Sitting in their living room, we four adults worked through the details of an egg production contract and, specifically, the regulatory aspects of egg processing. We, more than anyone, knew that getting these washing facilities right is important. There are always hurdles, but they’re additionally higher when working out ways to heat to exact temperatures and keeping clean eggs at a precise forty-five degrees without electricity. It’s doable, just not easy. And our conversation circled around gas generators, woodstoves, and battery-operated thermometers.
There were times when Ruth’s husband, Marlin, dug in on points, flatly stating they did not require electricity for some small task, like candling. It seemed like a tiny issue, but I realized that this entire culture plods forward in our modern world only by stringently holding the outside world at bay. With both arms locked.
At one point during our conversation, Marlin, a serious-looking man wearing suspenders pinned to wool pants and a vigorous salt-and-pepper beard, turned his attention from Jason to me and asked, pointedly, “How old are you?”
I was wobbled by the question but also attracted to its directness. He asked in the subtle accent that flavors Marlin’s English. To my ear, his you registers as yew, in deference to the Low German he also speaks.
I was silent for a beat.
“Did I offend you? I don’t want to offend you.” I could see he sincerely meant it.
“No, no, it’s fine,” I demurred, and answered that I was forty-three (though sometimes in poor lighting I can be mistaken for younger). He eyed me some more and nodded. I could only guess he was curious about us, too.
The men continued to talk numbers as I leaned into their circle of conversation. Jason, figuring a percentage in his head, was quickly corrected by Marlin. He may not have gone to high school, but Marlin was fiercely bright and used modern business terms like distributors and margins and capital costs.
“Could you bring in your computer, Jason?” he asked.
We’d left our Macs in the car, not wanting to disrespect their home with technology, but this is a good example of what we’ve found working with Amish families. They’re happy to benefit from technology, just not to wield it themselves.
This can be surprising, and I defend the Amish from those who mock their acceptance of car rides or the use of generators or the computer chip accuracy of our calculators. Aren’t we all just a big swirly of compromises? I think this as I write a check for produce from my local CSA and then run my debit card for toilet paper (and other items of excretion management like tissues and feminine hygiene products) at the megawarehouse store.
Jason and I hoped to hammer out a deal today and sidestep a few issues we’ve had in the past. We were (and are) learning when it comes to these partner contracts. There’s little out there to model on, especially as we try to respect the autonomy of the producers. While we require our partners to raise eggs like Locally Laid does, we get that farming is one of the last domains of the cowboy. Farmers are disinclined to micromanagement. We build in as much autonomy as possible. As in, here are the standards in regards to treatment of chickens, the rules set by regulators about handling and temperatures, and the ingredients for feed to be procured as locally as possible—find your way to do it.
But there can be no Wild West in egg washing. One of our partner farmers had some initial trouble, skewing more earthy when it came to shell cleanliness. And now that we work with chickens every day, I get it. The eggs I bring home to my own family often have mystery flecks one can scrape off with a fingernail or maybe a feather in the carton. That’s okay for us but completely unacceptable under the all-exposing fluorescence of supermarket lighting.
Commercial eggs must be pristine, sprinkled only by holy water, washed by the hair of organically certified virgins, with an ethereal chorus of angels singing as the carton is cracked open. This has led to awkward conversations with Amish producers and we try hard to not make it about them. Instead we draw the onus back to the consumer: typically a higher-income, educated suburban gal. And while she may appreciate the farm and theoretically loves chickens, she doesn’t need or want to experience the barn’s coarse reality.
It is hard for me to emphasize enough to our Amish partners the impact of a dirty egg out in the world—how an irate consumer may take a photo, put it out in social media, and it’s there forever.
“And this, this would not be good for Locally Laid and all of us who produce for the brand,” I say.
My speech is often met with silence.
It’s nearly impossible to explain the power of Facebook or Instagram and their flow of personal anecdotes and goofy snapshots to people who have never themselves been photographed. It’s like Jason once joked about the Amish: great at farming, bad at Twitter.
Ruth and her adult daughter, standing shyly behind her mother, called us to lunch. It was a meal served next to the wood-fire cooking stove, not unlike the historic one sitting in Glensheen, all scrolled iron legs and heft. The difference—this one was blazing hot. Ruth served a casserole meal of beef in a white sauce, green beans canned last season, bread, and a fruit crumble dessert. It was good and appropriately heavy for people who work out of doors. As I ate, I saw that nearly everything on this long wooden table was produced right there.
I sat near Ruth, who affably inquired about my projects, things I might be sewing, jams I’d put up last summer, and breads I bake. I had nothing to offer, to the point that as the conversation plodded on, I began to wonder, What did I do all day? Watching her desperately trying to create polite conversation, earnestly attempting to find something, anything I can do that she’d be able to remark upon was charmingly awkward. I didn’t know how to tell a woman who’d recently helped a neighbor birth a baby that I nearly failed junior high home economics. That indeed my mother had to completely remake my gym duffel bag project, a sewing task that involved three seams and a zipper, and that I was banned from handling the school kitchen’s plastic wrap given my ruinous attempts to start the roll.
