When we were starting out, moving from careers in academia to this farming life, I leaned on his words to make it okay for the part of me that had spent long in higher ed to spend these years in agriculture. Berry proved that a life in agriculture is not merely planting, feeding, and mowing; it is the business of life and living and the gifts of thoughtfulness and meditation.

This passage from Prayers and Sayings of the Mad Farmer seems right today:

Nalena, the lovely human would helps us on the farm, asked me this morning about belief, oddly, given the passing of Wendell. This passage, for me, summarizes it pretty nicely.

It’s hard, on the farm, to ignore the cycle of life that is right there, every single day, in simple ways.

I take scraps from our meals to the chicken and return to the house with a basket of eggs.

I pull spent flowers from the beds, and they become a treat for the pigs.

We compost the litter from the chicken coops, and the flowers bloom bigger.

Is what is passed around God? Bits of heaven? Stardust? Who knows. Not me. I think, though, what animates us connects us. I feel linked - physically, emotionally - to these other living things, from the grasses to the trees to our giant boar Mick. (He has deep thoughts too, mostly about connecting with the ladies in his life but that seem like a pretty solid if somewhat noisy connection.)

So thank, Mr. Berry. You have been a gift to me that I hope to pass on.

Also - if you have not read The Unsettling of America, pick it up. Or listen to it - Nick Offerman reads it and is also an admirer. For essays, The World-ending Fire is also grand. Jump on board.

The NYT reported on the recent interest in what it referred to as intentional hobbies or grandma hobbies (article here). Examples of them it lists are basketry, bookbinding, papermaking, beekeeping and sock knitting.

Let’s add another to that list and then discuss the whole lot - soap making.

Pondering the origin of all these “hobbies” - formerly, almost all, necessities - I’m reminded of my grandmother. Born in 1917 and passed away a couple of years ago, she was a mender and a fixer but also a quilter and a canner and a gardener. She had the corner on a whole raft of grandma hobbies.

I’m working on my own set of grandma hobbies. With the farm, some of these hobbies are necessities - chicken keeping, gardening, canning. Some of the others are the basics of my other life in the theatre - pattern-making, sewing, millinery, etc.

Sidenote here. Here’s the shitty bit. The culture at large, even our friends at the NYT, loves to trivialize these activities. Hobbies. Women’s work. Domestic arts. Lesser.

What unites them is to take something leftover or discarded and put it to good use. Usefulness. Necessity. Seems valuable.

And here we are at soap.

We raise fatty pigs. They offer us delicious pork - chops, roasts, sausages - but also fat. Two kinds - leaf fat and back fat. Most of the back fat gets used in our sausages, but the leaf fat is available and plentiful.

Our first solution for wealth of fatty riches was to make lard. Leaf fat rendered (cooked to clear it of water and any meat) make beautiful lard, great for use a cooking oil, frying, seasoning cast iron, conditioning cutting boards, etc. But not all of humanity is on the lard train, and it often takes some convincing to make someone believe lard is not evil.

So we make soap from it. From what I have read, the very first soap was created accidentally by dripping fat from a spit into the ashes below, adding the necessary alkaline to the fat to saponify it, basically making soap.

Things have streamlined a bit since then. Now, we mix the fat with lye, add a fragrance and let it rest for a while. Voila - soap. No meat spit required.

It’s really nice soap too (sound of horn self-tooting) and we use it all over the house. It’s at all the sinks, in the shower, even in the laundry soap. It leaves your skin clean and smelling good without stripping it dry.

Back to grandma. I spoke to my sister today, who was always my grandmother’s favorite, and she runs a company that deal mostly with importing small consumer goods, items that you see at Advanced Auto Parts, Wal-Mart, and O’Reilly Auto Parts.

She is concerned about the holidays. Summer is when retail folks think about Christmas a lot. She is afraid that by December, if things continue (high gas prices, high grocery prices, etc), any extra income folks have will be spent at the pump and meat counter.

Anybody see a connection here? When times get tough, we start looking at ways to make the most of the scraps, the bits, the discarded.

Hey grandma. Glad you’re back.

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But there's nothing I can do about it. Where's complaining going to get us anyway.

