The Dirty Life.On Farming, Food, and Love

by Kristin Kimball

  So that morning in Hawaii, I began harvesting the collards the only way I knew how. Not exactly at Mark-speed, but fast. My new friend, the island farmer, had started work on another item on his harvest list, but when he saw what I was doing, he was so alarmed by my pace he stopped me, arms waving, as though calling foul in a football game. It upset him so much he had to take a break and went to the house for a smoke. When he came back, calmed, he showed me how he wanted it done. His harvest style was less a death race, more of a gentle plucking. He would consider a leaf for a while. Then he would nip it off with a pair of scissors, almost reluctantly. Then he would let it flutter into the basket. It hurt me to watch him. It took the whole morning to harvest vegetables for ten people.

  Watching that guy’s collard flutter into his basket was the moment I got married, in my heart. There is no such thing as escape after all, only an exchange of one set of difficulties for another. It wasn’t Mark or the farm or marriage I was trying to shake loose from but my own imperfect self, and even if I kept moving, she would dog me all the way around the world, forever.

  I couldn’t wait to get home. When I did, I dug in as deeply as I could.

  Epilogue

  I got back in the darkest week of winter and took up my old chores, the ones Mark had been doing for me since I’d been gone. The word chore connotes tedium, but that was not how I felt about them. I had missed my chores. Chores were the first taste of the weather, first effort of limbs, a dance to which I knew all the steps with certainty. Mark and I made the first few stops together, in the dark, hardly needing to speak, carrying with us the warm intimacy of our bed. We fed the two calves in the nursery pen their bottles of milk, gave them a scratch at the root of the tail, then moved to the barn, called the cows in from pasture. I fed the barn cats, and Mark spun the root grinder to chop a bushel of beets and carrots. The cows munched, we milked. I left him washing the dairy buckets and went to pour fresh water into the chickens’ pans, refill their feeders with mash. Water for the dairy cows, plus a trip to the loft for four good bales of second-cut hay. By the time I rounded the west barn, on the way to the draft horses’ pasture, the sun was coming up, highlighting the Green Mountains across the lake. I stopped every morning to consider the faraway, singular peak of Camels Hump. Some days it was obscured by clouds, some days tinted orange or red, and some days, when I was running early, it was visible only in two dimensions, black against a less black sky. I tried to augur the day from that view, to predict its weather and what it might hold.

  When the horses and steers and pigs were all fed I walked back to the house, leaving a trail of comfort and contentment in my wake. Mark had the dairy things washed and had our own breakfast sizzling on the stove.

  He’d survived my absence, but barely, and only through the help of members, friends, and neighbors. When I got back from Hawaii, something had shifted. Without me to struggle against, without the constant chaos of our first growing season, without the pressure of our impending wedding, he seemed to have found his own steady rhythm. I worked my way into it, looking for the harmony this time, instead of conflict. We found easy joy in working together, becoming real partners, instead of combatants, for the first time.

  The seasons have unfolded into years. We pack them up in the fall, after frost, and label them according to the prevailing weather of the summer, by which they’ll be remembered. Year two was a good one for vegetables but harder on us even than year one, and so relentlessly hot and humid that four of our Highland cows died during it. Year three was textbook perfect. Year four was somewhat dry, which stressed the plants just enough to make them exceptionally tasty. Year five was cold and disastrously wet, the dark clouds gathering over us again and again until it seemed like a joke, standing water between all the rows, three-quarters of the vegetables lost to rot. Year six it rained too much again, and late blight took all the tomatoes and the onions—three tons!—did not dry down and would not keep.

  Every year the membership gets a little bigger. It hovers around a hundred now. By year three, we couldn’t do it by ourselves anymore, not without risking burnout, or divorce. James and Sara and Paige came to work for us, stayed a year, then moved on to start their own farms. After that came Brad and Matt and Sam, then Susie and Anthony, and then Tim and Chad and Courtney and Racey, all young farmers aiming to gain skills that they’ll use on their own places. Some of our neighbors—Kristin, Kim, Barbara, and Ronnie—joined our permanent staff. The farm has grown beyond us. On Friday nights after distribution, I cook a big dinner for everyone who worked on the farm that week, a celebration of their effort and of the harvest. In the summer the crowd runs over twenty, and we move the tables outside and send someone to the barn for extra chairs.

