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Our Plan B Life

Grief at the Grocery Store

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On a camping trip to Nakusp, we swing by the Save On to restock our groceries. The list includes cheese smokies. I find the cooler, see the options, and stand paralyzed by indecision:

Brock’s favourite cheese smokies are not available.

It shouldn’t matter. Brock died 23 months ago. I’m here in this grocery store with my son, my boyfriend and his pre-teen. They don’t care what kind of cheese smokies I put in the basket.

But I can’t make myself pick up the ones Brock deemed inferior. It’s ridiculous, and I make fun of myself, sharing the moment with my boyfriend. He gets the smokies so I don’t have to.

Farm wife vs. widowed mom

Not so long ago, a “good meal” meant one featuring ingredients produced by people we knew and our own farm. Brock and I ate mostly organic food, always fresh, seasonal vegetables, and celebrated the sourcing of new “local” ingredients like salt and walnuts. For holiday meals, we happily paid $100 for a fresh-killed, free-range, certified-organic fed turkey from farmer friends.

One of our meals in 2014: veggie skewers from our farm, roasted organic chicken.

These days, I budget-shop at No Frills and strive for meals my five-year-old will eat: homemade macaroni and cheese, tacos, carrots on the side. I buy $10 rotisserie chickens.

Old vs. new priorities

ORGANIC

In 2015, we had the largest certified-organic vegetable farm on the south end of Vancouver Island. But these days I rarely buy organic vegetables.

No, my values haven’t changed. I still think organic produce is healthier, want to support organic farms, and prefer to keep chemicals out of our water and soil. I just don’t want to walk the five feet over to the special organic section. My time and energy are limited these days, and organic food is no longer a priority for me.

Isaac’s strawberry buffet, age 2.5.
GOALS

At one time, our goal with food was to shop and eat politically: to support the food producers and farming practices we thought best.

My current food goal is to make proper meals for my son and have sit-down time together while we eat, which is harder than it sounds in our one kid, one adult household.

TIME

When we “retired” from farming and stopped selling at six farmers’ markets a week, Brock and I still made a point of buying most of our weekly groceries at the Duncan Farmers’ Market.

I haven’t shopped at the local (excellent) farmers’ market once in the two years we’ve lived in Invermere. Instead, my son and I spend our Saturday mornings playing Lego and planning our day’s adventures.

SOCIAL

Our friends in the Cowichan were farmers, chefs and foodies. In this new, Plan B life, I’ve collected friends who want to hike, camp, have road trips and say YES to adventures.

The past + the present

I read somewhere (Saturday Night Widows?) that losing your spouse isn’t the end of a chapter: it’s the end of a book. You have to start a whole new book.

The changes I’ve noticed in my relationship with food are just a metaphor for the changes in the rest of my life. My priorities have changed, I’m directing my energy elsewhere, and we’ve physically moved from that agricultural, food-centric world to an adventure-lifestyle-focused community. Instead of riding the tractor or eating sugar snap peas in the field, my son and I hike, camp and kayak.

Yes, it’s silly to maintain brand loyalties that are no longer relevant, to drive around to three different grocery stores to find the Pace medium-heat salsa that Brock liked best, but I like these random tributes to our old life together.

I like hearing his voice when I reach for the Doritos: “Do they have Old Dutch Arriba Nachos here, instead?”

Even though I was surprised by that whole-body paralysis when standing in the cooler section of Save On, it made me happy to remember our family holiday on Chesterman Beach, when Brock’s parents drove the 8 minutes and back to Tofino just to get his preferred kind of cheese smokies, because that was something they could do for their terminally ill son.

And I suppose it makes sense, for a family like ours where food was so very important for almost a decade, that food is part of my grieving experience.

One food constant: Jiffy Pop. Isaac takes pride in making it over the campfire, like his dad did.

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I’d love to hear your thoughts. If you’ve lost someone you love, do you maintain habits or have specific triggers that remind you of them? How do they make you feel? Please comment, share this post online or read more posts on this website.