Today I spent at least an hour aimlessly wandering around the farm in a way that I would not have done if it had been a nicer, more productive day. I hosed off the hot, hot chickens and took a walk with the dogs once it had dropped below 100° and they would agree to it. They swam way out into the pond. I laid down in the tractor shed and let the cat lick my fingers. I picked enough grapes to eat but not to save. I was idle.

I was so still that the geese sauntered by, never stopping their conversation.

Universe. I decided to kick the can down the road. The work that needed to be done today is now for tomorrow. And I'll be fortified with sleep for that list. See you then.

Any month where you remember any individual day that is less than 90 degrees - there were two - is a rough one. On a person, on the animals, on the pastures, on your undergarments.

There’s no relief in sight. I used to say that I preferred the hot, but that was pre-farming and now untrue. I even grew up in Arkansas without air conditioning, but this has reached a new level.

This is the time of year when I start to daydream about other locations. So let’s consider those locations, where things aren’t this hot.

Pete, the head of the Hillcrest Commons and father to the very sweet and fluffy Callie, is headed to Patagonia. That seems like a great idea. There are penguins - must be cooler. And it’s winter there currently. Let’s call that option A.

I have a friend in Hudson Valley in upstate New York. Can’t be this hot there. Also, her spot is in the running for our future commune, so maybe I can take that trip off my future taxes. Option B.

Now, let’s think bigger - like Alaska bigger. No penguins but fluffy bears. Colder for sure. Today’s high in Anchorage? 60 degrees. Salmon is delicious, right?

Summer will end - eventually. Time goes by fast these days, even if these very hot afternoons last a long time. Fall and spring are beautiful, and winter is fine, short with only a few really cold days, like Milwaukee cold days.

It’s something to think about, though. I’m starting to dread next summer already. That’s probably not a good sign. I can’t imagine it’s going to cool off.

My last question for you this week is about clothes. I’m of the opinion that one can be more comfortable in the terrible heat in more clothes rather than fewer. Outfits of choice? Chambray shirts, loose cotton pants. Socks and short boots. No open toes, no shorts. That would be way too much exposed skin, vulnerable to sun and mud and pigs. Nothing for the sweat to absorb into.

Good luck out there this week, in this hot, hot place we’ve created - either in denim or your favorite tube top. And dream of penguins…

Who knows why. Just landed in a right time and place? Or maybe spiders have an untapped fan base on social media.

My smarty pants computer friend George looked into and determined that there is an interesting and consistent response to spiders in the online world, sort of love or hate…or maybe love or terror. But an intense response for sure.

Made me think about what else elicits a similar response. We’ve had folks reach out with passionate feelings about snake posts in the same way. Appreciation or disgust.

We’re not so different from the other animals, right?

Fear is an incredible motivator but also an amazing attention getter.

I think she’s only much of a danger if you are a grasshopper. And then I think she’ll murder you.

As kids, we were in the camp of fascination rather than fear. Excited to find a snake in the yard and run in the house to show it off.

Some of the lesser charming comments on the spider video were about unliving the spider forcibly. We’d never even consider it. Spiders and snakes have work to do in the world and who am I to get in their way, other than a short trip to impress my dad with our snake identification skill?

Best case scenario, she’ll continue to harvest this year’s bug bounty until the frost comes. Long may she reign.

Overall, good. Visually pretty great. A little too much fighting, not enough gods popping in…nice costumes, especially Penelope’s. The pleating, oh, the pleating.

Let’s talk about the pigs, though.

If you know the poem, then you know of Circe and her witchy ways, turning men into pigs. If not, spoiler alert, she turns men into pigs.

We also know something about pigs here. More than I ever dreamed. I’m of the opinion that Homer didn’t, given that I know a few people who I’d actually prefer as pigs. So not that terrible of a fate maybe.

It’s the specific pigs in the movie that I found problematic.

Anyone see a problem here? What is that pig? In no world is that an ancient pig. That’s a standard issue, factory farmed pig. They were all pink, tails clipped, and mostly gilts (girl pigs). Unintentionally (I’m guessing) anachronistic. Given all the detail in the film, this seems totally off.

Actual ancient pigs? Mostly black, hairy, More like Razorbacks or wild boars. Like this.

or this.

Certainly more like the pigs at our farm, except ours are chunkier.

