BACK TO THE GARDEN
Commune Still Simmers With The Sense Of Revolution At The 50th Reunion
For three glorious days this summer, I cooked alongside my dear friend, Verandah Porche, and women with whom I have cooked, off and on, for five decades. The occasion was the 50th reunion of the commune in Packer Corners, Vt., where I lived in the 1970s, and where Verandah still lives.
My son, who was born on the farm, and his father came in from the West Coast and joined me for the drive up to the reunion. My daughter, who was 2 when we arrived at the commune, had just taken a new job and, sadly, was unable to come. But the core survivors and tattered edges of the radical left of 50 years ago — activists, novelists, farmers, teachers, musicians, filmmakers, labor organizers, poets, draft dodgers, radicals and rabble-rousers — gathered to celebrate.
They arrived from London, Barcelona, Montreal, Boston and Los Angeles, and came up the farm’s dirt road bearing baskets and boxes full of homegrown produce, a giant ham from a pig Sam raised, buttery baked sweets, gussied-up peaches and berries in pies and tarts, tomatoes, squash, beans, pheasant, burnished breads and more.
The command center at Packer Corners was always in the farm’s cacophonous kitchen, its thrumming heart. And now, once again, the sound of wooden spoons against wooden bowls, the comfort of cotton towels, dented dark-bottomed pots and peals of naughty laughter, became, for three days and two nights, our own Kitchen Esperanto — the language of a shared past, tribally secret.
The kitchen has fed thousands over the last half-century, its wooden floors and counters polished with the repetitive grace of salty, working hands and gallons of cheap olive oil. Old knife gashes have become soft archaeological evidence of meals past. If you put your palm to the wood and are quiet, it’s as if you can pull up the poetry, the song, the iridescent promises of lovers, the hard-fought liberation and shared dreams that worked their way into the grain along with the small tragedies, lonely late-night tears and moments of unrelenting grief that play dead in the countertops and dark cupboards.
By the first afternoon, every flat surface in the farmhouse groaned under the weight of the collective generosity, and a giant pot of tomato sauce simmered and smiled like a sturdy country pieta, blessing us from the stove. Fuses were blown and lights extinguished, reminding us that ample electricity is a luxury in the country. Small children, our village’s grandchildren, threaded through the kitchen
to grab a carrot, a cookie, a waffle or sweet things made from zucchini. Many of our children, who are now parents, have built houses on that land and watch their sons and daughters play in the same dirt, run up the same hill to where the Maypole stands every cold spring.
The first night, there was a slide show of old photos in the barn. The sight of our thrilled-to-be-alive, beautiful, young selves made us wonder aloud how we had managed to keep our appendages intact while rototilling butt naked. There was a massive bonfire to end the evening. The next day, in the soft rain, under a tent, there were readings from the many writers, followed by singing and a full reading of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” accompanied by live music.
And always, everywhere, there was food.
Food is about more than flavor. It is more than sustenance. In that farmhouse kitchen of 50 years ago, I learned to cook and feed for love. I learned that at a full and welcoming table you slowed down and listened, you opened up, you engaged and laughed and took risks. I learned there’s a rhythm to a good dinner table, a slow swaying start, a lively collective crescendo, and a sustained and raucous finale.
The cooking joy I learned in my early 20s at the farm — finding it there with other women — changed my life inexorably and sweetly. We learned together — grinding wheat berries in the old Corona mill to make bread, keeping food-giving animals alive and producing, spending a day butchering a pig, squeezing apple cider in a hand press, boiling down maple sap, churning butter, growing gardens and canning and storing their gifts. We learned to survive in a world we created, for better or worse.
The last night, a famous homegrown band played for three generations of ecstatic dancers. Then, a small knot of us stayed near the house, sitting around in chairs and on rocks, and talked softly, savoring every last bite of our weekend, appreciating our beautiful, imperfect and scarred tribe, together again.
“You know, you really haven’t changed,” we told each other. And laughed out loud at our own generous lies. We did, of course, not look the same. But we still carry within us the core of who we were then — what we believed, how strong we were, and how loyal to one another and to the idea of cultural and political revolution. We believed in possibility. And in the obligation and privilege to nourish each other — body and soul.
Catherine Blinder lives in Hartford.