Brothers

I wrote last May about an endeavor that I am in support of called The Perennial Plate (see But These Are My Friends).  This is a web-based series written by a chef, Daniel Kline, and his girlfriend, Mira, as they tour around the US meeting very common people and making short films about how they are growing and more often than you maybe realize, foraging for food.  The program is presenting different viewpoints about the word “sustainable”, which is used a lot these days.  Sustainability doesn’t always just mean growing organic vegetables.  It can mean managing an invasive animal population like the feral pigs introduced to Texas by the Spaniards hundreds of years ago.  It’s not always a neat or pretty topic and this program is doing a great job of simply presenting how people are feeding themselves from the earth’s provisions. 

This last program, Brothers, struck numerous heartstrings for me.  This is an episode about twins who are living off-the-grid outside Durango, Colorado.  They are living exactly where I grew up, on a red-soil farm where finding an ancient Anasazi arrowhead or grinding stone (we fed our dog out of one) was a usual occurrence.  My parents still own their farmland and they struggle a lot these days about whether to sell or keep it for our family.  The government has just offered my parents a plan to plant their farm in wildflowers to keep the farmland in reserve for food production and to hopefully contribute toward the regeneration of the honeybee population.  It’s a great project, but not effortless and they aren’t sure that in their mid-eighties they can keep up with the land maintenance it will require. 

This short film further amused me because I birthed two brothers who are as close as twins and one of them is very interested in living in a way that makes him prepared to support himself and his family if some unexpected disruption to life as we know it should occur.  The other one’s biggest fear is that they will end up as the Old Bredy Brothers, holed up on a remote farm, living off the land.  In fact, he spelled out to his brother just a couple of weeks ago that that would not be their fate.  Just to be clear. 

We laugh a little about taking such drastic measures to live independently, but the note from this film that families could, if ever needed, congregate together on farmland and survive meant something to me and I know that my family, immediate and extended,  could do it.