Good Husbandry

by Kristin Kimball

  But each of us is responsible for our own measure of joy, and this frustration with our living space was sapping mine. Eventually, I called Candace to talk us through it. She used her powers to make us look at each other and explore our differences honestly, calmly, and with empathy. We dug down, painfully, until we got to the bottom of it. He was afraid that once we started tearing things apart, I’d just want more, the cost would be overwhelming, and we’d live in a construction zone for eternity. I was afraid we weren’t important enough to him, that he cared about the well-being of the farm more than that of me and the girls. By the end of the session, we’d agreed on two things: a small budget, and that the entire project was up to me. He wasn’t going to stop me, but neither was he going to help. After that meeting, I stood in the cramped dining room, the dreary playroom, feeling a little nervous. I didn’t know anything about renovating a house. I had no idea how I was going to get it done, and now that I had his grudging consent, I was afraid to start. For a long time, nothing happened.

  Then, just after Christmas, Mark took the girls to Montreal for a few days’ vacation in a gorgeous penthouse apartment with a panoramic view of the old city and a private skating rink on the ground floor. A friend had loaned the apartment to him. This is what my friend Alexis calls fancy squatting. Mark adores fancy squatting, because it combines luxury and thrift; somehow he ends up in a lot of fancy squatting situations. I packed the girls’ bags and kissed them all goodbye, wished them a happy New Year, and stayed behind to take care of the farm and catch up on paperwork in the blissfully quiet house.

  Early on the second day of the New Year, two Amish teenagers knocked on the door, looking for Mark. It was Do What You Will Day in the Amish community. I knew about this tradition. When I’d first heard about it, I thought it meant they could do whatever they wanted, but this was a very conservative Old Order group, and it wasn’t quite that good. The day after major holidays—Christmas, the New Year, a half-day after Thanksgiving—the young people are allowed to look for work wherever they choose, and to keep their pay instead of contributing it to their family, as they usually did. The boys had driven their horse an hour to our house in their black wool cloaks. I could see the buggy and the horse tied to the pole barn, a blanket thrown over his steaming back. They wanted to know if Mark had any work for them for the day. It was a good bet. If Mark had been there, he certainly would have. He always had a to-do list in his head. But I couldn’t think of a one-day two-person job that wouldn’t require more supervision from me than it would be worth. “I’m so sorry, he’s not here,” I said. They started to turn away. “Wait!” I yelled after them. “Do you know how to tear down a wall?”

  They unhitched their buggy and put the horse in the barn, then went to the machine shop to look for sledgehammers and pry bars while I ran to the basement to shut off the circuit breakers. Wham! Wham! Wham! The bars bit through a wall and its leprous layers of wallpaper. Wham! A few more hits, and the light shone through, and the two small rooms were on their way to being one big one. Soon the whole house was a fog of plaster, splintered wood, and hundred-year-old dust that settled onto the roaring woodstove, sending up a scorched smell that filled me with joy. The Amish kids threw open the windows and chucked the old wall outside in pieces, which I shoveled into the bed of the truck and drove to the dumpster. Then they ripped down the horrid acoustic tiles on the drop ceiling. Those fell to the floor, with their coating of grease and dirt. Then down came the damaged old horsehair plaster and lath ceiling underneath. They shoveled everything out through the window. Mark called from Montreal in the middle of it to tell me about the skating rink. “What’s all that racket?” he asked. By the time the buggy disappeared down the driveway late that evening, I was white-haired with dust and bone-tired, and the downstairs of our claustrophobic house was laid open, its depressing old elements gone.

  * * *

  It took a year and the help of several friends to finish all the details, but when it was done, it was perfect. The dingy maple floors that had made me so sad to look at were clean and smooth, finished with a linseed-based hard wax that I put on myself, which turned them the color of new honey. The molting wallpaper was gone from the old plaster walls. The cracked too-small windows were gone too, new ones fitted into the original framing, so the house no longer looked like it was squinting, and the room was flooded with light. Ronnie’s husband, Don, copied the intricate original molding so faithfully in his woodshop that you would never know they were new. My designer friend Mark Hall figured out a clever, simple way to punch through two walls and access a staircase that adjoined the main floor with the bedrooms so that at last, we didn’t have to go outside in order to go to bed. His wife, Erin, who is also a designer, helped me pick out a warm white paint for the walls, a shade that makes me happy in every light. The budget ran out before I got the ceiling replastered, so I left it open to the rough rafters. It was fine. It was perfect. I liked seeing the old house’s good bones. Mark tied two swings to the rafters so the girls could sail through the air the whole long length of the room. In the winter, the heat of the woodstove seeps through the floorboards and rises up the stairs so our bedrooms are no longer frigid. I made sure we installed enough warm, soft lighting that it would never feel dim or dingy again.

  We didn’t need a new house after all. When something isn’t working, you don’t always need to tear down the whole structure. Sometimes you just pull down a wall, reinvent, put some new skin on the old bones. And it’s lovely.

