A Recipe for Childhood: Blueberries

This is a mid-winter picture from the east side of Blue Hill Bay -- less than 5 miles from where I was born. If you could pan around to the left you would see the small town of Blue Hill which is a lovely little town in mid-coast Maine. It was listed (along with Athens, Ohio -- the place I currently call home) as one of the 12 Best Places to Live You Never Heard Of by Mother Earth News. Somehow I am deeply connected to both places.

The hill in the distance is one of the three mountains making up Mount Desert Island, where I spent much of of my early childhood. When I was young -- 8 or 9 years old -- my best friend Elihue and I used to row our little dingy out into the middle of Bass Harbor amidst huge cargo ships, sailboats and lobster boats. We also spent hours and days exploring the rocky coast line near Bass Harbor Lighthouse which was about 2 miles from my last Maine home. I remember running fearlessly and quickly over the rocky coast letting my feet guide the way -- never hesitating and never falling. We found some huge caves that led way back into the shoreline. It was a pretty magical childhood really.

When I returned a few summers ago with my friends, I once again decided to run fearlessly and quickly over the rocks way down the coast, leaving my friends far behind. The smell of the ocean and the pounding surf, the rough, sharp rocks, the spray of the ocean as it moved endlessly, the sound of seagulls above and the endless coastline (Maine has the longest coastline of any state in the US -- longer even than California's, though the state is much smaller) kept my feet moving and my footing solid. The motion of my body over these rocks a memory that required no thought process.

I associate that feeling with freedom from way back in my childhood and was happy to know that even as an adult, I could move over that landscape almost like a bird -- no fear of falling, only the quick pushing off of one foot, the jump to the next rock, pushing off again, and again.

Behind the photographer in the above photo is a hill with a bumpy unpaved road that becomes a mess of mud and ice throughout at least half of the year. That road leads to the Circle Farm, the old name of the hippie commune where I was born. It is covered in low-bush blueberry fields and some 5-6 houses spread out through the 80 or so acres of the Farm. It is my second home.

My recipe for remembering what it feels like to be a kid goes like this:

In mid August find a large, open blueberry field
Sit down in the middle of it
Eat as many blueberries as you can from that spot
Move on to the next spot
Keep eating blueberries
and move on again, until you can't possibly eat another blueberry and at some point later you will probably, as I did when young, make some pretty awesome blue poop.

Sick

I have been really sick. Coughing and hacking so violently that my stomach and back muscles are remembering times when hard labor was the way I made my money. It has been two weeks and I have finally decided to give in and go to a doctor. I've tried all the herbs, tinctures, steam baths, hot water bottles, vitamins and anything else I could think of to knock this cough out of my body. Nothing has worked.

I'm going to California in a week to take a permaculture design course north of San Francisco, to visit friends and to get a much needed break from Ohio in winter. I'm really looking forward to all three.

Since I last wrote, I have moved into a little apartment in Athens and have been religiously going through all my stuff and getting rid of excess weight -- emotional and physical. it's been really gratifying to see the trash pile growing as I purge my life of the dead weight of so much stuff. Most of my stuff is just ridiculous -- old articles from my college days, 25 copies of all the papers I wrote for my creative writing workshops, old notebooks -- so much paper! In looking through all this stuff again after many years, I realize that the things I know, I already know. I don't have to save all the pieces of the picture that helped me create the person I am today.

Of all the pieces of paper, I am saving only the words I have written -- papers, journals, the stories I have told myself about who I am, what the world means, where I want to go. I imagine my grandchildren's grandchildren discovering the words someday and piecing together the stories of a life lived. I wish I could find some words written by my great-grandmother Carmella who is said to have killed the man who killed her husband -- stabbing him with a kitchen knife in the back as he ran away. There are also stories of her following her husband to work every day dressed as a man, packing a gun, protecting him from some unknown danger sensed in the streets in turn of the century Dayton, Ohio. What I wouldn't give to hear some stories of her life. The love she felt for her first husband Domenico. Supposedly they both worked in the palace of the Italian king until he was overthrown and they had to leave the country.

Anyway, I have decided to let myself sit with my heart for the next 6 months in Athens. Too much of my life for the past several years has been lived in fear and anxiety -- always worrying about each choice, paralyzed by my opportunities, always trying to fulfill someone else's needs while my own wither away and die. This is a pattern I have known for much of my life, that I felt I was really overcoming 3-4 years ago and which I have fallen back into as a result of family trauma and the complete restructuring of my emotional foundation. Sitting with my heart, I can learn to hear it again, to trust it again. I can remember that it is much more frightening to not follow your heart than it ever could be to follow it.

