The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

A lot of South Enders, isolated from the mainland and remote from major grocery outlets, have reverted to primitive customs.  Now, don’t you northern neighbors worry — we aren’t talking cannibalism here.  Not yet.  No, we’ve gone back to ancestral roots.  We’ve become hunter-gatherers.  Most of us have small gardens, some of us have large ones, but we grow what we can to supplement what we can’t afford down at the Plaza IGA and Hardware Sales.    

  Sure, the tomatoes we planted in May don’t ripen until October and the corn won’t grow high enough to hide our medical marijuana plants and there’s really only so much a person can do with the zucchini that always threatens to escape the deer fence and become the kudzu of kamano with thousands of gourds dropping down from power lines like aerial IED’s on car windshields and the Walking Women of Mabana’s phalanx of human obstacles to unwanted commuter traffic.  

    So we’ve been forced to resort to yet another strategy for culinary survival: CANNING.  A lot of my neighbors come to me and say, Skeeter, I just don’t think I can eat another jar of your savory ZUCCHINI DADDLE DILLS, no offense.  And I say, None Taken, and gently move them to a recipe from Skeeter’s Skillet Skills (available at Addled Daddle Press for 9.95 plus shipping and handling), the chapter on food preservation.  I like to give them a Tried and True first, something like the wildly popular Nettle Kraut, a fermented in the crock nettle with maximum garlic that, once canned, can be eaten on Christmas snowgoose or Easter crab bratwurst (another Skillet Skill fave) or just a snappy side dish any occasion.  

    I’m not suggesting these pioneer skills will end poverty down here or take the place of  our food banks, but for those of us who chose unemployment over work, it has been a lifesaver.  You start canning a cellar full of nettle kraut, you might consider telling that jerk boss of yours to take a hike too.  You got the safety net now, that’s for sure.  And with a healthy diet, you can drop that health insurance.  This stuff cures what ails ya.      Next week we’ll talk Animal Husbandry.  And no, I don’t mean Tough Love Matrimony.

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When I was a pimply teenage pup, I had a fantasy of living on an island.  Just me and my baby.  Robinson Crusoe and his sweetheart.  Like most fantasies, it skipped a lot of important details.  Like making a living.  Or needing a few skills.  You know, how to build a shack or repair a roof or pluck a chicken or grow a garden or fix a well pump.  Basic stuff like that.  I guess I believed the A.M. radio bubblegum songs:  Love will find a way.  Or all you really need is love.  Or love is the answer.  Love love love.  Oh baby oh baby oh baby.

Oh brother.  I’ll be the first to admit I daydreamed my way through school.  Stared out the window all day and missed, apparently, the crucial message education had for me.  Which was learn some skills, get a good paying job, conform and be happy.

You can learn life’s lessons the easy way or you can learn em the hard way.  Oh baby oh baby oh baby.  Abject poverty never intruded on my boyhood fantasies.  But it sure did on my adulthood dreams.  Or nightmares, really.  Still, I was knock-headed persistent.  Bought my shack and 7 acres on the South End and proceeded to the task at hand:  Hand to Mouth Survival.  Karen, my wife now of four decades, left a world of security for a vow of poverty.

The years passed and we tended our homestead, built a house, grew vegetable gardens and flower gardens galore, planted orchards and arbors, and like most folks in the Land of Plenty, we managed to survive.  I suspect each of us down here has an island dream, a fantasy that filled the sails of our imaginations,  that took us on a unique journey to this exotic archipelago in our minds.

We each learned how to live our lives here on the islands, even though we each could tell a different story…with an ending not yet written.  I think, though, and this is the hopeless romantic still staring out the schoolroom window – I think we all know it’s really, on some level, still a love story.

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