By the time we had collected all three hundred buckets, we and the horses were sweaty and muddy, and night had begun to fall, bringing a chill that would freeze the trees and send the sap back to the roots, to rise again the next day. We needed to begin boiling so we would have room in our tank for tomorrow’s haul. We backed the sap wagon into the pavilion, near the evaporator. There was a stack of dry wood next to it and a holding tank above it, suspended by an enormous set of chains. We pumped the sap up into it, bucketing the last of it by hand. It was past the children’s bedtime, and Miranda was sound asleep in a little nest Mark had made for her, under the eaves but away from the sparks, encased in her layers of fleece. Jane was thrilled to be working with grown-ups, around all that sugar, up late in the dark. She played outside the pavilion in the mud, brought twigs to burn, stomped at the ice forming around the edge of the stream. Then I took the horses to the barn to brush and feed them while Mark gathered kindling, stacked it neatly in the evaporator, and put a match to it, igniting the sugar season.
By the time I got back to the pavilion, the main pan and the finishing pan were both at a rapid boil, and the air was fogged with steam and smoke. The first boil of the year is the one that sweetens the pan. It takes a long time because you are starting from scratch—all sap, not syrup—and must drive off almost all the water.
We ate a supper of eggs that we’d hard-boiled in the sap of the finishing pan, piling the sticky shells on the ground. Mark and I took turns stoking the fire, adjusting the valves and floats.
We drew the first syrup at midnight. By then Jane was asleep next to her sister, cuddled into a sleeping bag that I’d fetched from the house. She had been sleeping outdoors regularly since she was eighteen months old—summers in a tent because of mosquitoes, winters in heavy bags, under the stars—and she could fall asleep outside as easily as she could in her own bed.
The first draw is the clearest and lightest syrup, a pale delicate amber color with a pure, sugary taste. Later in the season, the finishing pan would hold more caramelized syrup, and the color would be darker and the taste more robust, but this was the fancy stuff, the precious first sweetness of the year. We got a good bottle of peaty Scotch from the house—a Christmas gift from my friends Nina and David—and toasted the coming season, the completion of our family, four people on this piece of good land, working together. It felt good, with a glass of Scotch in my hand, to sense the firm weight and certainty of that work and envision the years ahead. The cycles of the seasons, the tides of dearth and abundance, the turning of the calendar. It was exciting to feel that we had found our permanent form and could spend the next decades of our lives within its bounds, tending it.
* * *
I wasn’t exactly right about that, of course. We were still actively wrestling that spring with the problem of scale. Scale was nothing and everything. We were growing the same diverse array of plants and animals we had our first year, to feed a group of people directly. But a change in scale meant a change in the type of equipment we used, the number of people we employed, the kind of infrastructure we needed. There’s a limit to how big a farm can get without changing its nature. There’s a limit to how small it can be and stay afloat, pay its taxes, its mortgage, provide a living of any sort for a family. We argued about this a lot. Mark saw the big picture. We couldn’t stay small and diverse and survive economically. I saw the details. We depended so much on human labor that a bigger farm meant a more crowded farm, a more complicated farm. All those personalities and changing moods mixed together, sending out cacophonous emotional noise even when things were going well. And we were both insecure about investing in the expensive improvements we needed to make, because it meant taking on debt. Debt, on a business that still felt precarious, was scary.
So we inched our way toward larger scale that spring as cheaply as we could, using half-measures, trades, and bargains. Our basement wasn’t big enough to store all the potatoes and squash we planned to harvest that year. The cold root cellars, in the foundations of the old round barn, were not reliable enough to keep our cabbage and carrots from freezing or rotting or both. Mark found another tractor-trailer box. The ground was frozen when he bought it, and it had to be ripped out of the hard mud it had sunk into, so the front end was torn and tattered. We parked it next to the butcher shop and added insulation outside, refrigeration inside. Mark saw how cost-effective this was and beamed at it every time he walked past. I saw its unremitting ugliness and averted my eyes.
* * *
Racey came home from Africa in the middle of sugar season. She’d had enough of communal living at the Yellow House, and rented an apartment a few doors down, in the servants’ quarters of the mansion across from the ferry. She invited me over for a homecoming dinner. Over a bottle of red wine, I brought her up to date on the girls and the farm, and she told me about Africa. Her job had gone well, but the peace in Central African Republic was looking fragile. She was glad to be back but worried about what might come next for her friends and colleagues there. We talked about the French paratrooper she’d been dating, Lolo, who was stationed in Bangui. She had gotten in a little too deep this time, for something that wasn’t ever going to fit, but it felt safer now that they were on different continents. Lolo Skyped her in the early mornings, before she came to work at the farm. Also, Nathan had friended her on Facebook while she was away, and had sent her a string of letters. He was a good writer, she’d discovered, and insightful. I raised my eyebrow at her. “Nope,” she said. “He’s way too square for me.”
