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| A goatular rendering of yours truly |
One of the best things to happen to me in the last year since moving away from Lazy Lady Farm has been the unlikely correspondence I've struck up with Laini Fondiller, a woman who has been and remains one of my favorite human beings of all time. Our back and forth has been irregular, with periods of frequency and then weeks or months of radio silence. When I worked for her, I found that she would often speak warmly about past employees or acquaintances and I couldn't quite square that seeming affection with what I had witnessed in her real time interactions, which were at best gruffly loving, with an emphasis on gruff. To wit: it was only after my pal Shifty died that Laini expressed that the goat had been her favorite in the herd.
What I've gleaned is that distance makes a Fondiller's heart grow fonder, or at the very least allows for some as yet unsurveyed intimacy that can only be risked with a healthy time/space buffer between both parties. The entire time I was under Laini's (distant, nearly non-existent) tutelage, I got the impression that she was just barely tolerating my presence on the farm, resigned to the reality that she was stuck with a person who in spite of her enthusiasm was simply hopeless at the vat and in the cave. And when she begged Michael to let me stay past my hard end date last year as I was departing, I knew not to take it personally or ascribe any inherent indispensibility to myself, but merely to assume that Laini was confronting being woefully understaffed and overworked without me, having lined up no replacements in the given time.
Much as I have, for as long as I've been aware of her, been googly eyed and adoring of Ms. Fondiller for all that she has accomplished and all that she represents, I know myself well enough now to know that part of my perhaps outsized love for her has to do with just exactly this arms-lengthness. The colder the shoulder, the more I am desperate to win over whatever eked out or begrudging affection there is to be had. (See: Gary, most of my ex-boyfriends.)
And that may all still very well be true, but now that I am gone, I have perceived more of an openness in our communication, abetted perhaps by the inscrutable scrim that all tech based communication provides. Back in the spring when I went to pick up Q-Tip, I was outright SHOCKED when Laini invited me in to SIT DOWN on her COUCH and GAB for MORE THAN FIVE MINUTES. And even more gobsmacked when I saw her at the Cheesemaker's Festival in July and she legit hugged me like a real actual human being!
I'm too lazy right now to refer back to the emails and see exactly when it started, but our pen pal situation has evolved such that in addition to the intermittent catching up note, Laini and I have begun to exchange books in the mail, like a very anti-social book club of two. (Her review of the latest tome she's been devouring: "a lot of laughing out loud while reading," which is, I gather, Laini speak for LOL. The tech-logisms are creeping in by osmosis and being spit out in predictably odd ways.) The pinnacle of this strange new mail-based relationship was the time she sent me a clipping from the local newspaper announcing the opening of a new coffee bar in the Northeast Kingdom, with a hand written post-it attached forewarning: "Don't be saying we ain't hip-dip up here, sister."
Possibly the most mom-like gesture she has ever made towards me.
Also: noted.
As I've begun really grappling with what lies ahead for me, I've woven some of my doubts and fears and general existential musings into my recent spate of emails to Laini, and she's offered up what little counsel her emotional bandwidth can scrape together, mostly amounting to: "this life's for loners, which is why I like it" and "dive into your work and you won't notice that you are going to die alone, probably soon" and "what's your hurry to bust outta here? You like the goats, isn't that enough?"
Obviously I'm paraphrasing. I can only imagine that an actual conversation on this topic in real life would mostly entail me stream-of conscious barfing at length, punctuated by a series of Laini-produced grunts and groans.
What I have not shared previously on this here blob in more than an ambiguous way is the very real dilemma that I face of carving out more space to write in a serious way, maybe even a book sort of way (I realize I'm FUCKING CURSING MYSELF by even putting this down on virtual paper, but perhaps this will hold me goddamned accountable) while also maintaining some ties to farming and/or fabricating and/or goat hugging AND maybe perhaps also trying to have some human friends to hang out with on more than a bi-monthly basis. (Step one in forging my path as a book-writer is to stop penning paragraph-length sentences ugh.) This quandary is necessarily tangled up in questions of whether to stay in Vermont or fly the coop, to stay at Twig Farm beyond December but in a diminished capacity as I attempt to supplement my goat life with the pursuit of an MFA and/or freelance writing, or to decamp to Chicago to be closer to my family and really hunker down with a daily writing practice and a side job to keep my head above water, sans my quadripedular friends (bew plus hew).