  Our daughter, Jane, arrived in year four, at the end of that dry August. I gave birth to her in the farmhouse. Mark brought me a sunflower, and it was big as my own face and full in its moment of perfection; and when I looked at it, from the depths of the work of birth, it seemed to be looking back at me reassuringly. The midwives weighed Jane on a fish scale: seven pounds, eight ounces, a keeper. I remember waking that night with the notion in my head that the whole long trial of labor might have been a dream and there was no baby, and then finding her between us, warm and alive, and feeling not relief but almost its converse, the bright feeling of winning something unexpected at long odds. Later that week I took her to the barn to meet the horses, and held her up to Sam’s big head so he could blow his breath on her, give her his blessing.

  That fall we bought part of the farm from Lars, eighty acres and the house and barns.

  Silver died in the winter of that same year. He and Sam had begun to show their age. The work was too much for the two of them. We’d bought another team, to take the pressure off them. Jay and Jack were Amish-bred geldings in their early teens, part Belgian, part Suffolk. I was walking back to the house after chores one cold Saturday and out of the corner of my eye I noticed Silver in the pasture, standing still, with his right foreleg cocked. It could have been a resting posture, and I almost kept going, but there was something off about him, and it made me look again. It was his expression. He looked worried. This horse was king of the pasture. He never worried. We’d turned him out with Sam and Jack after morning milking, and he’d been fine when I took hay out twenty minutes earlier. When I got to him he put his nose out and blew through his nostrils in greeting, like always. I rubbed his great, thick neck, ran my hand over his shoulder and down the leg to his knee. The leg felt sickeningly loose. He didn’t flinch or pull back when I touched him. He didn’t look like he was in pain, though he must have been. I knew in my heart that he was done for. I went in and told Mark, and he called the vet. Dr. Dodd, Dr. Goldwasser’s partner, was on call, and she said she would come within the hour.

  When I got back out to the pasture I found Silver down, his big feet curled under him like a resting foal. The shoulder on his injured side quivered, but he was very calm. I offered him some carrots, and to my surprise he ate every one. I sat down next to him and stroked his velvet nose and tried to convey my gratitude to him for everything he’d taught me, for laboring so hard and so willingly, and for all the times that his presence had comforted me. By then I was sniveling, the tears freezing my cheeks, and my nose was running wildly. Sam walked over to us, lowered his head to touch Silver’s withers, and slowly walked away. The animals, I thought, are so much more dignified in their good-byes than we humans. Dr. Dodd arrived a few minutes later. She could tell at a glance that the leg was broken above the knee. Could have been a kick from another horse, she said, or it could have been an unlucky step on a patch of ice. There was absolutely nothing that she could do for him. He stretched his neck out then and laid his head on the snow. If we had needed a sign that it was time, that would have been it. Mark walked back to the house, got the gun, and through the haze of his own tears laid the muzzle against Silver’s broad forehead and put him down.

  Our first Christmas as married people, Mark gave
me a puppy. He was an English shepherd named Jet, black and white, a good and useful farm dog. From the beginning he was my shadow and lived to please me. The next spring Nico died, and we buried her in the yard next to the flagpole. The grass above her grave grows wilder, more rank. I think of her when I walk over it, and also whenever I look at the tuft of white fur on Jet’s muzzle, the scar where Nico schooled him on not taking another dog’s dinner.

  We bought yet another team of horses: gorgeous young Belgians, Jake and Abby, only four years old, well-broke but without polish, a good challenge. Chad brought his own horses when he came to work for us, and in the summer our friend Bill West brings his team of Suffolks to our place every week, so there have been as many as four teams at work in the field at the same time, and anyone driving by would think we’re Amish.

