R.I.P, Tasha Tudor.

(She was 92. She published her first book in 1938. 1938! Amazing...her first work came out before WWII, before television...and I think her last was published just a few years ago).

She was an interesting person, to say the least. She was sent to live with a family in Vermont, to protect her (it's said) from the "big bad city" (New York in the 1920s). She grew up to be an artist. She was one of those people for whom the phrase "traveled to the beat of a different drummer" could have been coined.

She claimed to have been a "reincarnation" of an 1840s sea-captain's wife. (It's sometimes hard to tell how much of it was something she literally believed, and how much of it was something she said because it made good press). She lived for years on a farmstead without running water or electricity, and she raised her children there (she was married twice and divorced twice; perhaps her husbands weren't as mad about the "good old days" as she was, or perhaps, like many artists, she was simply a difficult person o live with. I don't know). She tried to re-create farm life of the 1840s - the idea of self-sufficiency, of simple celebrations, of making do with what you have.

(The New York Times obit is here)

One thing I always liked about her was that she was, in some respects, a Renaissance woman - as the Times obit states: "[she] could play the dulcimer and handle a gun, once promised a reporter for The Times that she could find a four-leaf clover within five minutes."

In other words, an eccentric. But one of the mostly-good kind.

I have a couple books about her - highlighting her farmstead, her crafts. I have her cookbook though I don't remember ever actually making anything from it. She used to be regularly featured in Victoria magazine (and I suspect they'll probably do a retrospective on her in a couple of months).

I have to admit - though there are certain things about that lifestyle I decidedly Could Not Do (no running water being the major deal-breaker, though electricity is something I'm quite sure I'd miss as well), she represented for me a certain powerful fantasy. As a child, I read the Laura Ingalls Wilder books a lot. And I read a couple of books my parents had on "going back to the land" (I do not know if they ever had actual serious plans to do so, or if it was merely part of my dad's "Cold War Be Prepared" mentality). And I have to admit that there's something attractive about the back-to-the-land lifestyle. The idea of living off the grid, of not needing anything from anybody, being able to fix things yourself when they break, being completely independent when it comes to things like food and entertainment. (Oh, I'd still have to have books. I am sure that Tasha Tudor read by candlelight in the evenings. Perhaps things like Swift or Dickens rather than modern works, but still).

I admit some of these days I still harbor a little fantasy of running off to the woods, building a cabin (hah. as if.), clearing land, planting a garden, and surviving with no input from anyone else, with no need to go through the "middleman" of trading hours of my life for the necessities to live. (Because really, that is what all careers are - we are trading our life, our time, in return for money that allows us to buy things that, in an earlier era, we would have directly obtained ourselves. Of course, in the best of situations - and mine is very close to that - you're happy to make the trade because doing something like standing up in front of a class and showing students how to calculate life tables is preferable to spending 10 hours a day grubbing the soil to grow your own food). And yet - after the difficult days, after the days when I've dealt with someone who got on my last nerve, I still say it to myself - how much nicer it might be to run off and raise chickens and have a fish-pond and grow my own food and chop wood to stay warm in the winter.

And it's one of those silly fantasies that kind of keeps a person going - an imagined escape hatch that would never actually be used.

I know it's something I could never do. I'd start to get cold and hungry (I cannot really, practically, imagine growing enough food to feed one's self, even with having chickens and goats, as Ms. Tudor did. And I don't think I could do my own butchering beyond perhaps cleaning fish, which I have done.) And I do like a lot of the modern conveniences - for goodness sake, without the Internet or a computer, I probably wouldn't be bothering to write this.

But I liked the idea that she was out there. There was something comforting to think of a person living her life as she saw fit, even though it goes totally against the grain of 20th (and 21st) century life. And there is that little fantasy there - the idea of sitting by the fireside in the evening, braiding rag rugs or cracking walnuts while someone reads aloud for the family.

The idea of having that time - of having the time to work in the garden, to tend the chickens, to make clothing by hand. And yes, I recognize the tradeoffs - taking that time means there is not time for other things. And there's a sort of close-to-the-bone quality that would make me uncomfortable - a bad hailstorm here destroying my tomatoes might make me stomp around and curse a little, but I wouldn't starve. But if I were depending on the crops I grew, a hailstorm could be catastrophic. And on some level I'm grateful not to have those problems. (And yet, then again - are the problems of the modern world so much easier to deal with? Certainly they are less immediate, certainly many of them may be less life-or-death, but on some days I think the problems of navigating university politics or the challenge of fitting all necessary errands into a day on top of my usual work are perhaps not as satisfying to solve as the problem of, say, chickens making their nests in inaccessible places).

So although that life remains in the realm of fantasy for me, I still thank Ms. Tudor for living that way - for showing people that it's possible to do, even if you might not choose to do it.

I vaguely remember reading a number of her books as a child - we got them from the local library. And later, as a young adult, I was drawn to the simplicity of the way she lived, of the way she tried to live gracefully (and in a relatively low-impact way, long before the "green" movement). And the idea of honoring the past appealed to me. So I'm happy she was, and I guess she went peacefully - and, if her statement on this memorial homepage is to be believed, without fear.