Later that week, a late-season storm dropped two and a half feet of snow. It slid off the roof of the barn into heaps higher than my head. We had a boar we’d rented who needed to go back to his owner. Mark had assigned Racey and Nathan to dig a chute through the snow for him, from the barn door to the stock trailer, which was parked twenty feet away, as close as they could get. It was heavy snow, a big job, and it had taken the two of them all day. I could see them from the upstairs window of the house, where I was nursing Miranda, and could hear them talking and laughing while they worked, and then a hoot as they ran the boar successfully onto the trailer. They looked like they made a good team.
* * *
There followed a string of warm days and cold nights. Sugar season was long and plentiful. Smoke and sweet steam rose without stopping from the pavilion. Mark didn’t trust anyone else to run the evaporator, so he spent long nights out there alone, then started his workday at dawn. His energy seemed bottomless and held the whole potential of the year. On the day of the last good run, the horses went to the woods with the sap tank three times, bringing it back down the hill each trip sloshingly full with two hundred gallons. Then the trees put an end to it. Their buds swelled and began to break. Sap from budded trees smells sour when it begins to boil, and the syrup tastes acrid, exactly as awful as the good stuff is good. We pulled the taps, thanked the trees, and put seventy-five gallons of syrup in jars for the year.
Our house was mostly free from farmers that spring, but not from farming. The first batch of chicks arrived, three hundred fluffy yellow balls of life that arrived in the mail, making a high-pitched racket in the post office, prompting Susie the postmistress to call us before she rolled up her window and say sweetly, “Please come pick up your box of noise.”
Racey and I set up the chick brooder on the house’s enclosed porch, the only space available that had electricity and was also dry and reasonably free of rats. The porch’s drywall ceiling had melted from a leak in the roof before we arrived. The leak had been fixed, but the ceiling had not. As Racey filled the feeders, I mixed up a gallon of my special chick elixir—sap, salt, and a splash of cider vinegar in a gallon of water—meant to refresh them after their long trip and ease them into the delicate first days of life. The elixir was mostly superstition on my part, but we’d had good results with it. We dipped each little beak in it as they came out of the shipping box. The brooders were awkward but terribly efficient things that could accommodate
150 chicks at once. They were made of plywood, on short legs, with lightbulbs inside to make a warming box. The chicks could run underneath to get warm, then increase the length of their forays into the chilly world for food and water as they grew. When they could regulate their own body temperature and withstand some cold and rain, they could go to the pasture. Until then, they depended on us for survival. We bedded underneath and around them with fresh hay twice a day, refilled their waterers in the kitchen. No amount of sweeping and tidying could keep the smell of hot chick from rising through the hole in the porch ceiling to our bedrooms above.
We were also growing Belgian endive in the dining room. Endive gave us a taste of fresh leafy vegetables at the tail end of winter, a luxury, but growing it was a long-term, labor-intensive project. We’d planted it the previous spring, and it had spent the growing season developing a hard, fleshy corm—a rootlike structure, similar to a bulb, that stores the plant’s energy underground—and its characteristic chicory-family leaves. In the fall, after the leaves died back, we’d dug up the long row of corms and buried them in plastic root bags filled with potting soil. The corms slept, dormant, in the cellar of the farmhouse through the winter. The last phase required the most work. In order to wake the corms in early spring and get them to grow, we needed a warm place. And Belgian endive has to be blanched—deprived of any light—to keep the leaves from developing chlorophyll, and becoming unpalatably bitter. A few weeks before we wanted to eat them, we built a sturdy lidded plywood coffin near the woodstove, filled it with fresh potting soil, planted the corms in it, in a grid, and kept them well watered. In a few weeks, they sprouted a white crown of tightly packed leaves that we harvested for our members and ate dipped in homemade sour cream with finely chopped leek and a sprinkle of salt. I could tolerate, barely, the mess and earthy stink of that soil coffin for the crisp taste of fresh vegetables during mud season.
The endive had taken the place of two barrels of sauerkraut that had spent part of the winter fermenting there, filling the whole house with the smell of old socks. Kraut was the practical counterpart to our froufrou endive project, an efficient and nutritious way to preserve cabbage, which we could grow in great abundance in our soil and climate. After frost, we’d cut the voluptuous heads from their wrappers of leaves and trimmed and cleaned them. Then they were ready to be shredded, salted, and packed for fermentation. The magic of traditional lactic-acid fermentation is that it not only preserves a fresh crop but transforms it into something entirely different in taste and even more nutritious than it was in its original state. Sauerkraut has more vitamin C than cabbage, more than almost any food on the planet, and contains a rich, living community of beneficial bacteria that are good for your gut. Its sour, salty, acid tang accompanied most of our meals.
We made sauerkraut for our members every year, but that year, we were at an awkward scale, well beyond the size of equipment made for large families and still too small to be properly commercial, even if we’d had the money for industrial tools. We improvised and temporarily turned the house into a wild sauerkraut factory. One day my friend Kristin Fiegl came over with her son, Jameson, who was seven. Ronnie came over too, bringing a pan of brownies and her favorite knife. Ronnie had been a schoolteacher until her retirement, and came over to help with the work and the children on days like this when there was a big job to do. We cleared all the furniture out of the dining room, cleaned it from top to bottom, and set up a station for chopping, one for shredding, and one for weighing and salting the shredded cabbage. Jameson was old enough to help, ferrying cabbage from the cutting board to the shredder. Jane played with Jet in the stray cabbage leaves that fell under the tables, and Miranda slept through the commotion in a bushel crate in the corner.
