Kate arrived in our lives like the deus ex machina from an ancient Greek play. Chaos was at the height of her fury at Sap Bush Hollow: Dad was limping through the fields, moaning from his easy chair as he fell into it each night. Mom couldn’t decide whether she despaired the endless to-do lists or the non-communicative (text-me-don’t-talk-to-me) interns more. Bob and I wondered if we’d ever see each other again, if we’d ever know days off, much less be able to take our girls on a vacation. And suddenly, this bright, curious, competent, and powerful young woman showed up on our doorstep, her only baggage a vet tech license and a sense of humor.
Kate loved the work. She loved the animals. She loved the food. She even liked my kids. And she wanted to stick around.
It has her arrival into our lives, and a desire to keep her there, that made us finally take measures to pull ourselves together. We crunched numbers, took farm transition and business planning classes, tore into the darkest recesses of our family finances and interpersonal dynamics. We came up with a plan to make it work.
And we were able to entice her and her fiancé, Joe, to move to West Fulton.
Mom and Dad began spending time off the farm. Bob and I scheduled to take the girls to the Moab desert next fall. Saoirse jumped with both feet into the new business plan and began training herself to work in the cafe. Ula identified Kate as the ultimate superhero, and became her shadow, absorbing her fascination with animal health, along with every bit of information about observing, diagnosing and treating any possible ailment.
But it wasn’t long before Dad went back to moaning in his chair at night, Mom resumed complaining about the to-do lists, Bob and I began working through our days off, and I relapsed into my most famous mode: Don’t talk to me now. I’m too busy and frantic trying to hold it all together.
I credit our nation’s renewed interest in the future of soil, good food and farming for fueling Kate’s journey to our pastures. I credit the Dust Bowl, and then fifty plus years of Post World War II farm culture for our dour degeneration once we had her here.
There was a time in our nation’s history, most notably during our golden age of homespun, when farming was synonymous with good living: solid houses, abundant food, established families, good business prospects, days of rest. The industry took some bumps and turns, but the vocation held its appeal right up until the Dust Bowl, and then the industrialization of agriculture that began in the 1950s. By the 1970s, we were drowning in a farm crisis in a nation that no longer cared about us. It seemed like it wasn’t until we disclosed our new farming story: that we were over-worked and underpaid, that we captured the attention we needed to start pulling ourselves out of the shit. We were no longer esteemed family businesses, the backbone of our community. Our survival was contingent upon our ability to complain, and to incite guilt and pity in anyone who didn’t work as hard as us. In my own family, it seemed like the culture of suffering rose to a whole new level: being over-worked was a form of self-defense. If you are over-worked and suffering, you can’t be asked to do something else.
I was reminded of all this the first week of June. Bob and I were scheduled to deliver our fleeces to the mill, two days’ drive away in Prince Edward Island, on the 7th. To be able to take those days away without letting things fall behind here required a Herculean effort. There were several days when we had little more than three to five hours’ sleep. Seeing our strain, Kate stepped in. She let the kids come up to her place to watch a movie one night while Bob and I loaded wool. We staggered up the stairs to her apartment to retrieve them sometime after 9 that night, flopping down on her couch while we waited for the film to finish.
“So you must be excited, right?” Kate effused from her chair beside me. “Four days away! Gorgeous scenery! Some rest! Great food!”
I turned and faced her as a sneer curled my lip up to my nostril. “Excited? No! We have to work twice as hard for every day we take away! This sucks!”
Her smile faded. She rewarded me with a compassionate reply, fully imbued with appropriate acknowledgements about how hard I work, which, of course, I was aiming for.
We rounded the girls up and brought them home, where I continued my dramatic display, dragging my body across the kitchen floor, using the bannister to pull myself up the stairs, complaining to the girls that I was too tired to read to them before falling asleep.
It was still dark outside when I woke up, the full weight of the stupidity of my actions heavy in my chest.
What was I thinking? Living four miles down the road and only two miles from the farm is a young woman who is considering a future in farming. She has thrown herself into the soup pot of family and business. And sitting on her couch, I was faced with a simple choice. I could tell her the soup was toxic, or that the soup was delicious. And I told her the soup was toxic?!
Yes, I was tired at the end of a long day. But I’d spent the entire day doing things that mattered to me, with people I love to be with. And at the end of a long week doing just that, Bob and I were going to climb into the pick-up truck and drive up the coast with a load of wool, feasting on seafood at every stop, gorging on movies with free hotel internet, listening to audiobooks while we drove. I’d knit while he was at the wheel, we’d have a chance to talk uninterrupted, to sleep in a bit, to check out coffee shops, to sit beside the ocean.
I replayed Kate’s question: You must be excited, right? The correct answer would have been Yes. Yes, I’m thrilled to take this trip. Yes, I love seafood. I love the smell of wool in the back of the truck. I love to touch the yarns and review the blanket orders at the mill. I love to knit while we drive, to pull over to the side of the road and make a picnic wherever we happen to be, to hold Bob’s hand in the truck seat. And, sure, there was a push to get ready. But did I have to incite pity and guilt because of it?
What am I imparting to the next generation of farmers with that kind of attitude? My continued pleasure in this life is contingent on her newfound pleasure in this life. The myth of the long-suffering farmer needs to be destroyed. It will scare away the next generation. It will ruin our own time in the vocation.
