My paradigm has shifted, and now when I see married people I have an involuntary violent impulse to punch ‘em in the face.

For three days I had panic attacks – including a memorable four hours spent pacing my living room. Midnight to four a.m., it’s hilarious in retrospect. Then I had a panic attack at work because one of my clients wore a wedding band. I went to the clinic. I got a scrip for trazodone. I slept that night.

It’s something like that movie, “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” I’m taking these pills so in the five minutes or two hours between closing my eyes & sleep I don’t become overwhelmed with thoughts I’d rather avoid. I’m taking these pills so during the day when I start to cry or panic or remember, I can pause, breathe, wait, and the feelings float away.  I have yet to grieve. Or those three days I spent crying were grief enough. The first few days I imagined that this lack of anxiety would be enough – this would be a magic pill to fix all of the problems he had with me.

It took a week or more before I began to admit that I did nothing to deserve a broken doorframe, I did nothing to deserve being shoved out of the doorway during the second assault, I did nothing to deserve it. I should have put down the knife I was drying before I answered the door, that accident was tragic. Then again, it doesn’t matter how damn big and angry you are, don’t shove a girl who’s holding a knife.

Despite his injury and despite his (presumed) despair and despite the ten-day recovery from surgery on his hand (his father  told me they had to pull out a tendon that had retracted down into his arm), when his father came to pick up the last of his things from my house, he wouldn’t hear my apologies.

He said, “Well, I’m sorry all this happened.”

I said, “I’m sorry you trusted me.”

And he said “Oh honey we still trust you, we still love you and respect you, but.”

We sat in the warm late sun and he talked at me about his job and I smoked, crying, and I don’t know if he noticed the tears.

What the hell do I do with that. I am no longer a member of the family. I was once honored to be accepted: but I can no longer call them relatives, or prospective relatives. I am no longer honored by their support & friendliness & advice.

I am again obsessed with self-sufficiency. I will fix my own dam car, take heavy things down from high shelves, open jars. Solve my crises.

But I’m taking advantage of assistance from amicable acquaintances – soliciting more from some, trusting them to decline if they want. I was told this morning to trust. I agreed to assistance, negotiated repayment, and he said, “Trust me.”

I can’t. I don’t. I never have. I trust within limits, not implicitly. More important than trust is the acceptance of risk, the acceptance of consequences. I wish it were as simple as trust.

I believed in the longevity of commitment, believed in change, believed in benevolent mutual dependence. I believed I was worthy of marriage.

I believe I still am – just, obviously, better than that situation.

I am believing presently in negotiated use. I am believing presently in an economy of general reciprocity, I am believing presently in getting needs met through various means, using people and offering myself and my skills for use. I don’t believe in trust: I believe in acceptable risk.

It’s damn empty over here but so far there are less tears.

I impulsively sent a text today, then continued chopping cabbage and rolling dough for pasta.  When my phone finally buzzed me back I replied with clumps of dough on my fingers, and alternated thumb-typing and pasta-filling, trying to keep my thumbs and fancyphone clean. Then he called, and dear lord if he’s not sillier on phone than in person. And a little deaf, so I was yelling over the chicken frying and when he asked what I was cooking I left that part out because he’s some kind of vegetarian.

He sang about half the conversation in silly voices, imitated other people laughing, spontaneously broke into flute playing, drum thumping, tibetan-singing-bowl-ringing. Strange one, that one.

“I’d rather he buried under daffodils” he said, when I told him I was dirty from digging up daffodil bulbs. “Rather than pushing up daisies?”

And I squealed “There’s a Greek correlation I think! Thanatos! The Greek word for death, okay right, the first letter of the word Thanatos is theta, and the shape of theta is inside the daffodil flower. Unless it’s something else.”

I should invite him over to share the damn tedious beautiful dumpling things I made for Aaron, which he eschewed, on account of a dinner with relatives he didn’t mention until I was at work and the fried chicken and Greek dumplings were waiting in the oven. I shouldn’t.

I read about the plight of farmworkers in America. I read about poverty, illiteracy, abuse, uneducated children forced to work in the fields, migrant people whose immigration status is questionable. I read about the pride some have in their work, the crushed  belief that America held greater opportunities than home. Occasionally I read reports of farmworkers in my home state, interventions to attempt to educate the children, and I am shocked that this takes place here.

