Whole Earth

I loved how the "Whole Earth Catalog" held the possibility of so many things to be made, and all the things needed to make them. Things made of straw or metal or wood or yarn. It held the secrets of how to use medicinal plants or build a house out of tires and mud. You could learn to renovate an old bus and make it your home, and there was even an address to write away to, to order an old bus.

Looking at the catalog more than thirty years later, I noticed that the hippies that looked so old to me then looked so young to me now.

It brought to mind an image of my parents in our kitchen dividing a large bucket of molasses into canning jars, when they ran a co-op out of our home. I saw individual paper bags of oats and nuts, and how other long haired parents with little kids like me came by to pick them up.

I saw my mom and her friends wearing overalls and braids, and my dad and his friends with long hair and beards. I remembered how I never had a meal that wasn't made at home, how I carried my lunch to school in a basket, and how I once landed a pitchfork on my toe when I was digging in the garden that filled our back yard.

I remembered too, how it suddenly, unexpectedly, unknowingly, began to change. Somewhere around the time my parents went to see the movie "Saturday Night Fever," and I started wearing a Bee Gees belt buckle.

Looking closely, now, at the "Whole Earth Catalog," I noticed how dads were just young guys with long hair trying to do their best, and moms were moms at a time where women were caught in a cross fire of change. How they were trying to be moms and dads while also trying to grow corn, can tomatoes, make chutney, stack wood, build dulcimers, bake bread, sew quilts, knit sweaters, fix their own cars, make their own gifts, and work to pay for it all.

How could it not fall apart?

Images don't decay, they pass through time unhindered -Lynda Barry