Johanna took this photo three weeks ago, around the time the last Newsletter came out. Since then, the string of holly-days—or is it holy days, or holidays—have come and gone. And nearly two feet of Snow have melted into the muddy ground. And, starting on the first of the year, I have been sitting down in front of the computer each morning and wondering if there’s a book ready to be written, presumably about the remarkable food-gifting work I was involved with for three years in Vermont called Brush Brook Community Farm. In the first piece of writing that came out, I was surprised to read the following sentence:
This is a story about longing for home in a dislocated time.
If there’s a book in me worth reading it is likely going to come as a surprise to that me doing the writing. Twenty-five pages in, the following string of stories came from somewhere so deep in the memory bank that I have been on the brink of tears the whole time writing them down. Gratitude can have its way with you like that.
Many blessings to you and yours.
Adam
I have been flirting with something for a few pages now, and you may already see its shadow around the corner: This is a story of longing for home in a homeless time. A friend of mine works alongside people who live on the street to imagine the unimaginable—a world where radical neighborliness makes handouts and homelessness obsolete. As I hear Sam describe that work, I notice that he uses the phrase un-housed people. When I ask him why those words, he responds that it changes the focus from the people who don’t have a house to the people who have an extra room in their house but choose to keep the doors locked. This is a story about realizing that I am one of those people, and then learning how to live alongside that unwelcome news. This is a story that entertains the possibility that home is less a place to dwell than a capacity to make house with the unwelcome—or to welcome the unchosen. This is why I am going to tell you a story about ancestry and therefore about Europe.
A decade after I survived that Lightning storm as a teenager by knocking on the door of some kind strangers, I traveled to Europe for the first time. This was just before I got my first cell phone. I prepared for the trip by asking German-speaking friends to help me write a letter to farmers over there whose name and address I had picked out from a list put together by an organization called Willing Workers on Organic Farms. This process must have begun months before the trip. The farmers wrote back to me and, if I remember correctly, we even spoke on the phone prior to my arrival to arrange the pickup details. I didn’t speak much German, but they had enough English that we worked out the timing based on the train schedule. It was to be fairly late in the evening. On the train, I asked the only other people in my car—three teenage boys—if they could alert me when the stop approached, as it would be very inconvenient to miss it at this late hour. They spoke English, and seemed more than willing to do this. They were headed for the same stop, in fact. But as the train came to a stop, and they pressed the button again and again, the doors would not open—a technological malfunction. The train pulled out of the brightly lit station and into the dark night. If I had been alone this would have been terrifying. Instead, these three young strangers, fluent in the local language, arranged a cab for the four of us back to the town we had missed. What’s more, they wouldn’t allow me to pay and they helped me call the farmers from the pay phone at the station. That was how the trip began. It seems terribly and beautifully old-fashioned, does it not? A relic from a bygone time.
I was twenty-seven when I embarked on that three-month trip to Germany, and presumably I went over there to learn traditional techniques in bread-making and farming. I had taken up those crafts back at home for a couple of years prior to the trip, and I was smitten. I learned a lot of useful techniques and skills during those three months, yes, but more importantly the villagers of rural Germany offered me a crash-course in hospitality. An initiation I wasn’t asking for into a fraternal order I didn’t even know existed as a 27-year-old white kid from the suburbs of America. Quite honestly, I am only realizing that that is what happened over as I sit down to write this book, and I can feel my tears close as I type. The longing for home is a deeply powerful and painful thing when it arrives, unbidden, on your doorstep.
I will try to offer you a few of the gems from that trip. The farmers who drove down a second time to the train station to gather me in that fateful evening fed and housed me in a way I had never before experienced. They worked a team of Oxen, and sent me on my way with a small wooden cutting board with their farm logo on it—a team leaning into the yoke. Two and a half decades later, I still eat my breakfast of rye bread, meat and cheese on that little cutting board in the same way I did for the first time there. Frustucks brett in German means breakfast board. I have been looking at that stylized image of their oxen every morning for the past twenty-five years. And I am now training my first pair of young steers. A few days into the trip I was invited to accompany the farmer as he delivered a beef steer to the slaughter house, which ended up being a tiny three-generation, family-run butcher shop. I made a connection with Hans-Peter who could see the hunger I carried, and he invited me back for an apprenticeship later in the winter. That came to pass, and while I was there a reporter from the local paper wrote an article about the American in the Black Forest butcher shop learning the ways of a real food tradition. The title of the article read, “Black Foresters extend Foreign Aid.” It was funny because it was true, which they clearly knew much better than I did at that point.
