High Summer

 

 

The zinnias are taller than the fence now. We cut flowers before the heat comes up and set up the stand.

And Saturdays, the crew loads the truck for New Haven.

The tomato rows have closed in — you walk them sideways, crate on your hip. The first heirlooms are in, split shoulders and all. 

The harbor holds the last light.  August is close.

Full House

 

The heat came first. Then word of the storms.

This is the week summer stops being a promise and becomes a fact. The air is heavy by nine. By afternoon the sky goes green at the edges and everyone watches the west. We move the hoses. We check the ties on the tallest stems. We wait.

The plants do not wait. They grow into all of it — the heat, the wet, the wind that comes down the field ahead of the rain. The snapdragons are shoulder-high and every color at once. The dianthus runs in a pink line all the way to the hoop house. The tomatoes have closed their rows into a hedge. Whatever the weather is doing above, the growing goes on below.

And the house is full.

There are bikes leaning against the trees again, the way there have been bikes leaning against these trees for years now. Seven of them this season — people I did not know in the spring, who know the beds by name now. They rise early. They pick before the heat. They eat at the long table and they laugh at things I don't always catch. The work moves faster with more hands, but that is not the reason to be glad of them. The reason is the fullness itself.

I have watered this ground alone and I have watered it with a crowd. The crowd is better.

Tonight the storm will come. We will bring in what needs bringing in and we will let the rest take the rain. In the morning the field will be washed and bent and heavy, and there will be more hands than I have to set it right.

That is a good way to meet a summer.

Before the Heat

 

The top half of the door stays open from May on. Some mornings that's the first thing I see—the whole day still blue, the maple just inside the frame, everything unspent.

Then you go out into it.

The snapdragons get cut by hand, in the cool, before anyone's awake. Thirty-one Junes of this and the work hasn't changed: cut, carry, set them in water, open the stand. The light doesn't last and neither does the cool, so you move while you can.

It's a heavy armful some mornings. Most mornings I don't mind.

The Stand

This week our farm stand goes back out by the road. It is the same one it has always been — a small wooden thing, weathered now, with a corn table beside it and a scale for weighing what you take.

I bought it in 1995 for fifteen dollars.

It came from the Bauer brothers, here in Madison. Erwin and Anthony were truck farmers who had run a stand out of their garage for years, driving their vegetables up to the market in New Haven before the highway made that trip short. By the time I knew him, Erwin was in his nineties and no longer using the stand. He let me have it with the corn table and the scale, the whole arrangement, for the price of a good lunch.

Neither brother married. They had no heirs, and what they had they gave away — some sixty acres left to the town, which is Bauer Park now, out on Copse Road. Erwin stayed on in the farmhouse to the end. We hayed their fields for years, until the town took the mowing on itself.

There is a plaque on our stand for the two of them. It seemed the least we could do for a thing that has outlived its makers and gone on being useful.

The roadside stand is a great American tradition — the farmer puts the day's crop out, sells it straight to whoever stops, and everyone comes out ahead. As a child I traveled the secondary roads with my family, living mostly off whatever the local stands were selling, and I have had conversations at our own stand with people who came from as far as California.

But not every stand is what it looks like. Plenty of the trucks parked in lots, dressed up to look like a farm stand, are selling the same wholesale produce that fills the big chains — tomatoes labeled local that may have been grown anywhere and trucked a thousand miles. Here you can see the fields right behind the food. And yes, sometimes you will find the stand self-serve. That is not neglect. It means we are out in those fields, doing the thing that makes the food worth stopping for.

So the stand is open again. The first things are not much yet — early greens, a few flowers, whatever the season has decided to give. Weigh your own, make your own change. The box is where it has always been.

Many Hands

Our Driveway

There is a moment, most mornings, when I stop at the edge of the field and just watch the work happen. Someone bent over a row, weeding. Someone else moving down the beds with a flat of seedlings. The particular quiet of people working near each other but not talking — only the sound of hands in soil, the occasional question, a wheelbarrow finding its line through the grass.

I have been watching some version of this scene for a long time now. The faces change. The work does not.

