Possum Living was published in the late 70s as a sassy guide to anti-consumerist living. Mostly ideology-free — unless you count a cheerful curmudgeonliness as an ideology — the book, written by the pseudonymous 18 year-old Dolly Freed, has just been reissued by Tin House. And I wrote about it for Boldtype/Flavorpill yesterday:
Dolly’s practical lessons are presented with an irresistible wiseass grin: “We usually leave on the head, tail and fins for the simple reason that the fish looks nicer that way; and it means less work,” she writes. “Also, many fish have considerable amounts of meat in their heads — just like some people.”
Dolly lived with her father on a half-acre lot in suburban Philadelphia off just $5,000 a year, which was perplexingly cheap enough in her day to get her on the Merv Griffin Show. Her dad earned the little cash they needed doing odd jobs during winter, but the book is about everything else it took to live like possums: the gardening, the scrimping and shortcuts, the “merrily gurgling” home still.
What’s remarkable is how prescient, or smart, or just plain no-nonsense Freed’s advice was, because so much makes sense today. Not only do they ditch their car and ride bikes instead, but she warns against getting overly expensive bicycles — see ya, fixies — that might get stolen. Like my neighbors, she uses her yard as a vegetable garden, which she plans carefully (she explains how). She grows herbs and preserves the extras in vinegar. She makes pickling sound simple, cooks over an open fire when she can, buys clothes at Goodwill, and has plenty of time left over for playing chess on the porch.
Some of the projects are harder to imagine adopting. She and her father purchase wheat, soybeans, and potatoes in bulk from a feed store — there are still feed stores around, it turns out, but how many of us will make the time to clean and grind our own wheat? Freed made moonshine with a pressure cooker, some copper pipe, and rubber tubing, assembling the pieces with dough. OK, that’s inventive, but would it be so terrible to buy a gasket or two? Winemaking is easier in the final stages — once you put it all together, you just let it ferment — but even with Freed’s fruit-and-sugar measures supplied, calculating it all gets pretty complicated.
But the real challenge is the bunnies.
This is where Freed is awesome in her punk rockness: like a band that knows it will offend, she puts the hardest track right up front. She raises chickens and bunnies; the chickens provide eggs. The bunnies? They provide meat.
There’s more (more!) and I swear, even if the byline bears the editor’s name, it was written by me. And now I’ve got to hop offline to buy some bunnies soil to see if I can get a garden going.