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DINKS on the Farm

July 2008

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Tuesday, July 15, 2008 – The chickens and the egg

Makaria Farm became the home of 50 18-week old hens late last week. Today, when I went into their coop to open the door to their yard, I found OUR VERY FIRST EGG!!!! So exciting. We weren’t expecting eggs for another week or two! This weekend, we might actually be eating eggs from our own free-range, organic-fed chickens along with our farm-fresh new potatoes and homemade bread. SO cool.

Also, the mosquitoes are brutal out there. Once the sun starts to go down, it’s a madcap race to harvest potatoes/peas/strawberries for dinner and the farm gate stand before we’re eaten by the stupid bugs. Other veggies we are now harvesting from our farm include: zucchini, kohlrabi (ate my first one tonight, sliced and fried with fresh garlic from the garden), the aforementioned garlic, carrots, herbs (mint, chocolate mint, lemon chamomile and tea tree make the best herbal tea ever), basil, stevia, cherry tomatoes and one roma, and the occasional blueberry or raspberry that we split between us because it’s too good and we have to share. Our lettuce is the greatest disappointment this season: it looks stunning, but is much too bitter to eat. We also have one “stirfry green” that looks like purple lettuce but tastes like horseradish — it goes right into your sinuses. Bizarre.

We’re now old hands at the weekly farmer’s market, except that I forgot to load our table into the truck last Saturday. Our Harvest Box Program has officially begun, and we fill regular orders for flats of shelling peas for people who still know how to (gasp) preserve the harvest. All in all, there’s much more demand out there for our produce than we can supply, which is exciting and frustrating, because we want to grow MORE MORE MORE! We take elaborate notes for what we want to do next year: install the irrigation BEFORE the peas grow a foot high; trellising isn’t just for pussies; and you can never have too many potatoes (which were edible a full two weeks before we even thought to look for them).

We’ve also met numerous farmers: the veterans in the neighbourhood, whom we’re sure have cancelled their cable since we amuse them so much; the newbies, who face the same shocking obstacles as us (“what do you mean, you can’t build our house in two days for $1,000??”); and the almost-newbies, who are investigating land options, farm mortgages and loans, and gobbling Harrowsmith magazines like we used to . . . back when we had spare time.

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Sunday, July 20, 2008 – And then things started to happen

Brock and I eat bacon and eggs at least once every week. For more than a year and a half, we have been aware that our traditional breakfast is 100% locally-growable: we looked forward to our own eggs, bread and bacon. Saturday morning we actually ate eggs from our own free-range, organic hens for the first time ever.

The coolest part was that not only were the egg shells tiny (being the first eggs our hens had ever laid), the eggs themselves were tiny: the yolks were the size of dimes, the white a large toonie around. It was adorable, like eating Barbie-scale breakfast. The second egg I cracked had two yolks in it: my first ever double yolker. It took five eggs to feed us both, but they were so yummy and amazing, and they were (I realized with shock) not just 100 mile eggs, but 100 ft eggs, having been created by our very own (locally purchased) hens.

I suppose it’s bizarre that eggs were the highlight of my week. Try this: today I picked strawberries and managed to fill over five pints with ripe, perfect berries. We’ve averaged 2 pints/day or less up until now. Even better: I put them out at our farm stand, and we’ve already sold 4 at $5/pint in the past hour. The less-than-perfect berries filled about three pints, and I will wash and freeze them for future pies — I already have two pies’ worth of frozen strawberries in the freezer.

And: I filled a pint with ripe tomatoes from a variety of plants for the market Saturday, and in accordance with our quality control policies I had to try my first Black Krim tomato, which was so ugly that I was tempted to throw it to the chickens. I sliced it up and ate it with prejudice, and was shocked to discover that it was the best tomato I have ever eaten. Ugly or not, those babies are getting a premium price sticker at the market from now on. If I can bear to part with them . . .