Full Disclosure

I'm not cut out for the Back-to-Basics life.

The last few years seem to have been on repeat:  By late winter my body is craving an unprocessed, detoxed existence in the sun filled with hard work, and less digitized shenanigans mediated by an ongoing and evermore invasive variety of screens.  So nose in a seed pack, fingers in the soil I get to work preparing and planting while dreaming about making cheese from scratch and creating handmade paper.  Horrifically, I actually begin to think that one of those back-to-the-land communes could be kind of cool--communes got a bad rap, but they could be something special.  Ugh.  What is wrong with me?

By late fall, I'm so sick of tomatoes, radishes, and whatever else I seemingly planted by the freighter that I cannot wait for the frost--the kind that turns basil plants black and brittle and finally puts a stop to that ever growing ogre known as the tomato plant (they seriously never stop growing--it's kind of frightening when you think about it).  Today my parents and I cut up and baked/steamed a pumpkin well over fifty pounds.  As I scanned the kitchen littered with dishes and utensils dirtied by this daylong endeavor, while my father diligently separated the meat from the pumpkin flesh into bowl after bowl after bowl (and then what are we supposed to do with it?), I thought, thank god I only had one pumpkin that got this huge and that the majority of the plants croaked.  Had I been a fully committed (and deranged) back-to-basics person/nut-er, my days and nights would be filled with stockpiling the larder rather than having time for what is truly important:  obsessively adding films to my netflix queue, searching for free books for the kindle, and googling important facts like how did manila envelopes get their name anyway?

Yet, as I write this I'm envisioning my expanded garden next year and just how I could set up that paper making studio.