Every once in awhile, a favorite aunt or someone reminds me that people actually read this blog sometimes, and inspires me to write more, and more often. There is so much that got lost this summer and fall when I was away from internet and out of a routine. It's hard to write about life that happened months ago, but I'm gonna try.
In late September I spent two weeks with my brother Tim on the small organic vegetable farm where he's been interning since May. It was the kind of place you just sink into, and I could have stayed for months. Not just a place, not just work, but a whole way of life. We worked hard sometimes, but always pleasant, with others. Each morning I helped Tim haul water from the creek for the animals. I learned to coax the first streams of milk out of the three goats he milked each morning. I learned that "Castor" was nervous, but not strong; you could hold her leg away from the pail with your left arm.
I learned that, theoretically, one can reach under a roosting hen to pull out eggs, but I only got up the nerve to try it once. I learned to speak "rrrr-bit" with Phoebe (the four-year-old daughter of the couple who own the farm), and which rules of frog world are non-negotiable. I learned that she likes stories involving pigs and princesses and can switch in and out of a Kentucky drawl.
I learned how to identify the "sticky amaranth" plants, and to get them, carefully, near the root, before they got me. I learned to be picky about what we harvested. Checking the underside of the bell pepper to make sure it had completely turned from green to red. Culling a bunch of cherry tomatoes for just one black spot. Only the slimmest string beans are sold; the others we fry with olive oil for dinner. Throwing out all the vegetables we can't eat.
"This is what it is to live with a spirit of abundance," I thought more than once to myself. Talking and talking and talking in the shade of the tool shed. Two afternoon hours dedicated to the fiddle tunes we would play at the art exhibition on Saturday. Swinging Phoebe on the handle of the shovel. Walking slowly down the hill to the house to pick raspberries from the vine before dinner. Offer them by the handful to Phoebe, who says, "chubby bunny, chubby bunny" between fits of giggles. Eating quiche and Spanish frittatas three times a week. The chickens have been laying more than we can sell.
I learned that commercial fertilizer is petroleum-based. So not only is your typical grocery produce soaked in the oil of transport from California or Wisconsin, but in the oil used for production as well. Who knew? Not me? My brother reveals this in our, um, "discussion" about how we all could be educating ourselves better, in general . . . and specifically, about what we eat (as if we need more reasons to eat local and organic).
Because Tim makes just about enough to pay off his monthly college loans and to buy sugar, and because he is passionate about reducing personal oil consumption, he lives a life that rivals the "simplicity" of mine in China. I enjoyed it. It felt like home.
I found an old typewriter in the trailer, and clacked away at letters to friends until my brother couldn't stand it. Most of the time we curled on the sofa and read companionably, with tea in the afternoons.
For breakfast, Tim made coffee, toast, and eggs. When the bread was all, we made more. We made homemade chutney out of the last of the tomatoes that Tim and Krista had planted . . . and discovered the difficulties of collaborating in the kitchen after four, six, eight years apart. There were spicy mustard greens with homemade balsamic vinagrette. Biscuits with homemade strawberry jam. Scones from "Crumb and Crust", which I'd brought from the Rockingham Public Library.
In the cool of the morning before we left for the fields, we'd roll down the thick blankets that were hung over the windows. Then when we came back at noon to broil slices of sweet potatoes and red peppers, the small trailer was blessedly cool. Later it got chilly, and Tim would sing out his excitement for the smell of fall as we cut across the creek to report to the barn for another day of work.
I was hungry for the physical labor. It's something I've always enjoyed, and four years of "English expertise" in China haven't held enough. My first afternoon at the farm my muscles were yanked awake on the top of the hill digging fence post holes. Tim and David, neither of whom are built especially big, could go at it for five minutes or more. I lasted for a minute before I was breathing hard and my shoulders were screaming. Tim's friend Micah, another organic vegetable farmer, taught him that you never need a gym to "get into shape". You will develop the muscles to do whatever work you need to do. "We're getting strong," we said to each other. "Soon we'll be strong enough to build a fence."
The flat rocks we flipped up out of the soil were imprinted with fossils of shells and sea creatures. These hills once lay along an ocean bottom. A closer history is tobacco all over these hills, and grown until the soil couldn't hold it anymore. We pile loads of manure from a neighboring farm onto one of these old fields, in some places five inches deep.