This farm has never run on one pair of hands, or two. It was never meant to. Kingsley's great uncle put it in the ground in 1909 — a circuit court judge in Manhattan who, by every account, would rather have been here with his animals. He kept sheep and cows and donkeys, the sheep most of all; a man in robes during the week who came home to muck and hay and the company of livestock. A place like this was held up, even then, by everyone within reach of it.

The original caretaker who lived in the farmer's cottage. 

I know this partly because I have been lucky enough to hear it firsthand. Over the years I met people — well into their nineties, most of them gone now — who remembered coming to this farm as children to swap cows and sheep with the judge. They had grown up just down the road, on their grandfathers' farms, in the early years of the last century, and they carried whole worlds of story about this ground: who traded what, which animal was stubborn, how the place looked before the trees grew tall. To them, our farm was not ours at all. It was a thread in something much older and more shared, and they handed me their piece of it the way you'd pass along something fragile and precious. A small farm is a conversation between everyone who has ever knelt in its rows — or bargained over a ewe in its yard.

And so many have. Over the years I have lost count — though I haven't, really; I remember nearly all of them. The ones who stayed a season and the ones who stayed years. The ones who arrived knowing nothing and left able to read the weather in their bones. The ones who taught me things. The young people who slept here, ate at our table, learned what it feels like to be tired in the good way, and then went out into their own lives carrying a little of this place with them.

I think about them more than they probably know. When I transplant the elderberries, I think of the hands that planted the ones before them. When the lettuce comes in red and bright, I remember who first showed me to harvest it in the cool of the morning. The field holds memory the way the stone walls do — quietly, without announcing it, but you can feel the accumulation. Nothing here was built alone.

The Barns

It is harder now to find the help a place like this needs. That is true across small farms everywhere, and I won't pretend otherwise. The arithmetic of it keeps me up some nights. But the harder it gets, the more grateful I am for the ones who do come — for anyone willing to give their back and their morning to ground they didn't grow up on, for the simple grace of not being alone in the field.

So this is for all of them. The ones here now, and the ones long gone on to other things. If you ever worked this ground — pulled a weed, set a plant, hauled a crate up from the lower field — you are still part of how it grows. You are in the soil now, in the best sense. The farm remembers you, even on the days I forget to say so.

A place is only ever borrowed. We tend it for a while and then hand it on. What stays is the work, and the long line of people who showed up to do it — beginning, ending, and all the space in between, held together by many hands.

With gratitude, from the field.

The Work That Looks Like Rest

I haven't written here in a while. Not because the farm went quiet — the opposite. The season got loud all at once, the way it always does, and the writing was the thing that waited.

I don't have many pictures to show for it either. But the few I have say more than I expected them to.

Here is the greenhouse at the start of a morning, before the day has decided what it wants to be. The seedling trays are lined up the length of the bench, the hanging baskets are just beginning to throw out their first vines, and the light comes through the poly soft and undecided. This is the part of the year that is all promise. Everything in that house is a sentence not yet finished.

And here, in the tomato tunnel, is the end of that same sentence. The plants have climbed their strings nearly to the top now, leaning into each other down the whole length of the row. A few weeks ago they were the small green things in those trays. Now you can lose a person in them.

In between those two pictures — the trays and the jungle — is all the work nobody photographs. Which brings me to Cathy and Gabe.

If you glance at these two, you'd think they were taking a break. Gabe sitting back on the landscape fabric with a grin, Cathy on an overturned crate in the middle of the greens, hat down against the sun. They look like they've stopped.

They haven't. They're weeding.

That's the thing about this stretch of the season. The planting is mostly behind us and the harvest hasn't fully landed, and so the work that fills the days is the close, low, patient kind — the kind you do sitting down, hands in the row, pulling what doesn't belong so that what does can have its space. It is the least dramatic work on the farm and very nearly the most important. Nobody comes to a farm stand asking to see the weeding. But there is no full tomato tunnel without it.

Thirty-five years in, I've come to love that this work looks like rest. Maybe that's the part I most wanted to say after being away from this page so long. Some of what matters most is quiet. It bends down low. It doesn't ask to be noticed.

Cathy and Gabe were noticed today, though. By me, and now by you.

More soon — once the rows let me sit down for a minute myself.

On this Earth Day

Some photos from years past.