The trip cost me almost nothing, at least in dollars. Most of the farmers I stayed with for two- to three-week stints insisted on buying my train ticket when they dropped me off at the station. The winter was unusually mild and so I purchased a bicycle for $60 and rode all over the southwest corner of the country. One time, after a half-day ride, I arrived at the farm of a young couple whose third child had been born six-weeks premature at home, that very morning. I was able to cover all of the barn chores—mixing up formula to feed dozens of dairy goat kids—while they kept their infant alive and the older kids fed. They set a place for me at every meal during my stay there, and filled my pack with food when I finally departed on my bike. If there wasn’t so much outrageous beauty trapped in the wreckage of modernity it wouldn’t be so exquisitely sad.
I remember vividly riding my bike one hour from the farm where I was staying to the butcher shop to begin work each morning at four o-clock. One morning it was snowing hard, and the winding tracks of my skinny bike tires left in the snowy dark is an image I only could have seen by looking behind me with my headlamp on. I am not sure if I actually did that or whether I am just imagining it, but I have access to that image in my memory from where I sit. Writing this book doesn’t seem all that different really, and I can feel my tears close once again as I write that down. This is a story of longing for home in a homeless time.
At the butcher shop I spent a lot of time working alongside a young man of maybe twenty who was undergoing his formal apprenticeship there. I had never heard of anything like what he was doing, training for three years under a master—that would be Hans-Peter—so that he could officially call himself a butcher and maybe even start his own shop. Back home I had read a book on baking bread and immediately started calling my operation Adam’s Village Bakery. Hans-Peter’s mother and father, who had opened the shop, still worked there every day. Hans-Peter’s mother and wife ran the retail store in the front room, with windows onto the street. In my memory, the store was a magical place of hanging hams, salamis and smoked bratwursts, of brightly-lit cases filled with pistachio-studded terrines and five different flavors of liverwurst. His father helped him to keep the butchering work—which took place in the middle room—and the slaughtering work—the back room, with a door out to the street—in good order. As I remember, despite the fact that Hans-Peter’s father was a butcher, he had still gone through the formal schooling and then apprenticeship in someone else’s shop, before taking over the reins. Hans-Peter called me an apprentice, but I think that was only because he lacked another word for what I was doing. Perhaps that’s what he was trying to explain to the newspaper reporter, who then summed up the story with the line about foreign aid.
I was there as a twenty-seven-year-old trying to figure out—in two and a half weeks—how the heck to become an adult. The twenty-year-old I worked alongside, often washing dishes or doing other grunt work for hours, had no trouble with the idea that he would have to keep his head down for three years before he would be anointed with that designation. In English we use the word master, but within the formal structure there also meant that you were a teacher, a designation that ongoingly obliged you to pass down what you had been taught to ensure that something that we would call craft, or even culture, would continue. To Hans-Peter there was no question that he would take me in even though I had no plans, or capacity, to stay long enough to learn much of substance. Hans-Peter sent me on my way with a recipe for the liverwurst I had fallen in love with there. The real gift that he gave me has apparently take nearly three decades to mature. Again, I couldn’t even recognize it as a gift until I sat down to write this.
This is a story about longing for liverwurst and dark rye bread in a time of pre-sliced cold cuts and squishy white bread and on-the-go, instant everything.
This is a story about longing for home in an uninitiated time.
This is a story about learning that elderhood has a very-slowly-acquired taste in an adolescent time.
This is a story about learning that home tastes more bitter than sweet in a time with little training in extending welcome to the unwated.
Dear Adam, thank you (yet again!) for stopping me in my tracks, for filling my morning with tears, for reminding me of the deep longing within for home and culture and true apprenticeship. You inspire me and I’m so grateful for your sharing the beginnings of what promises to be a truly meaningful book. Best, Rebecca
This was a wonderful story to read and savour Adam. Thank you for taking the time to put your thoughts into a medium I could consume.