summer in the muck

Hey guys,

How is everyone? A year older and infinitely wiser, I assume?
It's great to hear from you Lisa--and Henrik, I searched for you on Facebook but couldn't find you. Did you already decide that it isn't worth your time? Good move. I wish I had the guts.

I'm spending my summer on a muck farm called Trillium Haven growing all sorts of organic vegetables. Muck is a fantastic, fine soil that's pitch black when it's wet and miserably powdery when it's dry. Sadly, we're in something of a drought, and it's all together too dry too often. But with irrigation, most of the plants are doing okay, and it's in a low area, so the water table is only about 5 feet down.

I work about 50 hours a week, always outside and always moving. It's been tough, but it's good, because I've never had a real job before and now I know what it's like to seriously work my ass off. Everyone should have a blue-collar job at least once, I think. Organic farming doesn't even compare to working on a line, but it's something close. Our customers may be bourgeois, but the work is just as dirty.

In my spare time (of which there is little), I'm working as an assistant to an English prof who puts out a journal, copy editing articles and sending emails to contributors and reviewers. It's a good combination with farming, because the academic half of my family can respect that job, while the other half respects the farming (my mum's parents grew up working on muck farms not far from where I work now). It's great because I never have to apologize about what I'm doing. It's like everyone can say, "At last, you're actually working." They just have different ideas about what constitutes work.

In fact, I think different kinds of work compliment one another very well. It keeps you balanced and lends perspective to any sort of pain. When I'm sick of being inside at a computer, I think of the mid-day heat and am thankful for the walls and the roof and the shade. When my back is aching and I cut my thumb in a bed of broccoli, I think of the amazing pomposity of some professors and am glad to be scratching around in the earth.

All in all, it's given me lots of time to think about life and food and literature and how everything fits together. I've learned tons, too. I can drive tractors (small ones, at least) and slaughter chickens and identify different types of tomato rot. A farm is an excellent place to be curious, and it isn't half as boring as you'd think to read an English pedagogy journal cover to cover.

Anyhow, yeah, letters are great! Let's write some.

Love!
Emma

Chives inside one of our greenhouses.

Beans are a bitch to pick, but they sell like crazy at the farmers' market.
(I posted more pictures on Facebook too.)