a weekend for summer and family

i spent the latter part of the week in new york seeing girlfriends i hadn't seen in months, years, and many years. eve. jacqueline. ayana. meagan. all smithies. each in their own way the antithesis of the farm and yet we still find so much to laugh about. and while that was wonderful i felt myself holding my breath looking at the bluebird sky and thinking of the garden. of the weeds. of the mountain. of nick. of those wretched beasts we dimly refer to as our brood. 


i bussed back to vermont late friday night and my parents met me in town and we rode the rest of the way to the farm together. they dropped me straight off at the barn so that i could milk and feed and close in. i breathed deeply again. nick arrived home the next day and the four of us humans settled into a weekend of early vermont summer. we herded runaway sheep. twice. dad built a dock on the pond with our neighbor. nick made cheese. rudy ate two wheels of drying cheddar + cloth. we navigated the newness of caring for a fox pup. mom made cake and we celebrated birthdays. dad made omelets and many pots of coffee. we brushed the winter coats of the donkeys and horse.  we ran and walked and swam. we hunted morels, furiously. we learned much about morel etiquette. you can politely ask somebody how their morel hunting is coming along but you don't dare ask specifics about where. it will embarrass both them and you as they don't want to tell you where. 


there is nothing i want more in this life than to have my family living on our farm. i don't care much for the goodbyes and the phone calls and the emails. i want them in the cabin through the woods. far enough away that we can all pretend we live in solitude but close enough that you can yell through the window to call them to dinner.

someday. for today i have what kristin kimball referred to in the dirty life as nostalgia for the farm's future. for the someday when the land we farm is our own. when we are picking from an asparagus patch that i had planted years ago. when we have our own morel spot in our own back field. for when we have family and friends staying and living and existing all around us. dreaming about that someday.