Then he turned to the fields. We’d never used anything but our own compost to feed our soil, and we’d relied on it to keep the plants healthy enough to grow and fend off the pests, but this extraordinary year demanded something different. Mark dipped into our credit line to order five tons of organic fertilizer to replace the nitrogen that the rain had washed away, and used it to side-dress the peaked plants. They sucked up the nitrogen, spread their leaves in the summer sun, and grew.
And I went back to the house with the children, because that was where I was most needed. Our farm kept trying to separate Mark and me into traditional gender roles, and I wasn’t sure how to feel about it. I had been raised in a family with a full-time homemaking mother right at the end of the era when that was default normal. But I was the cultural product of third-wave feminism and had assimilated all the ideas. I had married someone who was enlightened enough to take my last name. I never doubted that I was a full and equal partner in our business. And yet I was the one who was mostly in the house, at the stove, taking care of the children, while he was running the business, managing the employees.
It wasn’t even much of a discussion between us. It’ll probably even out later on, I thought. I kept my milking shift, and for a while, that was enough to make me feel like I still had a role on the farm. However, when Miranda had grown heavy but hadn’t yet learned to walk, I blew out my left shoulder from carrying her on my hip all the time, trying to do everything right-handed. It took months to heal and made milking impossible. I couldn’t lift the ninety-pound milk cans or tip the buckets into the filter. The irony of it—that motherhood was more of a strain on my body than farming—depressed me.
I’d had a lot of ideas about myself and work and motherhood before kids, and they didn’t match up with the reality, and that was difficult to reconcile. I half-consciously believed I should have been capable of giving efficient birth in the hedgerow, picking up the baby and a hoe right afterward, and continuing along. Once a young woman came to farm with us for a week, bringing her fourteen-month-old daughter, who rode around with her in a backpack. The woman and her baby spent a long day in the field, weeding, fencing, harvesting. Just before dark, they came back to the barn, the baby slightly toasted from the sun and bitten by gnats. The mother pulled out some farrier tools and trimmed the hooves of a team of horses—the heaviest kind of awkward, muscular, bent-over work—while the baby slept on her back. I thought I should be able to do that too.
It turned out I couldn’t. Not that I didn’t want to, I just couldn’t. Maybe, I thought, it was because I was a geriatric multipara. That woman was almost twenty years younger than I had been when Miranda came along. The thought hurt my ego. In my family we did not blame age for weaknesses. My father took up kitesurfing in his seventies, skied black diamonds well into his eighties, and I was cracking under the weight of a mere baby?
For the rest of that year, Mark and I divided our labor for the good of the whole farm. The children plus the cooking made a full-time job. The farm was full-time and then some. We could have split those jobs between us, but I didn’t have the same set of skills that Mark had. I wasn’t as strong. I was roughly half his size. It was irritating, but he had a decade more farm experience than I, had apprenticed with master farmers, and had a degree in agriculture. I was an English major who had spent my twenties with books in New York City. I didn’t know how to weld or fix an engine or do basic carpentry. If I broke an implement I was using, I’d need to call someone else to fix it. I didn’t know the names of half the tools in the machine shop.
Mark was as much of a menace in the house as I was in the shop. He wasn’t patient with the details of the housework and children. His love of efficiency made him want to pare down those duties to their most minimal forms. Once I found him sketching a baby-shaped bag in his notebook. He’d had enough of the fussy little socks, pants, and shirts that had to be put on and taken off a wriggling child, washed, dried, and paired up again. So much time! So tedious! Too many holes! It would be more efficient, he said, if we dressed both of them in one-piece sacks, color-coded by child, and had seven sacks, one for each day, no extra pieces. “Why can’t we?” he asked, dead serious. “Because they are humans,” I answered. “They are small but real people, and people wear clothes.”
