Today I headed to our Hollywood farmers' market as I usually do on Sunday mornings to get about 90 % of our food for the week -- we now get our dairy, meat, eggs, vegetables, fruit, bread, honey, and more from the local organic farmers and vendors there.
The farm from which we get our two dozen eggs every week and occasionally some chicken or other meat was having an open house today for its CSA members and others that buy from them often. So after lunch we got into the car and drove the hour or so northwest out of Los Angeles and into some especially lush farmland (thanks to all of unusual rain this year) to visit the chickens that give us our eggs. What we found was a lovely farm full of rabbits, emu, goats, horses, cows, pigs, chickens, sheep, llamas, turkeys and more.
We finished off the day with a quick drive into Ventura and over to the beach (only about 15 minutes from the farmland) and some fish and chips at a little dive restaurant have a block from the water.
Jack had a blast throwing hay to the sheep and climbing and jumping on the hay bales. He loved playing with the baby chicks. And he definitely did his part to fatten up the pigs with lots of carrots. He brought his egg home for us to cook up tomorrow morning along with the eggs we had already bought from the farm at the market this morning.
It is really important to me that we eat the best quality food available to us and that it is locally grown as much as possible. I want Jack to understand where it comes from and how much work goes into his food arriving on the table. I want him to enjoy good food made with lots of love out of good ingredients. I want him to truly savor eating it -- as so many Americans seem loathe to do.
And if there is one thing that I want to share with my son, beyond a love for good food and the joy of eating it with good people, is the joy that comes from striking out on an adventure, whether big or small. The joy of not knowing exactly what the day will hold or exactly where you will find your next meal. The joy of seeing a field for the first time or sitting in a little dive restaurant you have never been to before eating fish and chips at the end of a long, good day. And not only the joy of when an adventure goes "right" but also the particular type of (perhaps postponed) joy of when an adventure goes terribly wrong. Because how you handle that stuff builds serious character and tells you a lot about the people around you (like whether you want to have them around you anymore). And perhaps best of all, it is the disasters that breed the best stories. Hands down.
I needed the wandering we did today and the newness we found by wandering. It is such a part of what makes me tick and yet I have struggled to find a place for that part of me in life as a mama, and really since coming to Los Angeles. I have been trying to wrap my head around the bigger adventures I want us to take on but in the midst of it all I sometimes forget to just jump in the car and go.
And to end up at a farm, a place so dear to my own heart, was lovely indeed. Although I did not grow up on a working farm exactly, I do feel like I grew up on a farm. Watching Jack climb on the hay bales, I remembered climbing on hay bales so much higher in our hay shed. Dad always warning me that I was going to bump into snakes or fall down. I would climb so high. I loved that hay shed. I loved that farm. I spent hours a day there, running around on my own through pastures and forests of adventures. Or helping dad with the cows. It is hard to imagine being able to give Jack the kind of freedom and playgrounds of imagination that I had laid out for me there every afternoon. But I would like to. It seems like this faraway, magical land now. With each adventure coming to an end as I heard the loud call of my dad -- the same, or a similar call, as the one he used to call the cows-- letting me know it was time to start heading back to the front pasture so we could head home.
I ramble.
Today was a good day.
