They don’t know I’ve been crying. I give them credit for persistence. They’d shown up the first time right after we’d closed and I uncharacteristically turned them away. “Sorry, we’re closed,” I’d called out as soon as they’d walked in the door. They shrugged their shoulders, settled for a pint of ice cream as their […]
Talking Dogs
“Please. I would like to play catch-peanut.” Kit, our border collie-blue healer cross, stares intently at Ula as she flops down on the couch on the screen porch. Her pointed ears radar themselves at my daughter, as though she can summon special powers through them. “It’s a very excellent game, Ula. I really enjoy playing […]
Do What You Want.
Shannon Hayes, 40, doesn’t do anything she doesn’t want to do. I’m going through a box of newspaper clippings when I find this. It’s the opening line to a story about the health benefits of simple living in the Nov 5, 2014 edition of US News & World Report. I’m wondering if they fact-checked that […]
Endless Growth
If you’re not growing, you’re dying. This aphorism has annoyed me since I heard it in my first farm business management class twenty-two years ago at Cornell. I heard it repeatedly in my entrepreneurship and human resource management classes, and again in the farm transition and business planning classes I took before we opened the […]
Hope or Despair?
“There’s sex,” I chime cheerfully from the passenger seat. Bob’s icy stare barely cracks. We’re winding up the dirt road, headed home for lunch with the girls. “And chocolate!” He doesn’t respond. “And coffee! And we still have Barbers’ vodka…..just down the road!!!! And there’s all those puppy noses. Really. How can the world be […]
For All Souls
Bob and I have had a special tradition since 1999. In 2013 I wrote about it. This coming week, we’ll be celebrating again. I hope you all find similar freedom and joy in your hearts this week. Every November first, I wake up early. I do not check for messages, or sit down to write. I […]
Farmer Scrooge
I’m out with the broilers in the second field back, watching Bob as he drives the tractor from the barnyard. This is the last batch of chickens for the season. Late afternoon sun bounces off the roof as he navigates through the pastures, his big brown eyes focused on keeping the crates in the […]
Swords & Pens
“The pen is mightier than the sword.” It was an odd bit of Shakespeare for a farmer/reproductive physiologist to quote to his daughter. I’m not sure when I first heard those words from Dad. It may have been in kindergarten, when I clobbered a bully on the head with my lunch pale. Spoken words had […]
FLUSHED: When parenting dogma goes down the toilet
Bob and I took the girls backpacking in the Adirondacks this week, so I didn’t get a chance to write a post. That said, my brother and his wife are expecting their first baby later this fall, and as a result I’ve been thinking a lot about this story I wrote back in the spring […]
The Perseids
I was seventeen when I discovered the shooting stars. I was so enthralled that my best friends from high school, Jonathan and Louigi, fellow band geeks, came up to the farm. We spent an August night in our sleeping bags on the hillside behind the barn, watching the Perseids, trying to think of ways […]
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