  EPILOGUE

  There was a cold snap, the temperature dipping into the mid-teens. In the morning, we skated on the pond, all four of us. The ice was over an inch thick but transparent as still water, unscathed until we ran across it with our blades. Underneath, at the edges, we could see the crayfish and water bugs eyeballing us from the other side. The wind was so strong we reached our arms out and let it push us across the surface. I skated circles around the edge, and Mary ran laps on the bank, barking with something between joy and frustration. She couldn’t understand the sudden solidity of the pond, and she wanted very badly to work.

  Mark and I took a farm walk. After frost, and before the monotone of winter, the farm was in a state of transitional beauty, at the threshold between life and death. The tomatoes on the ground were bright red and softening into the earth. The raspberries clung to the canes, but their life was gone, their color washed from vibrant acrylic to soft gouache. Only the hardy chickweed remained green over frost-rimmed ground. It had taken hold around the tomato stakes and spread from there. It was tenacious, low-growing, and strongly rooted, a formidable enemy. It would give us trouble in the spring.

  “It might be time to mow the asparagus,” Mark said as we pushed our way through fronds that towered over my head. In the summer, the girls had hidden in them, and woven them into fairy crowns and wide green skirts. As the days had grown shorter and frosts came and went, the green slowly drained from the tops of the plants downward, until the whole plant was brown. That was how you knew the plant’s energy had left the surface and gone underground until spring. That was an image I would have liked, the life force of the plant disappearing from view but not from existence, returning to its source, and waiting there until the sun called it to incarnation in the spring, its energy—that notion thin as a ghost—waiting to knit itself together into being again, out of the threads of carbon and nitrogen, water and minerals.

  But there really is no clear line between green and brown. As with all things in farming, there is no simple answer. Most of the asparagus stems were brown but not all of them. To preserve the plants’ energy, it would be best to wait a few more weeks before moving. But meanwhile, the asparagus beetles, the specialized pests that plagued the plants, were on the march, climbing down the stems, aiming to burrow into shelter for the winter. We had to balance the plants’ needs with our desire to kill the beetles. It’s always a choice between imperfect sides. We decided to mow as soon as possible.

  Mary came on t
he walk with us, and Jet trundled along at our heels. When Mary arrived, he relinquished all his responsibilities to her. He seemed content in his dissipation. Mary ran circles through the cornstalks and then bounded back to him, took his snout into her mouth, draped her forepaws over his broad back. He flapped his tail slowly back and forth under her assault, like an old veteran waving a flag at the edge of a parade. She was manic circles of youthful energy; he was mature conservation of effort.

  The farm looked fecund, even in the mode of early decay. The cover crop was particularly beautiful. There was an impressive stand of oats, peas, and tillage radish planted to add carbon, nitrogen, and friability to the soil. The radishes had dug six inches into the topsoil, their taproot three feet. When dead and rotten, they would leave organic matter and airspace behind them, giving next year’s plants the underground oxygen they needed to thrive. Mark pulled up a radish and took a bite. Tillage radish is a sibling to the daikon, and it looked like a long, white, thick carrot. The flesh was frozen at the top but fresh and sound at the bottom, where the frost had not yet reached. I took a bite. It was mild and good. The peas, most sensitive to frost, were shriveled brown tendrils, twelve inches long. The oats were still green. Mark swept up a big handful and chewed it, so that for the rest of the walk, the corners of his mouth were stained green from the juice. It reminded me of a Mark Strand poem I had tacked above my desk when I was in college:

  Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.

  There is no happiness like mine.

  I have been eating poetry.

  My Mark is a person whose intensity and sheer capacity for joy make him want to consume the things he loves until their essence drips from his mouth. It’s a lucky thing, really, that his vices are food, farms, and work.

  The hot peppers were hanging dead and limp on the vines. “We could harvest these,” Mark said. That’s how chili powder is made, and dried pepper flakes. There were a million things exactly like that in the fall. Things we could do or should do, things we wanted to do, but there simply was not time or bandwidth to do them. A part of me believed there should be time, and there would be time, if only I were a better person—more efficient, less messy. I was old enough to know, deep down, that even if that were true, it was not possible to will myself into an entirely new shape, different from what I have been.

  The last sun threw our shadows in front of us. Even all these years in, I find the difference in our height startling. Until I see us reflected somewhere, I forget I am small and he is so tall. We seem like different species. Mark looks older than when I met him. His face and neck have been creased and permanently colored by the sun, and his sandy hair has crept backward a little, grown thinner. In the unfair way that some men age, it all looks good on him. He is still lean and strong, and his familiar hand is warm and callused. His physical presence is a pleasure to me.

  The moon came up, gigantic and perfectly full. I had heard on the radio that this was the month of the supermoon, when the two unlike bodies—one large, one small—are as close as they ever get, and the apparent size of the moon is at its most glorious. This is my place in the world, I thought. Five hundred acres of soil, between mountains and a lake. I was a foreigner here not that long ago. But I have eaten what came from this soil and the rain that fell on it until my cells were made of it. This was the raw material that knitted two children together in my body. And if a person’s essence is made not of atoms but of thoughts or of time, still, by any measure, I am made of it, and I belong here.