The hardest part of making kraut is packing the shredded, salted cabbage tightly enough into its container. You have to get rid of the air, and bruise and break the cabbage, in order to allow the salt to draw the liquid from the cells of the leaves. The brine must cover the kraut completely for it to properly ferment. If you are making a quart or a gallon of kraut, it’s easy enough to crush and pack it with your hands and the end of a wooden spoon. We were making a hundred gallons. The packing was wearying. We tried using heavy wooden mallets, throwing them down hard into the barrel after each layer of cabbage was added, but it was exhausting and inefficient. Mark, who hates an inefficient system with the same passion a preacher feels for the devil, came in and found us sweating and panting with our mallets and decided there had to be a better way. That’s how I found myself standing inside a fifty-gallon barrel in our cabbage-strewn dining room, wearing a miniskirt, with freshly scrubbed bare feet, stomping the cabbage down into its chilly brine like a deranged Germanic bacchant. It worked so perfectly, I am shocked there are no records of European villages holding annual kraut-stomping festivals.
We were near the top of the first barrel, my feet red and cold, when we heard a car pull in. Mark, who had been working the shredder, looked out the window and saw the seal of the state of New York on the side of an unfamiliar van in our driveway, and several men climbing out, clipboards in hand. I leaped out of the kraut barrel as Mark was opening the door to a whole parade of food inspectors from both the federal USDA and the State Department of Ag and Markets, on a surprise visit to check on our milk house, butcher shop, and storage facilities, and try to get to the bottom of what we were up to at Essex Farm.
They must have wondered why I was barefoot, dripping with brine, but I think they were so disoriented by the total weirdness of the scene they’d walked in on, and by the sheer number of potential violations all around them, that they couldn’t bring themselves to ask. Jet stood in the middle of the pile of cabbage leaves, waving his tail diplomatically. I froze, wet strips of salty cabbage falling off my bare legs. Ronnie read the room and hustled the children outside. After a few stunned seconds, Mark started talking. I have no recollection of what he said. But he swept them out of the house very quickly, on a tidal wave of words. Then he walked them all over the farm, talking the whole time. He showed them the buildings, and our cobbled-together infrastructure, and described our business model.
Somehow, by the end of the day, we had the foundations of a good working relationship with all of our inspectors. We drove them crazy because we were always pushing the boundaries of what was allowed, and neither our business model nor the food we produced fit neatly into any of the boxes that it was their job to check. But they worked diligently with us to find solutions that would keep us in business. By the next year, we’d be large enough to rent a proper commercial kitchen to make our sauerkraut, but I think the year we stomped it by foot in the dining room made the best kraut of all.
* * *
Nathan took a week off to visit other horse-powered farms all over the Northeast. The day he was due back, Chad mentioned that the furnace had gone out at the Yellow House. Chad was on his way to visit family for a few days, Tim had a girlfriend he could stay with, and Blaine had moved in with Tobias above the post office. But Nathan would return to find the house cold, and we should probably warn him. After work, Racey walked to the Yellow House and left a note on the kitchen table. “If you need a warm place to stay,” it said, “you’re welcome to come over.” She went home, climbed into her ugliest pajamas, and went to bed. At nine-fifteen, there was a knock on her door. It was Nathan, carrying a bottle of her favorite Scotch. They stayed up late, talking and laughing. Then he said the words she had known were coming: “I like you and want to get to know you better and—” Racey interrupted him, talking fast, a blur: Paratrooper. Work. Friends only. I can’t! He listened, then got up. “Okay, fine,” he said. “I’ll wait until you’re ready.” He turned to leave. “What? Wait!” she yelled. “Where are you going?” After that, they were together. Nobody needed to wonder, and they felt no need to define their relationship because it was obvious. They fit.
* * *
At Eastertime, Jane went to play at Ronnie’s house with Ronnie’s grandso
n, Jason, who was eight. They made cookies, and Ronnie sent a plate of them over to her next-door neighbor, Myrna, via Jane and Jason. Myrna took the cookies and asked Jane if the Easter Bunny was going to visit her house that weekend. The question confused Jane. Maybe we hadn’t yet taught her that tradition, or else she was too young to remember the Easter basket she’d received the previous year. But she wasn’t too young to remember the rabbits we had raised, nor how delicious they’d been. “No,” she told Myrna cheerily, “I think we ate him.” Myrna reported that Jason, who was a big fan of the Easter Bunny, was aghast. So we had left out some pieces of a typical American childhood and added a few unusual extras.
The farm was busy, the house was messy, the children were small and helpless, but we were doing okay. Miranda was sleeping in slightly longer stretches during the night. The brittle edges that come from prolonged fatigue were beginning to soften just a little. The snow disappeared, the mud dried up. It felt for a while like we were through the worst of it. When the peepers sang from the back pond in April, the fields were ready to work. And then it started to rain.
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