time begins 335length she asked, “Mama, did you get born, or are you one of the ones that
evolved from the tree primates?”
I’m not eight million years old. But I am old enough to know I should
never, ever, trust I’ve explained anything perfectly. Some part of the audi-
ence will always remain at large, confused or plain unconvinced. As I
wind up this account, I’m weighing that. Is it possible to explain the year
we had? I can tell you we came to think of ourselves, in the best way, as a
family of animals living in our habitat. Does that reveal the meaning of
our passage? Does it explain how we’re different now, even though we
look the same? We are made of different stuff, with new connections to
our place. We have a new relationship with the weather. So what, and
who cares?
All stories, they say, begin in one of two ways: “A stranger came to
town,” or else, “I set out upon a journey.” The rest is all just metaphor and
simile. Your high school En glish teacher was right. In Moby-Dick, you’ll
know if you were half awake, the whale was not just an aquatic mammal.
In our case, the heirloom turkeys are not just large birds but symbols of a
precarious hold on a vanishing honesty. The chickens are secondary pro-
tagonists, the tomatoes are allegorical. The zucchini may be just zucchini.
We set out upon a journey. It seemed so ordinary on the face of things,
to try to do what nearly all people used to do without a second thought.
But the trip surprised us many times, because of all the ways a landscape
can enter one’s physical being. Like most of the other top- heavy hominids
walking around in shoes, failing to notice the forest for the mashed trees
reincarnated as our newspapers and such, I’d nearly forgotten the truest
of all truths: we are what we eat.
As our edible calendar approached its arbitrary conclusion, we were
more than normally conscious of how everything starts over in the spring-
time. All the milestones that had nudged us toward the start of our loca-
vore year began to wink at us again. Our seedlings came up indoors. The
mud-ice melted, and the spicebushes in the lane covered themselves with
tiny yellow pompoms of flower. The tranquils bloomed. On April 3, the
secretive asparagus began to nose up from its bed.
What were we doing when the day finally came? Standing by our empty
chest freezer at midnight, gnawing our last frozen brick of sliced squash,