Why Permaculture?

            There are many folks here about who likely have never heard of Permaculture. Those who have heard only a little may not like what they have heard. My best guess as to the reaction of most folks here in the Lone Oak area (and some other areas) to the very idea of Permaculture is: 1) Why do we need this, whatever the heck it is, anyway? 2) Isn’t that some hippy-dippy thing where you give up meat, join a commune, and give everything away? 3) Why change what’s worked in agriculture for ages? Haven’t American Farmers been feeding the world since WWII! We’ve even exported our way of farming to poor nations to pull them up out of poverty!

            Let’s start with #3. American Agriculture hasn’t been as it is “for ages”. I’m willing to bet that few farmers around here had a diesel or gasoline tractor before WWI. That would be your grate grand-dad, I think. Few if any at that time used artificial fertilizers and they certainly didn’t raise crops of plants that had been genetically engineered to resist pesticides as they likely didn’t have chemical pesticides either.

            Oh, a side note on those GMO’s. Those crops are being taken over by weeds that have naturally developed a resistance to the herbicide that the crops were engineered to be immune to. Hello!  Big chemical company I don’t dare name least I be sued! You can’t engineer around nature and you don’t own it, either.

            Yes. Thanks to modern fertilizers and pesticides the American Farmer has been feeding the world since about WWII. We’ve also been losing top soil at several inches a year, every year, at the same time. The soil in most fields now MUST have fertilizer on it or it can’t grow anything BUT weeds. So we have fed the world, at a price far greater than what we were ever paid for it.

            Yep. We did export our farming methods to poor nations. And now they are even poorer. Not because the folks there are lazy or incompetent, but because they used AMERICAN methods of farming instead of some method that would have fit THEIR climate, THEIR terrain, THEIR culture much better. They also fell into the same trap American Farmers now find their selves in. The farmers in the poorer nations just fell into it sooner. They fell into the trap of needing to buy and apply fertilizer every year or even every crop. They must also buy fuel for those big tractors and pesticides to protect the mono-crops we taught them they had to grow. These are recurring costs that a poor farmer, a family or a subsistence farmer, just cannot bear. Which brings me back to American Agriculture being as it has “for ages.” The big Agri-businesses that have driven the family farm out of business then bought the land haven’t been in existence for ages. Heck, I don’t think they existed even in the 1950’s except, perhaps in an embryonic form.

            So much for changing what hasn’t changed in ages. Except, I happen to believe that Permaculture can change it for the better. It would result in the Family, the subsistence farm, the LOCAL farm replacing the big agri-businesses, while building soil and feeding the farmer, his/her family and the local community as well.  It would also be done without fossil fuels. It would have to be. There aren’t enough left to bother with, really and they add Carbon to the atmosphere that was sequestered long ages before some government hireling came up with the idea of trying to do it again.

            I can see some out there reading this far and gasping, “But what about the poor and underprivileged in the big cities or in other countries!”

            Teach them Permaculture too. Permaculture is great in suburbs, and in big cities. A roof garden on a tenement building would insulate the building and provide food for the people in the building. Those better off could have at least a few fresh veggies from planters on their fire escape, their patio, or even just in front of a window. Earth worms can compost whatever left over’s you have, or even newspaper and cardboard in a pinch, into great soil for growing things. As for the poor in other countries, the same idea works. They can rebuild their land using the same (but different and specific to their needs) methods of Permaculture.

            Now for question #2 above, especially as I have probably started sounding just a little hippy-dippy with all the saving the world stuff I’ve written above. To refresh all our memories that was:  “Isn’t that some hippy-dippy thing where you give up meat, join a commune, and give everything away?”

            Well, you can give up meat if you want to. Or, as I plan to do, you can continue your carnivorous ways.  It’s just that with Permaculture you would know that there was nothing “extra” in your meat. In fact, in most situations you would have raised it, be it a cow or pig from your “back 40,” a chicken from your suburban back yard, or a pigeon from the coop on your tenement roof. As for joining a commune, once more, only if you want to and can find one that suites you. If you just plain don’t want to, that’s fine to. Though with Permaculture, once it gets going you might need help with the harvesting. Yeah, there is a part of the Permaculture philosophy that says something about sharing. That’s sharing the excess. It’s what’s left over after you’ve fed yourself, your family for the season and sold some off to pay land taxes or pay whatever other bill you might have. Maybe even bought that really great new whatever it is you think you need. Then, if you still have left over harvest, or money you find someone who needs it. Not Joe Blow who would just buy another hit of his favorite intoxicant, unless you want to. But old Granny Good Gal who is too crippled up to work her own garden. In fact you might work her garden for her in your spare time. As for the poor in other countries; you could help them by going there in the off season or whenever you have the time to help them adapt Permaculture to their own landscape or help them by just by not going in and taking their resources for your own use.

            Now for #1 above: “Why do we need this, whatever the heck it is, anyway?” I’ll do a quick rundown of what Permaculture is first. At least I’ll do the best I can as I have yet to be able to get to a Permaculture Design Course. I do plan to remedy that as soon as I can.

