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.
The crunch of the frost under my boots this morning brings another growing season on the farm near its conclusion.This week is the last shared harvest for our CSA members and the first of the October hayrides and pumpkin picking weekends.
This is neither the first nor the last of the hurricanes that have rattled the timbers of our old barn. The hickories and sugar maples that tower over our little crops have seen the likes of Irene, and her much bigger siblings, many times before. So as the barns and forests stood their ground against the winds and uprooting rains, our transient mob of farmers, crops, and livestock took shelter behind their shields. I emerged agog to see how much was, indeed, not damaged. Greenhouses are standing, even a fair number of our apples clung on their boughs and surfed out the storm unscathed. To see the bright colors of the eggplants, sunflowers, and sweet red peppers perking up again in the sunshine: that is my rainbow after this flood.
This July 4th, I am thinking a lot about the pioneers who first broke ground in Connecticut. The stone walls they built rock by rock on this farm remind us of to how much their liberty meant to them - and how lasting a contribution they made to our town: we are still harvesting food from the fields they established on this ground two hundred and fifty years ago. Freedom came to them in the form of their own fields, their own crops and, eventually, their own government. Food independence is part of what it is to be a strong nation. And they knew outright what I have spent the last five years rediscovering: that aside from the deeply political, there is a personal freedom that comes with a taste of self-reliance. Sugar snap peas grown in your home town: a little pint of a gesture that would make those patriots proud.
On a battered barn board above the low-slung door of our livestock stall, etched in with a pocketknife, there is a list of how many bales of hay came off each of the fields on our farm in 1962. Fred Jones was the farmer back then, and this old beam stands as the single data set and profit-loss statement for his hay production that year. He was a brilliant farmer with a lifetime of experience – virtually all of which left this world with him. As a new farmer, I wish that I could sit down, just for an hour, with Fred Jones and retrieve some of that information. Fred etched a lifetime of this land’s agricultural history on forgotten barn boards and the backs of grain bags.
This July 4th, I am thinking a lot about the pioneers who first broke ground in Connecticut. The stone walls they built rock by rock on this farm remind us of to how much their liberty meant to them - and how lasting a contribution they made to our town: we are still harvesting food from the fields they established on this ground two hundred and fifty years ago. Freedom came to them in the form of their own fields, their own crops and, eventually, their own government. Food independence is part of what it is to be a strong nation. And they knew outright what I have spent the last five years rediscovering: that aside from the deeply political, there is a personal freedom that comes with a taste of self-reliance. Sugar snap peas grown in your home town: a little pint of a gesture that would make those patriots proud.