What we had in common is motherhood. I complimented her children, who joked quietly with each other at the other end of the table and, once the dishes were done, alternately entertained the baby and read books. I noted that one of the teen boys studied a music book that looked like hymns, but I couldn’t be sure given they weren’t in English. I was taken that a boy his age would be interested in music like this.
I later read that singing is the courtship ritual of the Amish young. While it varies from community to community, it’s one of the culture’s oldest activities, going back to the 1800s. It’s basically a young folks’ choir, but seemingly a little romance happens with the chatting and laughter in between songs and, of course, the buggy rides back home.
Learning this made me smile. No matter how different we were, there are some basic universal tendencies. Boys will do what it takes to meet girls.
Months later, on a different visit, an evening one, we sat around that table again with the woodstove blazing to boil water for tea. The younger daughters were there this time, sitting beyond the table, bonneted heads together in the ethereal light cast by the lantern. They whispered, giggled, and sneaked glances at me. I thought they looked remarkably like Abbie. I cannot imagine what I looked like to them.
This encounter felt more relaxed, or maybe I was just more relaxed. There was laughter as Marlin recounted one of the big distributor semis coming to pick up eggs, overshooting the driveway, and getting terribly stuck.
“Well, we hooked up our team and just straightened them on out,” Marlin said. He was smiling. I can’t imagine how fun it is for the Amish to get one over on the “English” (as they call us) and our technology. Even I felt a flush of pride on their behalf. I suspect the truck driver made no mention of the incident back at the home office.
As we discussed some accounting issues and ideas to make the payment system better for the producers, I noted that Ruth was not sitting at the table, only the men—her older boys and me. Nibbling cookies,
I felt that I’d screwed up.
Getting up to make our good-byes, I gathered up mugs and brought them back to the kitchen where Ruth stood near the sink. I wanted to apologize for not sitting with her.
But she jumped in first. “You shouldn’t have taken your shoes off, it’s too cold in here for that.” She looked down at my stocking feet, filled with chilly toes. “We’re insulating this whole part of the house soon. It’ll be so much more comfortable then.”
She said this with a tinge of pride. I smiled, thinking this home improvement was likely linked to their new egg revenue. Though communication would never be easy with the Amish, I decided then not to worry about where I sat. No matter which chair I took, I could see Middle Ag at work.
Chapter 21
Can’t you let me be happy for more than seven goddamn minutes?” This came out louder than I intended. I rubbed my hands, then my temples.
In the summer of 2014, Jason and I were making the drive down to Minneapolis for a speech practice session. We’d won a spot in the finals of the Minnesota Cup, a business competition that ferrets out innovative ideas with a thirty-thousand-dollar cash prize. As I was going to be the one presenting, I was already touchy. There was some pressure. Although the farm was technically making money and most everyone in the region knew our company name, nearly all profit was funneled back into the business for improvements, debt service, and to pay our small part-time staff.
That was when Jason said, “There’s really no good time to tell you this.” I snapped my head up from my notes. Dean and Sandy, he said, the former owners of the farm, who had stayed on as great tenants, had given notice.
My mouth fell open and I gasped, reacting like a bucket of water had been upended over me.
“They’ve inherited a house on a lake.” Jason spoke slowly and gently, like he was trying hard not to spook me. I recognized it as the tone he uses when prattling to a hen he’s about to snatch up in the field.
“They’re looking to make the leap in the next few months, so it would be a good time for us to look at moving out there.”
I don’t think my allusion to seven minutes was an accident.
A psychologist I know claims it takes seven years for a place to feel like home. And that feels about right. In that spring of 2014, we’d nearly summited that number and Duluth felt like a place we were from. Doing errands now meant seeing people we knew, we got the inside jokes and the political asides, and even the gray skies now felt somewhat sheltering rather than cause for wide-arcing mood swings. Or biting.
Plus, the past few weeks had been happy for me, ecstatic even. I’d given notice at Glensheen, leaving to both work for Locally Laid and finish my book, which had been recently purchased. I was thrilled on a number of levels, but especially that I’d be more available to the kids. Be on top of their everyday school needs. Make eye contact. Increase the odds they might pick me out of a lineup of other middle-aged women purporting to be their mother.
Also, I was looking forward to getting back to some of the other things I’d missed, like sleeping past four a.m.
So, of course, Jason wanted to move.
“Don’t Dean and Sandy’s kids go to school in Wrenshall? I … I thought they were going to stay until they graduated.” As I stammered through the last part, I remember hoping that was the case. It was unlikely that anyone had ever said that.
“I don’t know,” said Jason. “I just know they’ve given notice.”
Certainly, the farm is pretty, in a country-living sort of way. And while I grew up with plenty of land around my parents’ home and even some round hay bales on its few front acres, Maine rural feels different than the Midwestern version. Land in topmost New England is hemmed in safe by far-off hills and forests of thick pine and birch, some 17.7 million acres of woods.
In Minnesota, rural means open, sweeping—exposed. And to me, that’s unnerving.
Back when I first drove to the middle of the continent in 1995, I remember listening with increasing intensity to a book on tape, avoiding eye contact with the ever-widening sky outside my windshield. When I looked too long over my steering wheel, the broad vista made my heart rate quicken and my breathing labored as I envisioned scenarios of breaking down, fully vulnerable to the elements.
