New York City has some high profile celebrities in residence this week…. None more prominent, in my estimation, than Flaco. I’m Shannon Hayes, and you’re listening to Season 4, Episode 1 of The Hearth of Sap Bush Hollow.
Welcome to The Hearth of Sap Bush Hollow, chronicles & lessons from a life tied to family, community and the land. I’m Shannon Hayes and I operate Sap Bush Hollow Farm with three generations of my family in the northern Catskill mountains of Upstate NY. I’m the chef owner of Sap Bush cafe, a farm to table and neighbor to neighbor experience open Saturdays 9-2 from April thru November in our tiny hamlet of West Fulton, and I’m also the author of a few books, including Radical Homemakers, the Grassfed Gourmet, and Redefining Rich.
For those of you out of the who’s-who loop of New York Society, Flaco is a male Eurasian eagle-owl who escaped from the Central Park Zoo when vandals let him out of his cage back in February. Zoo experts feared his lifetime in captivity left him unprepared to hunt and fend for himself in the wilderness. Flaco is flouting their predictions. He’s taken up residence in the North Woods of the park, dazzling the neighborhood birders with periodic appearances, worrying them when he goes missing.
Flaco has been on my mind most of the winter. Bob and I became deeply acquainted with Central Park while we lived in New York City during his proton therapy treatment for prostate cancer last December. The North Woods became one of my favorite places to go and sit with the birds.
All my life, I avoided New York City like the plague. The people, the transit systems, and the noise were all too overwhelming for me. But when Bob got his diagnosis last summer, the research on the best possible treatment pointed us to the Island of Manhattan.
I tried to fight it. I tried to figure out if there was a way to commute. Then I told Bob he would have to stay there on his own, and I’d periodically visit. Ultimately, we both realized that our mutual health and happiness meant that I, too, should step away from our beloved Sap Bush Hollow and join him in learning the layout of the streets, memorizing the subway routes, and finding respite in Central Park.
And the most unimaginable thing happened.
This farm girl fell in love with New York City. I admired the energy and the people, and how so many folks from so many different walks of life managed to live in such close quarters, and with statistically few exceptions, remain kind and respectful. Bob’s treatment was in Harlem, and we began to observe the same people in the same places each day, greeting each other and caring for each other, their sense of community compressed down to a city block, as opposed to our upstate community, which stretches for miles in all directions.
We were glad to come home to our hearth, but a tiny piece of my heart stayed there.
The rest of me faced a mountain of work upstate — the farm inventory, financial planning, and CSA recruitment letters filled my days. On my days off, I began a project with Dad, interviewing him about the daily operations on the farm. All of it matters. All of it is joyful.
But in my dream of having long winters off from running the cafe, I’d hoped to have time to write the next draft of a novel I’ve been working on for over a decade now. The current draft was 600 pages, and my agent refused to even look at it until I can cut it down by one third. In order to accomplish that, I’d have to eliminate characters and scenes, and then rewrite the manuscript to get the plot to hold together.
I love Sap Bush Hollow. I always wanted to run the farm. As a kid I also dreamed about running a little farm cafe. I also dreamed about playing music and writing novels. Music and books were as much a part of me as these forests and fields. But the farm has become so all-encompassing, my dream to write a novel has gotten pushed aside in favor of tabulating disability insurance premiums for the employees, participating in ag energy audits, reviewing feed costs, projecting chicken production, writing up meat cutting instructions and calculating recipe costs. A major rewrite of a novel no longer squeezes into my headspace easily with Sap Bush Hollow’s invoices and receipts.
By early February, around the time Flaco escaped from his cage, I was wondering if I had built one around myself.
And that’s when the Wallaces came through with their offer. They were traveling in March, and their Harlem apartment would be empty for ten days. I could use it as a writing retreat.
I’d need one day to travel down, one day to travel back. That gave me eight days to do the re-write. I could forget about farm business for eight days.
I bought a train ticket and headed down.
I hadn’t lived alone since I was 22 years old, the year I met Bob. We married when I was 26. We built our lives around our joys: our family, this farm, homeschooling our daughters, working every day with Mom and Dad. Aside from a few hours squeezed out of the days here and there, I have never known solitude since.
Could I bear it?
Bob’s illness last year rattled me. There was a stretch of several weeks last summer when we didn’t know how far the cancer had spread, or whether it would be treatable.
That makes a wife think. There was the obvious question —- What will I do if I lose him?….But then, underneath that, was another question:
Who am I without him?