           

           Permaculture is a system of designing your home, your city, your country, your life so that it all works with and within nature rather than trying to impose our will and, possibly misguided, ideas on nature. It was developed by Australian Bill Mollison and David Holmgren, one of his students. There are three ethics and eleven principles at the core of this system. They may sound simple or even simpleminded to some. But, I don’t think they really are that simple. As for an exact, simple definition of what Permaculture is, there isn’t one. Even Bill Mollison can’t and won’t give one.

THE ETHICS:  1) Care of the Earth I know. It seems obvious. But I think it needs to be enlarged upon here. I’ll use my Peanut M&M © analogy. Get a Peanut M&M candy, preferably a green one, for reasons that will soon be obvious. Carefully bite it in half, through the peanut. Now, closely examine the remaining half as you savor that tasty bit of candy. (Yes, I am addicted to the things!) Note the relative sizes of the peanut to the chocolate to the candy shell. Now look really close at that candy shell. I said use a green one remember. You will note that there are actually two colors there. A white inner line and an even thinner outside that carries the green coloring.  Now consider this in relation to our home planet. The peanut can be seen as the inner and outer core of the Earth. Okay, technically it may be a little on the large side, but hey I’m working with a piece of candy here! The chocolate is the mantel. That part of the Earth, like the core that science can know about only because of instruments that show how the energy of earthquakes bounces around inside it. To us it is so distant as to be of little or no interest, unless we happen to be students of the Earth Sciences. And like the core, both inner and outer, it really has nothing more to give to this discussion than the fact that it exists and is approximately of the same size relative to the Earth as the chocolate is to the peanut candy. Our focus must now go back to that thin candy crust. That white line of sugar coating? That is about the same relative thickness as the sea floor and the mass of the continents below about one to two miles from the surface.  Are you starting to get the BIG picture here? That even thinner green line of dyed surgery candy? That is what we Earth Science nerds would call the BIOSPHERE. It’s where life happens. It’s where we live, breath, eat, and take care of business. Now, here is the really scary part, folks. This lonely little M&M is the only one we know of in the whole knowable Universe. There might, MIGHT, be others similar to it out there somewhere. In fact it’s quite likely given what the telescopes keep finding. But first off those places are so far away they may have developed civilizations ten or more times over since the light we see left their star! They may be similar to Earth but also might be in no way livable for us. We also know for a fact that there simply is no other M&M enough like ours here in our own solar system for us to live on as comfortably as we do here. 

            So we only have this one lonely little Green M&M, and we just bit it in half! (Need I mention: Peak Oil, soil depletion, over population and pollution among other things!)   We really need to take excellent care of what we have left.

2) Care of People and all other species   we as humans must begin to recognize the place, use, and needs of all living things while remembering that we humans, People, are also part of the process. We stand now at the place of the parent or guardian on an airplane who is told to put on their own oxygen mask before going to the aid of the person they are to care for. If you do not care for yourself you cannot care for another. We humans are part and parcel of that thin green line on the M&M I used in the analogy above. We need to care for our own personal needs and uses, the needs and uses of our family and friends and for those more distant while also taking into account the needs and uses of all the other forms of life around us. Life is a web, after all where the “waste” of one is the “food” for another. Remember the old example of the plant breathing out oxygen while we breathe it in and exhale CO2 for the plant to breath. That is only part of the massive web of life on this world.

3) Limit Consumption; Share Surplus   we need to think about what is a reasonable rate of consumption of anything and everything and then live within that limit. Yes, that means trashing the old idea’s of ever more of everything. It means rethinking the ever bigger bottom line, asking if we really need that new pair of fancy shoes or do we just want them cause Joe Bob got a new pair, and frankly, do we really NEED all of this STUFF!? Couldn’t someone else use some of this “stuff” because they don’t have any, always providing that they even want it. Some might think they have nothing to share but there is one thing that grows when shared and that is knowledge. Information is often far more powerful a thing than any weapon. Oh, yes, by limiting consumption it is also understood that population would also have to be limited, preferably by personal choice.

The Principles of Permaculture:

            I’ve read these stated several ways. These are the last ones I heard, but they are all similar. Just remember that Permaculture is basically about how to design things from the small to the large inclusive

.

1)      Relative Location:  There is value in the number of beneficial relationships between structure      and elements. The chicken coop is near the garden so that garden scraps can be easily tossed over the fence and ‘fertilizer’ from the coop can be carted to the garden. The compost pile should be nearby as well so the chickens can be let out onto it to harvest bugs and turn it for you.

2)      Each Element performs multiple functions: A pond on your farm or in your front yard can be used for irrigation, habitat for useful critters, fire control, thermal mass, growing food (fish and plant) or bait to catch fish with or to sell.

3)      Redundancy or every important function must be served by multiple elements: This goes straight to leaving the foolishness of big agricultures mono-cropping behind. If you have one or one hundred acres grow as many different kinds of food on them as you can. Then if one crop fails you can still eat or sell the harvest of what’s left. And by all means learn what “weeds” are edible. Put in solar, and wind energy harvesting systems but don’t give up your wood fired stove or your connection (while it still works) to the grid.

4)      Plan to use energy efficiently: That goes for all energy. Electric energy, wood energy, animal energy and your own energy should be used as efficiently as possible. Depending on the conditions, would it use less energy, make you more tired (or less healthy) to walk into town to get a loaf of bread, or drive. Only you can answer that. This also relates back to the location of things. With the chicken coop near the garden you don’t have to move the stuff from the garden you want to feed the chickens as far or haul the fertilizer as far either.

