Yesterday I told you about my house. But nothing about how or why I came to live here. So here’s for a quick sketch.
I’ve been a “greenie” for years and years. From the San Francisco Bay area of California, where environmental activism got a foothold early on, back in the late 60′s/early 70′s. From what I can only describe as a kind of transmission from cosmic consciousness, I suddenly started thinking about garbage…..Why do we have it? Where is that mysterious “away” place that we throw it? What happens to all that stuff and what is it doing to our environment? And the same cosmic ray or whatever it was also got me to start calling around to waste hauling companies, scrap metal outfits, and a lot of other entities I don’t remember now, trying to find out what could be done with the various components of the waste stream so that it wouldn’t all just be a huge stinking pile of garbage. Like many another person who has just heard the voice of the Almighty, or whatever it was that sent this mental thunderbolt my way, I was inspired, to say the least. Not long after that, I found out that the recycling revolution had already started in the Bay area, people were actually setting up community recycling centers that collected newspaper, metals, and glass. (I don’t remember if the earliest efforts were able to deal with plastics, but I would guess that came about a little later). My parents caught the recycling bug, too, and volunteered for several years at a community ecology center in my hometown of Castro Valley, California. They smashed a lot of glass and crushed a lot of cans!
Now that I think of it, I wonder if I’m genetically-programmed to hate garbage. I always hated litter. I hated that a pretty landscape or a roadside was blighted by stuff people tossed out their car windows, the broken glass, the beer cans, the dirty paper and plastic wraps. Walking to and from school, I saw this stuff up close. When I was 8 years old, I got so mad about it that I finally wrote a letter to the then-governor of California, “Pat” Brown (Pat was his nickname, I don’t remember his real first name….anyway, he was the father of Jerry Brown, who later on also served as governor and also ran for President and at some point became the mayor of Oakland), asking him to please do something about the litter problem. I must have told him that the broken glass, in particular, was dangerous, because what if someone falls on it? Kids are always falling off bikes, wrestling, horsing around, running thither and yon as fast as possible and generally behaving as if gravity has not yet been invented. This has consequences–and what if a nasty piece of jagged broken glass happens to be underneath? Anyway, the Honorable Brown wrote me back, a nice letter actually signed by him. But I failed to notice any improvement thereafter. So you can imagine my excitement 10 years later when the recycling thunderbolt suddenly struck!
Whoa, this was a detour in time. Let’s go back to Brokenfoot Ranch.
The rest of my environmental awakening followed quickly on the heels of the revelation of recycling. But when I was young I also had all manner of emotional issues that required years of living and experience and therapy and healing and all that I was still a long way from being able to put my ideals and understanding into some kind of constructive work.
It wasn’t really until the mid ’80′s, in Seattle, that I really caught the organic gardening bug. Well, I’d done a couple of tiny gardens before, and they were always organic, but they soon became casualties of my personal instability/immaturity. But by the time my then-boyfriend (later husband and now ex!) and I signed up for a plot at one of the P-Patch program’s community garden spaces, I must have been ready to put down some roots. We had such a great time, double-digging the beds, amending the soil with organic fertilizers, making compost, choosing and planting the seeds, watering, harvesting, and hanging with the other P-Patchers.
But for work/career reasons, we didn’t end up staying in Seattle. In ’88 we left and went to Leesville, Louisiana, to get jobs as school teachers and live with my then-husband’s grandmother, who was in poor health and needed someone to stay in the house with her. We thought we’d homestead there, and started gardening as soon as we arrived. I still remember that concrete-hard red dirt. We had to soak it all night just to get a shovel into it. Yeah, Louisiana was WAAAAAYYYYY different from California and Seattle. We lasted about a year there, then went to Florida. Two years in Tarpon Springs, we didn’t garden there, but did get involved with the newly-forming Green Party and participated in various related activisms such as protesting the Gulf War, protesting mass-burn and toxic waste incinerators, nukes, and community-building. But then we moved to Gainesville, so my then-husband could attend University of Florida. He wanted to get a PhD in physics so he could quit teaching high school. Gainesville, sometimes known as “the Berkeley of Florida”. Amen to that, but so much sunnier! Gainesville was where I finally caught up with my life and started to make some kind of sense to myself. And the subject matter was (no surprise) reduce-reuse-recycle-and compost, the Green movement in general, stopping a medical waste incinerator at UF, stopping a new landfill in Alachua County (the county where Gainesville is located), and more than anything else, community gardening. First I volunteered with the local Community Action organization, to put together a community farm on some land they had in the country just north of town. It was an all-volunteer project (until the organization finally started paying me half-time wages as the project coordinator), and there was endless (as in more than full time!) physical and community-building and organizing and publicity to do to make it happen, and I loved it. But after about 3 years, the organization claimed it no longer had funding for the project (that’s a whole story in itself), and I was not only out of a job, I was out of a context to follow my passion. So instead of quitting, I decided to continue the parts of the project I could still do, even without the community farm component. So I kept on collecting the fruits and vegetables discarded by a local produce market, sorting out the good stuff and distributing it to many of the same needy families (clients of the Community Action agency) who previously also had been receiving produce from the community farm. Ditto with the stuff we got by gleaning–I especially remember some fabulous harvests of ripe red bell peppers, and even more amazing, the boxes and boxes of ripe persimmons from an abandoned orchard. Meanwhile I got Florida Certified Organic Growers and Consumers, Inc., whose head office is in Gainesville, to agree to sponsor my project, which I called Neighborhood Nutrition Network; they said, fine, as long as I did the fund raising. So in addition to gleaning, collecting and distributing “waste” food”, and starting school gardens and community gardens around Gainesville, I also had to become a grant writer. And we got funding (this was the ’90′s, to be sure)!
And then, and then….in summer of 1998, my then-husband graduated. Now, since typically your alma mater doesn’t hire you to be a professor there, especially just after you graduate, this meant he had to look elsewhere for a job. The elsewhere turned out to be Haverford College, just west of Philadelphia, PA. A two-year temp.
I did not want to leave, I was deep deep into my project, I had good friends in Gainesville. But I couldn’t go so far as to countenance separating from my then-husband. My loyalty collided with my life-work, so to speak, and the loyalty won, at least in practical terms. I came back to Gainesville and stayed there another month or so, after we had moved all our stuff up to Haverford, so that I could wrap up all the loose ends of Neighborhood Nutrition Network and leave it in a condition to pass along to the incoming project director. Even in Haverford, I kept on writing grant proposals for the project for awhile. The summer of ’99 we went to Gainesville for a couple of months and I volunteered with the project the whole time we were there. In time it grew and developed, they got a big Federal Community Food Security grant, hired several people, and ran with it for another 3 or 4 years, but apparently the director lost interest in fund raising, the project ran out of money, and had to close. By that time I was already here in Carrollton, where my then-husband had gotten a tenure-track position at the University of West Georgia. We rented a house in town, and I got a full-time job at an employment agency. And we fell back (well, really, forward) into our dream of finding our own piece of land and actually starting an organic farm. So before 6 months were out, we were driving around looking at land for sale.
My then-husband saw the for sale ad in the local paper classifieds. 66 acres west of town. Up til then, we’d been looking at 5 or 10 acre properties. 66 seemed like an awful lot, but then we went out and looked at it. And it was so much more than we ever dreamed we could find. It was like a miracle had just descended upon us. We told the owner we wanted to buy it, and she held it for us for the several months it took us to get financing and close the deal. She kept her own little house and two acres, so she didn’t have to move.
And now it’s getting late, time to post this. Thanks for listening, see you next time! 
