Eating life alive (on a toasted buttered bun)

It's a cold, damp day - whiskey weather, I call it - and while I could be sulking at the fact that it's almost June and I'll still be wearing my long underwear to bed tonight, I'm fending off the bone chill by cooking in my camper.  This afternoon I harvested six big stalks of rhubarb from the patch alongside the farmhouse.  I mixed together a sugary, buttery crust from my mom's classic rhubarb bar recipe and topped it with the gooey mixture of chopped rhubarb, sugar, flour, and egg.  It baked in my tiny camper oven for 40 minutes while I prepared my dinner, and filled the space with warmth and sweet scents and the memory of home.  I'll take the bars to a farm potluck I'm attending tomorrow, proud to share this gift of myself, my family, and my farm.

My friend Sarah once said to me, "KJ, you eat life alive."  I took it as a compliment and a command.  This last week, I feel like sunk my teeth into a big juicy chunk of life here in Maine.

While I am loving life on the farm, cozy nights reading by the fire in the yurt at night, the peace and solitude of living in the meadow, I've always been an itchy little bug, eager to explore my surroundings.
One of the reasons I most love my location here at Black Kettle Farm is that I get to live in an area of rural farmland, winding roads through thick woods and rolling hills of pasture, but I'm also close enough to a handful of awesome little cities where I have access to the things that I always loved about living in New York.  Last week, I went to a farmer training workshop and potluck, saw one of my favorite authors read at a great independent bookstore, went to a bar for live jazz, had a date a newly opened noodle bar, and took a Nia class.  All the things that make me tick.

On Sunday, I randomly picked a destination from my hiking guide, hopped in the car, and drove 90 minutes north to Reid State Park, at the end of a peninsula in mid-coast Maine, near Bath.  The skies were overcast and it rained as I drove up Route 1, but by the time I reached Reid, the sun had come out, and I was rewarded with a beautiful day for exploring.  Since I'd arrived early, I nearly had the place to myself and I walked along the sandy beach, marveling at the expansiveness I felt in myself, in this place.  Once my sneakers had filled with sand, I gave in and kicked off my shoes, letting the bitterly cold and foamy ocean waves touch my toes.  I slung my fleece jacket over my shoulder and let the sun warm my skin.  Goldfinches flitted about and plovers scurried alongside me on the shore.  I gave myself a little kick for not thinking to bring a picnic for myself - this would have been the perfect place to settle in with a book and a few snacks for an entire day.  But I wandered until my stomach told me it was time to go.

Luckily, I recalled that my friend Ron had recommended a place not far from where I was, Red's Eats, which often tops the list for "Best Lobster Roll in Maine".  I drove to Wiscasset eager and hungry.  No surprise - it was Memorial Day weekend and the place was overrun with tourists, but I sucked it up and dealt with the crowd.  On the flip side of a 40 minute wait, I sat down to enjoy my lunch: a heap of sweet lobster meat on a toasted buttered bun, with melted butter on the side, an order of coleslaw and a root beer.  I left the place with my annoyance abated and my taste buds sated.

It goes without saying, but what I'm really coming to appreciate more and more as I chomp my way through Maine is that so much of what makes food good is about the quality of the ingredients, and you just can't compete with local.  Most days in my camper, I make an omelet or an egg burrito for lunch.  We get our eggs from a CSA workshare member or from neighboring farms, and I cook them with chives I clip from our herb garden.  Each time I cook the eggs, I remember those Julia Child videos about how to cook a perfect omelet.  I rarely mastered it when I was living in Brooklyn, buying my eggs from the natural grocer down the street.  But when I cook these eggs in my camper, they are effortlessly perfect.  Fluffy and beautiful and tasty.  And so, sure, there are many factors in making the perfect omelet - the cookware, the heat, the technique.  But really, when it comes down to it, it's all about the egg.

I feel such immense gratitude for my life here these days - the deliciousness of the food, the beauty of the place, the unending sense of discovery.  My friend Adrienne said to me the other day, "It sounds pretty good to be you right now, KJ."  And I concur - it ain't half bad.

Spunk and splendor

Bucking a gloomy forecast, the sun shone pretty consistently this week and our little crew got a lot of plants into the ground: even more onions, fennel, parsley, napa cabbage, five beds of red gold potatoes and zucchini and summer squash.  We're in the final countdown of weeks until CSA begins, and Laura is on her third week of farmer's market.  The watermelon, winter squash, and brussel sprout seedlings are popping in the greenhouse, and things are about to bust open and boom.  Our second apprentice Shannon joins us today and just in time - we're going to need that extra pair of hands as we hustle to finish out our transplanting and prepare for summer harvest.

