November 2011

Dear All,

     Anne Lamott wrote in her novel about faith that the two best prayers she knows are “Help me, help me, help me!” and “Thank you, thank you, thank you!”  To be blunt, those are probably the two prayers I know best, too. In farming, as I face both the constant obstacles to be overcome and a vaulting, clear November sky, alternating prayers of desperation and gratitude are with me all day long.  

     Nearly two feet of unseasonable, unreasonable snow fell on us ten days ago.  As I stood on the back porch in the Nor'Easter, listening to the death cracks of trees, I came a bit unhinged.  Sometimes I just cannot help but feel that Nature is mad at us.  And if we do not change our ways, these storms will seem mild compared to what is coming. Losing electricity again for a full week - no email, no phone, no radio, (no shower) – it gives one plenty of time to sit and think. Hardship brings out the best and the worst in people, no doubt.  But what was food for my thought was a sense of how very unprepared we all are for working together, living together, and sharing.  Irony was everywhere, but the days following the storm melted any of the humor I saw in it.  Ridgefield is among the most fortunate towns in our country, and yet we had to set up a shelter for people who were not being taken in by their neighbors and friends.  With the loss of all those trees, a years’ worth of renewable firewood fuel fell from the sky onto the front lawns of our town.  The vast majority of it was chipped to clear paths for people to get to the gas station to stoke generators and heat houses with oil.  Far be it for me to cast stones: our well here is dependent on the power grid, I am not that great at cooking on a woodstove, and sometimes I get mean when I do not get a hot shower.  

     So I guess we all have a lot to work on.  I said this after Irene, but this time I really mean it.  Re-neighboring our neighborhoods means knocking on a new door. It cuts to the quick of every independent Yankee bone in my body, but we all simply have to get a lot better at saying “help me” and a lot better at saying “thank you.”  What makes those phrases so lovely is that they are an acknowledgement of our dependence on each other.  These are not just prayers we silently send up, they are gestures we can make towards each other every day. 

     This is supposed to be a newsletter about food and farming, however, so here goes my flying leap towards consistency.  Here’s my point: sustainable farms remind us that we can rely on different power grids: one driven by sun up and sun down and another driven by human gumption and sharing.  Hans and Steve of Apple Ridge Farm have used the power of sun and rain and grass to raise up a noble supply of grass-fed beef.  Now we have the delightful opportunity to do our part; we need to buy it and eat it and tell others about it.  The sun feeds the grass, the grass feeds the cow, the cow feeds the people– it is a solar powered system that will never blink out on us if we take care of it – and it tastes fantastic!  Because in truth, we farmers are as dependent a mob of Yanks as you can find in this town.  Small, locally owned farms are at a “help me, help me, help me” moment in which we need people to care about us again – to care about what we are trying to contribute to our neighborhoods and towns. Come hurricane, come snow, lights on, or lights off, we all have to eat.  So we might as well eat well.

     Apple Ridge beef shares are for sale on our website (http://www.thehickories.org/catalog).  Here at The Hickories, the sun and the earth keep our greenhouses warm and our root cellars cool.  The cold-tolerant greens in our fields, protected from the snow by our home-made wire hoops covered with a thin layer of agricultural fabric, weathered the storm well.  Our vegetables will continue to be sold at Ancona’s Market for as long as we can stretch our season. All the while, we will be stacking up our firewood and dreaming up a way to install a human powered hand-pump for our well.  

     To all who are supporting local farms by eating organic vegetables and pasture raised meat: thank you, thank you, thank you.

All the best,

Dina Brewster