And then, looking at my multigenerational farming life, living in the same town since I was five years old, where my three business partners are 27, 26 and 16 years older than me, I am forced to go one level deeper:
Who am I without any of them?
This was not just a writing retreat. It was an Odyssey into the depths of my soul.
On the first day, I bought myself some groceries, a bottle of wine, and a little dark chocolate. Bob made sure I knew how to access the Netflix account on my computer for my evenings.
Instead, I called home and cried.
But within 24 hours I realized that I didn’t enjoy the wine. And I couldn’t be bothered to turn on the Netflix. (I did enjoy the chocolate.)
Left to my own devices for the first time in my adult life, I broke my day into three writing segments. The first one came after pre-dawn yoga and meditation. I’d finish the first morning writing session around 7:30 am, then treat myself to a cup of coffee while listening to Gregorian chants and watching the sun creep up over the horizon, slowly illuminating the building outside my window. The second session went from 8am until 10:30 or 11am, after which I stopped to make myself brunch. Then I walked to Central Park, sat in the North Woods feeding birds, and looked for Flaco. When he didn’t turn up, I went back home and wrote until five o’clock. I cooked myself supper, listened to audiobooks while I cleaned up, then went to bed and read novels until I fell asleep.
Each day became the same – the yoga, the meditation, the writing, the birds, the quest for Flaco, more writing, then listening to books, reading books, and falling asleep to dream about books. My imagination and the wildlife of Central Park were my only company.
I quite enjoyed myself.
Then, much to my surprise, on the morning of Day 7, I finished the draft. I had managed to rewrite the entire novel, and I had cut out 225 pages.
I wanted nothing more than to be with my Bobby.
Realizing that Saoirse could hold the fort in his absence, he grabbed the 11 am train down, and we spent the afternoon perambulating Washington Square Park, singing along with the old hippies who gathered near the arch with walkers, wheelchairs, drums and guitars; smelling the pot wafting through the air, admiring the artistic entrepreneurship on display — original paintings, phallic candles, and spontaneous poems all for sale. We met up with our friend Anthony for negronis to commemorate the completion of the new draft, then walked through the city, through Greenwich village, through Chinatown, through little Italy, through SoHo.
And once gain, I was very much not alone.
How I reveled — that the next draft was complete, that I had cleared my mind to return home to the farm and delight in focusing once more on CSA shares and sausages, on shearing and lambing and re-opening the cafe, and on all the pleasurable drama that makes up the life of teenagers and young adult children and customers and neighbors and aging parents.
More quietly, I celebrated something else — that for seven days, I had the pleasure of my own company. In that time, I glimpsed the person I was before I was a wife, a farmer, a chef, a mother, and adult daughter.
To be honest, while going back to the farm felt great, I wasn’t ready to let her go.
But it was time. Bob and I packed our bags and headed off to meet the train. Rather than grabbing the subway outside our apartment, I dragged my heels and suggested we walk down to Central Park for one last visit to the North Woods, one last sit with the titmice, chickadees, sparrows, robins, cardinals and squirrels who had become my companions through my solitude….It was my one last attempt to find Flaco.
We tramped through the park, our packs on our backs, over to my favorite place to sit, when we heard the other birders whisper amongst themselves: “he’s at the end of the trail!”
We hurried to the edge of the park. And there, in the cathedral of the woods, up in a tree, sat Flaco, contentedly free, taking a morning nap.
We stared at him a long while. And I couldn’t get over the trio of us: The mighty Flaco, set free by vandals who cut open his cage; and Bob and me, set free by the vandal called cancer that threatened his life.
Flaco won’t go back.
But Bob and I hitched up our packs and made our way across the park to grab the A train down to 34th street, where we climbed aboard the Amtrak and headed back upstate. A route, once alien and intimidating to us, is now familiar. A world that seemed closed to us on our path is now blown wide open.
Maybe it is a cage we return to. But after the shake up that was last year, I recognize that unlike Flaco, who must escape recapture, we hold the key to our freedom. And we come home and unlock the cage freely to let ourselves back in to this world — where the snowbanks are melting and the mud cakes our shoes and the wood smoke curls it’s way around a bright spring sun as the seasons change, and another year of growth begins at Sap Bush Hollow Farm. And we are ready to bask in it, knowing now that we are truly free to come and go.
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And that’s a really important thing to do, because all of this— the podcast, the blog, the novels and books and the creative recharging that happens over fall and winter— are a result of the support of my patrons. And this week I’d like to send a shout out to my patrons Laura Norma and Laura Stephens. Thank you, folks! I couldn’t do it without you!