Making a meal of daily life
“Some historians would say that ‘thinkers’ are behind the ideas and mythologies people live by. I think it also goes back to maize, reindeer, squash, sweet potatoes, and rice.”
— Gary Snyder
If you ever wanted to know what it would be like to live a self-sufficient lifestyle and largely off-the-grid, then “Lambs in Winter” (Bright Leaf Press, 2024, 215 pages) by Alexis Lathem might be the book for you, especially if you are a woman.
Lathem’s memoir is evidence of her Vermont farming experience during her middle-aged years from a female perspective.
Having lived off the grid myself during my late twenties and early thirties and living on the food I grew, I admired Lathem’s task toward self-sufficiency beginning at a slightly older age and taking on all of what this life entails. It’s not an easy life even for a young person, and especially when, like Lathem, you come from an urban background with little to no prior farming experience. So, in this sense, in “Lambs in Winter” we get to walk alongside Lathem as she discovers, attempts and lives with this new and sometimes mind- and body-altering life.
Right from the beginning she tells her readers what her intentions were and some of the important projects and issues she planned to investigate and address. On a small three-acre homestead in Vermont, she sets out to, as she says, “... do this on a very small scale as an exercise in freedom and personal sovereignty, and as a form of inquiry into what it will take for human and nonhuman life to endure — a life of infinite inquiry into what it means to live as a human being inside a greater community of life.”
She talks in detail about natural farming, regenerative agriculture, renewable energy and their challenges in the real world. On this subject she says, “We grow our own food as an exercise in food sovereignty.” She also brings up the subjects of climate change and global warming, saying “weather is what shapes our world. Weather is the ultimate wilderness that we cannot control.” She strongly invokes Indigenous communities, saying, “This is a life born out of some deep need to connect not only with the food that sustains us but also with our own deep past as human beings.” Hence she begins her skillfully and intelligently written memoir starting in 2007 when she and her husband Art are getting started with repairs on an old farmhouse and barn, a few animals (sheep and chickens) and the birth of a first lamb.
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In the early chapters she tells us about her family’s genetic roots from the Isle of Skye in Scotland and about her previous lives in many places and countries — London, New York, Oregon and Paris, France. She shares with us that “my teachers were my books” and that books would eventually lead her to discover other kinds of teachers such as “trees, grass, caribou, salmon, seeds and compost and domestic animals.” Lathem quotes many thinker-writers throughout the book, people like Gary Snyder, Helen and Scott Nearing, Michael Pollan, Aldo Leopold, Annie Dillard, Margaret Atwood, Wendell Berry and even Ghandi, who says “the future of our life on Earth will depend on the countryside also being ‘the solution,’” as Ghandi saw village life, rather than urban development, as the future for nonindustrial nations.
We follow Alexis and Art throughout the pages of “Lambs in Winter” with chapters such as “Off the Trail,” “It Pays to Eat Well,” “Food As Medicine,” “Rain, Rain, Rain,” “Going Gently,” (a chapter on surviving the pandemic) and “The Great Flood and Other Catastrophes”( such as wildfires). We learn about local barn history, woods and trail explorations, feeding and shearing lambs (with names like “Obama”), about the wilder animals in chapters like “Listening to Loons,” “Monarchs and Milkweed” and “Song Dogs,” (about the howling of coyotes) and about butterflies and the many references to all the wild birds. And then the subject that comes up again and again throughout the book: that of our Indigenous forebearers. Lathem cites Indigenous writers such as Robin Wall Kimmerer and her Abenaki teacher Judy Dow, who tells Lathem of not only her people’s history, but shares legends and stories such as Years of Darkness and then about seasons such as Moon of the Falling Leaves and life knowledge such as reciprocity, responsibility, reverence and respect — the “sacred ecology of Indigenous peoples” as she refers to it.
But it is not until we get to the section on “Disturbance” in what Lathem calls “The Middle Years’ that we get perspective on how animals and humans have dealt with difficult times. Here she talks about elephants and whales and about Jane Goodall’s work with chimpanzees while not neglecting the world of animals right around her in Vermont. “Our understanding of animals is coming around full circle to what the aboriginals always knew, who certainly never doubted that animals had ‘theory of mind,’” she writes, adding the phrase: “... if only we would pay attention to what is hidden in plain sight.” She also talks about “direct action” related to GMOs and industrial farming in an activist state of mind, quoting Karl Marx: “The earth is not a fountain of perpetual resources for the taking.” And then she adds, “The meaning of direct action is we are not waiting on change but are building the future now. This is the revolution. The work of putting culture back in agriculture.”
Finally, I leave you, here, with Lathem’s wise experiential observation from her years of farming in a rural community: “Our days are the shape of our lives. They are line and stanza, musical phrase and bar. They are the glass cups filled and emptied with light, filled and emptied. Even the most chaotic life is contained in its vessels.”
(Thomas Crowe is the author of more than 30 books, including the award-winning nature memoir “Zoro’s Field: My Life in the Appalachian Woods,” and is a longtime resident of Jackson County.)