Why would you not go the extra mile and get the right pigs? Or closer to the right pigs. At least pigs with tails. They can be found. And trained similarly. Seems like a real miss.

Is it possible that we now think that all the pigs of the world look like those pale, indoor pigs? Maybe. Certainly most do.

The world is full of riches though. Pigs come in all shapes and sizes and colors. Don’t limit yourself to those pale beasts in the movie. Look these up this week - Mulefoot, Kune Kune, Mangalitza. Pigs are amazing. And I bet some of them look like a sailor or two who’s lost his way.

Totally avoidable. I had just come outside into the Arkansas summer, close to 100 degrees, traveling from the -6 degree freezer, through the 36 degree walk-in cooler, down the 70 degree hallway and then out into the hot. Do you wear glasses? I do. Real cold to real hot results in quick condensation. I stepped out of the door and had the thought that when I got to the bottom of the steps, I should take my glasses off. Well…gravity helped me out and took them off for me. The bottom step evaded me in my blinded state.

It hurt. Still hurts. Nothing broken, methinks. My friend Lara would have been impressed with the bruises.

What also hurt was the memory of that thought at the top of the stairs. Damn it. I was so close to stopping and avoiding this trouble.

It’s a shame of sorts to lose the invulnerability of youth, bounding down stairs without a thought that you’d fall. Nowadays, after a slip a few years ago, when in socks and flying down stairs, I tell myself “Slow down, silly, and grab that handrail.” I just have to go slower. Slower. Sigh.

I’ve finished a book by Nick Hornby, Ten Years in the Tub: A Decade Soaking in Great Books, a collection of his columns from the magazine The Believer. The point of the column is what Nick’s been reading and his thoughts on it. Simple. It was, objectively, great. And clever and witty and arranged in very appealing bite-sized chunks. I’m using it as a reading list currently (after I finish up All the King’s Men that I started this week - wish me luck.)

One of the books (an essay or short story really) that he references is from Jess Walter called Don’t Eat Cat. “Maybe it’s always the end of the world. Maybe you’re alive for a while and then you realize you’re going to die, and that’s such an insane thing to comprehend, you look around for answers and the only answer is that the world must die with you.”

We’re now in the realization phase, here in my life. And I’m going to have to take it all little more carefully. Grab the handrail and take off the glasses.

And the end of that quote? There’s the apocalypse. That’s the commune, right? Handrails there too.

So when I heard about a new NPR podcast Are We Doomed?, I was, of course, thrilled.

Here’s why: “The thing that is helpful, and the thing that people have done historically, is rebuild their communities.” - from the Sunday Up First interview about the podcast last week.

After pondering so many ways for civilization to end (nuclear war, climate change, pandemics, AI, super volcanoes, aliens, gray goo, etc.), the host of the show, Ben, has concluded that if the end comes, when the end comes, most likely we’ll see how important each other are again.

In addition to a small landholding in the hinterlands of Arkansas, I bring some helpful skills to the table - growing stuff, sewing, trailer backing up, basic electrical, guacamole making. Pretty sure we’re going to need more than that to make this thing work, what with the locusts and super volcanoes and all.

I’ve also watched both seasons of The Pitt so I’m mostly a doctor too.

What are you working on, to bring to our end of the world communal living?

Here are my suggestions for helpful skills, moving forward. Begin your training now! And what have I left out?

Dental: just basic stuff - tooth pulling, some sort of pain alleviation (isn’t there a bark or something that works? Let’s find that stuff.)

Plumbing: This feels like an often missed category when people ponder such things. What happens with the water? And the poop? Needs!

Mechanical: Who knows if the internal combustion engine goes by the wayside? We’re still gonna wanna move around - let’s consider some solar panel stuff too.

Also maybe a therapist or two? I feel like some counseling couldn’t hurt here either.

Welcome to the first official meeting of the commune! You can now say you got in on the ground floor. I’m pondering a name…

A gentle reminder that we’ve been considering our own ends (and beginnings) for some time - two poems (and two of my favorites) that address such matters: The Second Coming by Yeats and Ozymandias by Shelley. I do hope the end of days can be so poetic.

All Things Considered was talking to the author about process and inspiration and other stuff. The last part of the interview was the author reading the epilogue. Which was lovely.

