Bad Friend Summer
It's that time of our year when I find bits of carrot tops adorning the barrel of our washing machine after running a load of laundry. Whether they snuck into our pockets during harvest, or while slinging carrots at the farmers market, they come out in the wash. When we wrangle our kids for the bedtime routine, I find that the bottoms of Jack's feet are nearly black from his preferred barefoot existence on the farm. Oh yeah, we never ran the bath after dinner tonight. If May and Jack run themselves ragged enough, they fall quickly into deep slumbers as I use the last hour of daylight to pick all varieties of summer squash in the field.
It's a nightly chore keeping up with the patty pans and the cocozelles and the classic zucchini before they reach zucchini bread status. If I fail to wear my squash uniform of longsleeves and pants, the prickly leaves of hundreds of plants score my shins and forearms. After ten years of summer squash harvests, at least my skin is immune to the rashes that I used to get in my earlier greenhorn years when the urticating bristles entered my skin.
Buckets and buckets of squash are deposited into bins to chill in the farm cooler overnight. The accumulation of these cucurbits is lugged out on a dolly to be washed midweek in time for wholesale deliveries...and again at the end of the week for the Oakwood Farmers Market. The squash fruits which hid from me under the broad, dinner-plate leaves of their mother plants, in the waning light of dusk during the course of the week, grew too big for palatability. These overblown squash get turned into zucchini brownies for market goers.
We attempt to keep up with the squash schedule and that of twenty or so other vegetables. The summer agenda at Foxhole is packed to the gills. By this stage in my farming career I've acquiesced to the dynamic schedule of an annual vegetable operation. I've surrendered a daily planner, knowing that we are at the farm's beck and call as it weathers the seasons and their conditions. Simultaneously, we are allowing enough flexibility in our days to tend to May and Jack and their ever-changing needs. Perhaps most importantly, we neglect the vegetables while we fit in spurts of summer spontaneity with the kids, hoping to teach by example that the best life is multifaceted and chocked full of playfulness.
It's wild and fruitful season. And, it's bad friend summer. It's the time of the year when I return phone calls a week later and reserve a bit of time after Sunday breakfast for responding to personal texts and emails amassed during the week. This time of the year the farm gets its payback the morning after we go out on the town to play or get to the lake for an overnight, with cultivation catch up and jungle fever tomatoes on the back end.
I find myself hoping that the people in my life will bear with me, and I willingly accept any eye rolls that may happen on the other side of the phone ("Yep, Sam still hasn't gotten back to me"). In all likelihood, their eyes aren't doing any such thing as I have the good fortune of having prized, empathetic people around me. Suffice to say, I've recognized the sacrifice I make missing out on the regularity of a nine-to-five kind of friendship. Entrepreneurship lends freedom as well as it demands a lot of energy. Ultimately, I know the love I have for my people is effervescent enough for them to feel it all the while I am out of touch.
Just last week a sweet friend who we have come to know over the course of years of shared conversation and stories across our market table, succumbed to that most wicked of maladies: cancer. Seasons and schedules are irrelevant in times of loss and love and I found myself scrubbing off the "tomato tar" which accumulates on my finger tips, arms and shoulders while trellising tomatoes to then tame my hair and don a dress. I sat amongst a sea of people who gathered to celebrate this woman's life. That room of us all left the minutiae of our lives at home and communed together to remember and pay respects to a person who meant something to a lot of people. What a beautiful communion and what a woman, whose stories were recounted, giving me something to aspire to.
As a farmer and young mother, my summers are bound to be bad friend summers on paper. But a lot of life transpires in the meantime. All the while my love for the people in my life deepens. I hope they feel it.
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