Cider at the Project Circle

So we (sort of) pressed cider this month! It was a valuable lesson in a few ways. First, if you know anything about cider pressing, you can already see what we didn’t do in the cute picture above. It makes for a beautiful header image; neat slices of apples arrayed in the top of the press. But what should’ve been filling that wooden basket is a messy, ground-up slop of shredded apples. I’ll just report that we worked a lot harder than we needed to, and got a whole lot less cider than we could have. At least it was tasty. And so second lesson: for now – fun as cider was – I think I’ll just stick to doing ice cream in the summer. I’ll leave the logistics of multi-faceted operations to other events (check out the cider pressing event at the bottom of this newsletter), and just bring my own projects going forward. That’s the point after all: I’ve got lots of projects that need the monthly reminder. But that said, I do hear the people: I’m thinking on some consistent snack options.

Anyway! We enjoyed the cider we got, we hung out, we fixed a sweater or two. If you missed out and want to make it next time, put it on your calendar! It will be on Halloween, so it will be a good time for autumnal projecting, and last-minute costume touches. Find us from 10:30 – 1:30 on Saturday October 31st, at Nature Nurture Farmacy.

Updated About Page and Resource Hub at the Website

The new website is getting more and more official. Go check out the new About Page and the improved Resource Hub!

The About Page is exciting to me personally, because it serves as a bit of a Folklife 101 page. I find that a lot of people intuitively get excited about much of what could be described as folkways, but don’t have great language to name it. And it’s easy to let things take a back seat when we don’t have strong language around it. So a big part of what I hope to provide through Everyday Folkways is that very language – a way to name and prioritize those parts of our community that need a little extra support to be valued. So go check it out: I do think you’ll get something out of it.

Just as importantly, however, go click around on the Resource Hub! It’s still under construction, but the structure is all there. The biggest way you can help out and participate is to explore the hub and get thinking about the types of local folklife resources you know about. When any such resource comes to mind, go fill out this form to tell us about it. The Resource Hub feels like the meat of the meat and potatoes of Everyday Folkways. If our aim is to be a community resource network, having a strong resource network is kind of a big deal. So that’s where you come in! You’re the folks we want to get connected and talking.

Oh, and the calendar, I suppose, can be the potatoes.

Don’t Forget about the Repair and Sustainability Fair

And of course, you know where to be on the morning of Saturday October 10th! Come find us at the Fall Repair and Sustainability Fair. We’ll have an Everyday Folkways table, and a bonus project circle, so come on out! If you don’t already know, it’s going to be very cool. It’s an event the local Master Recycler/Composters are hosting as an opportunity to get your stuff fixed or given away: clothing, textiles, basic electronics, small engines, furniture, bikes, and more. There will be folks to help repair your broken belongings; a stuff-swap table; and booths with free pens and information about local sustainability resources. So come see me there, at least! While I won’t have free pens, I will have flyers and a table and chairs set up all day for that very special edition of the project circle. Be there.

As a reminder, this will all be taking place during the twice-annual SW Washington Fair Grounds Garage Sale & Swap Meet. If you didn’t have enough reason before, you do now.

The whole event runs from 9AM to 3PM at the SW Washington Fairgrounds, and the repair fair will be in the Community Events building from 10AM – 2PM. So yes: go buy something broken and come hang.

It has been a BUSY month, and it’s about to be a busier first two weeks of October. So this one-man show doesn’t have a podcast for you yet. But I do have two wonderful interviews recorded, and I’m excited about both of them. The first interview, featuring Jay Ryan at Grist (your local stone mill), should be out as a podcast in time for the Repair Fair. Following that, in the coming month or so, you’ll have the pleasure to meet Carl (and Lorna) at Twin Brooks farm in the Lucas Creek valley. Carl is a font of wisdom on pruning and cultivating fruit trees, so prepare to be en-knowledged.

As proof, and to whet your appetite for learning, I present a few favorite photos:

Of course, in the mean time, go check out the podcasts that are available! They’re lovely, and of course you should tell everyone you know about them.

And then if you think you or someone you love should be interviewed about a needs-meeting activity or skill, I would be thrilled to hear from you at hello@everydayfolkways.org. And if you’ve just got something you’d like to learn about, I would be equally glad to hear from you.

In last month’s newsletter, this is approximately where I wrote about the passing of Wendell Berry. As I mentioned, his writing was one of the first places that crystalized what I’ve come to understand as the importance of a folklife in communities. In a very tidy essay entitled Waste – published in his 1990 collection What Are People For? – Wendell describes strongly and clearly the wide-ranging consequences of depriving communities of a meaningful role in the work of meeting their own needs. (The following emphases are mine.)

