Detours

When I walked across the stage at my MFA convocation, dressed in radiant purple robes, to be hooded like the scholars long before, I was told, along with the rest of my class, that we were among the ‘overly educated elite.’ I dreamt of best sellers. I dreamt of writers residencies where I would talk craft and how to write. I dreamt of prestigious offices in revered academic institutions.. Of my own writing office in my home with antique glass doors, book shelves lined with volumes upon volumes and a growing section of my own publications. I would say to guests, “Oh you’ve not been able to find a copy of my latest work? Here," I’d take one from the shelf, and inscribe it for them, “with my love….” They would be thrilled and on the way home, wonder how they ever got to be friends with someone as cool as me.

Five years later, I am neither on the best selling list, the glass door office hasn’t been built. And instead of haggling over publishing contracts, I’m debating over the pros and cons of a dairy cow versus a pair of dairy goats to supply milk for our small family.

I have, against my own wishes and (possibly) better judgment, and in addition to my writing, and teaching, become a farmer.

Realistically, it may not be a far fall from the metaphorical tree. I grew up in a rural area of Northeastern Pennsylvania. Farming had been the primary way of life until Procter and Gamble moved into the area in the late 60’s.

My family always had some animals (not used as pets), rabbits and chickens mostly. one of my earlier memories was collecting eggs from our barn red chicken coops during a thunderstorm. i pulled my shirt out to make a hammock for them, and the warmth coming from the small, golden brown eggs radiated through my shirt to my belly, even though i was dripping with rainwater. I still love the feel of a warm egg straight for the henhouse and the beauty of the light brown shells.

This rural up-bringing has always set me apart. In many places I was a novelty so to speak. While living in the UK, I was an ‘agricultural consultant.’ By this I mean I ended up educating my city friends on the ways of country life. Behold the glories of Duck Tape (there it was Gaffer’s Tape) , hard physical work, and being unafraid to get one’s hands dirty.

While doing my MFA, my lifestyle was viewed by colleagues as some sort of pastoral idyll. They thought it sweet that I made my own bread, and that i grew and canned my own tomatoes. They marveled that I schlepped glass Mason jars, lids and rings through the Manhattan subway turnstiles to my sister so she and her husband in Jersey City could make jam, syrup and preserves from the mulberries she found in a nearby park.

In this routine, my colleagues usually asked the same question: “Well it’s fun, but why bother when you can just get it from the store?”

While it was certainly more work to bottle up all the mulberries into jam, syrup, or to dry them into mulberry raisins to be used in breads, oatmeal and muffins, there was something about it rewarding. Something about doing for ourselves that made it worthwhile and made the jam taste all the sweeter. There was something about continuing the traditions we cherished so much. But to our city friends, we were novelties, and they smiled at us, and shook their heads.

“To each their own,” they would say, as they opened a jar of Smuckers grape jelly.

My sister, also one of the overly educated elite, graduated from an MFA theater program of only eight people. Her resume stretches longer than I care to think about. She and her husband moved to New Jersey so she could pursue auditions and an acting career. He was a successful equine massage therapist. But as time went on, they came out to the family farm more and
more, until they decided to make it a permanent move.

Fast forward a few years, and you find us all living on the same farm. My sister and her husband, my parents, my maternal grandmother and my husband and myself. Add to that two toddlers, a newborn, and we have four generations living on the same property we, our parents, paternal grandparents and great grandparents lived on.

The farm by this point was a farm in name only. A few of the fields were rented out, but that was the extent of it’s health. The ancient apple orchards survived in spite of everything, growing wild and tangled among themselves. But when we looked at it, each of us on our own, we could see what there was and what there could be.

So slowly, and individually, we began. It started with some Scottish Highland cattle, some sheep, and some Arucana chickens. The garden was expanded significantly. More and more fruit trees were added, along with grape vines, blueberry bushes, and red currants. The bottom part of the barn was turned into a working kitchen for canning season that smelled of celery and tomatoes for about three weeks in the summer while my sister, mother and grandmother all bottle home made tomato soup, sauce, stewed tomatoes and salsa.

Tomato season is followed quickly by apple season. The spicey aromas are replaced by a gentle subtle sweet smell as apples cook down to make apple sauce, or sliced apples for pies.

Then in the idle of the winter, comes maple season. Our patio begins to smells smoky sweet as the evaporator burns day and night to boil down the sap into thickened amber syrup. From one hundred gallons of sap, we get about five to ten gallons of syrup.

