“I’ve seen an odd ant as weather warms up, but this guy makes the place out to be a temple of doom,” Kyle tells me. Kyle works on the farm and oversees Tibbets house, the old center hall with the field stone foundation across the street.
The Airbnb guest never spoke with us once. But his review was toxic. He claimed the house was unfit for a rental (strange, with all our five star reviews for cleanliness). He complained that the wifi was lousy (despite the tech professionals who’ve regularly rented the space for work-vacations), and then, to top it all off, complained that our prices at the cafe were too high. He really went on about that.
I call in Orkin. I ask them to do an inspection for ants, per the review. They find nothing. I call them in again. They find nothing. “It’s a house in the country,” Michael, our Orkin tech tells me, “Things get in. There’s gonna be a bug now and then. Some city people just don’t get it.”
I’m so ashamed. A bug in the house. A guest who thinks I was ripping them off.
I’m staring at Michael the Orkin tech, wide-eyed. Here it comes again….that recognition that I’m just an all-round horrible person. I’m just selfish. I’m in it for myself. I’m a money-grubbing piece of crap.
Then I recognize the fabric, the stitching, the colors….I’m wearing my cloak of shame again.
I thought I’d tossed it away ages ago. I should have known it would find it’s way back into my closet eventually. A garment like that is hard to destroy.
…Especially after what I went through this winter, frantically reviewing the financials and recognizing the hemorrhaging that was happening: the spike in our insurance costs, feed costs, processing costs. Like a lot of seasonally-based small business owners, I just don’t get a handle on the figures til the seasons done and the snow flies. And like a lot of other business owners I know, I had to take a hard line, and it started with spelling things out loud and clear for my family. We had to push prices up, and we could’t back down.
Like me, Mom, Dad and Bob also have cloaks of shame in their closets. They fought hard against me, forcing me to document and justify. I marveled at their reluctance, as I showed them how much money would have to be pulled from savings just to keep things afloat.
Is it genetic? In his open letter to The New York Review of Books, Wendell Berry reminded me that it’s not genetic. It’s cultural. Rural people are trained to see ourselves as worthless.
We’re fighting an uphill battle here in rural America as farmers and small businesses owners.
“The education system prepares our young people to leave, and they are leaving,” observes Berry. He describes the plight of rural America as “a land of worsening problems that it did not cause and cannot solve, from which urban America derives it’s food, clothing, shelter, plus ‘raw materials.’ For these necessary things rural America receives prices set in urban America. For the manufactured goods returned to it, rural America pays prices set in urban America.”
Mom, Dad, Bob and I have planted our roots in this soil and made our lives a fight against this plight. We educated our children to understand our way of life, to learn the economic nuances of a life tied to the soil, to recognize the cost upon our bodies to produce food and safeguard the land and water, and to financially prepare to sustain ourselves.
For some, that makes us heroes. To others, who would like to pass through our community on a holiday weekend, enjoy sterile and low-priced lodging with all the amenities they can expect from a posh neighborhood, a cheap breakfast from simple country folks under the money illusion where they are not asked to recognize that a dollar from March of 2021 is worth less than 85 cents today; without having to recognize the toil that goes into a dozen eggs, that goes into making payroll at living wages, that goes into caring for legacy buildings that are under non-stop bombardment from Mother Nature and climate change, or the cost of trying to live in rural America on prices set in urban America, while being expected to pay urban America for the products and services we require to stay afloat at prices they’ve determined.
I won’t do it.
I cannot hold my family together, much less honor my commitment to this land. And the cloak of shame that tells me that my business, and by association my character, is deserving of such vitriol, is an impediment to our success.
“Maybe you need to contact host support at Airbnb,” Mike the Orkin tech suggests, trying to be helpful. “You can tell them we didn’t find anything.”
I consider it, but truth be told, I’ve got bigger issues on my plate. Mom is back in the hospital. And if things go well, this is going to be a very long haul. Dad and my brother are by her side every day. Bob, the girls and I are keeping the farm and cafe going, then driving an hour into Albany every evening to be with her. The two hours we all spend driving every day is yet another tax that rural Americans are forced to pay out of our pockets, because we can’t get the health care we need. And, of course, as small business owners, Bob and I don’t get family leave, either. We just have to suck it up and make it work.
That’s when it occurs to me, that this negative review might be just what I need right now. I need to let it stay posted on the site. I just need to toss away that cloak of shame again.
Because, yes, there are ants in rural America. And no, life here ain’t cheap.
Maybe people will read his review before they come. And if they’re the type of customers who think rural Americans should safeguard our nation’s natural resources and provide food, lodging and amenities on prices that are convenient to them; if they think that the beautiful ecosystem that makes the view out their windows so lovely should never cross the threshold of a building; then I would prefer they stay away, leaving vacancies for those folks who we want to attract to our business, who get what we’re trying to do. And when those guests get here, they’ll know what to expect: that we’re a hard working family, that a healthy ecosystem has a little biodiversity, and that we expect to be compensated for our labors so that we can keep a good thing going, keeping the waters clear, the air fresh, the soils rich and the food nourishing. And that benefits everyone, rural, urban, and suburban alike.
Sources:
Berry, Wendell. 2023. What Liberal Elites Don’t Know About Rural Americans Can Hurt Us. Barn Raiser, May 31, 2023. https://barnraisingmedia.com/wendell-berry-new-york-review-of-books-rural-america/
Sommer, Jeff. 2024. With Inflation This High, Nobody Knows What a Dollar Is Worth. New York Times, April 26, 2024
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