The gist of it was that death comes and gives you not a second chance or a reprieve but 20 great minutes that you’d like to relive.

I was pondering 20 minutes that I’d like to appreciate again or maybe really for the first time.

1992. November Rain is playing on the radio all the time in the back of the snow cone stand that me and my sister Kendy work at most Summer nights. It’s technically Arctic Snow - the owners were very specific. The stand is a tiny log cabin across from Walmart with a drive-thru and a walk-up window. We At the start of the shift, we skewer cheap hotdogs on a merry-go-round of stainless steel spikes under a heat lamp. We don’t sell many and we have them for dinner at close most nights. With ketchup for me and mustard for Kendy. What we mastered was the perfect snow cone. We tried all the flavors and determined the best flavor is kiwi and pink lemonade. Perfection. It took a couple of weeks but we got there.

I’ll take any 20 of those minutes. The calories don’t matter. I’m thrilled to have a beat up car. We’re going to live forever.

I haven’t been able to replicate that snow cone since.

Ponder it for yourself. Twenty minutes is an interesting length of time. It’s not your wedding or graduation. Probably not a first kiss.

Maybe it’s golden hour and there’s a breeze and you’re in a green, green pasture. You’re with someone that you don’t have to talk much to or that you only want to talk to. Maybe there’s a boat. That sound nice. Maybe go get a snow cone together.

The better version of me reads books in those quiet moments. But apparently, I need some form of peer pressure to push me there—otherwise, I’m investing the precious, irreplaceable moments of my life into the rise and fall of the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders.

When I’m home on the farm, staying on track is easy. I’m not alone, and there are always 22 things that need to be done right now. Perfect.

But I still crave company. I like the background hum of a podcast or a news story while I go about those 22 chores. It’s a facsimile of a human that keeps me from backsliding into purposelessness.I don’t listen to true crime much so I run out of podcasts regularly so the library’s audiobook app, Libby, is my bestie. Busy hands, busy mind.

Porcine Literary Club

Today, I finished All Fours, last year’s “It Book” by Miranda July. My phone was tucked into the breast pocket of my sweaty denim work shirt, playing the audiobook while I fed the pigs from the ATV.

Aaron has asked me repeatedly why I don’t just wear headphones. I can’t be present enough with them on. What if a goose sneaks up on me?

A quick sidebar: I would have sworn I’d already read this book because I listened to an interview with the author last fall. But my friend Ren (cool kid, big reader, embroiderer of mushrooms and moss) brought it up during a “what are you reading?” chat. I realized from her tone that I hadn’t read it at all. I had read some other trendy book, but not this one.

I won’t belabor you with the plot, but the protagonist (a mother, wife, and artist approaching menopause) essentially blows her life up. It’s complicated, good, and sexy in a non-standard way. It’s one of those books that blurs reality. By the end, you’re left with a strange fuzziness: Are her issues mine? Is my husband angry at me? Did I forget to pick up her child from school? A success.

No Judgement

In the book, the protagonist has a friend named Jordi, a sculptor with whom she is completely, totally honest. Jordi is her ultimate sounding board—the person she seeks out to ask, “Is this crazy, or what?” Interestingly, the protagonist rarely asks about Jordi’s troubles, but Jordi is always on call for the unburdening.

After finishing the book, I was mowing the ragweed in the back pasture, missing my mom for some reason (though I suppose when your mom dies, you always miss them a little). As I mowed, I started thinking about how so many of us—myself included—use AI.

It’s the ultimate Jordi. It’s a sounding board where there is no shame and no such thing as an embarrassing question. You can describe a bizarre situation and see how it processes it. You can ask it to edit your writing, and it offers zero judgment on your spelling errors.

But it makes me wonder: Is this where we are now?

Are we going to lose our ability to connect to each other, the same way GPS ruined our ability to read maps? Or is this digital sounding board a necessary balm for the rawness caused by internet trolling, Ukrainian war, and a broken healthcare system? Is it just a way to never feel truly alone—something always there to validate our feelings?

In the novel, Jordi does tell the protagonist when her ideas are terrible. AI rarely does that. Most of my genuinely good ideas come from actual communication with real, breathing people. I need the push to be a real person myself.

But I am really happy with the spell-checking. So there’s that.

