“Zig.  Zag.”  I enunciate the words clearly in the kitchen as I squeeze the dressing bottle to demonstrate how I want the aioli drizzled over the fresh greens.  

“Ass.  Hole.”  Dad shoots back, snatching the bottle and splurping random squiggles, dollops and swirls across the salad he’s dressing.  

At least he’s wearing his hearing aids.

It’s going to be like this for a while.  Bob can’t be in the cafe kitchen with me because he’s covering for Kate down at the farmers’ market.  Kate’s out on her maternity leave.  No baby yet.  

I remember feeling the room spin and swallowing back a mini throw-up the day she broke the news to me at our staff meeting.  

I knew what I was supposed to do:  Smile.  Congratulate her.  I also knew what I wanted to do:  Shut the whole thing down… run around in a screaming panic…lash out in a terrified rage.

Ultimately I settled upon discussion about the one topic we could mutually relate to:  nausea.

I had wondered if a maternity leave could be a possibility a little over a year ago, and began working on a plan to get more legs under the business.  But it was a three year plan.  

“We didn’t expect it to happen this …easily,” Kate admitted to me.  “But with the livestock, that’s a sign that things are great!  When the sheep are properly nourished and relaxed and happy, they’re able to get pregnant.  So….that’s a good thing….right?”

She looks to me, her employer, for validation.  And suddenly I re-visit all those wretched stories I’ve heard about jack-ass bosses flying off the handle when women announce their pregnancies, vowing to never again hire a female.  Maybe they aren’t stemming from misogyny, as I’d assumed.  Maybe they’re a result of fear, because that’s what I most keenly felt.

Hiring Kate didn’t happen without my own personal identity crisis.  My love for my family and our land didn’t jive with my natural proclivities.  I was more comfortable cooking a piece of meat than I was growing it.  It took me a long time to accept this. Admitting I wasn’t the best steward of our livestock was, for me, a confession of agrarian ineptitude, an acknowledgment that I was a misfit in my family’s culture, a complete failure in the self-sufficiency department.  For years I told myself I could do it:  I could just try harder and force an interest in subjects that never naturally claimed my attention….I could invest all my time and effort building an understanding of things that I struggle to understand. 

Kate’s sincerity and passion unveiled my fraudulence.  Seeing her skip onto the farm in the morning, identify each of the 100 breeding ewes by name and personality, express grotesque fascination with autopsying chickens, and delight in hunting for parasites by scrutinizing feces under a microscope taught me a lot about myself.  It taught me a lot about farming.  

I learned that a farm cannot flourish and grow on determination alone.  I learned that Bob’s and my fantasy of self-sufficiency, of an ability to do all things farm-related — from cooking and caregiving, to marketing, gardening, animal husbandry and business management was, for us, untenable.  If we tried to do it all, we were going to lose it all.  

Kate taught me to chase my passions within this agrarian life.  I love to feed people, to give them a place at a table that they can call home.  I love to watch and learn from my family and neighbors who walk this path with me, then share the lessons they teach.  I love to study the light as it falls across the trees each morning, then find the words to paint the image.  I love to study marketing and profit margins.  Heck.  I even love spreadsheets.  

With each year that Kate attached herself to our farm, I grew stronger with my own passions.  

Last winter, as we sat in our rocking chairs beside the fire considering her news, I struggled to find the words to assure her that we’d hobble our way through this.  I only knew to assure myself that, after she walked out the door, I could wipe the foolish grin off my face and indulge in a robust session of panic and despair.  After, if I could keep my cool, an answer might emerge.

And then one day, the answer, at Ula’s urging, stood up from breakfast at the cafe, walked over to the register and asked me for a job.  

“Shilo’s really curious,” Ula had told me one afternoon over the kitchen table.  “I think she’d be really happy working on the farm.”

My three-year plan to eventually hire a second person accelerated in the blink of an eye.  Shilo joined Sap Bush Hollow.  And Ula’s predictions were right.  She teamed up with Kate in naming the pigs, and chose her personal favorite, Luna,  to be granted amnesty from the butcher’s knife this fall.  While she bonded with Luna, she worked to absorb every bit of information Kate would teach her.

And teach, she did.  For the next several months, Kate planned her lessons with Shilo, wrote down procedures, and worked side-by-side with her to impart everything she could.  She populated my calendar with all the butcher appointments and loading dates. 

Over the course of this season, I watched Kate grow into her talents as a manager, predicting where each of us may stumble in her absence, then taking measures to help us auto-correct.  I watched Shilo gain confidence in her strength and recognize how vital her own talents and intelligence are to our success.  And I learned how the admission of my weaknesses helped the farm grow stronger.

On October 1, Kate officially began her maternity leave.  To celebrate them both, we took the afternoon off and climbed up to the Tentrr site on the highest ridge of the farm.  For them, I did the one thing I do well —  I grilled legs of lamb over an open fire.  And there, as the summer turned to fall before our eyes, every member of our family took turns expressing our gratitude to these women for their strengths and contributions.  And I contemplated the trade-off our family made as we transitioned between generations.  We exchanged self-sufficiency for interdependence.  We, as individuals, have fewer personal accomplishments.  But Sap Bush Hollow Farm has more hands, more feet and more hearts invested in its future.  

I roll my eyes as Dad’s farmer hands squeeze the dressing bottle and make a mess of another side-salad.  Neither of us can make the plates as pretty as Bob does when he is here.  We’re all having to move and shift to hold things together until Kate gets back.  We’ll limp along and manage as best we can.  Because when she returns, there will be one more heart in our midst.  

Any day now….

This is the last blog for a few weeks while we take a rest, welcome our new neighbor/family member, and prepare the cafe for the fall and winter season.  I will, however, post an update as soon as Baby Batchelder is among us!