The Path Taken

Girl Gang

It happens every year but somehow each time, it's a marvel: the incremental lengthening of days. Perhaps I'm more attuned to it than ever now that I am up every morning just as night turns to day, and out again as day turns to dusk. I wake at 5 and putter about, pulling on the layers of clothes I'll need for the short walk to the barn, brewing a pot of coffee, filling two 2 gallon buckets with warm water and suiting up to face the subzero temperatures.

The advantage of these bitterly cold days is that they're often crystal clear, which means that for the breakfast shift, as I trudge through the encrusted snow drifts up to my shins, I am treated to the quietly lightening sky behind the eastern mountains, and the somehow transgressive co-mingling of the fingernail-thin moon and the most impetuous stars with the rising sun. By the time I've fed out warm water and grain and hay and doled out some prenatal massages, I don't have to use my headlamp to light the way back to the farm house for my second cup of coffee. It feels like a triumph after the weeks of darkening darkening blackness. 

How did I get here? Like bankruptcy, it happened slowly and then all at once. When I moved to Vermont to learn to make cheese in 2014, I never had a clear picture of a life that would lead me to eventually having my own farm or animals or business. I wasn't even certain I'd make it through a full season, soft and unformed as I was. As with many of my ambitions, this was more of an impression of a life I might want than a concrete sense of what it would look like and the steps it would take to get me there. I knew simply that I wanted to live in a beautiful place and make things and that place was indistinct, and those things ran the gamut from invisible to theoretical to tangible. 

This past fall,  I was back at Lazy Lady finishing up what wound up being nearly a full season. I had hoped to travel to England at the end of the summer to intern at Mary Holbrook's Sleight Farm, but finances and a feeling of obligation to stay with Laini until the milking season was officially over kept me grounded. I was not sure what would come next. I applied for and was accepted into the MFA program for Creative Nonfiction at the Vermont College of Fine Arts, and the semester was due to start right as the season on the farm finished up. As happens every autumn, I was  once again forced to contend with the cull list. I had been given to understand that a few of my pals at Consider Bardwell were on the reviled list, and a mounting anxiety to find a way to save them took hold of me in a way that it hadn't in seasons past when I was forced to accept as fate the decisions that my employers made about who would stay and who would go. Because I was renting an apartment with no land to board animals, I began to tentatively search online for "barns for rent," with visions of rescuing my pals Beetlejuice and Lil Blaster from their fates at the slaughterhouse and only an inkling of what it would mean if I actually found something. 

Almost immediately, a listing popped up that read as if it had sprouted fully formed from a dream. "Farmhouse and creamery for rent!"The rent was more than I could afford, the move-in date months sooner than what I could agree to, and still I emailed them on the off chance that it would work.

It worked.

As it had when I made the decision to move from New York to Vermont, the universe seemed to unfurl a path that had initially appeared riddled with obstacles. The first time I drove down to the farm to visit, I passed the exit to Montpelier that read "Vermont College of Fine Arts" and the symbolism of this was almost too on the nose to bear. As soon as I saw the rocky ledges and the hay fields and the steep forest paths and the funny little farm house where nothing was plumb, and the off kilter little family plot that you can see through the window of the creamery where the first family to live in the house is buried, their tombstones sticking out of the ground like crooked teeth, I knew. I deferred my acceptance to the MFA program and began to come to grips with the idea of being eternally rooted to a place and eternally committed to living things that would rely on me and me alone, like a strange funhouse mirror version of parenthood. No more wanderlust, no more impromptu trips to New York or Montreal or overseas. 

Predictably, the terms of my taking the cull goats from Consider Bardwell were reversed without warning, and so the impetus for my scrambling to find a place for them became irrelevant. But by then the wheels were already in motion. Laini had mentioned at the beginning of last year that my dear Placer would be "retiring," and feeling a sense of symmetry and synchronicity at the idea that the first goat I ever loved would be the first one I owned, I asked Laini if I could buy her at the end of the season now that I had a place to put her. 

"Yes," she said after a few weeks of deliberation. "But can you take Ellen and Sylvia too?" 

Two days after Christmas I moved into the farmhouse and a week later, three pregnant does arrived in a trailer, bewildered, shaken and not the least bit given to the affection I'd grown to expect from them. Suddenly I am chiefly and solely in charge of the health and wellbeing of these dear beloved creatures and as kidding season looms I find myself making silent deals with the universe and seeing portents in the mundane, bargaining with the universe to keep myself and my wards safe from catastrophe: "If I don't spill this coffee, there will be no complications with any of the labors this year." (You could say I still have some PTSD from last year's horrorshow.) Every morning I feed my little posse their special mix of grain and alfalfa and oats and sunflower seeds and raspberry leaves and rosehips, warm water and hay. In the mid-days we go for walks weather permitting, and I tuck them into bed each night with a "sweet dreams, good night, I love you," an invocation to guard against any future tragedy. 

Just this afternoon I learned of Mary Holbrook's passing. She was someone I admired greatly from afar, and viewed a bit as the British analogue to Laini -- a strong-willed, fiercely independent and visionary woman doing things on her terms.  During the very short time that we corresponded about a possible stage, she was kind and warm and funny. I can't help but feel some regret that I will never get to meet her and learn from her, but I also know that my life would look vastly different right now if I'd made the decision to travel overseas and work with her.  I am almost certain I would not be here, on this farm, with these goats. Now, strangely, I feel all the more connected to the legacy Mary has left in her wake, and ever more committed to the path I've chosen for myself. As I embark on this (probably insane) path of my own, I hope that I do her proud.