Building Castles in the Sky

Dandelions

Today we celebrate a national holiday.

happy 20 year anniversary of Neil banging out the tunes!

though every rat is special, it's a wonderful and unusual thing for their accomplishments to be remembered and cherished by so many people so many years later. we're all so fortunate to know about the rat who banged out the tunes!

thank you to all the people who sent me reference photos of their beloved rats for this piece!!! credits under the cut!

My grandfather responded by calmly explaining what he was doing, step by step. Explaining why he was skinning the deer, and quartering it, taking it from this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White-tailed_deer to this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venison

By the time he was cooking tenderloin medallions and plating them up to me with grape jelly (don’t knock grape jelly on meat until you’ve tried it!) and instant mashed potatoes, I wasn’t startled or concerned anymore. I had a deeper understanding of the way the world worked, of my role as a consumer, a predator. Of the responsibilities that entailed. I couldn’t have explained it then, of course, with my 4-year-old mind and vocabulary - but Philosophy had been set into motion. This is a core memory for me. 

I did not have nightmares about the butchered deer. 

People have such a romantic view of farming and growing food but a lot of my summers as a kid was spent trying to come up with ways to stop birds from eating our vegetables, planting other plants and releasing insects to keep other insects away, and pulling weeds.

Food doesn’t just sit there all pretty growing in the sun. Everything wants to steal it away from you. Agriculture even on a small scale is a never ending battle against insects, other plants stealing water and sunlight, birds, small mammals. You are not the only one who wants the fruits of your labor.