The Idea of Citizenry
We – this husband and wife team – love to work in the kitchen and in the garden and in the workroom. We’re fascinated by all those daily operations of living, which include hundreds upon hundreds of skills from dress-making to baking to sowing crops to brewing – those skills of necessity that allow us to live. Together, we’ve explored and honed our hands in many of the tasks: burned our hands shaping mozzarella, stabbed ourselves with sewing needles, and crusted our hands with yeasty dough. Now, we want to try and share what we’re doing with the thousands of other people who might share one or another of our interests.
So many of the skills have gone on a generational hiatus, not lost but perhaps neglected. And, along with people all across the country and beyond, we are trying to bring them back. The neglect isn’t true everywhere, but it’s true for many of us raised on products shipped thousands of miles, processed by hands that don’t know how to go without machines.
We want to use our hands to make great things—use our minds to puzzle through difficulties in learning new tasks, training our hands to stretch cheese or knead dough or germinate seeds or brew beer, or look to the future to prepare for bee-keeping, tree training, or sheep shearing. And we don’t want to learn just how to do something, but how to do it well.
We have loved doing these things for years and want to be able to continue, finding out whether it’s something we could sustainably continue or something best left to people more knowledgeable or able than us. In that vein, we’d like to take you closer to those with banks of knowledge – the bakers, weavers, cheesemakers and all the rest of the craftsmen we turn to for sustenance and comfort both physical and beyond. We hope you’ll enjoy learning more about them as we do. As we all become better citizens for the world around us.
The Citizens Kane
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