During his recovery, when he was well enough to get out of bed but before he was strong enough for farmwork, he’d developed a theory he called “micro-parenting,” which stretched the limits of how little one could do on behalf of a child and still keep her safe and generally happy. This style had nothing to do with how much he loved the girls. He loved them as I did, entirely. But it was related to his desire to spend every moment as though it were his last precious coin. “What would happen,” he wondered out loud at one point, “if we put the children in an electronet like we do the chickens? They could be outside, run around all they wanted to within it, but stay safe from cars, tractors, and horses. I bet they’d learn the boundary faster than a chicken does. Maybe get shocked once?”
“What would happen is,” I said, “the authorities would come and take our children away and put you in a cell.”
Often micro-parenting created a huge mess. He didn’t see the value of folding clothes or putting them away. Why not just heap the laundry, but in a kind of spread-out heap, so you could see what was there and grab it? I’d come in to find Jet sleeping happily on top of the clean clothes, shedding hair, mud, and straw into them. Mark had calculated, in his head, the amount of time we spent washing dishes; he floated the idea that we should eat directly off the table instead of plates, then clean up with one swoop of a drywall scraper into the compost bin when we were finished. Why fuss over socks or dishes when we could be doing something better together? Even if that was reading a book or playing tag? Weren’t those things more important? And underneath that was the feeling that if he relented and began to care about the details that other people cared about, he’d be overwhelmed by the enormity of our farm, and it would die.
* * *
People who came to the farm during that period saw me as a different person from who I thought I was. It hurt in the weirdest way. To these young newcomers, I was a mom, middle-aged, with tired-looking breasts and sun-damaged skin, and therefore, mostly invisible. I wasn’t the farmer but the farmer’s wife.
One Friday, our friend Matt came to visit and stayed for Team Dinner. Seeing him was always a treat. He ran his own farm in a different part of the state, a diversified CSA, and draft horse–powered, like ours. He’d come to work for us part-time in our second year farming, when he was a college student across the lake in Vermont. If our farm could have invented for itself the perfect person to help us work it, it would have come up with Matt. He was a star rugby player who didn’t drink, a philosophy major who was grounded by physical work, a heavy-metal fan who went to Mass every Sunday. In other words, tough, strong, serious, intelligent, fun, and thoughtful.
One of the biggest compliments in Matt’s vocabulary was “savage.” His best rugby teammates were savages. The drummer from Pantera was savage. Matt quickly fell in love with farming, and nothing we threw at him could shake him from it. He drove the hour from his campus to our farm after classes some days, and he spent most weekends and vacations with us. When he graduated, he came to work for us full-time.
Around that same time, we hired Sam. Mark had known Sam since he was a little kid, the much younger brother of a good friend. Sam had just graduated from college and, like Matt, was smart, strong, athletic, and soon in love with farming. We four made a good team. Mark and I taught them to harness and drive horses; butcher cattle, pigs, and chickens; and milk cows by hand. They were eager to learn, and they worked themselves to blissful exhaustion. They built their own cabins to live in, next door to each other in the woods along the farm road, surrounded by cedar, sumac, and wild blackberries. They had no electricity or running water, but each one had a small woodstove inside, and lots of insulation, and were snug and comfortable even
deep in winter.
It was a beautiful thing to watch those two work. When I think of that time on our farm, I see Matt and Sam running through the hayfield at dusk, the remnants of August heat coming out of the ground, throwing fifty-pound bales onto the horse-drawn wagon that I’m driving. Mark is behind me on the swaying wagon, stacking, chaff stuck to him, his long work-hard arms swinging the bales above his head as if they’re bits of mere fluff. There’s the good green smell of the new bales and the sweat of the horses and the dusty scent of the hot raked earth. The grasshoppers and crickets are jumping in front of us like popcorn in the stubble of the cut grass, and Jet, in his youth, pouncing on them. The red-tailed hawk is circling above, scanning the newly bare ground for voles and mice. Matt and Sam are singing loudly as they run, “Fox Went Out on a Chilly Night,” making up new verses. They run all evening from bale to heavy bale, jumping over the tongue of the moving wagon because they are young and strong, and they can. Those were moments of pure beautiful happiness, a crystalized image that combined all the best parts of farming, which is, in the end, a vigorous team sport.