I am shocked that the beautifully ripe tomato in the grocery store may have come from Chile or California just as well as Tennessee, but certainly wasn’t grown by a farmer half a mile down the road.  I watch my tomato-fence along the parking lot outside my apartment, waiting for the tiny yellow pear tomatoes to ripen, watching the color orange overwhelm the green on the skins of the little cherry tomatoes. I will have tomatoes when my tomatoes are ready.

This is what I know now of food:

I bought a share in the CSA this year. The lettuces, initially a revelation after winter, are now fodder for compost and my bucket of slow fat worms. But the eggs are perky and beautiful and the shells have personalities, and I can tell when the hens’ diet changes by the deeper yellows of the yolk.  I am making pickles of the yellow squash, I choose alien-spaceship pattypan squash over the baseball bat zucchini, I’ll plant some cloves from the purple garlic. Each Tuesday I drive out to the health food store and weigh my allotment, and we visit the grocery store only for milk and butter and whatever WIC provides. When we visit Aaron’s family an hour south we drive into the Big Town and buy immoral flour, sugar and rice  in cheap 50 pound bags from a supercenter.  We parcel them out into 5 gallon plastic pickle buckets salvaged from a deli, and we bake our own bread.

Boxed pancake mix can go _____ itself.

Yesterday Aaron and I were both off work, so we loaded rolls of chicken wire and half inch wire into the back of his truck (really a Blazer, but we like calling it a truck) and drove twenty minutes to our farmer. We’re starting up a small meat rabbit production with him, so we cleaned out the old open woodshed and started to build cages. Free-range chickens visited occasionally, and our farmer’s niece’s boyfriend, shirtless sweaty skinny and tan, came by and said “I reckon there ain’t much more to do today besides pick those huckleberries.”

I hope we never forget this miracle of pulling food from the earth.

We’re debating renting a tiny house within walking distance of our farmer. We’d lose the space we have and our neighbors (yesterday I traded Ms. Juanita a jar of squash pickles for a bag of fresh squash). We’d have to give away our kitchen table, the shelves we’ve built, the big desk made from salvaged cabinets and an old farm door. We’d have to spend our August vacation week washing and painting the walls, fixing up the floor, moving out. But we’d be closer to our farmer, and have a washer and dryer instead of paying the laundromat.

But maybe we could have a vegetable plot on his land, and we’d be that much closer to our rabbits. Maybe if we could rent a space for goats and finish some pigs? That’s asking too much.

But when I finish school, when I’ve completed classes and internship and have my Degree of Social Work, I want to be a farmer.

Yesterday I was in love with our crazy urban homestead. Aaron spent the day building a new two-box compost bin under the kitchen window – so I can lean out over the sink and toss compost down into the bin, hilarious. We took an old garden hose from the landlord (the ends were clipped off years ago, it’s been hanging out in the garage) and we made a drip line for the tomatoes we’ve set up along the fence. We hung the bucket from the top of the compost bin where it could be filled from the sink if we were feeling super lazy. We snacked on purple green beans from the garden beds in the yard, and ate caramel ice cream I made the night before.

Before we went to bed, we talked about the rabbits – priced out the cost for building the cages, argued about whether to buy weaned young rabbits or breeding-age adults, decided we need a spreadsheet for this info. Figured out some more questions to ask Farmer B, since we’re going in with him on his new rabbit operation.

This morning Aaron threw the wood scraps in the grill (another thing borrowed from the landlord – tenants evicted last year left the grill, so we use it) and fired it up to burn it down for charcoal. I tweaked a little over the huge smoke plume blowing up over the highway, the church next door and the neighbors through the woods. He said “I’m complying with state and local regulations concerning fires, we’ll be okay.”

Three hours later two middle-aged men drove up in a shiny black new SUV. They were dressed for church, for their Men’s Fellowship Group. They got out and hollared over toward Aaron, who was sitting on a sawhorse in the yard sanding dovetail joints for a cider press (everything in our yard is built from scrap wood and pallet jacks). They said, “Son, we’re gonna put this out over here” and walked into our yard, picked up one of our buckets, and turned on our water.

Aaron said “Alright, but that’s my grill and I’m keeping an eye on it.”

They said “Okay then” and drove off.

Aaron thinks I’m overreacting a bit, but I’m mighty perturbed by their trespassing. I know this land belonged to the church until fifty years ago, and I know we border church property, and I know our landlord goes to their church, and I know all last summer we were sweaty and scratched picking blackberries off the weedy patch of hill between their cemetary and road. We asked permission and everything. And a few times a week my son and I walk down to the playground behind the apartment, which is owned by the church but never used.

