“Think over your life,” Xavi said, a Marlboro perched between two fingers of one hand while the other used a demitasse spoon to stir so many sugars into espresso that it had become a syrup. I sat across from him at a sidewalk cafe in Barcelona thirty years ago, sipping my cappuccino in awe. […]
Eclipse Chicken
“I need to find a tempting treat for a chicken,” Ula says aloud to no one in particular one afternoon this past winter while she distracts herself from writing one of her college essays. She has plans with her boyfriend for the weekend, so she really needs to get her work done. But her mind […]
(Trying not to be) An Angry Farmer
This story first appeared on the Sap Bush Hollow Farm website on April 2nd. Jean-Michel Sibelle and his wife Maria are selling their farm in France. It has been in their family for over a century. I don’t know Jean-Michel and Maria. But my stomach churns as I read about them in the NY Times in a […]
Feed
Photo courtesy of Jasper Gribble, Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/@jaspergribble The email query from last week keeps swishing around my brain. A customer wrote to ask for all the ingredients of our livestock feed. She was looking for chicken that had been fed no corn or soy. The feed had to be processed in a mill where there was […]
Windows
“Homelessness. I think it’s a big problem. But is it one we want to tackle?”* The question appears on the front page of the March 7th issue of the Times Journal, our local newspaper. It was asked by a Lieutenant-in-Charge at a nearby village meeting convened to discuss a proposed affordable housing project at our […]
Kitchen Serenade
This is just a moment. It’s an ordinary ….and yet extraordinary moment. And I want to capture it here. I’m standing in the kitchen cooking dinner, listening to some jazz. Bob hears a song he likes, and picks up his guitar to play along. I’m so taken with this. With him. It’s so easy to […]
Fashion Forward Farmers
We couldn’t send our fashion-loving daughters down to NYC for a month to study clothing design and construction without taking a few field trips into the depths of one of the fashion savviest metropolises in the world. New York doesn’t just do new fashion. It does what Saoirse and Ula love best, which is second-hand, or vintage, […]
Everyone Else’s Expectations
It was the hardest lesson I had to learn as a writer. If people who never met me liked something I wrote, they somehow got it in their heads that I was….well…likable and admirable. But every person has different qualities that they find likable and admirable. And I couldn’t possibly have all those qualities. So when […]
How the Sausage Gets Made
No. This is not pornography. This is artificial insemination. Winter is a time of intimacies….and not just for humans. This week we separated the rams from the ewes, their breeding cycle complete. And we’ve been monitoring the pigs for when they come into heat so that we can artificially inseminate them. In January, my […]
Red Sky at Morning
Photo by Pixabay “You can’t miss it if you don’t know it’s gone.” Mom remains her pragmatic, equanimous self as we sit by the tree on Christmas morning after doing chores. She lost a chunk of her memories after a major heart surgery back in 2016. This fall, she’s been in and out of […]
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