Oregon Humanities

Virginia’s Pantry

A modern-day homesteader looks for a way to turn nostalgia into action

Harriet Fasenfest

It was nostalgia that called me to Virginia Yoder’s home in the small Oregon town east of Woodburn that bears her family’s name. It seemed a marvel to me that a person living today could share a last name with a place, but that was the case for Virginia and her large extended family. This connection to place was only part of the reason she appealed to me. The real attraction was eighty-one-year-old Virginia herself and, more specifically, the contents of her pantry.

There must be something primal in the allure of a full pantry, something inherent in the instinct toward species survival. Full pantries mean life, though I doubt you can get the same soul-satisfying experience from a freezer full of Hot Pockets. Given my own predilection for homemade rather than store-bought goods, Virginia’s pantry promised something I had yet to discover but longed for.

I am not sure when I became nostalgic for a rural life that I never lived. While it is possible that a Fasenfest traveled the Oregon Trail, I doubt it. Ours is a small East Coast tribe whose members arrived over wide-open water, not land. Following an obligatory delousing, my forebearers went straight from Ellis Island to a four-story walk-up in the Bronx. Who could blame my mom for finding my attraction to farm life perplexing? “What’s gotten into her?” she must think to herself. “Who needs such work?” I understand. I am often perplexed as well.

But then that is sometimes the point of callings: they confound expectations. Like nostalgia, callings speak to a time and purpose that seem wholly sacred, but they need not be static or frozen like the gilded rose. Better when they are the pulsing blood to a life made manifest in the here and now. Better still when they move us forward.

Standing face to face with Virginia’s full pantry made me blush. Just a few moments earlier I was babbling on about the emotional appeal of putting up the harvest, living in the seasons, and the opportunities inherent in homesteading, my position mostly theory, a thing of notion and hope. But standing there—amid the ten-gallon buckets of dried fruit from every season and jars of everything from applesauce and peaches to green beans and pickles, sauces and soups, canned tuna and sausage—my earlier words seemed like shameful conceptual dribble.

Gratefully, Virginia’s perspective was free of such high-minded notions. Her reasons for early homesteading were strong and steady—like Virginia herself: “It’s what folks needed to do. It’s how they ate.” Such a declaration rang clear of enviro-speak, which is not to say there were no stories of seasons and stewardship: they just weren’t as precious as the ones we city folks tell.

In the simplest terms, early homesteading, and all manner of family farming since, was about the intimate relationship between our species and those found within the boundaries (whether garden fences or mountains) of the natural world. To be sure, for most of our time on this planet, “stewardship” was logical, not merely an ideal.

Meeting and talking to Virginia cut free my nostalgic longing from conjecture. Somehow the most simple thing—“It’s how they ate”—had been made complex by my ignorance or by the allure, logic, and convenience of modern living. But Virginia’s pantry was my wake-up call. It was the moment I shifted from wisp to way, the moment I became less inclined to imagine the joys of food preservation, stewardship, or homesteading in lieu of the very hard work that would, inevitably, stand before me.

Surrounding Virginia’s house were orchards and gardens that had fed Virginia, her now-departed husband Emerson, and their six children since 1946. Prior to that the Schmachers lived there, and before that Emerson’s great-aunt and great-uncle, who built the house in 1909. Regardless of resident or deed, the homestead was connected to a large eighty-acre parcel that was purchased by Mary Yoder Schwartz and her husband in 1887, after they moved to Oregon from Missouri.

Mary Yoder’s brother, his wife, and their children (one of whom was Emerson’s father) followed Mary’s lead in 1889, bringing with them the hardware for the town’s first lumber mill. Virginia’s home, the namesake mill, country store, schoolhouse, church, and township still stand today, in one form or another, to share in a legacy grounded in place.

The Yoder family celebrated its seventy-third reunion this past August in the Smyrna Church (built in 1890 from the lumber produced at the Yoder mill). I was lucky enough to attend the event, having begged for an invitation from Virginia’s cousin Roberta, who, at ninety-five, is one of the oldest living members of the family.

