Farm Fresh

I’m scratching out some thoughts for my new blog on pen and paper while I eat my lunch of an egg and sausage sandwich. The egg is a local egg from a backyard flock, the sausage “artisan-style” (yet prepackaged) chicken sausage, the bread a 12-grain variety from the grocery store shelf. “Organic” blue corn tortilla chips give some crunch to my lunch. And I am sipping on a diet Dr. Pepper that contains something called “phenylalanine” in a plastic bottle that begs me to recycle it. All of this makes me think about the eclectic food world we now live in.

            The table at which I sit is a custom cherry Shaker-style table housed in a 200-ish-year-old Cape that I have called home for almost 16 years. Next to the table is one of four fireplaces in the house. The ceiling beams—which I released from a plaster prison a decade or so ago—are enormous, probably from huge trees cut on the property. The floor is yellow pine and completely uneven. In one adjacent room is a flat screen television that TimeWarner adorns with High Definition making every Jacoby Ellsbury at-bat successful in my opinion. In the other adjacent room, next to the window with the wavy panes of old glass, is the laptop to which I am soon headed abandoning pen and paper. And I think about the eclectic homes we make for ourselves these days.

            Our home is surrounded by around 90 acres of mostly wooded property—a mere pittance from whatever land the original homesteader secured, I am sure—whose current deed states my husband’s and my name. We have worked with our county forester to put in an access road around the perimeter of our property. And four or five mornings a week, I put on my sneakers and jog that access road. Jack constructed a great little sugar house; every spring he exhibits more patience than I will have in a lifetime waiting for 40 gallons of clear sap to boil down into one gallon of the sweetest syrup to dress our pancakes and to provide a gift of appreciation to those who bring our wayward Labrador Retriever home at various times throughout the year. Just a few hundred yards from the sugar house, cars of all makes and sizes whiz by with what seems like ever-increasing frequency and speed. And I think about what an eclectic atmosphere this rural property has taken on.

            Four horses roam on a few acres of our wooded land. I ride them along the access road, looping around, transportation to nowhere for no reason but pleasure.  I haul them places in a trailer with my weary computer-module-run F-150 pickup. A few months of the year, the horses munch on meager grass that we have eked out of this tree-and-rock laden property, but mostly I buy their feed—much of it in bales, some of it in plastic bags. I am a certified veterinary technician but since I am not practicing out in the veterinary world, I "practice" on my own horses. Although horse care involves lots of physical labor, it is not sustained cardiovascular or focused muscle development that a person of my age needs to hope to feel like a person of less than my age—so you would find it difficult to pry my Planet Fitness subscription out of my hands. Thus is the “farm life” I have constructed for myself.

            This is the world I will write about in this space—the eclectic life of the contemporary rural greater seacoast area. Not so rural at all. But amidst the Wal-mart plastic and the treadmill and the HDTV we can connect with bits of the land. Local eggs, compost, herbs, clams, lobsters, maple syrup, farmer’s markets and farm stands. Horses to ride, manure to clean up, gardens to plant, live Christmas trees to cut, fish from the pier, hay to haggle price over, sheep to shear, grain stores to visit, dogs to pull ticks from and give Lyme vaccinations, barn cats to catch the mice. I plan to blog about all these life-and-the-land little bits and more: the good things, the bad things, the controversial things.

Rural, contemporary, and opinionated. Farm Fresh.     

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