But these guys didn’t say “Son, that smoke’s blowing over toward the church, mind keeping it down a bit?”

They didn’t say “Hey, can we borrow this bucket and your water?”

They didn’t say “Your landlord said we could.”

They just walked right in like they owned the place. And now I feel like they’ll haul off those bike scraps we’re using to prop up the tomatoes, like they’ll tear down the trellis for the peas and squash because it’s ugly, like the landlord will evict us for being sketchy hippies, even though he was over Wednesday and we gave him fresh sweet snap peas to chew on and offered some dill for when his cucumbers come in and talked about the apple trees and he brought us up the garden hose to use and said we could poke holes in it for a drip line.

Today’s not a good day for paranoia – it’s that particular week of the lunar cycle, or something, and I just woke up feeling all rabbit-scared and bitchy. But come on, man…

Tomorrow Aaron’s talking with a local farmer about “going in” with him “on some rabbits.” Mr. M wants to start raising meat rabbits, and we do , so we’re thinking of buying a share of his operation. So we’d purchase a buck and four or six does, their share of feed and housing, go out a few times a week to work for Mr. M on whatever around the farm needs doing, and then recoup profits from selling the fryers or, you know, eat ‘em.

We’ve been offered a huge garden space an hour away at his family’s home. They’ve got a three acre partially wooded property and they intensively garden about an acre, but it’s getting hard on his mother’s knees and arthritis.

Our apartment is next to a huge field between the road and the church. There’s a playground below the cemetery beside the church, and I only see the field in use when the youth group has held a sleepover and the boisterous born-again are cutting across the wet grass to church in the morning, sneaking past the apple trees and the dead.

I’d like to see about renting a patch of that sunny flat land, close to the house, and having a garden on it for short-season things or fragile things, keep the sturdier and long-season crops for Lenoir. I’d like to sell to the CSA if we can manage a big enough patch, or  maybe that’s a plan for next year.

But we’re close enough.

http://summerburkes.wordpress.com/2010/06/30/o-death-of-the-gulf-and-maybe-us/

I should read that later.

This morning I killed my first …anything, really.

There is a curve in the road near my home, and in the mornings the asphalt sunny and warm and full of roosting sleepy mourning doves. I usually slow down and wait for them to startle and flutter away gently cussing me, but today I was late, and there was only one bird, and I thought I could aim my car so I would pass over and not hit it.

When I looked in the mirror I saw the dove was still, so I turned and went back and the dove was laying on it’s back, kicking feet, wings folded. I lifted it and saw it was having a slow seizure, and the brain was exposed. I’d flipped it over with the air from my car hard enough that it scraped on the pavement…I called my mother.

She’s a falconer, I asked if she’d like a fresh dove. She was at work so she talked me through dispatching it (“Snap the neck, birds have reflex twitching after they’re dead”). I grabbed the body in one hand and the head in the other and twisted, the wings and legs kicked out and the body lurched, the head was almost all the way around and it was still moving, nothing popped. I laid it down, it was still moving. I took the head and body and pulled until the soft flesh below the neck separated like gentle gauze and I felt a pop in the bones, I held the bird to be sure the heart had stopped. I thanked my mother for being on the phone with me, I left the body near a pile of brush near the road.

I should have brought it in to work and stuck it in the freezer, but I didn’t think to, and now that it’s occurred to me I’m also wondering who would scream upon finding a ziploc bag full of blood and feathers amid the popsicles and frozen lunches. On the rest of the drive I wondered whether the neighbors would be irritated to find a dead pigeon in their yard, and hoped the local wandering rottweiler wouldn’t get parasites (although considering how clean she keeps our dumpster, she is either full of ‘em or immune).

http://www.extension.umn.edu/distribution/horticulture/dg7618.html

Saturday we’re checking out another property. Out-of-state owners are seeking caretakers  for their recently renovated 2br cabin, with pasture and barn and gardens and orchard, on 250 acres of conservation trust land. Price is negotiable, and we may need to further negotiate considering the drive. We’d be taking both cars half an hour into town and back each day.

But to be able to bring land into production…that’s serendipitous perfection. There are expensive subdivisions nearby, the road might be rough in the winter, but the landowners welcome chickens and gardens and maybe goats.