I’ve been rankled by this since I heard it a couple of weeks ago.

Meddlesome, huh? What an impressively condescending word.

Also, sounds like a Scooby-do villain. “And I would have gotten away with it too, if it weren't for you meddling kids!”

So both condescending and infantilizing.

The innate assumption here is that the women as described are not seen to be in any position of power. You can’t meddle in your own work, can’t be quarrelsome if you’re the boss. These women are just annoying the real bosses, it seems.

Think about it: you can’t “meddle” in something if you actually own the project. You can’t be labeled “quarrelsome” if your authority is respected. “Meddling” is the word people use when they are deeply annoyed that a woman just held them accountable. It’s the sign of someone who got called out for bad behavior, asked to comply with a basic safety regulation, or questioned on their logic, and simply didn’t want to be questioned. They just wanted a chorus of “Yes, sir.”

Why We All Need Some Meddling

To learn, understand, we all - men, women, people, pigs - poke around. Curiosity, meddling. Potato, potato. Problems are not solved without poking, only glossed over or bandaged. If you don’t “meddle” on a farm, we don’t improve on systems. Water is wasted. Pigs are not happy. Chickens stop laying for whatever reason….

And maybe we can meddle together? Maybe we can meddle as equals? Because all of our meddling is better if we cross-reference and compare notes. I’m interested in your meddling.

So to all the “meddlesome” women out there farming, designing, creating, teaching - keeping the world running - cheers. I remember how all those Scooby-doos ended.

At American Players Theatre in WI, we are currently in technical rehearsals for a production of Uncle Vanya, which means the days have stretched to the very edges. You’re up early to communicate with the costume shop workers, who work normal daytime hours, and you stay late into the night to watch rehearsals under the lights until after midnight. It’s a series of 12-to-16-hour days, lots of cups of tea, and a shared eye on the finish line: opening night.

By day three of tech, the initial adrenaline starts to fade.

I was chatting with Paul, the assistant designer on the production, when he mentioned how tired he was from the process. From there, we talked about that in terms of generational differences, a topic that always trips me up because I can never actually remember which demographic box I belong to.

(For the record, I looked it up: I’m Gen X. Paul, meanwhile, informed me that I am old enough to be his mother, putting him squarely in Gen Z.)

Paul asked me, “How are you still acting like the Energizer Bunny?”

The truth is, my stamina is intentional. And a fair amount of it comes from my other life on the farm, which involves lots of physical work and a considerable amount of mental toughness. But it is not rooted in the modern, Gen Z way of moving through the world.

From what I understand of the Gen Z mindset, there is a big focus on emotional honesty, boundary-setting, and the art of “manifesting”—the practice of envisioning your goals, putting your mental energy into bringing them about through visualization, and honoring how your body feels in the moment. It’s a philosophy that says, if I acknowledge my reality, I can change it.

My Gen X survival strategy is the exact opposite. It’s rooted in pure, unadulterated cognitive denial.

I looked at Paul and told him my golden rule: never say you’re tired.

To me, the quickest way to feel exhausted is to admit to the universe that you are. The moment the words “I’m so tired” cross my lips, the battle is lost. My strategy is the old-school, head-down, grind-it-out approach. If I don’t give the fatigue a name, it doesn’t exist. I simply trick my brain into believing I have the adrenaline of a marathon runner until the curtain goes up.

It’s interesting to have this conversation while working on Uncle Vanya. If you aren’t familiar with this Chekhov play, it’s a study in existential exhaustion. The characters spend three hours lamenting their wasted years and how profoundly tired they are of their lives.

At one point, Vanya looks around and sighs, “I’m old, I’m tired...”

Paul has been a great assistant, and I respect his generation’s ability to vocalize their boundaries and honor their feelings. It’s probably a healthier way to live. But in the trenches of tech week, just like on any average farm day, if we start manifesting our exhaustion like Chekhov characters, we’ll never make it to opening night or to market day.

I’m sticking to my Gen X modus operandi. I’m not tired. I’m fine. Don’t give in. And if you need me, I’ll be the one mainlining black tea in the costume shop or at the farmers market, avoiding the Chekhovian traps.