This week, Laura gave a talk at a Pecha Kucha event at an art gallery in Biddeford, a mill town about 15 miles from the farm that is a burgeoning scene for creatives and small business owners.  Pecha Kucha is a presentation format, kind of like a TED talk on fast forward, that allows a speaker to show 20 images for 20 seconds each to share their ideas and projects.  Laura was an engaging and energetic presenter and made me proud to be affiliated with Black Kettle Farm and a participant in the greater cause for healthy communities and healthy food.  The other six presenters includes local craftsmen, artists, and chefs, a very inspired and diverse array that left me impressed with this spunky small town.

Today marks one month since I've left NYC, and I'm finally starting to feel like I've settled into the rhythm and have oriented myself to my new life here and I can start to explore.  I bought a hiking guide for Southern Maine and borrowed another from Bill & Adrienne and have begun plotting weekend excursions.  I'm eager to explore this beautiful state, by car and by foot, and now that I have my bearings and the weekends are bringing more sun and less rain, it's go time.  Yesterday, after heavy rains in the morning cleared and the sun came out, I made my way to the Steedman woods near York.  A causeway extends out into the bay and a small suspension footbridge connects to a preserve with a 1-mile loop trail.  It was a charming walk, but I wished it was longer for extended meanderings.

I had a date with a guy I met online in the evening and needed to kill some time beforehand so I wandered into Kittery to visit River Run bookstore and grab an ice cream cone.  I sat outside the ice cream shop in the sun, licking on raspberry chip and coconut stracciatella, determining that the summer would bring many afternoons just like this.  I feel such a spaciousness on my weekends these days - the hours seems endless and the days very long and easy-going.

I met my date at a brewpub in Dover, NH, and we chatted happily over pulled pork sliders and local ale.  He then walked me up to a lookout tower on a hill for a nighttime panorama of the area, pointing out the direction of the White Mountains, Kittery, and Portsmouth.  We agreed to meet up again for a hike and he sweetly kissed me goodnight before I got into my car and headed home.  It was better than any date I had in a decade of attempting to navigate the plenty-of-fish waters of New York City.  Walking through the meadow back to my camper around midnight, I noticed how full and illuminating the moon was that night - I didn't need my headlamp to help show me the way, and the clear sky was full of stars and breathtaking.

This morning, I woke early and drove out to the East Point preserve for a look at the ocean.  Maine, you knock my socks off.

A sea of seedlings

It's 4:45am and I'm waking up on the sun porch at my friend's house in Northampton, MA.  I'm most certainly awake hours before anyone will even think to get out of bed, but I also was falling, crawling into bed last night around 9pm while their 3 year old son was still tearing open birthday presents.  I'm on farmer time now, waking hours aligned with daylight hours, and while it doesn't quite make me the life of the party, it suits me just fine.

I'm sunburned in funny places, rocking the classic farmer's tan t-shirt line.  The tops of my ears are crispy red and I'm developing a very fine back patch of color, or "farmer's cummerbund" as I'm told it's called. I spent most of this sunny week on my hands and knees, dragging myself down 200 foot dirt beds to transplant onion seedlings into the field.  With the help of two CSA workshare members, our crew put over 12,000 onions into the ground this week - ailsas, copras, shallots, cipollinis, redwings, and an heirloom wethersfield red onion.  It's an astonishing number to me, and even more astonishing: we still have more to plant.  I'm amazed at what our little industrious crew can get done in a day, in a week, and when I look at how the farm has evolved in just the three weeks I've been here I can't believe that the bulk of that work was done with just six hands and a few tools.

My favorite farm tool so far is called "The Dibbler."  When I first saw the thing, I thought it looked like some kind of medieval torture device or something from a renaissance fair.  I'm sure there are fancier pre-made models available for purchase, but this one appears to be a cobbled-together contraption of PVC pipe and wooden spikes, set six inches apart in three rows.  The idea is this: Laura creates the bed in the field with her tractor, the tractor wheel treads becoming the aisles between where we will plant.  Then she runs down the bed with a three pronged implement attached to her tractor to create the lines in the bed: most of our plants are in two or three rows per bed.  Then, the dibbler gets attached to the tractor or we pull it down the length of the bed to create "dibbles", which are evenly spaced holes where we will drop and plant our seedlings.

