Times of Uncertainty

My grandfather’s grandfather was a serf in Poland in the early 1800’s.   I suppose he wasn’t an ordinary serf, if that isn’t an oxymoron, because he was a manager.   But an economic slave nonetheless, owned in most ways, owning nothing.

I was reminded of this ancestor when I found Julien pruning in the vineyard last week. Pruning and ruminating:  “I look up and see an ocean of vine plants pleading for care, costs rising, climate change, Bordeaux wines in crisis and the world at war.”

There was no easy repartee to this dark version of reality.   So I told him the story my grandmother’s grandmother told her.

When my grandfather’s grandfather was a young man, he peered out at a very gloomy world, contemplating his prospects.   Poland was the prey of Prussia, Austria and Russia.  He would live and die as a serf owning nothing.  His young wife and two small children had died in an epidemic.

He made the rounds of his neighbours.  “There’s nothing for us here. Let’s go. Make a life for ourselves in America.”  They told him he was foolhardy. “Nothing is known. How can you be sure your life will be better?  Here at least we know what we’ll eat, where we’ll sleep.”

He called them cowards; that they would regret their fear.  “If we don’t own land, we are nothing.”

Around that time, a young woman was working in a field.  She saw my grandfather’s grandfather following a mule-driven hearse to the cemetery.  She said: “Some woman is going to catch herself a fine widower.”

She, my grandfather’s grandmother, agreed to the journey, the only one to heed his call.

Thus my ancestors stepped together into great Uncertainty.

Of course there is something self selecting about people who do such things.   They must have been burning with impatience and frustration.   They must have had intelligence and vision.   For sure they must have had that quintessential survival quality, the ability to pull yourself up by your bootstraps.   When the only freedom you have is the ownership of your convictions.

Julien and I looked out at the ocean of vines needing care and read each other’s thoughts: limited means and insignificance in the face of global instability.   It was hard to resist that familiar, contagious, downward pull of fear.

As we flailed about trying to maintain balance, Henri arrived.  He noted:  “Vibrations attract like vibrations.”   Negative thoughts can scatter us into chaotic particles.   But with the right frequency, we can turn those scattered fragments into an organized, pulsing pattern.   Cymatics in action.   In us.

Our conversation turned from obstacles to opportunities: our current actions and plans to improve the vineyard, adapt to climate change, plant new crops to diversify, move into other markets…   Already Julien has sown oats and fava beans to fix nitrogen and decompact the soil.  Henri is concocting organic compost to stimulate micro-organisms.

We also posited that of course we could just up and sell the whole kit and caboodle.

Sometimes it’s useful to state the unthinkable out loud.   Let it roll around your tongue, see how it tastes.   Let it roll around your heart and gut, see how it feels.

As I tasted that thought, I pictured my grandfather.   A fierce, powerful hulk of a farmer who could lift, construct and negotiate anything.   He frightened everyone, except my mother.   Maybe because she was so much like him.

As I tasted that thought I admitted, I am not much like my mother.   Julien is not much like my grandfather.   We don’t have that animal ferociousness.

As I tasted that thought, I pictured us living somewhere else.

The taste was bitter.

It was bitter for us all.   How do you marry your love of a place and love of a land and a sense of responsibility and husbandry, family and identity – with the gnawing uncertainty of a dark-seeming global future?

Henri voiced the passion we all feel.   We’ve been granted a family place.  A place hard to come by, easy to lose.        A magic place full of opportunity.

If ancestral givens make a difference, I doubt we got the entirety of my grandfather’s raw, hay bale lifting brute force.    But I suspect we got enough.  What I’m sure of is our share of my grandmother’s power: her wisdom and discreet force, the energy of the willow.   She never broke, she knew how to bend.   I know it hurt sometimes, she told me of her pain.

But she held fast.   Through ten children, deaths of some of them, the Great Depression, three wars…

And she held on to her land.