Marta came over in January with a folder. She put it on the kitchen table between the mugs and opened it and there was a printed list, three pages, in a small font. Bread, yogurt, soap, chickens, canning, dehydrating, seed saving, rain collection, mending, cheese. She had annotated some of them. She had a column for what it would cost her and a column for how long it would take to learn, and she looked at me across the table with an expression I recognized immediately, because I had sat in exactly that state at my own table years earlier, and she said she did not know where to begin and had been not beginning since October.
I did not tell her what to do first
I wanted to. I had a whole answer ready and I could feel it forming while she was still talking. What stopped me was remembering that the advice I had been given at that stage was mostly correct and entirely useless to me, because the person giving it had a different job, a different house, a different body, and a husband who liked this sort of thing.
So I told her about my list instead. I made one too, the first winter, though mine was handwritten and had more items than hers. I read for four months. I could have told you the difference between hot and cold composting and the ideal pH for blueberries and I had not put a single thing in the ground. The list did not prepare me. It functioned, I can see now, as a way of feeling like I had begun without exposing myself to the possibility of being bad at anything.
What broke the list was doing one wrong thing badly
What ended the reading was cutting a bed out of the lawn with a kitchen knife in April, badly, in the wrong spot, and getting a summer of beans out of it. Not because the beans were significant. We could have bought beans. It was that after that summer I was a person who had grown something, and that turned out to be a different starting position than being a person who had read about growing something. The list stopped feeling like a syllabus and started feeling like a very long menu I could order from over the course of years.
Each year since has had roughly one thing in it
Not by design at first. It just kept working out that way, and eventually I noticed and stopped fighting it.
One year the thing was learning to save seed, and I only really got competent with beans and lettuce, which are the easy ones, and I still buy everything else. Another year it was the laundry line, which sounds barely worth mentioning until you consider that it changed what I do with a Tuesday afternoon between April and October and took me a full season to stop resenting on damp weeks. One year it was getting the compost to actually work, which took most of a year of paying attention to something profoundly unglamorous. Last year it was the two dwarf fruit trees, and the honest report on those is that they are alive and I have eaten four apples total.
That is five or six years and about five capabilities, which is not an impressive rate. It is slower than the list implied and slower than I would have accepted at the beginning. It is also the reason all of them are still going.
Why one thing survives a bad week
The years I tried to add three things, I lost all three, and I have written elsewhere about the seed rack and the corn and the canning marathons. The reason is not mysterious. Anything new needs attention while it is being learned, and my attention in a given week is a fixed and fairly small quantity, and a bad week takes almost all of it. One new thing can be carried through a bad week on stubbornness. Three cannot, and what happens is that all three get dropped at once and the failure feels like a verdict on the whole enterprise rather than on the arithmetic.
The other thing one at a time does is let a practice get boring before you add to it. The laundry line was interesting for about three weeks and then it was just a thing I do, and it costs me almost nothing now because it does not require any decisions. That transition from interesting to boring is the whole point, and it does not happen while you are still learning three other things.
What one thing does not do
I would be misleading you if I made this sound like a clever shortcut that gets you everything eventually. It does not. At this rate I will never learn most of the items on that list, and some of them I have quietly accepted are not going to happen in this yard or in this life. We are not close to feeding ourselves. We buy nearly all our staples. Some years the one thing simply fails, like the winter I tried to keep something growing under cover and got about a dozen edible leaves for my trouble and a lot of frozen mush.
And there are years with no thing at all. The year my mother was ill I added nothing and barely held on to what I had, and I no longer count that as a lost year, though I certainly did at the time.
What Marta did
She went home with her folder. In March she texted me a photograph of a windowsill with three pots of herbs on it, which was not on her list anywhere, and she seemed almost apologetic about how small it was. Two summers later she has a bed along her south fence and she is better at peppers than I am.
I do not know whether starting with herbs was the right order for her in any general sense, and I do not think there is a general sense. I know it was small enough that she actually did it in a week when she was tired, and that a person who has done one thing is in a different position from a person holding a list.