I’m planning for years. The first year (anywhere) I’d like to have a big enough garden to offset production costs, hopefully drastically reduce our expenditures. So if we move in August we’ll need to see about getting a crop in the ground to winter over, and build cold frames.  I’d like to raise broilers  since I hope there’s an easier learning curve with something you’ll process after a few months than with layers you’d want to keep around for a while. I’d like to pasture them, so we’ll need fence (portable solar powered electric booyah). I’d like to get Aaron responsible for some bees. And depending on how well we exhaust ourselves the first year, I’d like to add laying hens and/or rabbits.

The second or third year I want to sell to a CSA, or set up a farm stand targeting the nearby subdivisions. I’d like goats as well for milk and meat…

And in the meantime I have to finish school, maintain a 20 hour/week job and a full schedule of classes…we can do it.

I can’t help but overhear in the soft, neutral accents conversing behind me; words and phrases that come too close to what I’m experiencing and obsessing over today. Three middle-aged women, in shorts and pastel shirts and precisely tanned legs (you can tell a lot from a manicure but also from whether a girl’s legs are the same color as her arms), are talking about their children.

“The white pill is for in the morning. Right. So we have to…”

“I hate having to be a teacher, I hate to travel.”

If a group of teenage girls sounds like manic pigeons holding microphones too close to the speakers, these women resemble doves – the soft percussive quality of their speech just barely too quiet to distinguish words underneath the oppressive hum of fluorescent lights.

I am wondering that wealthy people talk differently about their problems, think about their problems differently, quantifying the ways in which I am still lower class despite my efforts.

I want to rage – I am doing everything right. My son was in the best private school in the county. My grade point average is 3.72, I have a well-paying part-time job, a wonderful fiance, almost enough income and savings just high enough to feel almost comfortable.

But my son was asked to leave that school, I can’t seem to find quality daycare with space for this fall, I am so very tired of the classes I’m taking, and my savings account is steadily being crushed by a hospital bill, my dental needs, and a check I wrote to my attorney. And I can only keep my son in daycare (so I can work) because of a subsidy (welfare), which expires next year, and then I won’t make enough money to pay for it out of pocket.

I feel like I briefly passed as middle-class but failed to crawl out of this hole. I feel like I failed, but I don’t know how to succeed.

If we buy medical insurance, we won’t  have any cash for savings. Aaron doesn’t want to sell his motorcycle but I don’t think we can afford to continue making payments on it. If we can sell both bikes we might make up for those recent bills…

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/19/us/19migrant.html?hp

NYTimes article on underage migrant blueberry pickers in Eastern NC, right in my backyard (if my backyard took six hours to drive across).  Current federal law exempts agriculture from certain child labor laws, allowing children over the age of 12 to work outside of school hours with no limit on the number of hours they work.

http://www.dol.gov/dol/topic/youthlabor/

In other occupations, the Fair Labor Standards Act “restricts the hours that youth under 16 years of age can work and lists hazardous occupations too dangerous for young workers to perform.” Agriculture is exempt from certain provisions.

http://www.dol.gov/dol/topic/youthlabor/Agriculturalemployment.htm

“Minors of any age may be employed by their parents at any time in any occupation on a farm owned or operated by his or her parent(s).”

http://www.dol.gov/whd/regs/compliance/childlabor102.pdf

“The Federal Child Labor Provisions in Agriculture Do Not
require minors to obtain “working papers” or “work permits,” though some States do; limit the number of hours or times of day (other than outside of school hours) that young farm workers may legally work, though a few States do.”

At 16, I believe the presumption goes, a person can drop out of high school and obtain work in any desired field. In agricultural occupations, a 16 year old may perform any jobs, including those legally defined as hazardous, at any hour.

At 14, a child can be employed for any number of hours as long as they are not engaged in tasks legally defined as hazardous, and as long as they are not working during school hours.

At 12, a child can be employed, with written parental consent or on a farm where the minor’s parent (or a person standing in for the child’s parent) is employed, as long as the child works outside of school hours.

“Covered minor employees must be paid at least the statutory minimum wage for all hours worked unless otherwise exempt or employed under conditions discussed below. ..Employees under 20 years of age may be paid $4.25 per hour during their first consecutive 90 calendar days of employment with an employer.”