We have developed a strong streak for doing things for ourselves. We still make the majority of our own bread. We now make our own yogurt, baby food, ice cream, and are expanding our repertoire to include cheeses. When our daughter was developing severe rashes from her diapers, we switched mid stream to cloth diapers. From October to December I was bent over my 1970s Kenmore Sewing machine, making all in one cloth diapers out of old t-shirts and flannel until we had enough with the store bought flat diapers and ones we had borrowed. Now the only time she's in a disposable is when she's asleep for the night, or we're travelling.

Quilting has always been part of our heritage. My mother taught me to hold a needle when I could hold a pencil. So as old jeans wear out, and flannel shirts are no longer patched, they come to me, and they are turned into heavy quilts. I am learning to spin wool into yarn, and then to knit up anything we can think of with that yarn. I plan on expanding my garden to include herbs and flowers used for dying the fiber nearly every color of the rainbow.

On top of this doing for ourselves, we’re considering homeschooling or charter schools.

You may have noted the person change. What had begun as simply my story, has become a family story. Truth be known, this farm can’t run by itself. It takes a bunch of us to get the work done. We all contribute in many different ways, some not as obvious as others, but it is still all about getting the work done, and breathing life into what was once a nearly abandoned idea. The Family Farm, with the Family working on it.

We live in a time when the economy is like a drunken high school sophomore. Things that were old are suddenly new again. Subsistence farming is growing gradually as people become aware and realistic about their situations. Families are planting gardens again, buying pigs to be butchered at the end of the year. Murray McMurray – one of the leading poultry hatcheries in our country – has been consistently sold out of chicks. Books like Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day is on the best seller list. Ways of life that were scoffed at, or seen as sweet, are becoming more of a standard, more steady and strong like the rock walls that continue to line our countryside, centuries later.

The list is beginning to sound familiar. “Well I used to be a teacher…” or Social worker…. or any list of other occupations. And they turn to farming. Most likely not for the sole support, but as a supplement for their family. an actress, a writer, a botanist, and a lab manager from Harvard. All reborn as farmers with horses, dogs, orchards, cows, gardens, and bee keeping operations either for themselves alone or for the small profit that comes once in blue moon.

Historically, farmers were not the most schooled people, neither were they the most pressing on the social ladder. But they had enough sense to survive. Now this new class of farmer is emerging, the enlightened farmers, with educations out the gesundheit, all to return to a more ancient and less applauded way of life. Though my studies didn’t teach me how to deliver a lamb or how to smoke out bees, my education taught me how to be a student, how to seek out teachers, and when in doubt, how to teach myself. in short, it taught me to keep learning.

We had a few friends come to our home for a get together. One couple was a successful military family, one child, one enlisted, or re-enlisted, the other having had a military past, and working in civilian life. One of these people I Consider to be a dear friend. This dear friend half jesting, half serious, said, "I don't think you'll ever leave. I just don't see it. You're always going to be right here. There are jobs other places you know." He later went on to poke fun a our lifestyle here on the farm, our growing our own food, raising our own beef, possibly homeschooling our children.

And I took a breath and let it go, because I couldn't say anything nice at the moment. Because in fact, it is a battle I fight every day. There are indeed jobs elsewhere. There are jobs with better pay, better clout other than in T-Town Pennsylvania.

It’s those moments that I wonder if this really was the best idea? My husband and I both still work, him full time, me part time. I wonder if this whole natural lifestyle is worth it. It really is just easier to go to the store and buy a loaf of bread, and a couple jars of baby food. And Smuckers really does make a pretty exceptional jar of strawberry jam. Is this whole thing worth it?

But when I see our daughter’s face when the sheep come up to her to say hello and the way she squeals at the new calf, when I taste the fresh bread, or do the basic math that shows how much money we have saved by making our own baby food, wipes and diapers…. when I realize that for as much as I worry, as long as we’re here and able to farm some, we will have food… when I see the apple orchards in full blossom and to steal a line from Keats, stand in the bee loud glade….or when I smell the roses my great-grandmother planted up against the barn - they were the only thing she brought to her new home when she married-.. when I see my daughter get to play with her two cousins who are also her next door neighbors, and how much she loves her great grandmother, and how her great grandmother loves her... how our daughter will grow up knowing what the stars look like, knowing what it means to plant a garden, pick an apple straight off the tree, to know what it means to have family around you (granted not all of her family is nearby; my husband's family is primarily in Utah, New Hampshire, Texas, and Kansas)....

It’s those times I realize, that yes, this is worth it. It’s something inescapable i think. It’s part of my family's collective unconscious. And as long as we are here and are able to work together, we will have food, we will adapt to figure things out for repairs or how to make new things like toys and clothes. To raise my family to live in a cleaner more self sufficient lifestyle, in the mythological echoes of her ancestors, this is worth it.