  Sam died in the summer of year six. He had worked regularly for us until Silver died, and afterward we used him for odd jobs, or when another horse was lame. Partnered with younger horses, he was ever willing, but he tired quickly and recovered slowly. He spent his last few months with our neighbors Bob and Patti Rowe. They had a barn full of draft horses, some young and beautiful, some old relics like Sam, all of them pampered. Bob hitched Sam a few times to drag the pasture, but mostly he was retired, content to graze and doze with the rest of the Rowes’ herd. Bob said that Sam took charge of the mares and their foals, acted like the herd sire, and wouldn’t let the other geldings get anywhere near them. I found that surprising, because he’d always been at the bottom of the herd order on our place, under beneficent Silver while he was alive, and then under tyrannical Jack. It made me smile to hear it, like knowing your second-fiddle uncle has become the most popular guy at the nursing home. Then one bright morning Bob went out to the pasture to find all the geldings mixed in with the mares and the foals. He counted heads, and Sam was missing. Bob found him under an elm, already gone, and laid him to rest in the pasture.

  Our marriage remains the fiery kind. Our front window is still cracked, the lawn is still shaggy.

  It’s never the way you think it’ll be, Mark used to tell me. Not as perfect as you hope or as scary as you fear. A man we know bought up a big piece of good land nearby, a second home, and once, at a dinner, I heard him say, “In my retirement, I just want to be a simple farmer. I want . . . tranquillity.” What you really want is a garden, I thought to myself. A very, very small one. In my experience, tranquil and simple are two things farming is not. Nor is it lucrative, stable, safe, or easy. Sometimes the work is enough to make you weep. But most days I wake up grateful that I found it—tripped over it, really—and that I’m married to someone who feels the same way.

  I wonder, sometimes, how Jane will regard her childhood. I am aware it’s not your average one, at least not here and now. We spent her second birthday, for example, butchering rabbits. She stood on top of a barrel and watched my knife. When the rabbit was skinned and opened, she poked at a kidney with her curious first finger. “That’s a kidney,” I said. “It’s sticky,” she said. When I meet adults who grew up on farms, I quiz them on their upbringing. The answer is never lukewarm. It’s either painted in golden colors—the perfect way to grow up—or described as pure drudgery, no childhood at all. The split seems to run fifty-fifty. I love this farm and the life that comes with it. I love that it makes me feel rich even though we’re not. I love the work. I figure the best we can do is share that love with Jane, and hope she loves it, too.

  There’d be no room for regret, if I had any. One cold winter Saturday we invited our friend Megan over for breakfast. It was her birthday, and I wanted to make something special for her. I was considering what we had in the root cellar as I walked downstairs with Jane, who was then not quite six months old. I found Mark in the kitchen, holding a calf bottle. We’d been trying to get Jane to take a bottle that week, and at first I thought Mark was making a visual joke with the gargantuan nipple, but then I saw the newborn calf in a heap at his feet. It was a bull calf, born to June and sired by Rupert. This was the third Jersey-Highland cross we’d had, and they’d all looked like Alfred E. Neuman at birth, with red, cowlicky hair and winglike ears. This one was no exception, but he was in bad shape. He must have been born right next to the electric fence and then slipped or stumbled across it, so that June couldn’t get to him to lick him off. What a way to come into the world. He’d been there for a couple hours, wet, hypothermic, and he looked more dead than alive, stretched out flat on the kitchen floor.

  Mark and I have developed our specialties over the years, the jobs we like best and are good at. Mark specializes in straight lines. The furrows he makes are like rulers. I specialize in doctoring the animals. My book collection contains a row of antique titles on horse and cattle husbandry, and various editions of The Merck Veterinary Manual, and I pore over them in the winter. So despite the breakfast to make, this calf was my project, by choice.