The NYTimes article describes measures taken by social service agencies in counties in Eastern North Carolina where migrant farm workers are employed. The Migrant Head Start program offers preschool for young children who would otherwise be taken to the fields, but a farm worker stated that she preferred working last year, before new regulations came into effect. This year she cannot work until a Head Start center opens, but last year she was able to take her children with her.

The woman interviewed had been employed as an agricultural laborer in the same county for nine years. I was shocked to read this number, because I assume after nine years she remains poor. Isn’t it some part of the American Dream that by working long and hard we may transcend the poverty of the earth and ensconce ourselves in air-conditioned cubicles with computers and dental plans and daycare for our children? What has failed this woman?

“Her family’s situation is typical: they and a second family share an aging trailer, paying $50 a week each. The workers also pay $6 a day to a van owner to transport them to farms nearly two hours away. On good days, in fields where plump berries are still plentiful, they may earn $80 to $100, filling four buckets an hour at $2.50 a bucket to surpass the minimum wage. But when it rains, the berries are too fragile to pick and they cannot work.”

My own understanding of poverty doesn’t hold up to the numbers quoted here. I lived briefly on $650 a month in a one bedroom apartment that cost $500. The state paid most of my son’s daycare costs, my college tuition was funded by state end federal grants that provided an excess of around $1400 each semester. I received around $300 in food stamps each month, WIC vouchers for staple foods, and my family was available to babysit occasionally. And before I allowed my savings to accumulate beyond the $2000 limit, I also had Medicaid. If I decided to stop attending school I would be able to find an additional part time job – as a barista or waitress, book shelver or tutor, burger-flipper or gas station attendant. As a middle-class halfway educated young white person with a good resume and a presentable demeanor, many jobs are open to me.

I have complained lately because my savings account, while still only four digits large, prevents me from obtaining Medicaid. I have a bill from an emergency room visit that will obliterate a third of my savings account, and I think I have a cavity that would like attention but is presently settled with frequent Tylenol. I have complained lately because my son is being asked to leave the Montessori school, and I am extremely dissatisfied with the other daycares in the area. I am philosophically opposed to the idea that young children are incompetent, incapable of learning, that they should be swaddled with diapers and Disney toys until they turn five years old and enter an academic institution. My two year old son is capable of using the toilet, washing dishes, folding laundry, sweeping the floor. These are the things I’ll miss from the Montessori school, but their philosophical rigidity and refusal to accommodate what they believe to be a learning disability make it easier to say goodbye.

I have admired farm boys who at 16 are running their own operations, who have found the kind of financial success I had thought reserved for 30-something people with suits and advanced degrees in business. I thought you had to fight your way through college and middle-class jobs to subsist, and I had some kind of mid-life crises when I realized I could be outside all day among chickens and apple trees and be exhausted and dirty and responsible and survive. I had some sort of mid-life crises when I realized I would rather be outside in the rain chasing chickens, and resolved to work toward owning a farm before I’m thirty.

But.

I didn’t think at the time of the long, squat cinderblock chickenhouses in the Piedmont, where the dead are removed with a tractor and a certain attrition rate is expected because at that high concentration you’d trample your neighbors too. I’ve never explicitly asked these chicken farmers but I understand that cutting off beaks and feeding a constant diet of medication is routine “modern” chicken management, so I think that’s expected here. I didn’t think at the time about the people who are employed by the processing plant in the Piedmont, or my mother’s stories of working there in high school: rubber boots if you had them, ankle-deep in blood and chicken muck, swinging a sharp knife over and over and over at the carcasses coming past you on the line. I know that the demographic differences between the Piedmont and my current mountain town mean it’s easy to find chorizo, fresh tamales at a roadside stand, horchata and goat meat down there, but not up here. I don’t want to draw uninformed conclusions, but.

“The requirement that minors be employed outside the school hours of the public school district in which the minor is living while employed in agriculture applies even if that minor does not attend public school. These hours apply when the minor attends a private or parochial school, is home schooled, or has completed his or her formal education.”

I was reminded of Joel Salatin when reading that last sentence, feeling fairly certain that he wouldn’t approve. If a family chooses to homeschool their children wouldn’t they have the right to determine the hours in which their children completed their studies? As long as the work is done and the children pass whatever mandatory exams and grading systems, does it matter if the work was done at 9am or 4pm? And if a farming homeschooling family has the goats get loose and needs the 10 year old to help herd them back into the fences, is that “work” that can’t be done at noon on a schoolday, unless the public schools have holiday?