Everyone in my life is aware of everyone else, though. I had a production meeting for Uncle Vanya out in the pig pastures, guest starring a pack of teenage large black cross pigs. When I’m away for a job, I get daily check-ins with Nalena and Aaron about orders, chicken behavior and and feed deliveries in between shoe fittings with actors and picking out buttons. No secret lives here.

Hopefully, one makes the other better. I certainly have more stamina for climbing up the hill to the theatre because of farming, and I can tailor the farmers market tablecloths to fit perfectly because of theatre.

I mention it because I had the good luck and pleasure to attend the Tony Awards on Sunday with a small group of my friends from American Player’s Theatre. APT won the award for best regional theatre. So well-deserved. It’s a wonderful place that you should visit if you are in WI. Or make a special trip.

So I went from working at APT all week to NYC for the awards to Porch Swing Farms in Bigelow, AR in the span of 36 hours. My double life compressed into a little over a day.

Some of you were there with me, some of you may have been there before, some of you may have watched it on TV.

Here’s what I learned from my experience that applies to both lives:

• Shoes are always important, critical really. Don’t wear uncomfortable shoes. Just don’t. Nothing makes me angry/sad/annoyed/confused faster than my feet hurting.

• There will never be enough time. I didn’t have enough time to talk to my friends at all. I made several follow-up calls when I got home to have longer, better conversations. I’ll never have time to do all the things that exist on the farm. I’m going to work on being at peace with that.

• Hard work - even in this strange, topsy-turvy world - does still matter to some folks, especially the ones that matter most to me. Among them are theatre people and farmers. Happy to be in the company of both.

The real difference? The wardrobe.

The pigs never appreciate the sequins anyway. XO.

I’m in Wisconsin this week, doing second fittings for the American Players Theatre’s production of Uncle Vanya. All is going great; after a small tariff payment, we are scheduled to receive some garments that we ordered from Russia at any moment. We are nothing if not authentic. And also law-abiding.

Also at this theatre, I met a new friend an assistant costume designer named Lily who, we discovered, had a very similar upbringing to mine. You just don’t meet a lot of kids raised on goat dairy farms.

My first question was, “What are your feelings about goat cheese?” (Which is, additionally, a great first date icebreaker.) She’s pro, unlike my sisters and myself. But we all agree on how gross hot milk is, as well as the valuable lessons learned by keeping a bunch of other creatures safe and happy. We also agreed on how darling a Nubian goat is—objectively the cutest baby animal. All told, not a bad childhood at all. Just keep the milk super cold, please.

The Feral Farm Skills Toolkit

What else is garnered from this kind of childhood? A confidence in your own abilities, especially among lesser-known skill sets.

• Impressive hand strength (all that hand-milking)

• Machinery facility with delivery vans, trailers, tractors, and manual transmissions. You never know what you’ll be driving next.

• Ironclad immune systems.

• Creative problem-solving. Because there is always a problem.

Another adventurous childhood experience I was reminded of this week was mushroom hunting. We’d venture out into the woods and return with ice cream buckets full of all manner of fungi and then sit with our dad to identify the edible ones from the... less edible ones. In hindsight, it was mushroom roulette. But no one ever got sick or perished, so apparently Dad was pretty skilled at this, too.

Last week, I came upon a small batch of orange mushrooms on the farm. I guessed they might be chanterelles, but I checked with our resident mushroom guru, Nalena, and the internet for confirmation. We were all correct! Aaron cooked them up for a nice lunch before I abandoned him for Wisconsin this week. They were delicious and, again, no one perished. A little risk and reward exercise.

A little confidence breeds a little more, and so on and so forth. Whether it’s trusting your childhood training to not poison your husband with wild fungi, or navigating international garment shipping for 19th-century Russian drama, farm life teaches you to just figure it out. A gift that keeps on giving.

Best wishes to you all to figure out your week and take a few chances.

There it is. There’s this life in a nutshell.

A regular customer paraphrased this to me at the market last Saturday. We were talking about eggs and golf and the week, and I mentioned to him that I had been invited to go to the Tony Awards. (The theater I work at in the summer, American Players Theatre, won the Regional Theatre Tony! I am so incredibly pleased for every single person at APT).

At the time, I was thinking the Tonys were the sublime and the farm stuff was the ridiculous. But the closer I get to packing a bag, the more I’m leaning the other way.

