Tuesday, August 28, 2012

Serving Floyd: Is that what I'm doing?

We had an excellent tomato canning class last Saturday in spite of my totally geezer moment of leaving the house without the cherry tomatoes, herbs and garlic for the roasting segment.  Micah's Garden came through with little paste tomatoes and saved the day (and my butt)!

In addition to the students we had a photographer and a writer from Virginia Tech in attendance.  They spent the afternoon documenting the class and  talking to folks.  At one point Lori Greiner, the writer, asked me what volunteerism meant to me.  I had an uhh...uhh... moment and then babbled out something totally disjointed about tradition, giving back to the community, self sufficiency, and god knows what.  Because I don't think of what I'm doing as volunteer work.  I don't really think about it at all.  I just enjoy doing it and having a venue to pass it on to others so we can have fun doing it together.  And yup, there's that little piece of me that does a happy dance while waving the one finger salute at Big Food with both hands.

Michael and I have talked about what we do as Master Gardener/Food Volunteers.  We do have an answer to that question, I just spaced it.  Lori, if you're reading this, here it is:

We can give a family a sack of food and they'll eat for a week.

But if we teach them how to garden

and cook and preserve

they will be able to feed themselves forever.

That's what volunteering means to me.



5 comments:

  1. What I beautiful motto - I couldn't agree more - I may have to borrow this one day!

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  2. I love your blog! I noticed the word Virginia is misspelled in your banner(?) I am a graphic designer too, and this type of thing has happened to me many times.

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    1. Oops! Nice catch! It's been that way for only forever. Fixed now!

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  3. beautiful statement about volunteering. I think the tools you are teaching have been lost for so many people. You are a great resource to you community to share these things.

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