5)      Where ever possible use bio or onsite resources: Use goats or chickens to mow your lawn rather than a gas mower. Use wood from your own trees to heat your house. Produce your own electricity, harvest your own food, energy, and water as well as you can with what you have. Just remember that all information you get on or about Permaculture must be adjusted to suit your own area!

6)      Energy and resource cycling:  Use everything more than once and for different things. Don’t toss that old t-shirt in the trash. Cut it up into dust rags, and wash cloths. When those get too raged to use, compost them, then use the compost to grow food or maybe some cotton to help make another shirt.

7)      Focus on small scale, intensive systems: Start small and build from there. At a small scale you can see if a specific design will work for you and tweak it until it dose before you scale up.

8)      Accelerate succession and evolution: Watch patterns in nature [including Human nature ;) ] and figure out how to accelerate them. Weeds take over a degraded pasture.  This is good! The weeds are deep rooted and will pull up moisture and nutrients from deep down up to the surface. Cut the weeds before they go to seed and after you’ve spread the annual ground cover, soil building grasses and legume seeds of your choice. The cover of mowed weeds will then protect and fertilize those seeds accelerating the recovery of the soil.

                
                       9)      Value Diversity!  Use poly-culture farming practices rather than mono-culture farming. Raise all kinds of crops at the same time rather than only one kind of crop at a time. Don’t limit yourself to “Just” being a farmer. You can be a writer, a philosopher and artist, even a scientist as well. Or you can stick to the one or two things you do really well and be glad that a friend, spouse or child can do others. Also realize that diversity can come in all shapes and forms and is always of value.

  
                     10)      Use Edge: It is at the edges of things where there is the most diversity and richness of life. Places like the sea shore, the river bank, the edge of a forest or the edge of a field. The more edges you have in your “garden” the more diverse and healthy it will be. This is true of more than gardens.

  11)      Attitudinal Principles: You can often find your solution in the very problem you face.


               Let's say you desperately want to garden and raise your own food but you live in a dying city with empty abandoned lots, are on social security and are in a wheel chair or on a walker most of the time. So in desperation you go out to one of those abandoned lots near your apartment and start picking up the refuse and looking for stuff you can use to turn it into a garden. 


              The local kids get curious and you tell them your plans and dreams. More than half snicker and leave the crazy old lady alone. Some stay to watch the nut case. A few feel sorry for her and start to help and end up learning. With luck their parents will soon come out to see what’s going on. Some of them will decide to help and then eventually there is a garden in that old lot, with raised beds that an old lady in a wheel chair or using a walker can tend and harvest along with everyone else. Don’t laugh at this little fable. It, or something like, has been happening all over.  
            
             You should also go beyond trying to eradicate a problem. Use those pesky weeds! Some may have medicinal uses and if nothing else they bring nourishment, water and minerals up from deep underground for use by you in your compost pile and provide a resting or nursery place for good guy insects. Or, as in a quote attributed to Bill Mollison: “You don’t have a snail problem; you just don’t have enough ducks to eat the snails.” Some things seen as a problem can actually be a resource. The loud mouthed know-it-all student can be the teacher’s helper and fire ants are great at cleaning out greasy food containers for reuse or recycling.

If you want to learn more about Permaculture, even if it is just to find out how to say I’m full of it, you just have to do a computer search on Bill Mollison, David Holmgren, or Permaculture. You can also go to Permies.com to learn that we Permies don’t take everything as seriously as you might expect.

             So now you at least sort of know what this Permaculture thing is. But you likely still want to know WHY? Why do we need this stuff? We need it because it works. Mollison and others, such a Fukuoka, have been doing this sort of thing, without the fancy word, for a long time now. In fact, since before WWII! They have generally lived by these principles and survived. They have helped others to survive. Some of Mollisons students have gone on to turn chunks of desert green and not just in the Australian outback. One took on a few acres just south of the Dead Sea.

           

             Yes. The DEAD SEA. That inland, super salty Middle Eastern, super hot, hell hole of a place to try to survive in or try make a living off the land.  He dug swales that harvested what little rain fell, he planted deep rooted trees, then fruit trees suitable to the region, as well as bushes, vines and anything else native he could get to survive. Thanks to the swales a lot more survived than most onlookers expected. He nurtured this little piece of Eden with the help of some of the locals for about three years, until his funding ran out. When he left it was green and lush in comparison to the land around it. 

           

              Then he went back about five years later and despite a bit of mismanagement by those ignorant of how to properly use it, those acres were still much greener than the surrounding land. That was FIVE YEARS LATER! After being mismanaged! This without pesticides, without oil based fertilizers or even hauling in thousands of gallons of fresh water to flush out the salt naturally occurring in that soil.

         

              If that can be done there just think what we could do here! That is if we are willing to open our eyes. Heck we might even be able to save civilization. Maybe not civilization as we know it today, but hopefully, something better to leave to the kids.    

Wishing on a rainy night

Hey! It's raining! In Texas! Even better it's not a gully washer type rain like we usually get after a drought. Most every bit of rain we've got lately has been slow and fairly steady. Okay, sometimes it's been nothing but a light sprinkle.But other times, like tonight, it's fairly constant and sometimes a hard shower. The rain is actually getting a chance to soak into the ground.

