancy my city Barbie would be among her country cousins, who wore homemade Barbie clothes made from fabric scraps. I was embarrassed then about my flimsy, trendy doll clothes, feeling as out-of-place as Barbie surely would, the city cousin who didn’t know how to fit into the country life.

My cousins loved the new, fresh additions to the collection, though; they were happy to trade their sturdy but boring practical items for my impractical, exciting ones, at least for a little while.

Their way of life was different and appealing to me. I loved ranging through the small town where my cousins seemed to know everyone, playing outside much of the day. I was fascinated that my aunt would make their milk–using powered milk and water–and everything else from scratch.

I think now that the teasing about being a Country Mouse and a City Mouse may have come from comparisons and insecurities that I didn’t understand as a child; maybe they meant Poor Mouse and Rich Mouse, although it was personality more than actual income driving the differences. More accurate titles might have been Thrifty Mouse and Sophisticated Mouse.

I still feel somewhere between the two, loving the different kinds of simplicity and complexity in both city and country life.

Kombucha and sprouts are two projects that appeal to both the country mouse and the city mouse in me. Kombucha is fermented tea, made by brewing  a gallon of black tea, adding a cup of sugar, and letting it sit for 3 or 4 weeks with a SCOBY (symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast, a fleshy blob that looks like a slimy mushroom, but grosser)–or “mother”–bubbling away on top. The SCOBY consumes the sugar, turning the sweet tea into a tangy, probiotic drink. People love it or hate it; it tastes like apple cider vinegar.

Sprouts are easy to grow. A few tablespoons of alfalfa or radish seeds in a jar with a mesh lid grows into a jar full of fresh sprouts in a week. They just need to be rinsed twice a day under the faucet to water them and keep them growing. I recently bought an Easy Sprouter to make it even simpler.

I can’t get seem to keep them going, though. I start a batch of kombucha and bottle it, then I either start a new one right away and end up with too much, or I wait and don’t get around to it. There has been a SCOBY floating  in a jar in the back of my fridge for a long time; I just looked it up and found out they can last a year that way, so I still have a little more time.

Sprouts are the same way. I make a batch, bag it and put it the fridge, start a new one, and end up with too many, or I wait until we’ve finished eating one crop and forget to start another, and we run out. Before I know it, time has passed and my seeds aren’t fresh. It’s not as rewarding because only half of them sprout, and my crop is peppered with hard, dead seeds.

When I’m making kombucha and sprouts, I have to keep brewing and rinsing and drinking and eating so I don’t run out and I don’t waste. I can get all the processes humming along for a little while until something distracts me or throws me off–a weekend away, a cold, a good book–and it’s over. It’s not a matter of busyness, because these endeavors only require a few minutes a day, if that. It’s more a matter of concentration, of organization and focus. Maybe it’s a lack of necessity. I don’t have to make them, because it’s easy to go to the grocery store–even the main-stream, non-health-food stores–and buy products that are good.

I love the satisfaction of doing it myself, the independence and thriftiness, but often,  I find that I am my  mother’s daughter after all, and I buy them, content to know that I could make them if I wanted to.

It’s been a wet year so far in the Bay Area. Rain, rain, rain–and the drought is officially over.

Drought has been a way of life for as long and I can remember. Usually state officials and experts say, yes, it’s been a lot of rain, but we are still in a drought pattern and the rain may not carry over to next year. We have to wait until we have enough. We have to wait until we’ve had enough for several years in a row. 

Now, suddenly, it’s over in our part of California. Reservoirs are full and overflowing, snowpack is at record levels, and it’s only January.

I don’t know how to live without being in a drought. Do we take longer showers and put in pools and fountains? Do we plant water-loving plants instead of succulents and hose down our porch and steps? Do we wash our cars in the street without a bucket? Do we flush every time and let the water run when we brush our teeth?

Maybe I  have Post Drought Syndrome. I feel like the depression-era people who continued to live frugally after living through the depression. It’s hard to feel comfortable with abundance after living with scarcity.

My grandparents were in their young-adult years in the Great Depression in the United States. Their stories were fascinating to me as a child: how they had to stretch small amounts of canned corn beef or tuna into casseroles for the whole family and make fake apple pie with Ritz crackers and spices when apples were scarce, and search through the cushions of every chair and couch hoping to find a few coins dropped there by careless visitors so they could treat themselves to an ice cream cone.

It wasn’t a specific story or action that I remember most, it was a mindset: There might not be more, so we have to be careful with what we have. Throwing things away or wasting food made them uncomfortable, like the sound of a neighbor’s water gushing unattended makes me.

Last summer I heard that sound and traced it to water pouring down the next-door driveway. I opened the side-yard gate and followed the stream into the backyard to investigate. I found the hose on the back patio running full-blast.

“What the hell?!?” I yelled as I cranked the faucet closed. The words had just burst out of my mouth when I saw the precious drops being squandered in what I assumed was my neighbor’s absence.

Once the water was off, I calmed down and looked around, noticing for the first time the open sliding door. I ran back out to the street. The renters who were living there were from another country, perhaps one without water problems. Maybe it was on for the small children to play in, or maybe the kids had turned it on and left. Embarrassed by my reaction to wasted water, I crept back into my house, hoping they hadn’t seen me, but pretty sure they had heard me.

That same summer, driving to the house of some friends, we noticed that everyone in their neighborhood had brown grass; they had stopped watering because of the water shortage. We were playing Petanque after dinner in their water-friendly backyard, and while I waited for my turn, I stood on tiptoes to peek over the fence into their neighbor’s backyard, curious about the size or layout–or just nosey. I was shocked to see lush, green grass covering their yard, thick and moist, in stark contrast to the dead front lawn.

I gestured for my friend to come see; she was shocked, but we kept our voices to a whisper, in case they were outside. I’m not sure if she has forgiven the duplicity of her neighbor’s public austerity and private indulgence yet. We were all supposed to be sharing what little there was.

Today, I stood in the running  shower for a long time, my mind drifting, feeling a little guilty about the water flowing down the drain, but letting it go anyway, tired of worrying about it. The drought is over, just like that.

I rejoice that there is no longer a shortage, but I almost wish they hadn’t told us. It’s a little too easy to go back to my wasting ways. I hope it makes me a less judgmental neighbor, though.