It should have been a high point in my life. I had just successfully defended my dissertation and had three potential job opportunities. But I found myself pacing around our cabin or walking the hills of my family’s farm, alternately weeping and hurling invectives into the country air. Bob and I [...]

If I had to choose one food whose flavor fully encapsulates the glory of fall, it would have to be the wild apple. One can close her eyes, take a bite, and know what it is to taste an autumn-blue sky accented by golden rods, deep purple asters, the lush of green [...]

In writing with fondness about my life in Schoharie County, I seem to have given the impression that it is some sort of nirvana, where old and young are united in a shared passion for the culture and landscape; where age-old skills for resourceful living are handed down through family and neighbors, enabling each successive generation to carve out a healthy and sustainable, albeit modest, living in these hills and valleys. I do believe that is happening here. But not necessarily as some might imagine.

May hits us like an ice water dousing on a drowsy morning. It is simultaneously shocking and deeply refreshing. Winter’s leisurely breakfasts are suddenly a thing of the past: Bob and I scarcely have time to join each other for a cup of coffee before we find ourselves on our hands and knees weeding asparagus, donning nets to check on the beehives, pounding posts to trellis new grape vines, digging holes for new fruit trees, or heading down to the farm to make sausage before the farmer’s market starts. I help my dad vaccinate the sheep and bag fleeces for the mill; he examines the flock for parasites, moves the broilers out to pasture, checks the fences, hauls hay bales to the cattle to tide them over until the pastures are amply lush, and monitors the grasses and our very pregnant ewes. My mom faces an endless barrage of dishes to wash following our luncheon feasts (made larger to accommodate our springtime appetites), handles the incoming meat orders, and helps us care for the girls. But despite all our activity, we still feel as though we are in the calm before the storm that will hit when lambing season officially begins. All other away-from-home plans are subject to the whims of nature as our family readies to welcome the spring crop of newborns.

Can meat have a place in the life of a “radical homemaker” trying to live sustainably? Farmer Shannon Hayes believes it can.

posted May 12, 2010
 

I recently released a new book, Radical Homemakers: Reclaiming Domesticity from a Consumer Culture. The result of three years of obsessive research, the book is something of a manifesto for [...]

How one woman decided whether reproduction had a place in her quest for a sustainable life.
By Shannon Hayes
When I first began sharing my newest research endeavor—to explore the role of homemaking in healing our current global crises—I spoke with a slight tremor in my voice. I was afraid of what people might think: that [...]

Do children need a pile of wrapped toys in order to know that their family and friends are delighted and honored that they share this lifetime with us? Somewhere in our consumer culture, we have confused material items with expressions of love.

My youngest daughter, Ula, and I have birthdays one week apart. Thus, the [...]

This past November, I began a home school unit with my six-year-old daughter, Saoirse, on money. We opened our investigation by reading stories on the history of money. To paraphrase, early people originally made the things they needed. Then they began trading for the things they needed or wanted that they couldn’t make. The barter system worked out fine, as long as each party in the exchange had something that the other wanted. When that was no longer the case, money entered the marketplace as a tool to facilitate exchange. Eventually, in an effort to devise something that was relatively portable and of somewhat universal value, the Sumerians came up with the first silver coins.

If asked to select the single most important ingredient in my kitchen, it would have to be the little glass tub of demi-glace that jiggles in the back corner of my refrigerator.  Admittedly, I use the term casually. A French chef would likely have me strung up by my toes for awarding this wondrous gelatinous [...]

Long before we could pronounce Betty Friedan’s last name, Americans from my generation felt her impact.