But does this bucolic vision exist? I know of farming families around here who may employ migrant labor without asking questions if work needs doing and they don’t feel the locals are dependable enough. And I wonder if this idea of networks of sustainable, integrated, multi-product local farms pushes out employment opportunities for people who are coming to this country to work because there aren’t other options at home.

http://www.dol.gov/whd/regs/compliance/childlabor102.pdf

“A crew leader who takes young migrant workers to an area where schools are open may not allow minors under 16 to work during the hours school is in session in the school district where the farm work is being done.”

There’s an image in my head of a busload of young adolescent children. Is it right to prevent these kids from working, deny their family the income they need to subsist? Is it right to  encourage local farmers who don’t employ migrant labor? There are too many problems here – why do people immigrate? Why do we give them only the work we don’t want, and why don’t we want that work? Where does our food come from, our clothes, our furniture? At what point are we complicit in abuses and morally obligated to treat our farthest neighbors the way we would treat our children?

I called at 9am after dropping Orion off at daycare. I parked briefly at a gas station and rolled the window down just as rain began to drop little kitten-footprints down my windshield. Mr. M answered, and I said “Hi! This is Marie, Aaron’s girlfriend, he said I should give you a call.”

“Yeah?”

“Y’all need any help today?”

“Depends on th’ rain – got someone ouchear cuttin’ grass, I’m in the blueberries with a scythe. You warna come on ait?”

“Sure, where y’all at?”

“Aaron didn’t tell ya?”

So I drove down the road to Jefferson and turned right and drove three miles and turned left and looked “for th’ house wit all them chickens in the front yard.” It snuck up on me in a sharp curve, so I waved at the woman with the pruning shears and turned around as soon as I could, drove back.

She was Mr. M’s mother. I waved again. “Hey there how you! This the house with the chickens out front? Or this the wrong house with the chickens out front?”

We conducted the conversation standing on the yellow line of the road in the middle of a sharp curve between a dozen other sharp curves, a good place to take the road too fast. We stood in the rain and yelled over the sound of water on leaves. The road cut straight through property that’s been in the M family as far back as anyone can remember, makes sense they treat it like another part of their land.

“You lookin’ for Ted?”

“Yes’m, I called few minutes ago he said come on by?”

“You the girl wanting to volunteer?” She seemed skeptical.

“Well sort of yes’m, I mean. Aaron who came out here Friday told me I should call-”

“Did you call my house? Someone called me at home yesterday.” I got the impression one shouldn’t call her at home.

“Wasn’t me, I called Mr. M this morning.”

“Well, someone called my house said she wanted t’ volunteer for two weeks.”

“I have no idea. Wasn’t me.” I don’t know that she believed me.

“Well they’re up there in the apples, just walk up t’the top of th’ hill and hollar.”

“Yes ma’am thank you!”

I was out of breath by the time I reached the boys. I’d looked up and saw the farmhouse and thought that was the top, but there was another ridge higher so I walked some more and then I saw the apples even higher.

“You Marie?”

“Yessir.”

“This is Cody, he’s here workin. Did you have something in mind you want to do or you just hear to see?”

“I’ll be useful. I figure I can pay the university for someone to tell me to read some books, or I can follow people around who are doing what I want to do.”

“This for school?”

I lied a little. “Well, I’m supposed to be doing some volunteer work for one of my classes.”

Feels a little crazy to call someone up and ask to work for free. Feels a little crazier to admit that I just think it’s fun to chase chickens in the rain, that I long so hard for my own food and purpose that I’ll do what I can for a fix.

It was  a slow, pleasant day. From one of the old, crowded, clean storage buildings Mr. M handed us produce boxes. I laughed because I’d already figured out how to get those free from grocery stores, told him I’d used them to build compost bins at home. The boxes are made of paper-thin wood slats wired together, by unlatching one side you’ve got a simple box with a hinged lid. They’re darn useful things and exemplify this thing I love about farmers: well shit, it’s free, how many ways can we use it?

We herded month-old chickens – dinkies – and packed them gently into the boxes and walked them up to a higher pasture.

I learned the difference between two types of fencing: one’s a fine mesh fence, the mesh doubled over and tacked to light posts, with a hot wire on the outside three inches above the ground. The other was a grid, the squares about two inches by two inches, and the whole thing’s hot. The dinkies could fit through the larger holes and wander off.

