Nourishing Bites | A Well Seasoned Pot Part II
Savoy Cabbage | A gift of seed, soil, sunshine and time.
Part 2 of 4 | Part 1 | Part 3 | Part 4
If our December supply chain challenges sourcing seed was the Prologue, the Valentine's Day snowstorm was Chapter One. That storm set the pace of this season for us here at the farm. It was the beginning of the heavy lift of unforeseen challenges that could not be put aside. Had it not been for our dear friends who brought positivity, hard working hands, a confidence it could be overcome, and the necessary expertise to make it so, and had it not been for cash reserves that made the replacement greenhouses immediately accessible, at best we would have been facing a severely abbreviated tomato season and many other loose ends left untied. I don’t want to dwell on the worst case scenario. There is no good that comes from such ponderings.
But our worst fears did not come to pass and that is how I found myself on a late April afternoon on the tractor, preparing a few beds for transplanting. Suddenly I realized the very spot I was working up was the site of that stressful storm wreckage only 40-some days before.
Flash. All those feelings of defeat and exhaustion and worry came rushing back. I could feel the knots in my stomach.
Another flash, and the tension in my shoulders released. I felt a sense of transformation from discouragement to hope.
Hope.
This hope did not occur in solitude, but rather because and only because of the community around me. It was the same hope I set in every hole of every seedling I planted in that precious ground on that precious spring day.
***
This year, on the last day of July, I walked through the hot meadow and knifed my way in between two great firs, headed toward the creek bottom. In that transition, there was a hidden, but unmistakable, dramatic shift. A liminal space of two temperatures and humidities separated by an invisible curtain of change. Like a friendly fence covered by rambling vines, these two neighbors - The Creek and The Meadow, and the sentinel evergreens, mark the gate of passage from one experience to another.
What I call the shoulder seasons (spring and fall) also mark the passage from one experience to another. Spring work is akin to walking across a threshold- back and forth and back again. I bundle up one morning in a thick vest and wool cap, then just hours later I am in a t-shirt, then I am reaching for my raincoat. I am here, then I am there.
And fall brings me back here again. Before dawn, I layer up to keep the rain from soaking my shoulders, then shed those layers as the warmth of the noon sun soaks me, and by dusk I am reaching for a flannel and a wool cap. I am here, then there, then here again.
Flash, flash, flash. Whether I am working with garlic in my hands or out on a particular section of field, or I am harvesting or planting, or walking in the woods, in all sorts of weather, at all times of year, I find myself transported from one experience to another- one memory to a future dream to the present moment. This happens more often than I can recount.
This farm’s fields and rows, footpaths and gravel lanes are well traveled for me. In fact, after sixteen years of traversing this special place as an adult, and years more as an inquisitive and land loving child, I have a stock pot full of memories inside me. And while some memories evoke full fledged stories, others do not reside as discrete experiences I can put language to, but rather as sensory emotions, feelings, physical remembrances- almost as if I am transported back to that very point in my journey for a brief moment. For a brief moment, I am seven or seventeen or twenty-seven once again.
When you commit to long term work that is rooted in a particular place, it is inevitable that your relationship with time changes. You grow a taproot that emboldens a wider, deeper way of knowing.
Farming has no doubt rooted me in place. I understand now in a way that I never could have otherwise grasped, that time is not a superficial, dumbed down sort of linear experience. Time is a wholly, wildly, complex and circular way of being. Farming and this farm, have given me the tools— almost a strengthened muscle memory if you will— to comprehend that I am here, but I hold inside of me a knowing of what has been, and thus a knowing of what is possible, of what is yet to become. ~AJ
Savoy Cabbage | After the harvest.