Makes we wish  that I'd had the cash this summer to put in rain gutters, downspouts and rain barrels on every roof on my land as well as dig swales out in my pasture. Its just too bad I hadn't heard about something called hugelkulture back during the summer either. Then, if I'd had the money to hire someone to dig the ditches on the contours of my pasture (that's what a swale is. A ditch meant to catch and slow down water so that it can soak into the soil of the ditch) I could have also paid them to take all the downed trees and tree branches in the pasture and near my house and put them in the ditches. Ta DA! hugleswales!

Then of course, some of the soil dug out of the ditch could be put on top of the wood while the rest would be piled on the down hill side of the wood filled ditch. Then it should be easy for paths to be made across the swales so I could get to all the area's of my pasture without climbing in and out of ditches or building some kind of bridge to drive what ever machinery I need to out there. (Machinery like a fire truck to fight grass fires or just my vehicle to haul fence building/fixing material to where it's needed.)
Then, being rich, as I'd have to be to afford to pay for all that,  I could have bought the trees, bushes and such that I want to plant just down hill of those little berms and got some body to plant the suckers.

Sigh.

But I'm not rich. If any ditch digging is done on my place I am the most likely candidate. The problem there is that there IS a reason I'm on disability. Those forty plus hours a week spent standing, walking and hurrying around on concrete floors in shoes with little or no support did a real number on my feet and knees.
I'm just going to have to figure out a way to getterdone without money and with my rice crispy joints.

Yeah, I'm still here!

Okay. I know. I've been ignoring this blog for some time now. However on looking over it's stat's I see that the most popular blog I've ever had on it seems to be the one about my paltry attempt at worm farming.

Well, I may be posting more about the little wigglers. Don't know how soon, though. I've fallen in with the folks over at a place called Community Seeds. They are a faith based organization, which makes me working with them seem odd I know, as I don't rightly care what any one believes about such matters as faith . . . as long as they don't start telling ME what to believe. Then, Bubba, we will have a problem.

As to my association with the C. Seeds folks and the worm farming thing. They started a community garden. They wanted help with it and as they said they wanted it to be as organic as possible I was there! I am one of those of the opinion that the more gardens, for food, for flowers, for the public, that a town or city has the better. Especially if they are organic and sustainable. If you can get some info in there about Permaculture and get the word out about that, why, then it's all good!

Basically I and another lady who is an ex-master gardener in this area, (Ex as she had to stop going to all the meetings for some reason, I think. Or couldn't afford the dues. Or some such) and I got invited to go up to Michigan to learn about this thing called Growing Power. The stuff I saw and learned there was way cool, especially the way they were growing worms. Those feisty little wigglers were everywhere and in every pot of plants they had!

Needless to say those plants were very healthy and happy looking plants. If you want to find out about Growing Power just run the two words to gather and put a dot and 'org' after it. You'll get there. When you do you'll see as I did that the organization is right along the same lines, generally, as Permaculture.

Hey, they both like worms. Check them out. Check out Community Seeds to. Just do a search. I found their site that way.

Community Seeds is planning to use vermiculture and vermicomposting to expand it's community garden plans into bigger and better things. The hope is to eventually use the gardens, worms, hot houses and hoop houses to supply food for the community food pantry and perhaps even a local farmers market. A side issue, tied in with that will be something called transitional housing that will house homeless, jobless or underemployed folks until they learn a job, or get one or better themselves generally. Way I see it if they can be taught to garden in any kind of space they will be way better off than they were, period.

After all that old saw about giving a person a fish or teaching him to fish is even more true of gardening.

All we have to do is survive this drought and start growing stuff and building things. Money would help and they are working on that.

What I hate about cable and satalite television: A rant.

Hey! You may be thinking! What's to hate? Plenty if you ask me. The top problem is that if you use cable or satellite to get your TV programs then you are paying to watch them twice!

How'd I come up with that you may wonder. Well, I'll tell ya!

I figure I pay plenty to watch the programs I pull in with my antenna. I pay by watching, suffering through and putting up with all the freaking commercials they stuff into the shows. Y'all do realize that for an hour drama show, for example, you are getting; I'm guessing here so don't get out the stop watch! maybe forty minuets of drama! The rest is commercials trying to convince you to eat more fast food, go to a gym, use deodorant, soap, and go into debt for that really fine car so you can be either a chic or a guy magnet. I know because, writer wanna be that I am, I once read a book about writing for television and that's what they said. The story plot had to have space built in for the commercials and for an hour show could only cover about forty to forty five minuets. Now that was an old book and I read it some time ago so it may be down to thirty minuets by now for all I know. Sure seems like it sometimes.

Then here comes the cable or satellite folks wanting me to buy into their service. Do they take out the commercials and just show the bare shows. Not on your life they don't. Not only do I think it may be impossible to do, but they probably wouldn't if they could. There's likely some contract thingy about having to show the programing as delivered. So. There you have it. You pay for satellite or cable and you essentially are buying not only the shows you want to watch but the commercials that try to get you to buy stuff as well. The commercials that pay for the programs. The programs you pay for by watching the dratted things. You pay for the show twice!