  There’s no text for cases like this, only instinct and common sense. I pried the calf’s mouth open. It was cold inside. He was too far gone to suck. When I propped him up on his chest next to the woodstove, his head flopped, and amniotic fluid ran out of his nose. But where there’s breath, there’s hope. June’s thick, warm colostrum would do him a lot of good, if we could get him warm enough to swallow it. I rubbed him vigorously with one of our good bath towels, which is the only kind of towel that is ever handy at moments like these, and stoked the woodstove. I gave him a little pep talk, telling him about the white Highland calf, his half brother, that had been born into the ice-rimmed water tank on a below-zero night in February and survived. Then I covered him with a down jacket and a bedspread and let him rest, and got back to breakfast, while Mark went to finish his chores. It would have to be a hasty meal now.

  Jane was starting to fuss, so I strapped her into a baby seat and secured it on the kitchen counter and set several ladles swinging on the rack above her, which made her shriek with delight. I cracked two dozen eggs and got the pans heating on the stove. The coffeemaker was broken, and no coffee was not an option, so I boiled water and threw the grounds into it, cowboy-style. Megan arrived, and Mark and Sam and Matt came in from chores, and Jet trotted in with his girlfriend, Lady, and the two dogs licked at the calf, who was starting to look more lifelike. Lady was Jet’s first assignment as a stud dog, and it wasn’t going very well. She’d been with us two weeks, gradually coming into heat, and for the last four days, she’d been trying to get Jet to breed her. Jet was a jovial host but a reluctant suitor, and there’d been lots of jokes around the farmhouse about his naïveté, his preference for the barn cats, his moral rectitude, et cetera. Lady was more knowing, just waiting for his awakening.

  I added more wood to the stove, and the room got toasty. The calf regained his sucking reflex, and we got a half gallon of colostrum down his gullet, which revived him enough to hold his head up. I slapped the simplified birthday breakfast—scrambled eggs with pancetta, and toast—on the table and indulged in a very big mug of coffee, a little chewy with grounds. By the time we all sat down, the woodstove was glowing faintly red and we had to move the table away from it, to the far side of the room. We’d all stripped off layers, down to the bare minimum, and still everyone was sweating. The heat did have the desired effect on the calf, though. Halfway through breakfast he popped up and frankensteined across the floor and into the next room and out again, and had to be herded away from the woodstove so he wouldn’t fall into it and fry himself. He staggered into my legs while I was eating, and latched on to the bottom of the table and attempted to suck. Jane, in her infant seat, had gotten hold of a rattle, and she was shaking it and alternately giggling and happily shrieking. We were singing “Happy Birthday” to Megan when Jet finally got the hang of it, and the two dogs made their way around the table as one. It was in that sweating, giggling-shrieking, staggering, singing, doggy-style humping in flagrante chaos that I decided my life was full. Joyful, rich, but full to the brim and then some. This was not what I had pictured, when I had y
earned, from my East Village apartment, for home. If I could have glimpsed it, I’m pretty sure it would have frightened me off, which is a good enough reason to be thankful for the veil of time.

  And this is the place where I’m supposed to tell you what I’ve learned. Here’s the best I can do: a bowl of beans, rest for tired bones. These things are reasonable roots for a life, not just its window dressing. They have comforted our species for all time, and for happiness’ sake, they should not slip beneath our notice. Cook things, eat them with other people. If you can tire your own bones while growing the beans, so much the better for you.

  In times of upheaval, I read somewhere once, people go back to the land. As economies plunged around the world, and wars droned on, on two fronts, we watched our summer volunteer staff grow and grow, filled out by high school and college students eager to learn how to plant, to weed, to harness a horse, to put up a case of tomatoes. The New York Times ran a trend story with the headline “Many Summer Internships Are Going Organic.”

  From this point I can see it was a kind of upheaval that drew me to this and to Mark. It was a grasping out of chaos, personal and general, at the cliff end of blithe youth, for something knowable. This morass, I thought then, must be a symptom of too much input. Move toward a place so small that everything could be known. If my world became a farm and a single, tiny town, I could chart and understand every person and his connections, every acre, each plant, each animal, the trajectory of each thought, emotion, and action. I wanted to believe that such a circumscribed life could be sorted and organized, in the way that the nineteenth-century naturalists cataloged all known living things, from kingdom to species, categories and subcategories that were not simple, exactly, but at least made sense.