* * *
We were hosting a big dinner the night when Matt came to visit. There were twenty people eating, a group made up of volunteers and farm visitors in addition to our full-time crew. Everyone except me had spent the day in the field, haying, harvesting, weeding, moving animals to new pasture. I’d been inside most of the day with the kids, cooking the enormous dinner, hauling several loads of laundry from the washer to the line.
All the leaves were in the table, and still it was too crowded, people spilling onto the grimy couch or the piano bench, or perched on folding chairs against the wall, plates balanced on their knees. Passing between the kitchen and the table with a platter of food, I heard a newcomer ask Matt what it had been like when he’d worked here.
“Well, it was just the four of us,” Matt said, raising his steady voice to make himself heard above the general roar. “Sam, Mark, Kristin, and I. We did everything.”
“Kristin used to farm then?” the newcomer asked, glancing up, incredulous.
Had I farmed? My mind shot to one particular day during haymaking, five years earlier, when Matt and I were in the loft of the East Barn, stacking bales in hundred-degree heat, the bales coming along the overhead conveyer at a fast clip, crashing to the barn floor, the hay dust floating thick in the soft light and sticking to our sweating skin. If we slowed down and got behind, the bales would pile on the floor of the barn or, worse, come down on our heads. The gritty good feeling of hard exertion and teamwork shifted to a sort of gasping, determined desperation. I’d tried to match Matt’s pace and keep up with the relentless bales, and for a while I did, and then I suddenly had to stop, double over, and throw up. We yelled to Mark to slow the pace of the bales a little, and then we finished the load. Yes, young man, I thought, I farmed then. I wondered if Matt remembered that day.
“Kristin?” Matt answered the newcomer. “Oh yeah, Kristin farmed. She was a savage.” He remembered. I smiled to myself and cleared away the dirty plates.
CHAPTER 10
Mark still valued my input, we discussed decisions both large and small and strategized together every day, but our realms were clear. He was running the farm, and I was taking care of the children. I loved caring for the girls, especially when the demands of the day were only to keep both of them safe and fed, and give them plenty of the loving eyeball-to-eyeball attention that helps knit their neurons together. But it was isolating and frustrating to watch what felt like the real work take place outside, without me.
My eighth year in Essex I packed up my ambition, all the energy that I was used to spending in the fields, and brought it to the farmhouse kitchen. Before farming, I’d liked food in the same way I liked all sensory pleasures, especially novel ones, but I hadn’t been much of a cook. I’d lived in a six-hundred-square-foot studio apartment with a tiny stove and inadequate ventilation. I was single. Nobody in my group of friends cooked much. We all believed vaguely that cooking would be for later, when we’d have bigger apartments, maybe partners or families, and would have become “people.” We didn’t know a lot of people, but we could see them making dinner in the evenings through the windows of their brownstones. We thought of ourselves, by contrast, as something a little less substantial. And until we became people, there would be restaurants, and takeout, and no dirty dishes.
Mark had seduced me with his cooking. He’d been cooking all his life. He started farming in order to access the quality of food he wanted to eat. The meals he made for me were a lot like his personality: big, sure, and deeply, deliciously strange. Deviled kidneys, curried parsnips, a rib roast of beef dry-aged in the cooler until the outside was covered with a soft white fuzz that made the meat taste like mushrooms. Sturdy, nourishing soups, sour with fermented vegetables. Salads of shredded celeriac, a mess of bitter wild greens. Squash pie with star anise and maple syrup, encased in a flaky lard crust.
When we were first married, we cooked together all the time. What else were we going to do through the long dark winters when we weren’t outside? We didn’t have a TV, we were often too tired to read, and we were surrounded by vast amounts of fresh, delicious food. Moreover, we were always starving because of all the hard work. In those early years of cooking together, I absorbed some of his skill at preparing whole food in season and added to it my own interest in flavors from other cultures, plus deep dives into books by food writers and chefs, from the tart and scientific Cook’s Illustrated to the writerly narratives of Jane Grigson and Laurie Colwin. And then I practiced until I was as confident and efficient if not quite as wildly imaginative in the kitchen as Mark was.