Kate stopped by my house just as the sun was coming up. I rushed out to her truck. Before she could even say good morning, I fumbled through an apology. “Kate – That question you asked last night? I was stupid in my answer. Of course I’m looking forward to going! I shouldn’t have said what I said. We all run around like our lives suck. It’s like our family is in a competition to see who can suffer more. But the truth is, it’ll be a great trip.”
“I know! Riding in a pick up with your man! I totally get that!”
I smiled. “Kate? Can I ask you just one favor?”
“What’s that?”
“Just don’t tell my mom.”
Photo credit:
Destitute peapickers in California: a 32 year old mother of seven children, February, 1936: By Dorothea Lange, Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, [reproduction number, LC-USF34-9058-C (film negative)]
A handmade life…love it! Very inspiring and so well written…Thank you!
For some reason brought to mind one my favorite Wendell Berry Poems….Cheers
…So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.
Ask questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion-put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?
Go with your love to the fields.
Lie easy in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection
WENDELL BERRY
Thank you for the good reminder!
It relelated well to my wonderings on why here in the midwest, particularly among farm folks, we have a love of falling down old barns. They are popular for art and photos. It seems like such a depressing icon for us to hold onto. I have debated if the appeal is something old trying to still hold on, or if it is nostalgia. To me it is a reminder of what is at stake should we not ‘make it,’ our hopes and dreams slowing rotting back into the prairie soil. Which our culture here says, if you lose your farm, its because you didn’t work hard enough, which comes full circle to what you said.
But I realized it is not true. Whether it is the “Destitute Peapickers” in this famous photo or my friends families in high school, they worked harder than anyone I know and still lost the farm, simply because of markets that would not pay them for that work. I won’t get into my rant on commodity markets. But finding ways to make the labor on farms manageable is the driver behind much of the problems in ‘modern’ agriculture. We traded the long hours for more debt & environmental problems. But some days I totally get why they just put all the chickens and cows into a building and feed them with a single pass and automate all the milking & egg collection!!
Surprisingly, on this trip home to the upper Midwest I noted more family farms than I have for a long time. Is it just because I am aware of how precious they have become to me or because there seem to actually be more? How I love the rolling green hills, the cornfields and the cows grazing peacefully on the land. For a while, I forget GMOs and poisons and corporate farms. Thank you for helping remind us of what is truly important
Thank you Shannon for a post that applies not just to farmers — I was brought up on suburban Long Island, NY…yet somehow the ethic was the same. Perhaps it is a working class phenomenon…as so much of our labor is undervalued and underpaid. Suffer long and hard, and talk about it alot, so everyone thinks you are worthy and no one asks you to do more. It’s an approach to life I have been working to shed since childhood. We may be undervalued and underpaid, but in so many important ways, we are NOT under-compensated, if we only have the positive eyes to see our riches. My wonderful husband helps — even when things are really tough, and we like everyone have had our moments — he says he does not find life a burden, but a satisfaction. I am trying to do the same! I hope you and Bob had a FAB road trip — and namaste to you all, especially Kate, your current angel!
I absolutely loved this, it is why we moved from the seashore of Long Island to escape the poison that was creeping rapidly around us and destroying the island we loved so much. It was wrenching to leave the sea, but the mountains became its own sea of green for us. We taught the kids about all the rustic life that we knew and found others to help us with what we did not. You and everyone here knows what we speak of and why we had run up here. Dear hubby and I both had family upstate in the Catskills while we grew up so it was a natural gravitational pull we responded to in moving here when the little one was born. We wanted what we had and more for our kids, to not worry about belongings left on the lawn or the car unlocked in the driveway, and to know my neighbor would pull his tractor out to help us when needed. To see the trees between us and the neighbors and to know where one town ends and another begins by the way the terrain or trees begin to change. Long Island is a memory we only visit for the need of seeing family, but here we now have our home, we have always had to garden to get what the farmers here having at their beck and call for their families and what sustains them but we were eager to do it. Naturally we made sure our kids on some level at their abilities that they learn real food, real country living and what it means to work hard. Hard work as a family is the greatest moral glue, the kind that makes marriages last and blessings that never go away and that which others pay millions to live near or try to attain. Our kids have learned to be self-employed and work for others, they can read, write and speak other languages but most importantly they love what God gave them, this Mother Earth that sustains us all and family, we have taken them all to the high mountains and back woods to soak it in, respect life and also know how to hunt and fish and live off the land respectfully. We have done okay, our youngest daughter was at an event with kids having to dissect a pig and win a contest eating sardines while others turned their nose up whining she just dove right in and did what she had to do and well, she will also make you one mean gluten-free fudgy browny that you just want to eat until you wish you hadn’t. Sorry that I rambled here but Shannon you have struck a good cord in all of us and we love the life and wish we could do more if only God would grace us with less fatigue. There is good reason for the fatigue, God just does not want us to do it all, we have to share the load it is glory. So love your trip and know that we will try to do ours as well in whatever callings we may receive in a time. For now I am blessed because I am exhausted from a long difficult trip but I get to watch my dogs go be dogs out on our property and take in the gorgeous evening, because right now it is all mine. Blessings always!
Wow! well said and so spot on. i have fallen prey to this attitude many times – my bad. thank you for the boost! hope you don’t mind i share and reblog.
Fantástico! When the women farmers in Nicaragua ask me what it’s like to be a women farmer in rhe US I will think of this. Looking forward to having a cup of coffee with you when I get “home.”