I learned that they’ll graze the weeds and bugs off the raspberries and not bother the fruit while it’s unripe. I learned that he moves them higher to the cherries after the fruit’s done, and they’ll keep it weeded there.

Mostly we walked, admired the high far view across the green hills and river valley below, ate cherries and last year’s apples. We talked about markets for organic produce and free-range chickens. We talked about breeds:  Chinese Cochins, Black Orpingtons, Brahmas, Buff Cornish. Talked about attrition rates (5% for the broilers, closer to 95% for the turkeys he’s tried).

Talked about the expense of taking them to slaughter, but hard to hire (and pay) the help to process on the farm.

“They say the older breeds have more variation.”

“We used to keep the lights on ‘em all the time, make ‘em eat all the time and gain more weight.”

“They’re weird little things ain’t they?”

“Hold out your arms and walk toward ‘em real slow – it’s okay, some’ll get away from us anyway. Easier to grab ‘em if they’re all over here in the house. I like to move a few of ‘em whenever I get the chance, so I can leave the smaller ones behind. Does better when they’re not so crowded, gives ‘em a chance to catch up on their weight.”

“Seems like the roosters eat more ticks and bugs and things, the hens eat more of the weeds and stuff.”

I learned the deep percolating growl of a broody hen. I learned that four Brahma roosters run with a hundred layers and hundreds of fast little broilers.

“Yeah, the roosters sort of group themselves off with twenty or so hens, they watch out for ‘em and don’t bother the other roosters unless they want to get it on with one of the other hens. Where’d that rooster go…Aw, look over here, how’d you get in that box?”

The dinkies had fled the produce box and it had been wired shut again but only halfway. A sturdy hen had squeezed into the shoebox-sized space through a hole the size of my hand, and the big broad rooster followed.

“What are y’all doing in there. They’re weird little things, aren’t they?”

Mr. M showed me the walk-in fridge he’d built: put up braces like to build a dividing wall along half the basement of the apple house, set in an air conditioner and wired in a device that fooled it into thinking it was 72 degrees when it was really 44.5, so the conditioner would run past the limits it thought it had.  The silver insulation boards, the wiring and the devices ran him about two grand in costs, “But a smaller freezer’d run you three thousand.”

When I read books about working for yourself, they emphasize that you should make sure you make enough money to pay yourself. Arguments abound against farming because once you factor in the costs of land, housing, feed, equipment, you couldn’t pay yourself minimum wage! But if you’ve got a house and food and heck you’re around the place anyway and you like engineering clever solutions and being tired and dirty at the end of the day, why would you need to pay yourself? What would you do with it? Would you make money so you could go buy a frozen processed artificial meal from the grocery store?

The other boy working there, my age or somewhere nearby…let’s just say if I was single and didn’t already have myself a fabulous trustworthy gorgeous hard-working man over whose biceps I swoon, he’d have my number. But thinking of my lovely long-haired hippy biker didn’t stop me from getting all squishy when Cody and I started talking cuisine.

He cooks at a restaurant up here, and by restaurant I mean Restaurant, bless the wealthy, the tourists and the Summer People. He said things like “I’d love to buy some of those cherries off you and make confit for work” and “Chef would LOVE these eggs” and “Yeah, we just bought a cooler full of veal knuckles, we’ve been simmering it for two days.” Talked about where to buy tongue and heart, lavender goat cheese, and if I had no morals I wouldn’t have any morals.

I almost worked a mushroom joke in there (morels) but that would have been too much.

He was a finance major, we talked about the pressure to Get Through School and Get A Degree and Get A Job and what it’s like to realize you don’t want to wear a suit, you don’t want to push paper, you want to be knee deep in the blood and sweat and mud and offal and fermenting compost and bring food from the ground and wake up every morning and do it all again. We blessed Anthony Bourdain, and although Cody didn’t mean it (bless his heart) he unintentionally seduced me pretty well out there in the muck and wet grass, our arms sliced by raspberry canes, chicken shit under our nails, just enough rain to be wet but not enough to be lazy.

And when I left in the afternoon to go home and put on my suit, I realized my definition of femininity apparently involves practical boots, Levi’s jeans on their third day of “well, I’m just gonna get muddy again,” and a paper-thin shirt, in the rain in a field with two men I’d take out for a beer.

Doin’ it again next Wednesday, lord willing.

These people are real. This is real. What I want is in my hands.