After the girls were born, Mark stopped cooking almost entirely, and I took over. As with our other roles—housework, child care—we didn’t explicitly talk about the shift. It just slowly happened. Sometimes I missed the strange, seductive dinners for two, and our shared hours at the stove, but he was always out in the barn or the field, so busy, and I was inside most of the time anyway, with the kids. And cooking for all of us every day made me good at it. I learned the importance of forethought. If you are going to soak beans or make bread, you have to think at least a day ahead. For everyday meals, I learned to moderate my ambition and aim for the large territory of great food at the intersection of easy and delicious. I also realized that cooking never failed to cheer me up. The joy I took in our food and in cooking was immune to the ups and downs of the weather, the season, the finances, and our marriage. And it could be done safely, sometimes even gracefully, with children.
When the tiny row of cilantro was tall, I took the girls with me to harvest all nine hundred feet of it, enough to supply a sizable city. We should have planted it in successions, a hundred feet every week, but sometimes, with our horse-drawn systems—and especially in a year so foul—it was easier to plant a whole row than to plant a section, so we ended up with extreme excess. It would bolt soon, and that would be the end of cilantro for the year. Looking at it from the edge of the field with the girls, I got an itchy, covetous feeling. An abundance of herbs, like an abundance of flowers, still made me feel rich. Jane and Miranda played between the rows as I harvested armloads.
When we got back to the house, I washed out the field heat and the sand in the cold water of the deep kitchen sink, then hung it in a mesh bag outside on the clothesline, so the afternoon sun and breeze could carry off the excess water. Then we laid the green loot directly on the kitchen table, which doubled as an enormous cutting board, and I went at it with the big kitchen knife, rocking back and forth all the way down the table until the cilantro was roughly chopped. Then I pushed handfuls of it into a half-gallon jar, added olive oil and salt, and pulverized it with my immersion blender. I froze the green paste in ice cube trays. The next day, I would pop out the cubes into gallon freezer bags and haul them to the chest freezer in the basement. No matter how much cilantro I froze, I always wanted more, because the smell of it has the power to trans
port me around the world.
Travel was the love of my youth. After the farm, marriage, and children grounded me, I transferred that love to food and cooking, but they were related. I had grown up in a small town in central New York and gone to a big public high school, and that first year away at college gave me a glimpse of the breadth and depth of parts of the world that I hadn’t known existed. All of it was intriguing. I wanted to read everything and do everything and taste everything in gulps, and test the boundaries of who I could be. I was unsophisticated and unsure of myself but curious.
I started dating someone in my class who had a Turkish father and an American mother and had grown up in Istanbul before going to boarding school in Massachusetts. He kept a finch named Sufi in his dorm room, and when he spoke Turkish to his father on the phone, I drew close, trying to tease meaning from the rolling syllables.
He invited me to visit him in Turkey that summer, to meet his family and see where he was from. After my last exam, I got a cruddy apartment in Somerville, took wretchedly dull temp jobs in Boston, and saved every penny until I had plane fare and spending money. Just before I flew out, my sister’s then-husband put a hundred dollars in my hand and told me to go to the bazaar in Istanbul and buy something for my sister. He understood me and knew that the gift—which was really the imperative to explore—was the best thing he could have given me.
I don’t remember the airplane leaving Boston or landing in Istanbul. But recollection begins crisp as a movie at a table, the first meal. We’d braved what felt like life-threatening traffic to get there. In the calm courtyard of the restaurant, there was the smell of the Bosporus, the warm sun, a perfect white tablecloth. My boyfriend and a bent old waiter exchanged words that conjured a dish in front of me. It was pasta, but unlike anything I’d ever tasted—a delicate ravioli with a warm garlic-yogurt sauce and a drizzle of bright red butter infused with paprika. In my hometown, pasta invariably came with tomato sauce, and yogurt was mixed with fruit, always sweet and cold. Savory, hot, garlicky yogurt was a revelation, and I asked for the name of that dish—manti—so that if I got separated from my boyfriend, I could order it again. There were other new flavors and good meals on the trip, but that first one awakened me to a vast new possibility of taste combinations.
Good Husbandry Page 17