Greetings Neighbors and Strangers,
Clouds drift across waning Moon, making silhouettes from the fingered leaflets of Hickory’s hand-like branches. A gentle breeze from the Northwest keeps cloud and leaf in motion. This lively scene passes through the large window above the table where I sit remembering a week spent walking a stretch of land on the cusp of high summer.
These stories emerge from a real place called Sand River Community Farm, where, despite our ardent efforts, we still spend approximately twenty thousand dollars per year to keep things afloat. My coworkers and I have just released our 2025 Summer Budget Request, and we invite you to consider joining hands with others to enable our work to continue. You can make a financial gift of any amount by clicking the button below. Thank you for your consideration.
Pollen forms yellow rings on the Puppy’s snout from drinking out of puddles on the black plastic tarps that will prepare the ground for next year’s Corn patch. Tomato plants who nearly disappeared beneath the foot-deep hay mulch we spread at last Sunday’s Farm Frolic must be growing by an inch or more per day. Yesterday we began dropping support lines from wooden trellises, to guide them skyward. The work we will do for the taste of those sweet fruits appears to be almost limitless. Pampering to the extreme. Who domesticated who, really?
Pregnant cows wade through chest-deep grass, storing long-day sunlight as flesh and fat, bone and hide. Oxen-to-be lie in the watery, waiting dark of their wombs—umbilically tethered solar collectors. If we’re lucky, we’ll see a well-matched pair of bull calves, diving nose and toes first into the light. If we’re lucky, they’ll have keen eyes for the work. Not every animal has the temperament. Not every human does, either.
When I started working with calves, it took me a week to find an old laptop to borrow that could actually play the Ox Training DVD that I’d received as a Christmas present. I had to chuckle as I sorted through a trash heap of abandoned technologies. Oxen lasted my people many thousands of years. DVD’s: maybe a decade or two? After watching the film, I thought that I was supposed to train the calves. It has gone mostly the other way around.
If you suffer a low-grade malaise from loss of ancestral memory, walking alongside a pair of working steers will direct your attention back toward your people like almost nothing else I’ve undertaken. I’ve started three teams over the past three years; each time I have been awed by the capacity for trust these animals carry in their bones. From watching them, I have a hunch that pre-industrial relationships may have been marked by a degree of intimacy we can scarcely imagine from here.
Walking alongside human and nonhuman others whose ongoing affection, trust and care actively afford us life—those are the relational conditions from which we liberate ourselves in a quest for self-reliance. Walking down the grocery store aisle doesn’t remind us that we belong to others. Quite the opposite. We belong to the nowhere place called the market, where the weight of our total dependence disappears behind a fistful of dollars. The post-payment state is marked by freedom from relational obligation. It is interesting that we use the phrase ‘checking out’ as a synonym for paying.
Since I watched that DVD, I have walked away from three young teams. Each time, I wasn’t ready to keep up with them; each time I needed to be humbled by how many fewer things I would have to do in order to see the relationship through to fruition. If there was a formal curriculum for The Peasantry School, this lesson would sit just beneath the surface of everything: remembering how to become a trustworthy neighbor to the plants, animals and human people from whom you draw your life will be an exercise in less, not more. Our dependence might teach us how to become dependable.
Martin Shaw says that modern people have become a mile wide and an inch deep. I’ve wondered if I might get the ratio down to half a mile wide and two inches deep before they put me in the ground.
Last spring, I worked for days building Gratitude Feast benches from lumber the Old Man stickered and stacked sometime before he died in his sleep in the old Farmhouse two decades prior. The folks cutting the hay that summer found his body, clothes for the next morning neatly folded by his bedside and breakfast dishes laid out on the table. Henry Schermerhorn didn’t farm as an adult. He didn’t marry, either. He left the family Farm for forestry school in the forties, moving back here to live out his final years. The quality of aloneness he maintained with this place appears in the fingerprint of his endless tinkerings and tendings. He left a working museum of sorts—a testament to thrift—including a home-built, ceiling-mounted spool onto which he knotted each spent length of baling twine. We will use some of Henry’s salvaged twine to trellis those pampered tomatoes.
Henry died in late summer. I know this because I found the draft horse calendar upon which he scrawled his appointments. Nothing after September 15th. He left old horse harnesses hanging in one of the sheds, and the small white dairy barn still sports the side-by-side stalls that housed his parent’s last team. Perhaps he hung a draft horse calendar on his wall to help him remember the life he’d left behind.
By the time I came around, Henry had been in the ground for nearly two decades. The lumber piles he carefully stacked hid beneath a tangle of vines so thick it took me days to cut them back. The Gratitude Feast benches I imagined would be seven and a half feet long—sized to match the plastic folding tables that I picked up from Lowe’s. How many decades will the technological form we call ‘big box stores’ last us? How many years will these wretchedly convenient plastic tables with cheap metal innards last before they end up in the landfill?
