Windfall, Chaos, Hygiene, and Moderate Squalor

Attempting to live within natural systems is hardly ever tidy.

Living the dream, complete with ducks dabbling in the laundry.

I have just eaten a ripe peach found floating in a mosquito larvae ridden rain barrel. Fruit found on the ground is typically dry, and can be dusted off, but this is not true of fruit that has been discovered floating in a murky barrel. Best thing to do is to cross your fingers before eating. Take it from someone who has consumed a fair bit of waste.

Since last I checked in with y’all, we’ve had a couple of wind events, and the wind, as you know, is sometimes our most reliable harvesting labor. A stiff wind will thin fruit trees, bring nourishing leaves down to the forest floor, disentangle kindling and small diameter firewood, provide wildlife and livestock with acorns and honey locust pods and even rain a few tasty bugs. A summer breeze is ideal, a heavy gust can be helpful, but a wind-storm can be difficult to appreciate.

But whether it be a gentle breeze or a violent storm, wind is a vital source of momentum in natural cycles. While insect pollination gets a lot of the attention, wind pollination is crucial for many plants. Wind drops and shifts organic matter and nutrients across the landscape, feeding microbes, animals, and humans, so long as they’re willing to fetch a peach out of a barrel, or pry it from the clutches of a patiently waiting flock of ducks. And there is something about the fallen debris of branches in full leaf ripped asunder, squirming larvae that have dropped helplessly to the earth, and a plummeting, thumping rain of bugs, berries and hedgeballs that serves to remind me of the very three-dimensional nature of the land we steward.

So often, land-based work is predicated on the analysis of two-dimensional, overhead maps, and a mere ground-level, human scale view of the place we inhabit. These viewpoints are inherently anthropocentric, if not colonial in nature, limited in their perspective; the coordinates and private-ownership-based boundaries carved out of earth’s visible skin like slices of cake. This can sometimes be useful data, but windfall reminds me that there is a whole other layer above my head, thriving with life of its own. We won’t even get to what all lies beneath that thin skin of earth, this time.

If the debris along the forest edge tells us anything about the complex world of interaction outside of our vision from down here on the ground, the layer of detritus collecting in my home tells another story, one of complexity, chaos, and the scavenging habits of someone who would eat a bruised peach out of an opaque-tinted rain barrel.

Look folks, my place is not tidy. I’ve heard that it’s what inside that counts, but there’s clearly manure inside my house. Many different kinds of it. And my psyche matches the floor in here. There’s much to track, much to do, and an unbelievable amount of clothing changes that must occur between 5 AM and 9 PM, my basic hours of operation. It leaves our living space deeply mulched with socks, seeds, loose hay, and a leaf-litter like layer of inscrutable post-it notes. It is times like this that I remember the highest form of luxury is a clear, flat surface. Then there’s the “What was this jar used for?” game. But the gardens, orchards, and pastures are all relatively “tidy”, so as long as I keep to those spaces, I’m mostly undisturbed, returning home in the evening to make it to bed in the low light.

But then, inevitably, there is hygiene. I try to keep clean… but between my daily dance among the mud-streaked hogs, the sweat-inducing, crushing heat of Midwestern summer, and the very high likelihood of kneeling in poultry manure more than once a day, I’m sometimes a dirty boy. That said, I can clean up fine, and with very few resources. In the winter time, a quart of warm water goes pretty far. On a day spent gardening, a pond dip is ideal, but a half-gallon of rain in a bowl (plus exfoliation) is enough for an evening spent at home within my own atmosphere. The key factor is to move in order from the cleanest parts to wash, to the dirtiest. I’m not going to tell you which order I personally follow.

I know there’s a lot of folks out there, making their own soap. Good for them. I use some soap, typically not much above my forearms, but I like keeping my hands clean. But there is a strange crossover between simple living and an obsession with cleanliness that borders on neurotic religiosity. And I’m willing to play to that, to a point. If I’m out and about and meeting a local for the first time, they might ask what I’m doing here in Northeast Missouri, and my standard response has been, “I came here for good, clean living.” Our interpretations of this sentiment likely differ, and being polite Midwesterners, we do not seek to clarify this statement between each other.

Many years ago, before I was involved in homesteading or agriculture, when I even had regular access to a shower (but still ate a lot of windfall), a romantic partner said to me, “You cannot save the world by being dirty.”¹  I’m not sure where she is anymore, but I bet there’s running water. I wish her the best. I may not be saving the world, but I am saving water and associated resources involved with plumbing. We do have running water, by the way. It runs out constantly. Then we run off and get another bucket of it from the nearest clean source.  

Sometimes, it’s hard to trust the overly-clean. To speak again of consuming waste, I spend more time than I should looking at other homesteads and farms on social media. I appreciate a certain level of sanitation, when it comes to dairy processing, sausage making, and fermentation. But a clean homestead in the dead of summer doth smell a bit rotten to my sniffer. I’m not saying that we ought to reek of death or neglect, as some industrial operations certainly do. But if there isn’t even the occasional hint of dead mouse out among the wafting perfume of lemon balm, I’m not buying it. Much like that narrowed and limited view of our environment that encompasses neither the canopy of the forest nor the layers of life sequestered underground, a lot is left conveniently out of frame on the homesteading Instagram accounts.

I have “limited bandwidth” for cleanliness, in the parlance of our times. Growing food requires dirt, and long hours spent sweating in fields. If I can keep my fingernails clean for customers and rake duck manure off the path for visitors, I’m doing well. If I do not smell like dirt, or the stuff that will eventually become it, I’m fit enough for public appearance. As for the rest? Let the wildflowers grow tall and obstruct the debris of our vast and tiresome undertaking. The human project thus far has been stricken by complication. Sometimes, we view this as chaos and disorder, and we attempt to organize and sanitize the complexity. We narrow our senses, bear down on our natural environment, and we tidy it up to a socially and economically acceptable map of how we think the world works best. But inevitably, storms arise, and we find the full and intricate complexity of life in this place laid at our feet. I’d like to think it’s a bit more organized than the chaos we choose to inflict on ourselves, our fellow humans, and our planet. 

It’s damn near August. If you are growing food for your own survival, there’s a good chance that your hygiene is leaving a bit to be desired, and that you’re not making it into Good Housekeeping. That said, you’re only one clean, flat surface and a half-gallon of water away from pure luxury. To take the historic, wide view, we eat like royalty, and know material privilege that some can hardly conceive. Even if we’re fighting ducks for fallen peaches.

Gone to the pond,

BB

1. Yes, I’ve mentioned this before. It stuck with me.