Anno COVID

Jack Deatherage

(12/2022) I've a new reference point on my timeline, BC "before Covid". Anno Covid (AC)- "in the year of COVID" naturally followed the change. In my case, AC 1 began on turkey day 2021, two days before I knew I'd contracted COVID. As I enter into the new year, AC 2, I ponder the cock-up the news media, governments, bureaucracies, medical institutions, pharmaceutical companies and the panicked populous made of the infection's release. In my lifetime, the only other disease I'm currently aware of that came close to unleashing the worst of human vileness was HIV/AIDS. And HIV/AIDS did not shut the world down, though there were certainly factions that urged governments to establish concentration camps for those infected with the disease. The less totalitarian suggestions were along the lines of tattooing those infected so the uninfected would know who to shun.

If the first year of Anno COVID taught me anything it's to trust no one in authority, especially those appointed, anointed or elected to dictate to the masses. Were I less an idiot I'd have known not to trust those supposedly in control after reading my fifth grade history book, which I only skimmed in 1965 because history, as taught in school, was boring. Maybe I needed to experience the manipulators' lies first hand to understand just how easily those grasping for power lie to keep power?

With distrust of the masters welded firmly in place, and being currently unable to do anything to change who is claiming control of this wobbling rock as it spins along the outer edge of our galaxy, I set about preparing for the next global crisis. (I'm certain of nothing but my eventual death and some genius of smart's next attempt at creating a utopia via killing off as much of humanity as needs be to fulfill its delusion of godhood.)

Vague memories of my GrandmaC's pantry, root cellar, refrigerators and freezers (there were more than one of each machine on that tiny farm) inform me that I am woefully unprepared for the coming crisis, whether it's man made or natural. Grandma canned what they grew on the farm. I remember going down into the dim, dank cellar and marveling at the shelves of Mason jars filled with pickles, fruits and vegetables. There were bins of carrots and potatoes, possibly onions and cabbages, though that may be memories of later cellars overlaying hers.

I don't recall canned meats. Grandma may have canned beef while Grandfather and my uncles salt cured and smoked the hogs they raised before the freezers were acquired. That would have been a ways before my mom went to Bal'm'r' to learn nursing. Chickens were dispatched and processed as needed. I still see a chicken's head lying on the chopping stump, blinking eye looking up at me as the body flopped and flapped blood all about five or six year old me and my hatchet wielding grandmother.

I've since dispatched more than a hundred birds, never a pleasant task and generally a moral dilemma for me as I didn't have to do the killing to feed myself as my grandmother had to feed whichever of the clan was living under her roof at any given time. Chickens, as I kept them, were a want, an experiment, rather than a need. Grandmother's birds converted kitchen and garden wastes into the richest flavored eggs I've ever eaten. Chicken manure went into the compost piles along with whatever humans couldn't eat of the birds when they were taken as meat. The compost went into the garden to grow the plants that fed the family. I've yet to establish the cycles Grandmother grew old with. She could morally justify everything she did, while I struggle to justify buying flavorless meats.

Meat aside, I wrestle with canning beans and hot dogs! How hard can that be? (I failed to can 6 quarts of water when learning the variables of my canner and stove. One jar cracked and one lid didn't seal.) Now I've four quart jars of beans and dogs that leaked and didn't seal out of five jars that went into the pressure canner! One could think that having most of recorded knowledge just a few keyboard taps away would make learning to can easier than my grandmother, born in 1899, ever had it. But one would have to not be this village's idiot I suppose.

I've had better success turning 5 pounds of bananas into 13 ounces of dried chips.

The DW, shocked at that weight conversion, remarked, "Too bad we can't eat the peels."

Eh-hem. I'm now slicing the nanners, peels included, and drying them, though the finished weight isn't much more than it was minus the peels.

Now that winter temperatures are on us and we need to heat the unoccupied upstairs apartment well enough to keep the plumbing from freezing, I'm taking to making hardtack, rusks and sourdough crackers more seriously. Turning the flours I've stored in the freezers into desert dry breads (to be stored in air tight containers in the SHTF pantry) frees up the freezers for what little meat we occasionally acquire until I can master the canning methods well enough not to poison whoever might eventually open the jars and partake thereof.

Fermenting, preserving vegetables in salt brine has been an eye opener. The Mad One left me the last of the cabbage she fermented before she went off to Russia seven years ago. I only recently opened the jar which has been in one of the downstairs fridges all that time and started eating it right from the unprocessed jar. Delicious! And inspiring! Thanks to the Mad American Bulgarian, I've several times successfully fermented cabbage- whole heads and chopped.

Being in the camp that no longer trusts the governments and their oligarch masters to have the masses' best interests foremost in mind, I've been wondering how the DW and I might survive another disruption in our vitamin/medicinal herb supply lines. That has brought me to microgreens, which I vaguely recall the my oldest homesteading friend telling me about years ago. (As is often the case, I ignored her.)

While whole wheat hardtack bakes in the oven, and red cabbage and cauliflower chunks perfume the upstairs with their fermenting fragrances (the DW calls it something else while making gagging sounds) I do a deep dive into the hows and whys of growing microgreens as I gather the fixings for the first trials before I assemble my notes into a booklet I'll take to the library sometime this month to hand out to those few to none who show up for my lecture on the topic of gardening on a window sill through the winter months so's to have constant, fresh, nutrient dense greens to stopgap a potential break in the nutritional supply chain.

Sighing, the DW asks how much this "garden" is going to cost us. So far... $50.

I don't dare mention the clover seed I'm planning to use in the first microgreens trial could produce cyanide if allowed to grow out its true leaves.

Hmm... I might escape the library lecture after all.