Ten years ago I would have shaken my fist to the sky and despaired. I would have questioned all the choices that led me to this moment and wondered how I was to go on. Today, however, barely warranted a shoulder shrug and, perhaps, a slight eye roll. Some might call this resilience, and perhaps it is. I call it being old (er). I have to add the “er” lest my elders anger to the implication that I am as wise as they are. That is not, in fact, what I claim today. Today, I am simply much older and more experienced than I was ten years ago. This is no longer my first rodeo, so to speak. It’s no longer the first dreadful weather event. It’s not even the first time this particular structure was damaged. And still here we are farming. You know, I’ve been spending a lot of time over the past several years “working on myself.” It’s funny how I grew into that. In my youth, I was ever the sensitive soul, quick to anger or despair. I was, in the words of the father of positive psychology Martin Seligman, a “catastrophizer.” Even though I knew my sensitivity was a character flaw, it never occurred to me that I could change it. Isn’t that strange? George Bernard Shaw declared “youth is wasted on the young.” Never was a truer statement made, I don’t think. But the last several years have taught me things that my elders had been telling me with blue faces, but that I had, for some strange yet inevitable reason, to come by on my own. Things like: worrying or despairing over something doesn’t influence said thing at all; life will go on; and everything will be okay. Twenty years of farming has taught me that no matter what mother nature throws at us (this is NOT a challenge, mother nature), we’ll probably still be here farming. Age has taught me that if not, it will still all probably be okay. These lessons, and the change in me that they instilled, has opened me up to a joy I never fathomed as a youth. My elders, in all their wisdom, never quite conveyed the delight of middle age. I suppose I should keep this surprise to myself as well. For perhaps surprise is the great enhancer of the very joy of which I’m confessing. Ah well, too late, the cat’s out of the bag. The young won’t listen anyway.
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I was never an overachiever. In most realms, I didn’t like to challenge myself. In high school, I took AP classes but never took the exams to get the actual college credits. In college, I baffled some of my gen ed professors because I preferred to take classes below my skill level rather than test out. I don’t know why I was that way, it’s just something I recognize now as a personality quirk. While I’m still not exactly an overachiever, I no longer shy away from challenges. Learning to roll a whitewater kayak has been the most frustrating thing I’ve tried to do in a long time. I mean, tears, nervous stomach. I would get it and lose it and get it and lose it. And this was just in a nice warm, safe, flat pool. Every time I flipped over in a river, I just popped out of my boat and swam before I could even think about rolling back over. This, of course, was made entirely more frustrating because Jason, who began in exactly the same place as me, progressed much quicker. I watched him hit every roll in the pool in any boat he got in. I was proud and happy for him, but let’s be honest: it increased my frustration that I just wasn’t getting it. And then came Sunday. We finally went to the extremely intimidating and challenging whitewater center so I could demo a different kayak than the one I’ve been paddling. I flipped over in virtually the very first rapid and lo! I rolled right back up! Oh! The momentous feeling of surprise and glory that overcame me will be difficult to forget. I rolled my kayak up in a rapid! Life seems to be all about moments. “That moment when…” Our memories of these moments are essentially all we have. What I’ve learned from life and specifically from whitewater kayaking is that if you never step out of your comfort zone, if you never try something new (knowing you’re going to be terrible at it in the beginning or for maybe longer than you’d like), if you never experience frustration and fear and try it anyway, you never get to experience this moment of glory and joy when you finally succeed. It’s heady, that moment, and I will no longer trade it for the comfort zone. I can find faces In unexpected places And post them on-line Trying to live life To its fullest potential I find exhaustion I’m surprised how much Joy is found in middle age Older is wiser You know exactly When you become middle age Robot vacuum joy I always seem to Catch delight in every day When gratitude reigns It is time to start Harvest, washing, pack, repeat Spring is in the air I’m in the office Only one day per week, but Field work is better Sometimes addictions Are beneficial like our Kayaking hang-up Living in the moment is all the rage. Now, don’t get me wrong, I can see the benefit of that to some extent, but it feels a bit over hyped. I mean, we can’t do anything to change the past right? So letting it go seems the obvious choice. But we are borne of the past, forged in the crucible of not only our own history, but the history of everything. I’ll tell you the story that has influenced this line of thinking for me. I’m not a fan of the whole “red vs. blue” forced dichotomous language and thinking, but I’m about to use that language here just to tell the following story. There is a blue belt across the otherwise solidly red south. It coincides with the location of a prehistoric inland sea. Yep, prehistoric, you read that right. The explanation for this blue belt is that said inland sea left large flat swaths very fertile land that were later turned into