Yes, I have other gripes against the cable and satellite folks. Especially these bundles of shows they want you to sign up for. What's with that? What I want is to say, "I'll take the fifty channels for 29.95, please. And these are the channels I want: . . ." But I can't DO THAT!

No. If I sign up for the basic package I get the channels I could get off my antenna plus maybe one or two programs I'd really like and a whole raft of channels I have NO INTEREST what so freaking ever in! They are usually sports channels. GHAAAA!

I have no interest in baseball, football, soccer, golf, hockey, or racing of any kind. I might, occasionally watch figure skating on a hot summer day when nothing else is on, or gymnastics. If I don't have something interesting to read or an idea to write about. Get the picture.

All those stupid sports dedicated channels will be ignored or quickly flipped through so why would I pay to have them available!? National Geographic, the History Channel, Animal Planet, Oprah's channel, the Sci Fi channel and such, I would gladly pay to have available. There just might be fifty channels out there I'd really be interested in. Probably more like thirty or forty. So can I get that kind of deal? Say only pay 19.95 for the few channels I really want? NO. Why? Cause they got all these channels they want me to see even if I don't want to see them. Surely if I click on one of the shopping channels I will see something I just can not live without and buy it! Or find I can't live with out some obscure little channel I wouldn't normally choose.

Fine.

So what's wrong with letting me pick say twenty five or thirty of the fifty channels and then rotating through all the others twenty to twenty five a month so I can check them out and see if I'd like them? I'm still paying for the fifty channels and they still get to tempt me with all these other goodies, some of which I might actually decide I like and choose to keep, right? Nope. That don't fly either. They probably have some dumb contract with somebody, like the sports channels, so that they have to push them on folks who don't really want them just so the folks who are addicted to sports can get their fix if they happen to show up at my house during a game.

My other gripe against the cable and satellite folks? Glad you asked.

It seems to me that we are being forced to get these darn services like it or not. I live out in the country, several miles from the broadcast stations that send out the TV channels. If I don't have my antenna lined up exactly right, now that we've gone digital, I either can't get diddly or all I get is a massively broken and pixalated screen and audio so mangled I can't piece together what is being said. Oh, I do get a nice picture when I get it lined up right. Big deal. I got at least as decent a picture with the old analog tech. So it'd get a little fuzzy or snowy if the antenna was a little off! Big deal, I could still see the show without having to tramp out to my antenna to use a pipe wrench to realign it! Every time the wind blows hard enough to move the antenna around I have to fiddle with it!

Besides all the problems I had with the old analogue antenna I would still have with cable or satellite. Storms can interfere with both just as easily as they did with the old fashioned antenna. Ice or wind might have broken off some of the old antenna's and wind may have moved them around but they'd still work! With satellite you have to brush off the snow or accumulated rain from the dish, providing you can reach the thing and I swear rain wet cable just plain messes up. At least it did the one time I did have cable.

All in all I'm quite put out with the whole deal. If I weren't addicted to watching the darn TV I'd just turn it off and leave it off. Maybe get Net Flix and just use it to watch movies. Unfortunately I do so like to watch the weather reports.

I know, I know. I can get my weather fix off of the Internet, but all I have at the moment is dial up and that is so freaking slow! I definitely can't get Net Flix over it either, or that internet TV thing a friend has told me about. That may be my biggest gripe. If I want half way viewable TV, just half way! I'll likely have to get either satellite or cable. Like it or not. Grrr.

Kittens

Kittens. Kittens. Kittens! Cute, cuddly but such a pain. Especially when they try to climb your leg while you have shorts on.
I have two. One a black, yellow/orange tabby female with darn near no tail at all. Just a little stump and I don't think it was gnawed on by anything. The other is a light, light yellow? orange? male with enough tail to make up for his sister's lack there of.
A friend has already laid claim to the tailless kitten but so far no one has said much about the little blond boy kitten. If I didn't already have two cats, his mother being one of them, I'd keep him.
Him and his sister have figured out how to get up here on my desk. So now I have to fight with them and their mother to get to my keyboard.
Honestly, they are, like all baby animals, cute as little furry buttons. But I already have more than enough mouths to feed so I am looking for homes for this little boy. 
Sorry. Can't ship him anywhere. If you want him you'll have to come get him.

The Path, part three: Compleat fiction. Sci-Fi in fact so be warned.

Sometimes I wonder if the path I tramped into the soil between the Old Homestead on Baranga Hill and the Millers place is still there. Back then in Year 355 after the first landing on Middle Earth, Baranga Hill was a good fifty miles north of the original colony landing site and still considered raw frontier. I’d learned early on that the cookie Mom would deny me at home could be had with just a quick trip to the Millers house on the land they called Eden Valley. The land our house sat on, and that between us and the Millers had been well fenced, so even at a tender five years I didn’t have to worry about wild wargs. During the long hot summers of childhood that path would also lead to where I could nip into Adda Miller’s kitchen to snatch a salt shaker before raiding the cherry tomato patch Orra Miller always planted.

At least once a week my Mom’s feet would join mine on that path as we went to the Miller’s house to share the weekly chore of washing using the home made washer kept outside just below Adda’s kitchen window. All the Miller’s sons were grown and gone on to other settlements by then and the Miller’s treated us like family. Mine, and all the ladies clothes were washed separately with the under clothes. To save money the men’s work clothes were brought home from the space port to be laundered separately, then ironed.