  * * *

  The girls played outside in the dark until dinner, in the half-frozen mud. For dinner, we had squash soup, good bread, kale. The soup was from a roasted, pureed blue Hubbard squash, thinned with a Chinese master stock, and scented with anise, ginger, garlic, cinnamon, soy, and black cardamom.

  After dinner, we turned on They Might Be Giants, and the four of us sorted beans that needed to be packed for the city shares the next day. The beans we’d grown were called King of the Early; they were fat, mottled, wine-red and creamy-white. The fire crackled in the woodstove. We talked, laughed, and worked. We started with a great heap in the middle, the four of us sorting on four sides of the table. Jane turned out to be the fastest and most accurate sorter, her nimble eight-year-old fingers picking out chaff, broken beans, and stones. When the central heap was gone, her pile of perfectly sorted beans was bigger than Mark’s and mine put together.

  It struck me, that night, that it had gotten easier. Something shifted after Miranda turned five, just as Candace had predicted. I didn’t feel that clutching in my chest anymore if I didn’t know where they were every second. I didn’t worry, when I ran to the barn to check on a new calf, that I would come back to the house to find one in tears and the other bleeding, or the house on fire with them trapped in it, or any of the other irrational instinctual things I once feared. I had the sense that they were weaned again, in a different way. I could have back the piece of myself that they had needed for those years, and they could begin their exploration of the world away from me. It was a relief, tinged with sadness because there was such great love and satisfaction in the exchange of need, and it would never come back, at least not in the same way.

  It wasn’t just parenting that got easier. Marriage got smoother, Mark got healthier, the farm more stable financially. We learned the art of being grateful for what is, instead of longing for what isn’t, and the benefits of separating our own well-being from that of the farm, and even that of each other. As we slid through our forties, we began to settle into the prickly truth of middle age, which at its best is a time of acceptance, self- and otherwise. The hardest piece was something the farm was very good at teaching: Everything ends. The natural order of things is immutable. Seed, flower, fruit, decline, death, decay. Seed. Each stage has its own drama and its own particular beauty. If you can see it, you can accept it. The parts are graceful, and so is the whole.

  A Scribner Reading Group Guide

  Good Husbandry

  Kristin Kimball

  This reading group guide for Good Husbandry includes an introduction, discussion questions, and ideas for enhancing your book club. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting topics for discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.

  Introduction

  When Kristin Kimball married Mark and started Essex Farm with him, she traded the possibility of a steady paycheck and spontaneous vacations for a life and work that were challenging but beautiful and fulfilling. Ten years later, a run of bad weather, injuries, and financial pressures seemed to conspire against them, but with grit, grace, and a good sense of humor, they dug in deeper and found even greater joy together. Good Husbandry is a gorgeous memoir about animals and plants, farmers and food, friends and neighbors, love and marriage, births and deaths, growth and abundance.

  Topics & Questions for Discussion

  1. Discuss the ways in which the division of Good Husbandry into three parts (“Roots,” “Bedrock,” and “Regrowth”) shaped your understanding of the memoir’s narrative.

  2. On page 12, Kristin says that “seven is a number with mystical appeal.” What are some other mystical forces that she believes are at work on the farm?

  3. How does Kristin’s understanding of Mark’s personality affect the way she sees the farm, and vice versa? Can the systems that work efficiently in the fields work inside the home? Discuss the different ways they view their marriage.

  4. Good Husbandry recounts the events of five years on Essex Farm. How do the setbacks and triumphs that the farm experiences mirror the family’s experience during that time?

  5. Kristin wonders if it’s fair to subject her children to farm life, recognizing that she “had chosen farming when [she] was a fully mature adult who had seen a lot of the world and had other choices” (page 40). Do you think this is something all parents experience? What does your family need in order
to be happy?

  6. On page 95, Kristin observes a connection between Blaine and newcomer Tobias. Of farm relationships, she says that “there was no hiding your true self when you were working side by side for grueling hours,” commenting that “love sparked fast and burned out or else caught and transformed into commitment.” Do you think she was thinking of herself and Mark as much as the blossoming relationships around her?

  7. After the birth of her children, Kristin becomes less happy with the state of their farmhouse—both its physical disrepair and its role as the center of farm life. Why do you think this was?

  8. Even though Good Husbandry is Kristin’s memoir, we get to know Mark through her eyes. When he is injured, his absence casts a pall over the farm. Do you think during his convalescence Mark was also grappling with the same issues—marriage, family, sustaining the business—Kristin herself dealt with over the course of the book?

  9. Family is a central theme throughout the book. How does Kristin’s understanding of family change and grow as she and Mark go from being a couple to being parents?

  10. “‘If people knew how much fun farming is,” Mark says, “we wouldn’t be able to keep them away” (page 69). Do you think Kristin believes that? After reading this book, do you believe that? Or are some people more susceptible to the magic of farming?

  Enhance Your Book Club

  1. Read Kristin’s first memoir, The Dirty Life, with your book club, and compare the two. How has Essex Farm changed? Kristin and Mark’s marriage? Kristin herself?

  2. Visit your local farmers’ market and enjoy some seasonal snacks with your book club.