I never thought I would be here now. I thought I would be beyond all this navel-gazing emotional trauma. I'm not. I'm right here. This is my life. I'm living it in the only way I know how.

Letter to the A-News Editor, 11-14-07

I am really angry. I’ve been watching for the past several months, with a sort of passive indifference, the often ridiculous front-page stories featured in the Athens News:

Beer pong, hay shortages, a mellow Halloween. Don’t get me wrong, I see that all these stories have relevance to the loyal readers of Athens’ only locally owned newspaper. My problem is this: while Athens whiles away the days here in relative bubbleicious bliss, the world around us is in turmoil. Specifically, I am appalled that I learned about the case of Megan Williams on Democracy Now! (www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/11/14/1438201) rather than in my much-loved Athens News.

Megan Williams is a 20 year old African-American woman who was kidnapped and tortured in West Virginia earlier this year by 6 white men and women. She was held captive for one week, forced to eat human, dog and rat feces, stabbed repeatedly, threatened with death, raped repeatedly and assaulted with racial slurs. Her captors were charged with kidnapping, among other things, but have not yet been charged with a hate crime.

This is important regional news, especially considering the current climate of racial tension in our quiet little Athens community. Monday’s A-News highlighted this tension. (The story, however, was put in a small caption on the front-page under the story about hay. While this is a rural community and the hay shortage will impact many people and the local economy, I question whether it is as relevant as the story of Mahoney’s assault on two women of color on OU’s campus and the subsequent outcome of his trial. Especially since the majority of A-News readers presumably live in the city of Athens and not in the rural areas surrounding.)

The story of Mahoney’s assault and the hung jury at his trial (Monday, Nov. 12) very much relates to the story of Megan Williams in West Virginia, less than 100 miles away – which is certainly close enough to warrant attention from the Athens community. It is clear here that the justice system is a failure. Jurors were asked to convict in Mahoney’s case on some technical definition of the term “menacing” rather than on the real, pervasive impacts of a racist, sexist culture which continually and institutionally protect aggressors due to the color of their skin, their mental imbalances, their “unintentional” racist attitudes, whatever.

Mahoney should be tried for a hate crime, regardless of his mental health. People with mental illness should not be exempt from the consequences of their actions simply because they are ill. The illness can be an explanation for the crime, but not an exemption from the consequences of it. Has he expressed any remorse, has he apologized to the women, saying that he could not control himself due to his disease? Was he undergoing treatment for Tourette’s at the time? Has there been any indication that he feels badly about his actions or the repercussions in the lives of these women or in the community at large? Has he volunteered to enter into treatment or as a result of his actions? These are important, yet unanswered questions in the article. We as a community and the justice system at large continue to avoid the real issues of institutionalized racism and the hate crimes it ignores, or worse, protects through misidentification.

And the idea that these women did not feel threatened by this incident is utterly ridiculous when they (and we) are enmeshed in a culture that includes Megan Williams, the Jena 6, the continued shootings by police of unarmed black men throughout this country, the incarceration of black men and women at a rate that is far higher than that for whites, and so many more incidents of institutional and personal racism.

I love Athens. I love the Athens News. I know the A-News tends to focus on very local news and I appreciate that. But I would love to see more substantive stories on the front pages. I would love to see local stories in their non-local context. It seems significant to me that there have been 45 noose hanging incidents in public places across the country since the Jena 6 AND that Athens is currently experiencing a spate of racially charged incidents.

Making the connection is the media’s job. In this age of corporate media, only locally owned, independent media outlets are capable of making these connections. No matter what we might want to believe, Athens does not exist in a vacuum. Our issues, ie, the bulldozing of hillsides, the explosion of big-box stores, the gnawing hunger of poverty, the smart-growth/corporate growth debate, the economic and environmental effects of farm subsidies, the impacts of institutional and personal racism – these are part of a much larger national/international trend of the consolidation of power and are symptoms of the final destructive throes of a collapsing economic system.

The disconnection of local issues from their global context drives home the feeling of isolation that is killing public dissent and effective political action in this country. We are a part of the world. The world is reflected in us. Make the A-News relevant to our underlying knowledge of ourselves as global citizens who live in a great little community in southern Ohio. And get Democracy Now! on WOUB as soon as possible.

Sara DeAloia is a white woman who strives to be an ally to oppressed people. She believes anti-oppression work is one of the most important things white people can do to change the world.