Brunette Writes Podcast

When a reaction to King Arthur's bread flour reveals the company now adds "enzyme" as an ingredient, a baker is forced to ditch her sourdough culture and start over.

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A fiftysomething urban homesteader shares a litany of experiences showing just how challenging it is to operate a homestead in the city, from dealing with backyard poultry regulations to feeling the pressures of urban crime.

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Walls are always acts of violence.

So said the playwright Eileen Cherry when I interviewed her for a theater magazine back in the 1990s. I thought the notion was profound at the time, so I included it in my profile of Cherry and her work. 

But now I think it’s a profoundly illogical thing to say.

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It has recently come to my attention that the supplements I’ve been taking on a routine basis in order to reduce symptoms of an autoimmune condition might actually be triggering those very same symptoms.

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There was another reason we just sat with the house and yard that first year, 2017-2018. For many of us, gardens become an extension of ourselves, maybe even of our very souls. They represent our hopes and dreams, our deepest wishes and yearnings, and even our sorrows and losses. That first year was one for the books, and in the aftermath, I turned my energy toward that quarter-acre expanse of lawn, invasive plants, and exotic ornamentals, and the vision that came to me was clear: We needed a fence. One that would cordon off the entire backyard perimeter.

What happened, exactly, to warrant fencing? I alluded to it when I said the job I’d taken that brought us to St. Louis turned out to be “challenging.”

That’s an understatement.

I’d been feeling a little blue, and losing the lucky frog didn’t help.

It happened when I cleaned out the bird bath. The lucky frog sits on a broken paver in the middle of the bird bath, and I’d set it or dropped it somewhere when I scrubbed the green slime from inside the bath, switching out to a fresh stone for the birds to perch on. I looked everywhere: In the ferns around the bird bath, all over my little cleaning spot near the hose. The lucky frog had vanished.

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An urban farmer draws on the wisdom of his ancestors, and that’s just common sense.

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Tyrean 'Heru' Lewis takes up a career path that's incredibly rare today: farming.

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St. Louis hosted the 1904 World’s Fair, a moment that has been immortalized in film with the movie Meet Me in St. Louis. This was the river city’s claim to fame at the turn of the previous century, and folks here have never forgotten it. The vestiges of that boom time dot the city as remaining relics of its glory days, when St. Louis was fourth in the nation in terms of population, and we were on par with our chief rival to the north, Chicago, in terms of wealth and prestige. Our ‘farmhouse’ is one of those relics.

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They say you can’t go home again, but I did.

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