A Week Without Rich

A Week Without Rich
Wintry farm

A lot of people ask how we do what we do: farm for a living with no crew and two little ones to keep up with.  The answer is that we rely HEAVILY on our synergy.  It's a very specific and unique life we live and it's not easy to tag someone in outside of the two of us.

Amidst our yearly January reflecting, we decided it would be good for us to get bits of time away from it all...to let our hair down or to catch up on other parts of our lives.  Those of you who are parents or have dependents of another kind can understand how much it means to have moments of stillness without someone calling on you for this or that.  Not only do we have two actual orangutans living in our house (May and Jack), but we work from home...and so all those to-do's are always within eyesight.  Getting away means more to us than it might mean to someone else who's home is simply their nest.

Well, in the depths of winter and during the down time of early February, Rich boarded a plane to New York where he'd stay for a week with family.  We worked to get the farm prepped to be as low maintenance as possible...sheep in their permanent paddock where they stay when we travel, hoop house tended to and watered in, food stocked to the brim, even laundry done and out of the way.  As if I could ever prepare for a week without Rich on the farm...

Each day we started with breakfast and dream-digesting...Jack (just two) seems to always dream about his Mimi's house or tractors.  We're not sure he knows what dreams are yet...May vacilates between a dreamland set in 'fairy castles' and creepy dreams that I blame on early exposure to Jurassic Park.  We settled into a rhythm with farm chores after breakfast, then play and my work in between meals.  Kids are so incredible...they sense how a tide is changing and like creatures of clay just morph to adopt the new way.  It's like they knew I needed them to keep up with me while Rich was gone.

Well it just had to happen that the winter blizzard for the year was scheduled for the week of his absence.  And so it came...sleet pellets that drove May back into the house after ten minutes outside.  The hair sheep stood with their thick winter coats laden with icicle dread locks from the freezing rain that fell.  They are built to survive this and it astounds me every time I retreat into the warmth. I brought them extra hay on those rougher nights as a peace offering to stay in the fence while I was lone farming. Every day that the wet and frigid weather continued, I was so pleased to see that no lambs were born.  Fingers crossed.

Sleet continued to fall overnight, drilling the northern side of the farmhouse where Jack's bedroom lies.  And so it was broken sleep for the two of us that night as Romeo really put his arm into it, pitching pebbles at our windows.  Sleet turned to powdery snow the next day and we enjoyed sips of cocoa between mad dashes of harvesting for wholesale deliveries and playing in the accumulation.  When all the businesses in town close early and snow is falling so thickly you can't see the far end of the field, it's so lovely to be on the farm....with space to play in and everyone safe and sound off of the roads.  

I didn't foresee what was to come the next day.  We were buried beneath a preliminary few inches of ice and about a foot of snow which had fallen throughout the night.  When you live in the country where the wind can carry miles and miles before hitting a wind break, you get the most epic snow drifts.  So three-foot drift walls criss-crossed the driveway.  But they were no match for a tractor!  Needing to get out to make deliveries with the kids, I went to save the day with the Kubota.  Alas, it sits behind a massive sliding door on the north side of the barn, which just so happened to be sealed shut by an inches thick layer of ice.  And so instead it was a couple of hours of digging through drifts by hand to get our truck down the 500 foot driveway.  I'm convinced my back is stronger than a linebacker's after that workout.

Slipping on the ice on the way back into the house and a near miss of hitting my head on a brick pillar, it became so distinctly clear why we need other people.  I cringed at the hypothetical position May and Jack would be in if I was knocked out on the driveway...out of sight and 500 feet from the nearest neighbor.  There's an outdoorsman name Heimo Korth and you should look him up.  He and his wife are two of a handful of residents living in the expansive Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.  They are largely self-sufficient and live far from civilization.  They allowed a crew to document their lives and in our younger years Rich and I were fascinated and inspired by the story.  But what I've learned firsthand time and again is that there is much hardship that comes when you try to do it all yourself.  We are communal creatures and though I take issue with some of our society's dysfunction and corruption, we need each other.

The next day our neighbors rolled down the drive with two dozen excess eggs from their coop.  And after that my sister and brother-in-law trekked it to the farm to spend time with the little guys while I left the farm to represent Foxhole at a csa fair in town.  Since hearing about these escapades, many friends of the farm have offered to come out to lend a hand the next time we are down a man.  For all of you Heimo Korths out there, life is so much warmer and quite magnificent when you surround yourself with people and open your heart to the civilized world.  To me, encountering the good eggs is worth risking a run in with a bad one.

We obviously survived that winter storm...thankfully kept power and stayed safe. But on the seventh day when Rich came flying back to us, I cooked up a special dinner and we all just melted together, the kids fighting for the prime time spot on dad's lap.  In fact, I too was fighting for their dad's time and love :).  "Don't it always seem to go, you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone"...Joni girl, it's sooooo true.