Kristin Kimball Quotes

Mark came home late one frozen Sunday carrying a bag of small, silver fish. They were smelts, locally known as icefish. He'd brought them at the store in the next town south, across from which a little village had sprung up on the ice of the lake, a collection of shacks with holes drilled in and around them. I'd seen the men going from the shore to the shacks on snowmobiles, six-packs of beer strapped on behind them like a half dozen miniature passengers. "Sit and rest," Mark said. "I'm cooking." He sautéed minced onion in our homemade butter, added a little handful of crushed, dried sage, and when the onion was translucent, he sprinkled n flour to make a roux, which he loosened with beer, in honor of the fishermen. He added cubed carrot, celery root, potato, and some stock, and then the fish, cut into pieces, and when they were all cooked through he poured in a whole morning milking's worth of Delia's yellow cream. Icefish chowder, rich and warm, eaten while sitting in Mark's lap, my feet so close to the woodstove that steam came off my damp socks.

We drove out of New Paltz heading due north. Squeezed into my tiny hatchback, among our boxes and bags, were my dog, Nico, the hens, and the humming hive of bees, its openings covered over with tape. The dog eyed the hive, the chickens eyed the dog, and if the bees weren't nervous they were the only ones.

A farm is a manipulative creature. There is no such thing as finished. Work comes in a stream and has no end. There are only the things that must be done now and things that can be done later. The threat the farm has got on you, the one that keeps you running from can until can't, is this: do it now, or some living thing will wilt or suffer or die. Its blackmail, really.

There's no better cure for snobbiness than a good a** kicking.

Sitting at the table, watching the cards being dealt, I heard a man say that the difference between an amateur and a pro is that the pro doesn't have an emotional reaction to losing anymore. It's just the other side of winning. I guess I'm a farmer now, because I'm used to loss like this, to death of all kinds, and to rot. It's just the other side of life. It is your first big horse and all he meant to you, and it is also his bones and skin breaking down in the compost pile, almost ready to be spread on the fields.

Farming takes root in you and crowds out other endeavors, makes them seem paltry. Your acres become a world. And maybe you realize that it is beyond those acres or in your distant past, back in the realm of TiVo and cubicles, of take-out food and central heat and air, in that country where discomfort has nearly disappeared, that you were deprived. Deprived of the pleasure of desire, of effort and difficulty and meaningful accomplishment.

But raw milk from a Jersey cow is a totally different substance from what I'd thought of as milk. If you do not own a cow or know someone who owns a cow, I must caution you never to try raw milk straight from the teat of a Jersey cow, because it would be cruel to taste it once and not have access to it again. Only a few people in America remeber this type of milk now, elderly people mostly, who grew up with a cow. They come to the farm sometimes, looking for that taste from their childhood.

Food, a French man told me once, is the first wealth. Grow it right, and you feel insanely rich, no matter what you own.

My new life was marking me. It was happening so quickly. There were intermittent spells of resistance, during which I'd pluck and moisturize and exfoliate, and then there was a period of grieving for my old self, who seemed to be disappearing toward the horizon, and then I relaxed into it.

So there I was eating haute cuisine in a mobile home. He cooked for me as seduction, a courtship, so that I'd never again be impressed with a man who simply took me out to dinner. And I fell in love with him over a deer's liver.

Maybe most important, farm food itself is totally different from what most people now think of as food: none of those colorful boxed and bagged products, precut, parboiled, ready to eat, and engineered to appeal to our basest desires. We were selling the opposite: naked, unprocessed food, two steps from the dirt.

I suspected that most marriages were more complicated than couples tended to let on. That summer, it seemed like every week brought news of another pair in our community who were splitting up. They were all around our age, most with little kids, trying to run their own businesses in a small economy. The evidence of those breakups directly contradicted the rosy way relationships were portrayed on Facebook, in public. I began to believe that future generations would study how we represent our long-term partnerships, and call us on our lies, in the same way we look at the way the Victorians depicted sex and know that it simply wasn't like that, not behind closed doors or in the hayloft. We hide marital conflict with the same sense of decorum. We'd do more good if we were honest and set realistic expectations for what it's like in the long run.

Just a tick past fruition sits decay.

I was forced to confront my own prejudice. I had come to the farm with the unarticulated belief that concrete things were for dumb people and abstract things were for smart people. I thought the physical world - the trades - was the place you ended up if you weren't bright or ambitious enough to handle a white-collar job. Did I really think that a person with a genius for fixing engines, or for building, or for husbanding cows, was less brilliant than a person who writes ad copy or interprets the law? Apparently I did, though it amazes me now.

I wasn't asking him to guarantee that we'd be rich, I just wanted him to assure me that we'd be solvent, that we'd be, as I put it, okay. Mark laughed. "What is the worst thing that could happen?" he asked. "We're smart and capable people. We live in the richest country in the world. There is food and shelter and kindness to spare. What in the world is there to be afraid of?

My Dad was sad that he saw us working so hard on something that was destined to fail.

Without me to struggle against, without the constant chaos of our first growing season, without the pressure of our impending wedding, he seemed to have found his own steady rhythm. I worked my way into it, looking for the harmony this time, instead of conflict. We found easy joy in working together, becoming real partners, instead of combatants, for the first time.