feminish

Yesterday I covered some old little cardboard boxes with brown paper (I never want to be without brown paper), lined them with leaves and filled them with cherries we’d picked from the very tall tree at La Verie. (I’m a bit disappointed in myself for never wanting to climb to the top of trees - would that make me more of a feminist?). We harvested a lot of cherries - deep dark bright shiny red juicy-sweet globules. Cherries are improbably round.

We then set out with the cherries to try to return the generosity the village has given us. The idea was a simple one: to re-balance things between giving and receiving. We limited ourselves to four boxes to deliver and started at 7pm. We thought it’d take about half an hour to make good our debts.

It was 9.45 by the time we were knocking on door no. 4, starving and exhausted. We had, despite all our best efforts, received a huge pot of homemade jam, an attempted gift of a dozen eggs (”no no no, honestly, it’s fine. yes, I know, we’re vegetarian, but really, it’s fine, we’re fine.”), a bulging bag of freshly cut homegrown asparagus, and the offer of a sizable sitting room table. (Amid conversations about package holidays in Egypt, GM crops in France, Wikipedia, Asbestos, and the cost of leather coverings on dentists’ chairs). Alex, our fourth attempted-receivee, was movingly disheartened that we wouldn’t accept a drink and so, instead, gave us four plastic pegs for the bed (which he’d given us last week).

A lot went on last night which had little to do with supply, demand, need or preference - and a lot to do with hanging out and being unnecessarily good to each other. For all that it was human, it was also economic: despite our British privateness we were woven into tangled and enmeshed obligations and generosities that make the little things happen so the big things can follow.

The whole experience reminded me less of our erstwhile one-time neighbour Jeanette and more of Martha Ballard - diarist midwife of legend in 18thC America (as much a feminist heroine as MW and SdeB, IMO), who ran her farm household of nine children on barter alone (delivering, with unprecedented skillfulness, 800 babies while she was at it).