I’ve been feeling nervous lately. Our list-making has turned into check-writing and seed-planting. Our garlic has pushed up through the mulch and is looking around. After a week of summer and then nights in the single digits, we’ve been shuffling our fragile plant starts between greenhouse and back living room. We have two months until our first market. It appears as though this thing is happening.
I’m nervous because although we’ve been here for four months, it’s just now settling in that we’ll see seasons change here; we’ll put seeds in the ground and care for them through fruition here; we’ve got a commitment to this little piece of earth that is just becoming tangible. This is one of my internal dilemmas: I long to settle in, and I long for a little piece of earth to take care of; simultaneously, I long for change and adventure- all my life I’ve been too easily bored. And so it’s the work that’s scary but also the being here, the chores morning and night, the staying here.
My best friend came to visit last weekend. She showed up late Friday night, her long brown hair dyed red at the tips. She came into the house laughing, which is what she does for my soul. Out of her shoulder bag emerged a pound of fresh coffee, music, a new cookbook, and then a pineapple, which cracked her up. “I bought this at Trader Joe’s!” – the absurdity of which cracked her up again. April is my reminder of real life. She can worship farm fresh eggs as well as the next guy, then waltz into my living room with her spandex and boots and her spiky Chiquita pineapple.
April lives in Portland, Maine. I told her that if I had a city life right now hers would be it: funky apartment littered with art projects, a job at a corner bakery with butcher blocks and massive windows, bars and dance parties and friends with dogs who chase kids on the beach. When she came here, she told me that the city isn’t right for her right now, that if she had a country life mine would be it. She told me over coffee, eggs and toast, and a glass of champagne, “I know you know how much you have…how lucky you are…but Katie, I would do this in a second if I had someone to do it with.”
It is sometimes lonely here. I sometimes feel that I should be in a city, or at least a town, with people my age. I sometimes fear that I’m too young to be out here in the quiet with the barn and the record player and the gray-bearded dog. I sometimes regret turning down an opportunity to go backpacking in Montana for three weeks this summer.
This spring is about digging in. It is for doing the things that I have talked about and dreamed about. It is for understanding the choice I’ve made to move my life here and grow food from the ground. It is not forever; we are borrowing and exploring. This season is about knowing what I have and taking care of it.
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