Sixteen-year-old Rowan posed the question, "Grandma, were you a hippie?" This was after he accepted my offer to put a patch on his dungarees, and after I had kidded his little sister about the long tear in her baggy blue jeans. "They're torn jeans," she told me. "They came that way."
I heard my mother's voice in my head, "who would buy jeans with holes in them" as I took those same jeans out of the dryer and folded them.
I've always been a little uneasy about wearing the hippie badge but when Rowan asked, I said yes without a pause. My daughter was there for this exchange and I wondered exactly how she processed that answer. Our firstborn whose diapers I proudly hung on the backyard clothesline to dry in the cold Potter County sunshine, the little girl whose homemade whole wheat teething biscuits were stored in a canister labeled "Kate's cookies." That still brings a chuckle from my friend and fellow hippie, Louise. Those days of "grow your own," and homesteading and food co-ops.
The view of hippies from this generation - Gen Whatever - has none of the nuance of that time we lived. It seems there's a narrow definition of the word that marks hippies of this generation - the kids who adopt the fashions of the 60s - bell bottoms, tie dye and Indian cotton.
I was reminded as I watched to a documentary about the "The Farm" in Tennessee, hippie comes the word hip - up to date and in the know. Much like woke today, it means different things to different people.
I thought for a time during my late teenage years that I wanted to live communally - that is in a commune, much like the legendary "Farm. " Introduced to everything hippie by my elder brother and his wife, we once took refuge in a commune where I unrolled my sleeping bag on a splintery wooden floor in a second-story bedroom in an old farmhouse with no plumbing. We ate food prepared in a kitchen of sorts, an outbuilding with a giant woodstove in the middle. It was on that trip, I had my first taste of yogurt - Dutch Apple from Dannon, purchased in a food co-op in the village Woodstock, New York.
And it felt idyllic, the countryside, the garden with its whimsical artistic touches amid the long rows of beans and kale and okra, the easels of the artists in the backyard. It was a quick visit, just overnight, and it was a long time ago.Those memories are misty, colored by the retelling from that time and that place. A stone from the driveway where Bob Dylan lived and chocolate ice cream with the clear, sweet orzata syrup.
Later on that same trip, my sister-in-law took me shopping for clothing to accompany me to college. And I bought a long, green trench coat that dragged on the ground and a very short plaid dress with a long pointed color, paired with brightly colored tights. Neither choice fit in with the starched white world of the nursing school I had chosen. And from that environment I fled back home for a time and put in motion the steps that brought me today to my daughter's home in the mountains of Arizona with the tall Ponderosa pines in the backyard and that tall young man facing his own future, asking me about hippies.
And so, yes, I was - we were, Arthur and me - hippies of a sort. And we still are I guess, my hair long and gray, and Arthur with his pony tail. We still grow a big vegetable garden and our bookshelves still hold those hippie tomes - The Owner Built House, The Tassajara Bread Book, the original hand lettered Moosewood Cookbook.
And you know, Rowan, your grandmother did go to Woodstock.