Crafting wooden tables for a hundred-twenty Feast guests will require deciding to do many fewer other things. By the time we’re ready to begin that project, the oxen we’ve finally set aside time to train may be strong enough to drag saw logs from the grove of red pines Henry planted into the lower pastures before he died. A forester by training, Henry loved planting trees. The slow arc of the past curls back upon this Farm like a breaking wave.
We pressed pause on hosting monthly Gratitude Feasts last September not because they weren’t outrageously joyful affairs. Think shared songs and abundant platters of food. Think little kids on the shoulders of sweat-soaked dancers, ducking to pass through the joined-hands tunnel at the head of the line. Rather, the mile and a half from town to the Farm meant that mostly car-owning, middle-class folks found their way here, and it finally became clear that a deeper form of welcome was in order. Just then, another local organization called to ask us to take the reins at the Community Garden they’d started downtown. I couldn’t have said “yes” any faster.
Last Sunday, we squeezed two of those Feast benches into a car just in case the ten folding chairs we’d stashed down at the Garden proved insufficient. While JaeCub warmed soup and slid skillets of cornbread batter into the oven at the Farm, LeAnne, Allison, Sam, Zary and I headed down to the Garden where we pitched a borrowed pop-up tent and two of those plastic tables, lining them with the folding chairs and two wooden benches. We stretched out brightly colored table cloths with paper bowls, silverware and paper napkins.
The Community Garden amounts to six raised beds at the back of a parking lot along main street—the site of an abandoned grocery store. Tearing down the store appears to have left no topsoil behind. In an effort to keep the tent from blowing over, we struggled to pound stakes into the impenetrable gravel.
To our joyful surprise, some of our neighbors read the invitations we taped the evening before to motel and apartment doors in town. “Lunch at the Keeseville Community Garden, every Sunday at 1pm. Offered as a gift—Doesn’t cost money!” Both benches filled with bodies, and so we joined hands to give thanks for our good fortune. We hadn’t decided until the last minute to open with the Gratitude Feast blessing. “Would it scare people off?” we wondered. Better to scare them off before they come out to the Farm.
For the dark soil that cradles the seed.
For the rains that bring forth the green leaves.
For the stars that give form to the flowers
For the warm sun that ripens the fruit.
For the animals whose lives allow ours.
For the hunger that brings us together.
For the kind folks gathered ‘round the table.
For the fabric we weave with these words.
For all this goodness and mercy.
We give thanks.
As far as abandoned cultural technologies go, sharing the food family style is the one I am most committed to reviving. Here’s how it goes. We distributed some eighty paper invitations the evening before, and the Friday Sand River newsletter that Allison writes goes out to over 1000 people. The Farm’s tagline reads: “This food is offered as a gift to anyone who is hungry for any reason”. That could end up being a lot of people on the day the grocery stores stop having food on the shelves.
JaeCub and I decided to bring two gallons of soup and two 10” skillets of cornbread, plus the first garden salad of the season. Holding hands and working through the blessing appears to have primed the pump. Something began to happen there in that gravel lot.
Sitting on that wooden bench, I could actually feel myself falling in love with the human-ness of the human strangers sitting to my right and left. One wore oxygen to steady her breathing. Another had been bouncing from one housing voucher to the next. Another is knitting a sweater for the man who works across the street from her. She has received the yarn as a gift and will pass on the sweater likewise. Another’s kids and grandkids recently moved far away. Another is learning how to be a ten-year old with a brand-new cell phone in her pocket. Another travels to Mongolia to study the religious traditions there. She gave a talk on the topic in town a few days before. Another said he doesn’t leave his apartment often, but decided to take the risk and join us for lunch. Another didn’t say much except “Praise the Lord”, under his breath, on repeat.
With the total amount of food between us, we got to see how our decision to put a little bit less in our bowls enabled those seated to our right and left to eat. With no financial barrier to access, we got to practice a different kind of affording. The older meaning of the word afford wasn’t self-reflexive; it meant to provide or extend something to another. Affording was the active verb form of loving.
A few hundred years ago, if you turned to the person next to you and said, in English, “I can’t afford x, y or z” they may have been a bit confused by the formulation, asking you for clarification: “To whom?” Sitting on that wooden bench built from the lumber Henry stacked and left behind, sharing lunch family style with neighbors I was meeting for the first time, I think I finally knew how to begin answering that question.
“To whom will I afford x, y or z?” might be translated into modern English as, “With whom will I share this pent-up love that finds no home within the social norms of the marketplace?” or, simply, “Who is my neighbor?”
If you are willing to chip in a few dollars to enable us to continue doing this work, you can view the Farm Budget Request by clicking the button below.
Many thanks to you and yours,
Adam
If the Peasantry School really is a school, you really are its teacher. And like all great teachers you teach the same basic lessons time and time again - but without ever repeating yourself… what a gift! Thank you, Adam.
I live in the UK and may never get to visit Sand River (though I'd love to) but was moved to have the good fortune from here to be able to send some support - I get so much joy and meaning and tears and connection from reading about this wonderful way of living with every post.