huge plantations that brought in massive amounts of slaves. This population affects our current political map, if you will, and thus, the PREHISTORIC inland sea affects our current political map. See what I mean? The past is the past and I get that we’re not changing it, but we’re holding on to the residue of that past whether we acknowledge it or not. Or maybe the past is holding on to us, while we try in vain to cut the cords that bind us together. This is how I’ve become a big fan of onion seedlings. They don’t pretend to leave the seed from which they emerged behind, they just carry it with them into the present. It’s a full acknowledgement that they are a product of history, and I, of course, love the metaphor. There was a group of non-profit employees here years ago that were casually conversing with us beneath the packing shed. At one point, one of them said an entire sentence ostensibly in English, and I couldn’t understand a bit of it. Oh, I could understand the words individually, I suppose, but strung together in such a way transformed them into a language I did not, apparently, speak. Now, I’m a fairly well educated person with what I consider to be an above average vocabulary (not Tom Robbins level, but still), so this befuddling moment stands out in my memory. Every group, every profession, every everything it seems, has its own jargon and buzzwords. And that sentence was entirely made up of non-profit jargon and buzzwords. I’ve realized lately that agriculture is not immune to this phenomenon. I’m not just talking about the technical jargon for soil, amendments, etc. It would appear that agriculture is filled with a rotating dictionary of its own buzzwords. And right now, “regenerative ag” is on top. It’s okay if you have to fight the urge to roll your eyes—I just did. And I guess that makes me a grumpy old woman. I remember when “sustainable” was The Thing. Every young farmer across the nation—including us-- was throwing their hat and their farms into the “sustainable” ring. Yeah, we had to learn what it meant and how it was different than “organic”. I guess, looking back, that it was a backlash against the large scale organic farms that always seemed to be skirting at least the spirit of organic, if not the law. But organic was (and still is) the only thing with an agreed upon definition and set of agricultural methods. The only thing actually audited. “Sustainable”, when you boil it down, was just another hot buzz word. It’s definition a bit wishy-washy and varied depending on the farm and the perspective. Twenty years later and there’s a new hot buzz word floating around the agricultural world and it means about as much as “sustainable.” I literally attended a webinar trying to explain what “regenerative ag” was and you know what? It’s as wishy-washy and variable as “sustainable.” Some people think X and some people think Y and there’s no agreed upon definition and my grumpy old woman self harkened back to Utah Phillips saying “no matter how new age you get, old age still gonna kick your butt.” All this is to say nothing. It’s just another grumpy old woman ranting about “these young whipper-snappers” and their strange language, wishing she could regenerate an old body and attack the work of growing food with the gusto of the young We have this tree in our front yard that was supposed to be a weeping cherry tree, but instead is sort of a creeping cherry. Every year the tree creeps a little wider as if it were trying to blanket the whole yard. Jason wants to cut it down (it is a pain to mow around), but I love it with my whole heart. The horticulturists believe the graft was messed up and I just have to love the messed up unique things even when they’re inconvenient. You see, I really thought I wanted a weeping cherry there close to the red bud to put on a spectacular spring show. But a weeping cherry I did not get. I got this bumbling creeping thing that hardly blooms at all but spreads it’s giant awkward wings and puts on a show of its own, albeit a comedy. A tree that makes me laugh, how’s that for unique? How many of you have trees that make you laugh? So I was looking for the metaphor here, but perhaps there is none. Perhaps it’s just about finding the small joys in the everyday mundane. A tree that makes me laugh. A daily smile. And that is enough. We thought we were immune. We thought it had so much to do with the conscious effort we put into being a great place to work. But it turns out it must have been plain dumb luck. Because here we are mid-March without a full farmily in place. I try hard not to be afraid of the unknown. I know that things always work themselves out. But I can’t help the human part of me that wants to at least influence how those things work out. So we talk sometimes about exit planning. Usually we talk about it in times of deep stress, which can happen, if infrequently. But I feel like I just learned, after 15 years of being here working this land, not to worry about our future as farmers as much—that we’ll figure out how to survive and keep farming. Farming is a tough career choice. As Americans, we have always paid a much lower percentage of our income for food, which makes growing food a very tight margin to live by. But it is also a deeply satisfying career choice. Feeding people gets you down to the very basis of existence. Your job always feels important on some level. This is one of the things I love about farming. But now, we too, have fallen victim to the strange economy in which we’re operating. Our costs have risen dramatically, we’re in a record-low unemployment situation, and we’re, for the first time, encountering trouble filling out our fantastic farmily. Every year offers up a new problem, it seems. Whether