Using the dibbler this week, I was reminded of a guy who I used to work with at summer camp in Montana.  His name was Jacob Dibley, a super sweet, fun-loving dude that I've lost track of over the years.  I'm sure he's kicking around somewhere having a great time doing his Dibley thing.  But the association made me and Abi laugh as we were out in the field and we spawned a new creation: my imaginary boyfriend "Johnny Dibbles", who takes me to drive-in movies and rubs my feet and cracks a beer for me at the end of the day.  Good old Johnny Dibbles, I'm sure he'll get me through the summer.

It's a nice break to get over to Western MA, to celebrate Arlo's third birthday, and Mother's Day weekend and catch up with my friends.  My friend Nancy drove up from Brooklyn, and my 3 hour drive from Maine was easy and relaxed, and a great opportunity to see spring bursting forth: the trees are awakening in all array of chartreuse, yellow forsythia on display, and the azaleas are popping out in dazzling, showy magenta.  But I realize that I've become very attached to Maine and the goings-on at Black Kettle Farm.  And I know that when I cross back over the Maine state line later this afternoon, and drive past the fields that we've spent the week planting, and walk through the meadow to my little camper, I'll feel like I've come home.  

 

Beginner's mind

Yesterday morning, I hung around the farm and did a couple loads of laundry.  As I was hanging my clothes on the line to dry, one of my favorite Jane Kenyon poems came to mind:

The Clothes Pin

by Jane Kenyon

How much better it is

to carry wood to the fire

than to moan about your life.

How much better

to throw the garbage

onto the compost, or to pin the clean

sheet on the line

with a gray-brown wooden clothes pin!

There was a simple, pure pleasure in that chore, that sunny morning, with blue skies, clothes flapping in the breeze, my body sore from a week of hard work and a whole wide open weekend ahead of me.  Time felt expansive, I felt present and full, wanting for nothing more.  And I recognize that it is these small pleasures and merciful moments that will energize and sustain me.

In truth, life on the farm was not all sunny breezy fantasy this week.  It was cold and damp, the kind of cold that settles into your bones and only a hot shower can cure.  Nights dipped down to the 30s, and while I felt fairly confident in my fire-making skills a week ago, there were nights this week that I simply could not get anything to burn.  One night when I desperately needed a roaring fire, I failed  repeatedly and cracked a bottle of whiskey instead in a last-ditch attempt to warm up.  I burrowed into my sleeping bag as soon as the sun went down.  I missed my city friends and my cozy apartment intensely that night, feeling frozen and alone.

And when the weather is spotty and spring is slow in coming, things get stressful on the farm.  With one eye on the ground and the other on the skies, Laura has to make real-time decisions about the operation that are critical for the timing of planting and harvest.  On Wednesday, a chilly, overcast day with rain looming in the forecast, we hustled to get our first round of crops into the ground: rainbow chard, three kinds of kale, and napa cabbage.  Right now, we are a crew of three - Laura, Abi, and me. Another apprentice will join us in a few weeks and we'll get some additional labor help from CSA workshare members.  But that day the three of us hand-transplanted about 3000 seedlings into the ground.  Calculate how many squats that is per person and you'll wince or cry.

Needless to say, I was a little stiff the next couple of days.  But along with the soreness also came a few moments of humility that bruised me too.  It goes without saying that I'm new at this, and any apprentice is going to make mistakes as they develop and grow.  But I really, really hate making mistakes and am hard on myself when I slip up.  I'm trying to get better at shaking off those errors and just seeing them as they are - opportunities to learn - but I often allow them to build into rain clouds that hover over my psyche the rest of the day.

But as Kenyon says, "How much better it is to carry wood to the fire than to moan about your life."  And it's true and a little bit miraculous what a good day of hard work and a spot of sunshine can do to turn your attitude around.  By the time the skies cleared on Thursday afternoon, I had let go of my self-doubt and felt grateful to be exactly where I was.

When you've let go of nearly everything you own, left a place you've known so well, given up a paycheck that once allowed you to explore and entertain yourself to your heart's content, the small things really do come into focus.  I am grateful for the beautiful handmade cup made by my friend Ming that I use to drink my coffee every morning.  A trip to the local coffeeshop for wifi and a bagel is a once-a-week treat.  I have awesome new friends - Bill and Adrienne Andrews - who have made me pizza and introduced me to their pet goats and whose house is a treasure trove of books I can borrow.  A hot shower feels like a sacred experience, and a hot meal at the end of the day - even if it's just a can of soup that I heat up in my camper feels like necessary nourishment.

I am encouraged by the fact that the days will get warmer and longer, that I will get better at this, that I will get to know the people and places of Maine.  But for now, I am just here: to do the work, to take it all in, and to spend a whole lot of time with myself, living and learning.