Dad told me he’d met Orra at that space port when he had first come to the Middle Earth Colony in the second wave of settlement. Orra had helped him get a job there and, when he married my mom, Orra had even helped Dad get the land allotment next to his.

Oh, how I wanted to help with the laundry so I could play with that old fashioned contraption Orra and Dad had built. But adult caution kept me away from that fascinating machinery.

“No, you may NOT put the clothes through the wringer!” Mom would yelp when I asked. “That thing could squash your fingers clean off! Then how’d you do your school work on the computer?”

“Wouldn’t lose’m if I didn’t let’m get caught!” I would mutter as I angrily stalked off to sooth my hurt feelings with one of Adda’s sugar cookies. “Side’s the doctors down in town’d jus’ grow’um back.” Sometimes I wanted to accidentally break either the teaching computer, or the antenna that brought in the education programs from the town that had sprung up around the old landing site. But then I’d have not been able to use it to find out about other, more fascinating things.

Where there is an old time washer there must be a clothesline. Orra and Dad had built a huge clothesline in the fenced orchard between our two house plots. There were three uprights made with plastcrete beams left over from building the colony’s space port. The two men welded metal cross pieces on to it. Those held up four thick wire lines. These lines stretched east / west across my path down to the Millers house. That part of the path was in a clearing. With no trees over the lines, any clothes hung on them could get sun all day. This was important on cool or damp days when it took more time than in the hot, dry summer for the clothes to dry.

As I grew taller, around the colony year 360, I found myself hauling clothes Mom had washed at home, in a cleaner built by the colony’s new factory where Dad had gone to work, to that clothesline. Thus eroding that path just a little deeper. After Orra was killed building the Katy Dam that was needed to provide more power, and water for the factories; I pounded it deeper still going to Adda’s house to get the washing she needed done. I took it up to our house where Mom would wash it in her modern clothing cleaner.

Adda really needed the help by that time as one of those super bugs had infected her eye’s, blinding her, when she went in for new cornea’s. That was really sad as she had already had her last rejuvenation treatment fifty years before my birth and would never have the chance to grow new ones. She could take care of most things herself, but my folks and I helped with the farming and such. When the clothes were crisp from the cleaner and folded, I’d haul them back to Adda’s along that same path that went under the now seldom used clothesline.

By the time I left to go to the orbital University for college in 368 the path was worn so deep it was still there whenever I was able to come home from school. It was just part of home, the quickest route down to check on Adda. She was still getting along on her own, but was starting to complain that her boy’s weren’t coming around to help or even calling to see how she was anymore. Her eldest was already into his second rejuve.

After earning a basic degree, then four years in Star Forces, and a failed attempt at setting up a geologic mapping business over in one of First Continents other settlements, my old course along that path was reversed. Adda’s boys had told her to sell off most of Eden Valley as they weren‘t interested in farming, nor were any of their kids. It was 377, there was a spiffy new space port, bringing in a lot of a softer breed of colonist, and the population pressure of folks who had no intention of roughing it, had forced my folks to sell off most of their land. Adda’s boys were paying me to be live-in care for her and what acreage she had left. I was saving the money so I could go back for a master degree in Permaculture at our local college. I had to go up to visit Mom and Dad occasionally on what was left of the Old Homestead, just to keep in touch. I was an only child after all.

It was a good thing that path was still there when I came home in the spring of 382 for my father’s and then Adda’s funeral as grief hung over me like a dark cloud. I moved on automatic between the two houses during the family gatherings centered on these two tragedies. Adda’s death was acceptable, even expected, but my dad hadn’t even gotten old enough for his first rejuve yet. Even after leaving school for the last time that year with a brand new master’s degree I felt surrounded by loss, by death. Change had accelerated while I was at school. Baranga Hill and Eden Valley were now a subdivision outside of the sprawling capital of Middle Earth colony. Despite that I bought out Adda’s youngest son who had inherited what was left of Adda’s land. Mostly, I bought it to keep new homes from being built too close to me. I added it to what I inherited when my mom died, in an air car accident two years after her first rejuve. By this time the population around my land was nearly as dense as it was nearer New Washington itself, and I was working hard on the Planning and Land Use Committee to keep our growth from destroying Middle Earth as it had Old Earth. I was heart sick at our suggestions always being overridden in the name of ‘progress’ and ‘profit’.

Then the Uppies came out from old earth; the ones who cared not a whit for the land, or the people who lived there. All they cared about was ‘upping’ their personal wealth.

“Hey! Hi, there! My name’s Muffie! My husband and I bought a lot just down the street and a block over from here! We’re getting up this petition to change the ordinances to keep farm animals and other large beasts out of the neighborhood. We’d like you to sign it!” The woman said perkily after I got off the ridding grass harvester and came over to see what she wanted.

“What do you mean by farm animals?” I asked, leaning on the wide double gate across my driveway. The gate kept my tame warg and my horse as well as my partner’s safely on my 10 acres. Hopefully, it would keep Earth bred dogs out as I was thinking of getting some more chickens. A warg won’t touch anything with feathers. They can’t digest feathers and any thing that small they’d eat whole.

