Unwoven Memories

I grew up and out on a four family-owned, and cooperatively-organized, extended matriarchal farm. Four interdependent 1940s through 1970s patriarchally managed businesses, without substantial questions about who should wear pants, yet with a surprising matriarchal cooperative understory. The boxers outnumbered the panties, but the panties had full nutritional care-giving and -receiving reign, Monday through Friday, 9 to 5, and what the boxers missed, well, that's the competitive market price of non-panties. My maternal grandparents were farmer and wife with three daughters. These daughters, as adults, lived, and two died, within a five to fifteen minute drive from each other, an easy spring through fall bike ride for pre-teen cousins, ten of us in all, four all-American girls, five made in USA boys, and the fifth-born, well, we never were entirely persuaded one way or the other. During the spring each of the three sisters planted her garden, large enough to produce tiers of canned corn, rows of string beans, pickled beets, sauerkraut, stewed tomatoes, applesauce and peaches and pears self-picked in teams of two or three adult sisters and their attendant underlings infesting local orchards. It was at canning time our matriarchal cooperative came into its own. And the making of preserves, jams and jellies, cherry and strawberry, raspberry and blueberry. I recall bushel baskets of sweetcorn waiting to be husked and cooked and cut off the cooled cobs; huge harvesting pans of peas waiting to be snapped open then pulled out with our left thumbs, except for my oldest sister, princess Elder of all matriarchal cousins, who is left-hand dominant. Rows of tomatoes lined up on our enclosed front porch to finish sun-ripening on yellowed newspapers spread thin across the grey painted cement floor leaving only a center aisle to walk in from outside toward the sacred altar of our mass producing kitchen stove, all four burners sacrificing red hot electricity. The porch floor would fill with alternating waves of peaches and pears creeping toward their ripest time while we pitted mahogany sweet cherries for freezing and florescent red cherries tart, to drench in sugar and smack our mouths with amazing jam. So, there I was the fifth-born ambiguity of ten cousins living literally in the midst of a traditional MidWestern extended family matriarchal cooperative, Monday through Friday during summer vacations, with some elements of patriarchal sharing among my mother's dad and the three son-in-laws on weekends, sometimes even hot haymaking weeknights, sharing combines and bailers and harvesting wagons, forming hay bailing teams, drivers and stackers, unstackers and hay mount restackers, and cookers of meals for the field workers, washers of well-worn dishes. All this economic nutritional production was further enriched by shared sister and cousin lunches and laughter and lavish suppers with sweetcorn on buttered and salted cobs, sliced beefsteak tomatoes, potato salads and strawberry-rhubarb pie for dessert, a la vanilla-only mode for those who preferred creamy with their just desserts during summer's cooperative harvest. Good food, but also hot rhapsodies of laughter spreading echoes across the evening barn to share with dairy cows and satiated pigs cooling in their cooperative mud beside the algae-blooming pond. This cooperative worked and played across all four sites, grandparents and all three sisters and my usually convivial cousins. We peaked in summer and dwindled down in winter to monthly Sunday dinners extending on through sleepy afternoons of Sabbath rest, and maybe sledding, to end in nocturnal benedictions back at church, to close these sacred rituals where we began all of Sunday morning, 10 a.m. Sunday School through noonish, often over-heated over-extended admonishments against greed and lechery, dancing and provocative entertainments in movie theaters and pool halls, and don't even think about the bars and devil-liquor stores. In retrospect, I doubt these Sabbath admonishments against competing with extended family health were as influential as was our cooperative structure, our mutual enjoyment of nutritional outcomes but also the harvesting process together. Our matriarchal cooperative, for the generation it lasted, was 100% proof against unhealthy family disruptions. But, that was then, and this is now, spread out and dissipated, finding our new ways toward extending families of matriarchal and patriarchal cooperatives.