I'd guess I'm not alone in this, though most people my age have found some way to grow out of it. Me? Well, in the absence of any sort of romantic entanglements, I have endeavored to apply this same principle to the only love I can speak of: my farming life.
Lazy Lady was my first love. I left after just over a year, and it was one of many ups and downs, only some of which are chronicled in these pixelated archives. I can still feel those brutal pangs of uncertainty and the heaving weight of failure after failure, the small triumphs and the leveling tragedies like the raised skin of a scar, and while I know in my gut that I'm different than I was then -- stronger for having lived through it and pressed forward, and thus more secure in ability to weather the tides -- I still carry with me those seeds of doubt whenever things don't make sense, or don't come easily.
During my nearly three years away from Lazy Lady, I went through all of the cycles one goes through when ending a relationship -- at first I was relieved to be removed from its particular dysfunctions, and the me that I had grown so wary of being in that rudimentary role. I was enamored with The New Thing and all of the ways that it was not The Old Thing. But after a period of settling in, I started to pine. The darkness receded and all of the memories were suddenly imbued with golden light. That's the funny thing about former loves. You remember only the best of them.
I read recently that there cannot be love without grief, and while there are probably some Buddhists out there who would disagree, I find that to be true. Bundled up inside all of the weightless joy of pure love is its shadow side, the harrowing, hollowing absence. Farming has consistently reminded me of the cycles of nature and the inherent dualities that spin around us over the seasons - life and death, abundance and lack, hope and despair.
I returned to Lazy Lady in the spring, just as the grazing and milking season was ramping up. It was a time of awakening and of possibility. It was early May and still there was snow on the highest peaks here. The last doe had her last baby a week after I arrived. Within a month we were filling at least two ten gallon milk cans in the morning. Everything was full to overflowing. The grass grew so fast that every other week I had to trim the fence line to ensure it didn't lose its charge. The vat was so brimful that I could barely work my knife in, slashing my lines straight across with something like confidence, understanding that the key was a sort of blind faith in getting from top to bottom, from one side to the other.
This was the New Me. The me who, after so many years of paralyzing self-doubt finally knew enough to let go and trust in the process. It sounds corny as fuck but I don't say that lightly. It takes so much goddamned work to weed out the things that are important from the ones that are not, and to simply sip and gulp the air in greedily, and with it the knowledge that all of this is a privilege, every second of it.
The season is drawing to a close now, ice and snow again encrusting the ground. I forget, and remember, that particular way that everything takes a little longer and is a little harder in the cold. Milkings are getting lickity split fast as the girls' bags begin to deflate. Culling has begun. The line on the vat grows lower, but the caves are still full and thick with the warmth of deep earth. Soon it will be time for me to go.
A New and Older Me. A new place, a new farm.
At last, one of my own.
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