That was when I realized how much I like trees. While I’m no Maine Guide, the woods have always felt like refuge—a place one could build a shelter, find shade. Where dew would reliably gather in the predawn morning. But the sheer expansiveness of the midcontinent sky terrorized me. Though I wouldn’t have put it this way back then, it created the feeling of a chicken without cover, waiting to be picked off by a hawk.
I call this IFP: Irrational Fear of Prairie.
“But the children are in school in Duluth,” I protested. Abbie would be entering high school next year, and though I’d desperately wanted to bubble-wrap Milo for the start of middle school, it’d actually been a fine social experience for him.
“They wouldn’t necessarily need to transfer; you could drive them,” he said.
“Drive them? The Duluth schools are a good forty minutes one way. And then back home again? And what about swim practice? And Milo’s Dungeons and Dragons night? He wants to be a ski cadet this year at Chester, you know.”
“You could go the back way, through the state park. It’s a gorgeous drive,” he said.
I stared daggers at him.
He went on. “Lu, you’re not seeing the positives of the children growing up at the farm. They can learn real skills.”
I could almost see it playing out in his mind, visions of our kids helping him rip apart tractors and gathering eggs. In my own head, I did some quick math. I could easily be driving some four hundred miles a week, leaving the house at six thirty in the morning and not getting back till after eight at night. I wondered how pretty the drive was in the dark.
“But they won’t be at the farm, and neither would I. We’d be in the car.”
“Lu, it’ll work out, it always does,” Jason said.
It always does, I thought, because I jump on the parenting grenade, containing the shrapnel of chaos.
“Jason, I just got my degree and can start applying for teaching jobs now. Two colleges are walking distance from our house,” I said, clumsily gesturing toward Duluth behind us. “And another two are only a fifteen-minute drive—and you want to move now?”
He shrugged.
After so many years together, he knew I needed to mull. He, on the other hand, was mentally moving walls in the new place. I recognize that change energizes him, gives him a bounce, whereas the prospect leaves me pining to see through the life I’m presently living.
I spent the next few days in all shades of unnerve and anger.
The next week, we convened a family meeting, making the traditional pro and con columns. Milo, now eleven, was wide-eyed and sat stiffly at our dining room bench, having caught my aversion to all things new. Abbie, at thirteen, seemed pliable, curious about the possibilities.
After nearly an hour of discussion, the list tallies were nearly equal, even after heavily weighting the category of “time spent in car” with its due oppression. And as far as gut reactions go, we four were evenly divided—Jason and Abbie were keen for adventure, as Milo and I clung to the status quo as to masts on the proverbial sinking ship.
Trying to be all adulty on this issue, I agreed to walk through the farmhouse. Look at it with new eyes. That Saturday morning was warm, and the sounds of our chickens’ gentle clucking percolated over the landscape. It was clear. It was verdant. It was a setup.
It was over a year back that I’d done a quick winter walk-through of the home when we were purchasing the farm and, while I’d seen it from the outside plenty of times, my recollection of its details were foggy ones. For one, I hadn’t remembered it was built in 1998, a virile teen compared to our current geriatric Duluth house, leaning on its walker as it turned 100 years old. This gave the farmhouse some pluses, like real insulation and decent
windows. And as we walked through the house, I couldn’t help but see us enjoying the bigger living space.
Jason came up behind me and pointed to a corner. “This is where I think we should have a woodstove.”
I sighed deeply. Growing up with a woodstove in Maine, I can tell you there’s no heat like it. As ludicrous as it sounds, it’s just warmer. I’ve pined for that through-the-bone warmth all of my adult life. When that cast-iron door is opened and one can see the fire behind the metal mesh, there’s nothing like the mind-emptying gambol of flames. It’s humankind’s original hypnotic screen.
Our friend Mike, a gifted carpenter, had joined us and was making suggestions on opening up the space, filling it with light. Mimi was along, too, dizzy at the prospect of getting us out of our tiny home into something bigger, better.
There were advantages. The kitchen had a much better layout than our current galley one and the basement was largely finished, complete with a sauna, and could easily be a large family entertainment room or teen hangout.
Then we came to one of the bathrooms. Inside was a soaker tub. With jets.
“Oh God,” I said. The house was nicer than I remembered, than I hoped, truthfully.
“Moving here just seems the natural thing to do,” Jason said.
He was right. Residing in the city of Duluth while being farmers was like a story that didn’t quite fit together. When people learned that we didn’t live with our birds, you could almost see the cognitive dissonance pinging in their heads. Like we were cheating.
I juggled some ideas. One was to rent out the upstairs of our Duluth house but leave the teeny basement apartment for the kids and me to live in during the school week. It’s a one-bedroom with a second bed in the combo living room/kitchen. Very small, but doable—maybe. This way, the children could stay in their sports and clubs, while I taught.
Fortunately, it was taking the tenants longer to ready their new home, so I was granted more time to make friends with the idea.
And I had to go visit my parents in Maine.
Locally Laid Page 19
