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| My future digs no fucking shit |
I've slowly begun making preparations for my departure, which is just as thrilling as it sounds. In between making calls to cancel my insurance and trying to find a foster home for my best friend Bits [heaves huge profound body-shaking sob] and a buyer for my tried and true auto (225K miles and PURRING!), I have taken it upon myself to learn Italianate, the language of my soon-to-be home (look it up). I have been using a rad website called Duolingo #spon #notreally, which seems designed just for someone ADD AF like me in mind. I'm not trying to brag or anything, but according to DL I am now, after just under 2 weeks of dedication, 28% fluent in Italianate!
Real talk, I had just about forgotten what it was like to be somewhat naturally good at something, and doing my little lessons every day has given me a new lease on life. That and the promise of pizza and wine every goddamned day of my life for the next 9 months #toomuchofagoodthingisallieverwanted
I've been in intermittent touch with the kind ladies of Corzano e Paterno, which is the fattoria and et cetera where I will be installed for the balance of next year. It is a family-run biz that was started by an ambitious-sounding Swiss architect, who bought the dilapidated property in the 70s and slowly began to refurbish it. In the process of doing so, he acquired some sheeps (I know) for clearing land, and somewhat organically this is what kick-started their dairy, which now boasts 650 head of Sardinian sheep. The patriarch of the family has since passed on, but the operation has expanded to include not just the dairy but vineyards and a wine-making facility that produces Chianti and its brethren (in fact, we used to sell their entry-level red wine, Il Corzanello, back at Uva), an olive oil situation, and a rambling assortment of villas that are rented to tourists in the summer months. Every sector of the business is headed up by a different member of the extended family. Sibilla, my point of contact during the hiring process, is the youngest daughter, one year older than me. She seems to be in charge of the hospitality and retail elements of the place. And then there is Antonia, or Toni, who will be, as she calls herself, my "dairy chef."
A half-Italian half-Brit who married into the family (she is married to Aljoscha, the Patriarch's nephew, who came to help his uncle develop the land as a teenager and is now the head agronomist and enologist), Toni has been installed as the Head Cheesemaker for 20 some years. She currently makes something like 14 different types of cheese, including a fresh ricotta that is sold at the farm door just to locals. It's hard to get a sense of what she's like via email, other than to say that she appears implausibly warm and kind and Italian-y -- she's expressed how excited she is to meet me (WHY? IS THIS A TRICK?) and said that she would, "of course," come and pick me up from the train station in Florence upon my arrival. (Which thank god because according to GoogleMaps, the 40 minute car ride from the Florence train station to the farm would take 4 plus hours to walk and over 5 on public transit. You read that right. It takes longer on public transit than it does to walk. This seems to communicate something intrinsic to Italian culture.) To say that the nature of these interactions stand in stark contrast to my initial emails with Laini would be putting it fucking mildly. She describes herself as "something of a perfectionist," which LOLOLOL if she knew where I'm coming from she'd understand that that is NOT a concern for me. And tbh, if you're NOT a perfectionist and you're making cheese, there is something very wrong. It's a prerequisite of the job.
I know very little about what I'll be doing, other than that due to the scale of the operation, I'll be chiefly in the dairy making the cheese, and not so involved with the milking or animal husbandry (sigh). The days will be shorter (8-2 are you joking me?) but I'll be expected to work 6 days a week. I have only dim ideas about the essential differences between sheepsmilk and goatsmilk, chiefly that sheep tend to produce far less milk and have a shorter lactation period, but the milk they produce is much higher in solids and thus the yield is much great than with goat or cowsmilk. Our milk clocks in at about a 12% yield and sheep can get up to 20%. [Sheep people correct me/get at me with more facts and information, pls.] Obviously I will know more when I have begun my training, so TBD.
Meanwhile back at Twig .... Shit got wintery as hell just before Thanksgiving, which functioned as a real time reminder that everything is a little harder when it's cold out. While there is most certainly less to do over all, those things require more thought and effort, as though the universe of the farm and its requisite tasks must maintain some baseline level of difficulty at all times. Making sure to unscrew the silcock (LOL) after watering the various animals and draining the hose (LOL) is essential lest shit gets frozen, which requires even more annoying tinkering (ie defrosting a mile-long hose in a sink full of hot water). The girls are producing less and less milk as they become more and more preggers (their energy is now focused on growing fetuses rather than making milk for the kids that according to nature's clock should be fully weaned by now), and we've now dry-treated four more of the girls so that we're currently milking only 32. This means that I can now dump one full can of milk at a time into the bulk tank instead of splitting it up into two laden pours. Q-tip has rejoined the ranks of the other boys, which means breeding season is officially done. In the orchard, we are spreading mulch and manure to prepare for winter. Things are winding down slowly but surely, as they do this time of year, every year.
As I prepare to leave, I find myself in the awkward position of being drawn to New York, feeling the dull ache that builds up whenever I've gone too long between visits, and simultaneously estranged from it, as though the constant mounting changes that have been accruing in my absence have finally reached a tipping point and I'm now, once again, an outsider. I had hoped also to see my core crew of people before flying out and am discovering that a handful of my most precious pals will be away. The city has moved on without me, there's no denying it.
I'm equal parts overwhelmed by the prospect of thrusting myself into yet another foreign situation far from anyone or anything I know and excited at the promise of seeing the world with completely fresh eyes, inhabiting that particular ethnographic realm only accessible when trying to learn a new language and culture where the most quotidian elements of a life -- riding a bus or ordering coffee -- take on enormous, shimmering novelty. I am afraid to venture even further away from the things I understand and recognize. And yet, the way I see it, there's no other way to proceed. I can't remain still, I can't go sideways or back. This is the path forward. At least this time, there is no expectation that I'll "find myself" or be rewarded with my boldness. I am hoping that managing my expectations will open me up to an authentic experience, and to my old, forgotten friend, joy.
The inevitable process of emotional eulogizing that happens whenever I take leave of someplace, even if it's a place where I was largely anxious and unhappy, has officially begun. There are things that I will miss about Vermont, and about this magical, ridiculous, fraught time that I spent here. This is the place where I passed from being young to being not young, felt my solitude and my strength, my flaws and fears and terrible patterns, became alien to myself without all of the familiar trappings that bolster one's sense of being. It's been a slow slog, and the blink of an eye. I feel sure that when I leave here and think back on it all, it will feel like something I dreamed.
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