Me and my bitches

Me and my bitches

I have passion, lots of passion for lots of different things. As Elvis would say, I’m just a burning hunk of love. A love for all of those things that make life worth living, those things that are the components of life and love and joy and happiness, those little things that we all share as a part of our journey here. A love for beauty, both natural and manmade (although you could argue that manmade beauty is still natural), a love for good food, for plants, for clean water, for animals, for old dogs and children and watermelon wine. For me, the plowshare is far more beautiful than the armaments that were scrapped to make it. Rain is important, a rainbow is a beautiful gift, washing away the dirt and detritus of our society is necessary, but it is something that still needs to be controlled, so that the gift of rain which feeds us is not tainted to the point that it also kills the beauty of nature’s bounty. 

One of my passions without doubt is food. Growing it, preparing it, keeping it from going to waste are all mixed in there. Over the years, I have qualified with enough time in grade to be able to call myself “Chef” even “Executive Chef”, but that really means very little to me.  I actually have a custom embroidered coat, but I’m not wearing that hat. If I have to wear a funny looking hat, then I will request being promoted to Cardinal.  It’s my knowledge and my experiences that led to that, a path that I honestly did not seek, but followed it as it was presented. It’s that same knowledge and experience that begs to be passed on, that needs to be passed on. It’s foundational information that must be utilized, knowing how to cook, how to calculate, knowing how to meet the challenge, knowing what to do with what you’re given, knowing where it came from, knowing how to produce more, knowing how to utilize these skills, skills that are not limited to the kitchen, but to life in general. These are the skills that demand to be passed on and are necessary for the future of our people.

This afternoon, I came back from my foraging run and had scored quite a load which required prepping and a lot of slicing and dicing; on top of that, of course I also had to prepare dinner. And I’m only one itty bitty man, I needed help. I put forth a general announcement that carried through the house, “I need a kitchen bitch”. Almost immediately, I got a response, like Garfield responding to lasagna. Of course it was Kayley, stepping up, not just to do menial tasks, but to learn, to spend some quality time with the old bastard and to learn. Her first task was to take 10 containers of strawberries, sort, stem and slice. What was strange is that Liam also came along. Liam is a geek, he knows 0 and 1, he doesn’t know how to use a knife, and he barely knows how to use a fork. But, Kayley showed him what he had to do, to her satisfaction, a skill she had already learned. Two 1 gallon bags of strawberries hit the freezer. A papaya was peeled, seeded, and cut, a watermelon was sliced, a honeydew melon, was cut up.

Kayley proceeded to prep the salmon, prepare a lemon/dill/sherry butter sauce to poach the salmon and then proceeded to go play Minecraft, after she shoved it all into the oven. Prior to this, she helped pot up 90 strawberry plants, to put into the raised bed garden that Dakota built, tomorrow she’ll work on the 30 ginger roots that need to be planted. Oliver and Dakota keep feeding the compost piles so that we have a continuous supply of good rich organic soil, so that we have happy worms. And all of them take care of getting the recycling to the curb on Thursdays. And they all bitch and complain and fight with each other, and none of them are doing enough to satisfy the other and it all still gets done. And they all learn

This, this is homeschooling. These are life skills for which they will get no grades, these are things far more useful than advanced calculus, but these are things I taught, and I can’t give them a grade. But there will come a time, when society sees what they know, when society needs what they know, and society gives them the grade. And that grade will be more than the multitude of “I” that they received from a system that couldn’t comprehend what they were learning at home in the wake of a national government wide failure, they get no credit for the work in the field, for the exercise, for the effort. It’s all washed aside, in the wake of Covid this year, or some other excuse last year or next year.

As long as there is breath in my body, I will continue to teach my children and my grandchildren, what is important in life, what they need to survive in life, what they need to know to become the leaders in their lives and their futures. None of which is consistent with preparing minions to be fed into a machine to serve at the pleasure of a bunch of fat old white men who care not one bit about the things in life that truly matter.