[O]ur waste problem is … the fault of an economy that is wasteful from top to bottom — a symbiosis of an unlimited greed at the top and a lazy, passive, and self-indulgent consumptiveness at the bottom — and all of us are involved in it. If we wish to correct this economy, we must be careful to understand and to demonstrate how much waste of human life is involved in our waste of the material goods of Creation. For example, much of the litter that now defaces our country is fairly directly caused by the massive secession or exclusion of most of our people from active participation in the food economy. We have made a social ideal of minimal involvement in the growing and cooking of food. This is one of the dearest “liberations” of our affluence. Nevertheless, the more dependent we become on the industries of eating and drinking, the more waste we are going to produce. The mess that surrounds us, then, must be understood not just as a problem in itself but as a symptom of a greater and graver problem the centralization of our economy — the gathering of the productive property and power into fewer and fewer hands, and the consequent destruction, everywhere, of the local economies of household, neighborhood, and community.
This is the source of our unemployment problem, and l am not talking just about the unemployment of eligible members of the “labor force.” I mean also the unemployment of children and old people, who, in viable household and local economies, would have work to do by which they would be useful to themselves and to others. The ecological damage of centralization and waste is thus inextricably involved with human damage. For we have, as a result, not only a desecrated, ugly, and dangerous country in which to live until we are in some manner poisoned by it, and a constant and now generally accepted problem of unemployed or unemployable workers, but also classrooms full of children who lack the experience and discipline of fundamental human tasks, and various institutions full of still capable old people who are useless and lonely.

This all sounds quite dire. And Wendell, who published a collection called The Mad Farmer Poems, did not pull punches. But he spoke, foundationally, from a place that was also simple and hopeful. And there is great hope offered in this excerpt: in what can be gained by a community that learns to value its local, household-level economy.

This week I was reminded of this through an example of the small kind of joy Wendell often spoke of and fought for us to keep in our lives. I was caring for the kid of a friend, and I had brought a tangled, dried mess of bean plants to work on while we were there – I have not met a child who does not love this task. And sure enough, she dug and dug and dug until the last beans were found, and told her parents about it that night. What is hopeful and exciting to me is how naturally these moments come when we are able to bring some of the work of our own needs back in to our hands and the hands of those around us, young and old. Yes, Wendell wasn’t shy in calling out what was broken, but he also wrote affectionately and richly about a love for his home, his neighbors, and the work of living among them. He put it plainly in a 1998 interview: “Stop some place, and stay there. Learn the history of it, and the names of the plants and animals and the neighbors.”

Much of what I hope for the network of Everyday Folkways has its roots in the thinking of Wendell Berry and of others like him. In that hot new About Page I told you about higher up in this newsletter, you’ll find the influence of many of them. At its base, the aim is to preserve and support what is important about a day-to-day built of living activities we can share with one another and with the place we call home.

And so: expect to find this On Folkways section in the newsletter going forward – thanks, Wendell.

Resource Highlight

As an additional teaser for the upcoming podcast, I will just say further that we have a very cool local resource in Jay Ryan’s stone mill in downtown Centralia. You’ll hear more in the podcast, but stop in and visit Jay at Grist sometime. He’s got a whole slough of locally sourced grains, beans, and more, and endless passion for what they offer us. To top it all off, there’s something comforting about there being a local mill in town. You never know.

For more resources, go check out our resource hub

Event Highlights

• Oct 6 (Tues) 11AM-1:30PM Master Gardeners & Composters Answer Clinic in Randle
• Oct 10 (Sat) 9AM-3:00PM REPAIR AND SUSTAINABILITY FAIR AND ENORMOUS GARAGE SALE AND PROJECT CIRCLE GO TO THIS OR YOU WILL REGRET IT
• Oct 10 (Sat) 10:00AM Planting Garlic with the Master Gardeners
• Oct 10 (Sat) 1:00PM WAMA Slow Jam at the Hope Grange in Winlock
• Oct 11 (Sun) 1:00-4:00PM Juice Box Jam and Barn Dance
• Oct 17 (Sat) 10AM-3:00PM Community Cider Pressing at the Floral Park Sustainability Project with the Master Recycler Composters
• Oct 21 (Wed) 6:00PM Community Singing Circle
• Oct 31 (Sat) 10:30AM-1:30PM Everyday Folkways Project Circle

For details on these events and for more events, go check out our full community calendar