it’s a new pest or disease, a new weather pattern such as the 90 inches of rain we received a few years back (for reference, 50 inches is “normal” here), the Covid-19 uncertainty, or what have you. And we’ve pivoted, adapted, learned, and survived. But we have never ever had a dearth of applicants who wish to do this work and participate in this lifestyle. So of course, it’s terrifying. It’s the scariest new problem to arise, borne of our own hubris in thinking we were immune to this common theme because we had “put the work in”. So here comes the ole’ exit-planning chatter again. “Can we do this with just the current crew?” “Should we downsize?” “Can we go back to working constantly, including nights and weekends?” And the fear of the answers, and the wondering what-in-the-world-else we might do, and back to the scrambling, and “am I too old for this?” Apparently, we have just joined the club of every employer looking to hire. It’s not a club we wanted or intended to join, but here we are, speaking the same language—scrambling to figure out how to get the work done with fewer of us. I have mixed feelings about March. I never seem to be ready. I start to scramble to get those last minute trips in while I still have a weekend, and head to the gym to make up for any slack time I spent “wintering” over the past two months, and then there’s the Masterclass lessons to catch up on, and what about all that reading I was going to do this winter?! I feel like a cartoon character holding desperately to the out-of-control spring car with my feet plowing the dirt beneath as the daffodils and the peepers and the calendar all ignore my pleas to slow down! Time just keeps Marching, whether I am perpetually surprised by it or not. And so here we are full on in the planting frenzy, discovering all the things we should have been doing in December, like little squirrels finding all the nuts we stowed away for ourselves last fall. Maybe someday we’ll master this cycle, but the odds are, after 16 years, decidedly against it. Perhaps instead, we should just accept the March madness as part of the seasonal cycle. I’m sitting at a counter overlooking the parking lot in a strip mall with mediocre at best coffee in a Styrofoam cup having just eaten the best bagel breakfast sandwich of my life (and I like to consider myself an expert on bagel sandwiches). I tried to go to Cracker Barrel or Waffle House, but 11am on a Sunday in Mt. Juliet, TN is the right time for everyone else too, and a good bagel sandwich was exactly what I wanted. I just dropped one of my oldest friends off at the airport after a night of celebrating love. It’s not the first wedding of strangers I’ve attended as my friend’s “plus one”. I just tend to say “yes”. It was a long time ago that I was taught by a Jesuit brother that we are the Universe’s ability to reflect upon itself. I must have decided in that moment that I’d better show the universe the best of itself then. And while life certainly brings with it a necessary amount of pain and suffering (how else would we recognize the joy?), have been on an infinite path of joy ever since. Part of that infinite path of joy involves the word “yes”. I try to say that word as often as possible (within reason, of course). I mean, I don’t recommend this practice for teenagers as teenagers don’t necessarily know what “within reason” means, but “yes” for adults most often leads to the Universe’s best. Or, as my friend David says, at the very least it leads to adventure. It’s this little word that has led so many adventures, both large and small. And those adventures have led to so many moments for the Universe to reflect fondly upon itself. The natural beauty, the best of humanity, the laughter, the awe, the joy. All these things and more contained in that simple little word: “yes”. It snowed in the mountains. The ski slopes are opening. Skiing makes me feel dumpy. Coming from the flatlands, it always looked like a rich man’s sport, which, I suppose it is when you have to fly far away to find an actual mountain. But in the flatlands, it’s an even more distant idea. Snow comes, and visions enter our mind of lithe bodies, painted in tight brand name (what is a skiing brand name?) ski fashion, blond hair (they’re always blond) streaming behind them as them flit side to side down fluffy white mountains. And I, eating sausage and pierogies and sloshing through the slushy snow and mud aftermath in bulky layers and clunky rubber boots like a surly Russian peasant in spring marching out to milk the cow again. I don’t even make it to the lodge. Put me on that hillside and I’m inching down on my butt repeating the mantra “no health insurance, no health insurance, no health insurance”. Isn’t this how Sonny died? I pretend I would hate to be one of those people with enough money, insurance, and hair dye to be one of those bodies, but this isn’t really the truth. I came from the flatlands where we are stoic, reliable, reserved, tame, if a little bit dumpy. We know the truth, and we know not to speak it. You don’t need the truth to go out and milk the cow. You just do it. I bet that’s really where Nike got its motto from. Sure, they paint pictures of super human athletes blah blah blah, but I bet they really got their inspiration from the Midwest. Just go out and do what needs to be done. No protestations, no hesitation, and least of all, no truth. You swallow all that and just do it. It’s not lithe or sexy or brand name (unless that brand name is Nike), but it’s probably how we’ll survive the end of the world as we know it, and it’s definitely how I survive growing produce in the cold. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
April 2024
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