“Oh, you know,” she grinned, “The smelly and noisy ones like chickens, goats and horses.” Her face showed her revulsion. “And those horrible big dogs! They can get out so easily and frighten people! Not to mention the loud barking!”

I looked her up and down. She was dressed in the highest fashion from old Earth. Right down to the high heels wobbling on my gravel driveway. Her big fancy air car was floating right at the end of it. I hadn’t been paying attention while I was running the grass harvester but I doubted she’d walked from the house next door. I turned toward what was left of my ancestral land, and whistled a couple of loud notes before turning back to the Uppie. I knew what that whistle would call up.

“Why?” I asked as I turned back. “Why no animals like that?”

“Why, because they lower property values! We’ll never get the property in this neighborhood up to a decent value with all these farm animals around.” Her voice was emphatic even though she obviously wondered why I’d whistled.

“Now why would we want the property values to go up?” I asked reasonably, as my, and my partner’s tame wargs loped up in answer to my whistle. “You do know that’d just cause these damn new land taxes to go up even further, don’t you?” She’d turned white at the sight of the fearsome looking wargs.

“B-but,” she stammered as our horses came out of the shade of the orchard behind me, and her eyes widened further. “T-then you could sell your property for more?”

“But not enough to buy anything where we could keep our critters,” I pointed out. “Not here in New Washington. And some of us old timers here might not want, or be able to move. So you just keep that silly petition. I hope to hell no one is dumb enough to sign it. Bye.” I turned from her and walked back to the house to make a glass of lemonade. I almost started crying as I sat in the shade of a fig tree I’d ‘helped’ Dad and Orra plant beside the drive way, and drank my ice cold lemonade. I knew that Uppy was just the first salvo of faster, more drastic change. Change I couldn’t stop.

That path and the clothesline were still there when I sold out and moved to the Shire, a settlement on the last continent opened on Middle Earth. As the Master Permaculture Designer for the Shire I have a good bit of say on how we grow this place so I’m doing my best to set it up to stay in harmony with the planet. I don’t know if the Uppies got their silly petition passed. I do know that before I finely sold out, the city tore up the creek just South of mine and the Millers old houses to “improve drainage.” It was the creek that had run through the Millers old Eden Valley. The one where I’d learned the basics of geology from my Dad.

Then the police air cars started shattering the night with their low flying whine, sirens, and the bright light they used to look for the criminals who started hiding out in what was by then a plastcrete drainage ditch. The stolen air car found abandoned there was the last straw. New Washington and the greedy ways it had imported from old Earth was oozing out to envelop me, my animals, and my land. The only things I could pick up and move to safety were myself and my beasts.

I bought a place with the settlers headed for that last uninhabited continent on Middle Earth. It took all the money my parents had left to me plus most of what I managed to get for the land, and my severance pay from the Planning Committee. I, and my new partner, with the help of some relatives who really couldn’t understand our need to leave, loaded up an intercontinental shipping, and livestock container before taking off one warm day in February of 385. We headed for the Shire and a life far from the problems of big cities.

For me that move was as if my parents, and the Millers had died again. I had hoped to live out all my lives on that land. Now, I’m spending my first rejuvenated youth building a new life here in the Shire.

The clothesline is surely gone by now. The land divided up into at least ten city blocks, maybe more, with “little houses made of ticky tacky” built on them, if not a mall. Perhaps even the path is gone.

Yet, in a way that foot path goes on. I’m wearing extensions of it on the allotment acres I’ve bought here in the Shire. Paths I’m wearing on land bought with money left to me by my parents, and from the sell of the land I’d worn that old path on. So, perhaps Tolkien was right. The path does “go ever on” from the place where it begins. After all, after my third and last rejuve treatment, maybe I’ll finely settle down and start a family to leave this land to.

The Path, as creative Non-Fiction

Sometimes I wonder if the path I tramped into the soil between 8811 Old Homestead and 8814 Eden Valley back in the old Pleasant Grove neighbor hood of Dallas is still there. I’d learned early on that the cookie Mom would deny me at home on Old Homestead could be had with just a quick trip up to Grandma and Grandpa’s house on Eden Valley. During the long hot summers of childhood, that path would lead to where I could nip into Grandma’s kitchen to snatch the salt shaker before raiding the cherry tomato patch Grandpa always planted.

At least once a week, my Mom’s feet would join mine on that path as we went to Grandma’s house to do the weekly washing using the old time washer kept outside just below Grandma’s kitchen window. Mine, and all the ladies clothes were washed separately with the under clothes. To save money the men’s work clothes were brought home to be laundered separately, then ironed.

Oh, how I wanted to help. But adult caution kept me away from that fascinating machinery.

“No, you may NOT put the clothes through the wringer!” Mom would yelp when I asked. “That thing could squash your fingers clean off!”

“Not if I didn’t let my fingers get caught!” I would mutter as I angrily stalked of to sooth my hurt feelings with one of Grandma’s Vanilla Wafers.

Where there is a washer there must be a clothesline. Grandma and Grandpa owned a full half acre on Eden Valley, so Grandpa and Dad had built a huge clothesline. There were three upright old telephone poles with metal and wood cross pieces, which held up four thick wire lines. These lines stretched east / west across my path up to Grandma and Grandpa’s house. With no trees over the lines, any clothes hung on them could get sun all day. The access to sun all day was important on cool or damp days when it took more time than in the hot, dry summer for the clothes to dry.