These blatherings have made their way in to the last couple of missives to Laini, which is perhaps what inspired her to offer up yet another option to add to the complicated stew of possibilities: come back to Lazy Lady.
When I read Laini's email suggesting that I take over Rebecca's position when she departs to go full-throttle on her own enterprise at the end of this year, the tears came fast and furious. Because after all of the low-grade, murky overtures, this, finally, was confirmation and validation that Laini didn't think I was a useless dolt and maybe even liked me or loved me the littlest bit. For all of my doubt and uncertainty, all my missteps and fuck ups, it seemed I was part of her tribe.
Ladies and germs, I marinated on this potential avenue for days. I molded and shaped and formed the imagined life I'd live back in the Northeast Kingdom as if out of clay, some perfect amalgam of the quirky, hardscrabble life of Laini/goats/that unforgiving vat of milk and the promise of mastering those beautiful cheeses in earnest and some part-time job in a little book store as I worked towards an MFA and a book, exploiting to the best of my ability all the clear-headedness and focus that living in such isolation might afford. I even tacked on a little love story in the midst of all this, in the interest of really amping up the fantasy elements of this pipe dream.
And then I remembered that despite my unyielding love for Laini and the romantic sentimentality with which I recall my time up in the frigid north, to say nothing of the symmetry that a return to my previous rural life might afford in the context of a narrative arch, I was not happy or satisfied there either. I struggled and doubted myself and felt desolately lonely, and while the extremity of my circumstances forced me to grow as a person, it was painful and soul-crushing. Much as I'd like to imagine some triumphant return, where I waltz in, newly secure in my technique and slice up the curd like some tyrric samurai and make good for once and for all, becoming so indispensable to Laini that she would groom me to take over her farm, anointing me as heir to her throne, I understand the probability of that coming to pass. I also know, having been reduced to making an actual pro/con list (or actually more like a Jungian dream-interpretation diagram), that one of my core requirements for my future happiness is proximity to humans and/or the forging and maintenance of meaningful relationships. I'm not saying it's impossible in the NEK, but it seems like an unnecessarily obstacle-ridden path to take to get what I say I want out of this maddening little life. It is a step backwards, just as going back to the city would, in effect, be a step backwards. The work it would take to create the conditions whereby I would not fall victim to some heart-shatteringly disappointing regression would snuff out all of the creative energy I want to pour into my future endeavors. I need a clean canvas.
And so, maximally lachrymose, I sat down to pen my overly effusive and emotional declination of Laini's offer. I reiterated, as I had in the letter I wrote to her upon my departure from my job last year, how much she means to me, how ineffably she had changed the course of my life, and how difficult it had been for me to come to the conclusion to turn down her offer. I have no doubt it made her exceedingly uncomfortable. In the intervening days since all this went down, I've experienced an array of feels, from the aforementioned sad nostalgia to regret to anger and resentment that Laini had effectively outsourced any true, usable training to someone else and was prepared to reap all the benefits of someone else's hard work and patience with me. (This last one is certainly true but also almost certainly not a calculated or strategic enactment on her part.)
It is both overwhelming and exhilarating to be confronted with such a wide array of possible life paths, all of which are obscured to varying degrees on any given day by the fallen logs and immovable boulders of my own doubts and self-sabotaging tendencies. The anxiety of uncertainty is mitigated by the expansive freedom of possibility, and it's a place I can only dwell for so long before I am forced to gradually fence off all the tangential paths in favor of one. Being an adult is, it seems, closing door after door after door until finally you are shut into the corridor you must shuffle along for some indefinite length of time. Occasionally you feel along the wall for an escape hatch and fall headlong down a rabbit hole, Alice style, until you find your footing inside another long hallway by turns suffocating and reassuring.
They say when a door closes a window opens. I don't know who THEY are, nor do I wager that I need even MORE possible exit routes to add to the cacophony of structures being slammed open and shut, but it sure would be nice to let a little light and air into this wall-to-wall room full of forboding-ass doors.
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