Having lunch with Virginia and Roberta earlier that year had been one of the high points of my summer. Sharing a meal of chicken and noodles (that Virginia made), green beans (that Virginia canned), and shortcake made with fresh raspberries (that Virginia picked) reminded me of how far I had come from this kind of simple fellowship among friends and family: this is what life looked like before life had to be designed.

Perhaps I am being overly nostalgic when I say that meaning and purpose are lost when people leave home in search of meaning and purpose. I understand the reasons we searched, and I understand the promise inherent in the search, but I also recognize the downside: we could be losing the sweet, solid fellowship that comes from generations of hard work and staying in place.

These two women who, with six children each (Roberta had two sets of twins, so bore six children in eight years), knew and accepted the hard work of their lives and, more important, loved it. Not every day, to be sure, but as a whole. I think it was Roberta who chuckled at the premise of “working women” who never had time to volunteer because they were busy. “Like we weren’t busy,” she chortled.

Here were women who knew the trades of homemaking as they applied to the bigger picture of environmental stewardship, which was the essence of home economics before we grew ashamed of it. Here were two women who sewed, sowed, cooked, canned, volunteered, and even entered the county fair as a measure of their respect for the effort. These were happy women: Women before the diaspora. Women grounded in a tradition that was shared with family and the systems that supported families. Women who, as Roberta so eloquently said, were “happy as if [they] had good sense.” The point being, it was hard work, but so what? Here was the answer to my mother’s lament of “Who needs such work?” Evidently we do, Mom. Perhaps it makes us strong and clear about our interrelationship with and responsibility to the natural world in a way that all the festivals, lectures, and round-table discussions cannot.

My hunch is that women like the Yoders found value in their lives, homes, families, and communities through the hard work that sustained it all. I doubt hard work was ever so fully disdained, and leisure so fully embraced, as it is today. Perhaps in challenging our culture’s marked abhorrence to work, specifically that grimy-sweat-during-the-harvest type of work, could be the bridge between nostalgia and a real life. In the end, it might well be the sweat on our brow that will deliver us the greatest happiness.

Still, I admit, my own life is easier than the grueling work of putting up the harvest, all day, every day. It’s more akin to urban homesteading: the emerging ethic of small-scale systems and trades within the confines of the city. Think American Gothic with a tattoo. Think victory gardens and mojitos. Think city chickens and Vespas. Funny thing, this herky-jerky effort, but at least we’re all trying.

How does one reconcile a life that is part and parcel of large-loop, modern-living systems with a life committed to the smaller-loop systems of the natural world? I work through that question daily. There are no easy answers since we are so thoroughly mired in the logic and language of modernity. Still, there are many ways to live in this manner and even more reasons to try. For me, the most powerful way to undo the imbalance is to turn nostalgia into action, to follow nostalgia’s lead to my own backyard, to consider Virginia’s words—“It’s what folks needed to do. It’s how they ate.”—and to follow that logic home.

Today I teach, write, and posit on the life of an urban homesteader. My efforts barely scrape the surface of the thing I am most enamored with: an economy and life that levels the playing field for the planet and its citizens. Our failings in this regard are the source of my greatest sadness and my motivation for walking backward in time. I suppose I am looking for a time before the world turned from generosity to greed, for a time when our neighbor was our concern, when the soil was our responsibility, when the well flowed equally to all homes. And in this regard I suppose I am being nostalgic, or just plain hopeful, to assume there was ever such a moment or, rather, that it could survive the forward thrust of modernity.

In the end I’m sure that was exactly what drew me to Virginia and her pantry. It was hope—and the notion that within the context of a family, home, land, and the blessing of good harvests (not to mention an honest share of hard work), we could not only fill the world’s pantries but our hearts as well.

From the Spring 2009 “Nostalgia” issue