As I grew taller, I found myself hauling clothes that Mom had washed at home up to that clothesline and wearing that path just a little deeper. After Grandpa died, my feet compressed it deeper still going up to Grandma’s house to get the washing she needed done, and taking it down to our house where Mom would wash it in her newer style washer and dryer. Then, the clothes crisply dry from the dryer and folded, I’d haul them back up to Grandma’s along that same path that went under the now seldom used clothesline.

By the time I entered college, the path was worn so deep it was still there whenever I came home from school on holidays. It was just part of home, the quickest route up to check on Grandma or visit with relatives who came to visit.

After earning a BS, then four years in the Army, and a failed attempt at setting up a soil analysis business in Kentucky, my old course along that path was reversed. It was 1977 and my uncles were paying me to be live-in care for Grandma. I was saving the money so I could go back for a master's degree. I had to go down and visit Mom and Dad occasionally, just to keep in touch. I was an only child after all.

It was a good thing that path was still there when I came home in the spring of ’82 for my father’s and then my grandmother’s funeral as grief hung over me like a dark cloud. I moved on automatic between the two houses during the family gatherings centered on these two tragedies. Even after leaving ET for the last time that year with a brand new master's degree I felt surrounded by loss, by death. Despite that I bought out my Uncle Wayne’s share of Grandma’s land.

Then came the yuppies; the ones who cared not a whit for the land, the neighborhood, or the people who lived there.

“Hey! Hi, there! My name’s Muffie! My husband and I bought a lot just down the street and a block over from here! We’re getting up this petition to change the ordinances to keep farm animals and large dogs out of the neighborhood. We’d like you to sign it!” The woman said perkily after I stopped mowing and came over to see what she wanted.

“What do you mean by farm animals?” I asked, leaning on the wide double gate across my driveway. The gate kept in my big dog and my horse as well as my roomy',s big dog. Hopefully, it would keep other dogs out as I was thinking of getting some more chickens.

“Oh, you know,” she grinned, “The smelly and noisy ones like chickens, goats and horses.” Her face showed her revulsion. “And those horrible big dogs! They can get out so easily and frighten people! Not to mention the loud barking!”

I looked her up and down. She was dressed in the highest fashion. Right down to the high heels wobbling on my gravel driveway. Her big fancy car was parked right at the end of it. I hadn’t been paying attention while I was mowing but I suspected she’d driven from the house next door. I turned toward the half acre of my grandparents land I’d just finished paying off, and whistled a couple of loud notes sure to attract every beast I had that connected the sound to food before turning back to the yuppie.

“Why?” I asked as I turned back. “Why no animals like that?”

“Why, because they lower property values! We’ll never get the property in this neighborhood up to a decent value with all these farm animals around.” She continued, though obviously curious about why I'd whistled like that.

“Now why would we want the property values to go up?” I asked reasonably, as my, and my roomy's big dog loped up in answer to my whistle. “You do know that’d just cause the taxes to go up even further, don’t you?”

“B-but,” she stammered as my horse came out of the shade of the small bunch of trees behind me, and her eyes widened even further than the appearance of the dogs had caused. “T-then you could sell your property for more?”

“But not enough to buy anything where we could keep our critters,” I pointed out. “Not here in Dallas. And some of us old timers here might not want to move. So you just keep that silly petition. I hope to hell no one else is dumb enough to sign it. Bye.” I turned from her and walked back to the house to make a glass of lemonade. I almost started crying as I sat in the shade of a tree I’d ‘helped’ grandpa plant beside the driveway, and drank my ice cold lemonade. I knew that yuppie was just the first salvo of change . . . a change I couldn’t stop.

That path and the clothesline were still there when I sold out and moved to Lone Oak. I don’t know if the yuppies got their silly petition passed. I do know that the city tore up the creek where I’d learned the basics of geology from my dad. Then the police helicopters started shattering the night with their low flying whup whup whup and the bright light they carried while looking for the drug dealers who were hiding out the creek. The stolen car found abandoned there was the last straw. The big city was oozing out to envelop me, my animals, and my land. The only things I could pick up and move to safety were myself and my beasts.

I found a place. It took all the money my parents had saved up and left to me plus most of what I managed to get for the land and two houses I had inherited and bought. I, and my roomy, with the help of some relatives who really couldn’t understand my need to leave, loaded up a borrowed box trailer, a two-horse trailer, and the back of my pickup truck before pulling out one warm day in February of ‘85. We headed for Lone Oak and a life far from the problems of the big city.

For me that move was as if there had been a final death in the family. I had hoped to live out my life on that land. I had had no other plans.

The clothesline is surely gone by now, the land divided up into at least three lots, maybe more, with “little houses made of ticky tacky” built on them. Perhaps even the path is gone.

Yet, in a way that foot path goes on. I’m wearing extensions of it on the twelve plus acres I bought here in Lone Oak. Paths I’m wearing on land I bought with money left to me by my parents and from the sell of the land I‘d inherited; land I’d worn that old path on. So, perhaps Tolkien was right. The path does “go ever on” from the place where it begins.