Settling in, falling in love

Perhaps I shouldn't be so easy.  Perhaps I shouldn't fall so hard, so fast.  

I'm only a week in, but here's the truth: I am smitten.  

I love Maine, I love this farm, this way of life.  Upon leaving the city I was telling an astute New Yorker about my plans, and she said, "That sounds so nice...  you can actually have your thoughts back."  And I feel that bearing out.  I feel like I have gained oodles of space and time and, in my semi-rootlessness, I am beginning to feel rooted in myself.

One week in, I am starting to get a feel for the rhythm of the farm and living in my camper.  Here's how the days typically unfold:

5am - Dawn breaks and the birds starting singing.  I lay still in my bed, eyes wide open, cocooned under many blankets until I am ready to throw off the covers and bear the early morning chill of my camper.  Winter is slow in retreating this year, and a handful of nights have been below freezing temperatures.

5:30am - I bundle up, step into my rubber boots and stomp through the muddy field over to the yurt.  This week, the crescent moon has still been visible in the sky as the pink sunrise begins to filter through the trees. I do a 20 minute yoga routine in the yurt, fully bundled, and begin to wake up my body.

6am - I return to my camper, stream NPR Morning Edition through my phone while I prepare coffee and breakfast.  In the early season, farm work begins at 8am, so I have plenty of time to sip slowly, wash up, and get ready for the day.

7:45am - I commute to the barn via a 5 minute walk through the field and I check in with the crew for our game plan for the day.  The work is varied and continuous: my first week of tasks included trimming about 1000 onions, repairing the high tunnel, digging holes for new trees, clearing a thicket of brambles, potting up tomatoes in the greenhouse and thinning brassicas, building a new low tunnel, and assembling a shelving unit.  Some of the work is quite physical and repetitive, and some is very focused and detailed.  I find that I am quickly able to get "into the zone", and love the tasks that for some would seem tedious.  I can work with little seedlings for four hours at a stretch and feel a deep sense of presence and peace.

12pm - We break for lunch.  I generally retreat to my camper and prepare something quickly - a sandwich wrap or heat up some soup.  If it's nice, I'll sit outside on my "porch" for a few minutes, or if I'm tired, sneak in a 10-15 minute nap.  On Thursdays, someone from the crew cooks lunch for everyone.

1pm - We work for another four hours, solid.

5pm - Day is done.  I cook dinner in my camper and then spend most of the rest of the evening in the yurt, where there is a woodstove and I can stay warmer.  I build myself a fire, heat up water for a cup of tea, light candles and the oil lamp.  I cuddle up on the sofa under a wool blanket and read for about 2 hours.  Then around 9pm I do another 20 minutes of yoga and make my way back to the camper, using my headlamp to light the way.  I'll often spot deer leaping through the fields at night, and I always marvel at the abundance of stars.  I quickly get into my long underwear, pajamas, and burrow under a sleeping bag and 4 blankets and nod off around 10pm.

And when I wake and hear the birds start singing again the next morning, I smile and think, "It's so good to be here.  This is the way life should be." 

On leaving and arriving

This morning I'm typing from a sunsoaked window seat in a coffee shop in downtown Portland, Maine on Easter morning.  I woke up chilled to the bone in a tiny camper situated in a back meadow of an organic veggie farm 40 miles south of here.  How did I get here?  Let me back up a couple of months and explain.

In June 2013, I reached a major milestone in my life: ten years in New York City.  A full decade, longer than I'd lived anywhere since childhood.  I was living my dream - at least the dream I set out to accomplish when I was 23 years old: move to NYC, work in publishing.  And I was working for the best in the business: Random House, where I respected and adored my colleagues, believed in the strategy of the company, felt we had strong leadership, was well compensated.  In my social life, I was surrounded by loving friends who made me laugh and shared my interests and taught me about the world.  I was paying below market rent for a cute garden level apartment in a charming Brooklyn neighborhood with landlords who treated me exceptionally well.  I felt settled, established, lucky.

And yet, something about that milestone began to signal an end.  A decade: a nice round number, a tidy chapter.  And I began to feel a tug.  It was time to get out, to explore, to see what it might be like to live another way.

It took over a year of scheming and dreaming and hair-brained ideas for me to land here in Maine.  Should I go to Colorado to be with my family?  Should I go to the Bay Area to be with my friends there and attempt to stay employed in publishing?  Should I move to Asheville and be a bartender or rafting guide?  Should I take a year to tour the great independent bookstores across the country, working in each a month at a time?  I circled these ideas around and around, receiving all sorts of enthusiasm and eye-rolling from my friends.

But then, one weekend last fall, I went home to visit my mom.  On our way home from the airport, we drove past an empty lot, and my mom said, "That's what I need, a space that big for my garden."  And something in me clicked.

At the time, my mom and some of her siblings were in the process of selling off parcels of the farmland they grew up on in Eastern Montana.  Our family farm wasn't a place that I ever spent much time on or knew, and it didn't particularly feel like the place I should return to.  But, it struck me that doing the work of farming, learning the kinds of skills, doing the kinds of chores that my mom and her siblings and my family has been doing for generations before me, might be a really meaningful enterprise, a way to "come home" and honor my heritage symbolically, if not geographically.

So I began the process of unwinding myself from urban life and transitioning to farm life.

I was lucky enough to find an apprenticeship on a farm that I feel really suits me.  Black Kettle Farm is run by Laura Neale, a kind of farming dynamo, and real community builder in the area.  She's young and funky, goes to yoga and spinning classes and listens to reggae, and grows some of the most beautiful and tasty veggies in the area.  She raises pigs and runs the farm all on a 12 acre plot she purchased a few years ago.  She's business savvy and a compassionate person, and I have a lot to learn from her.

I'm living in a tiny camper with no heat, no electricity, no water.  I gave away all of my possessions except what would fit in my car.  When this apprenticeship ends in November, I have no clue what I'm going to do.  And all of that feels very different and very free.

People ask me if I felt sad about leaving New York.  I really don't.  I feel held by the relationships I built there and even in saying my goodbyes, I felt more taken care of and connected than ever.  I feel like I gave that city my all for 10 years.  My friend Sarah once said to me "KJ, you eat life alive."  And in NYC, I really did.  I devoured that city, literally and figuratively.  I set foot on every bridge, explored every borough, ate all the food, absorbed the energy, danced joyously, loved madly, said yes to everything, gave my time, money, hands, sweat, and worked my ass off.  I did good.  And I feel good about it.

But now I'm ready to greet new friends, see new places, and experience the world in a different way.  Last night after I'd moved into my camper, Laura threw a dinner party for the crew and friends of the farm.  About a dozen people showed up, decked in wool sweaters and Carhartts, all ruddy-cheeked and hale-looking.  Laura served up cuts of pork from last year's pigs that she'd brined all day.  I brought a bottle of Rioja given to me by friends in New York, a sheep farmer brought rum and pineapple and made rounds of Mai Tais for everyone.  And despite being the new kid, I didn't feel like a stranger in a strange place.  I felt home.