It’s a fine line

I’m pretty sure, per Thomas Paine, that these are not hard and fast categories. Golf, bratwurst, love—all can be sublime or ridiculous, and they can escalate or devolve into the other with breathtaking speed. Miss your shot, overcook your sausage, say the wrong name at the wrong time. Sublime, ridiculous, sublime.

The Tony is, of course, fantastic. It’s a well-deserved award for a theater that has been doing impressive work, treating people well, and offering up both education and escapism for over 40 years.

But the idea of me going is also entirely ridiculous. The dresses. The shoes. The plane tickets. The sheer amount of lint-rolling required to remove the ambient dog/cat/chicken dander from whatever I decide to wear. All for a moment or two.

And the farming? It is sublime regularly.

• Seeing chicks pop out from under a broody hen.

• Piglets yawning.

• Spotting a brand-new egg color in the nest box.

But then, sometimes, ridiculous is the absolute order of the day - mostly mud-based and often involving geese. And also - pigs.

Well….

Not our barn. This is what we call a show pony barn - one that might have functioned previously for agriculture but is now for receptions and farm themed gender reveal parties.

Ours - we actually have three small ones, by barn standards - are working girls. Dirt under their fingernails, get the job done kind of barns. Animals sleep in them. Chicks stay safe in them. There are a lot of dangerous tools.

They’re not messy, exactly. It just takes a lot of pieces to farm. Here’s a peek.

Needless to say, our barn is not in competition for the Lifetime movie. No worries there.

I did see it as a quick little reminder about what we think a farm looks like versus what an actual farm looks like. Useful warts (and messy corners) and all.

Also, life is messy and maybe we’d all be better off if Lifetime movies were a little bit messier too.

Parameters. Two sets in those retrofits - the established needs of her restaurant plus what the derelict restaurant brings to the table. A fascinating problem to solve.

I find problems are more interesting with boundaries. One of the best parts of designing for plays is that they come with boundaries - set characters, set times periods, set endings. The worst thing a director can ask of a costume designer is for costumes without a period. I don’t have any idea what that looks like. Everything in our life comes from somewhere. To quote King Lear, “Nothing will come of nothing.” (Not exactly what he means in the play but I think it still works.)

Which leads me to my superpower - I can break things down into steps. I would have preferred to control the weather or have super speed but you get what you get.

This power that I have is great for the theatre. You receive the parameters - Russia, 1890’s, upper class - and start working on the problem. What season is it? What do the characters say about themselves and each other? What’s the budget? And then find the entry point - research the look, collect images, learn the specifics. And then the next step and the next until the play is done.

So far we’ve talked about chicken restaurants and sarafans (Russian dresses - see, I did my research) but we’re really here to talk farming, right?

Everything is harder when you have to set your own boundaries. Maybe this is true of all self-employed people. I often wish someone would make me a to-do list, full of accomplishable tasks. But I’m in charge of the list and I believe the list can exist to shape the thing. Now - what do I want that thing to be?

We’re now far enough into the farm to have a framework built, a notion of where we’re heading and what the thing is. Delicious food from the farm, raised well, with the animals and the land deeply considered. The day to day of that is falling into patterns, now six years into it.

If we were a restaurant, we’d consider franchising at this point - selling the system and creating an additional income stream from all the structure that we’ve created. We’re not thinking expansion, but we are trying to formalize operations. Aaron is good at this and I’m getting better.

Now we’re back at steps, right? Steps are repeatable actions that offer a consistent result. True about 75% of the time on the farm. Nature has a way of thwarting plans. It also keep the whole thing pretty interesting. Maybe farms of the size of ours are inherently not franchise-able because of that 25%. The wheel must be reinvented, not daily but often, and that doesn’t sound like a reasonable business model to invest in. But it is certainly job security.

I drive way more than I thought I would as a farmer, given that my commute is now all of five miles. Trips to the market, to the processor, to do deliveries – all add up. I used to listen to NPR almost exclusively, but I’ve become a little more protective of my mood these days. And the world feels especially traumatic right now.

So I listen to the truck radio. I have lots of presets. I think most people now listen to music via their Bluetooth. I do that when working at the farm, but I use the time in the truck to listen to what the radio tells me is popular. How else am I going to know the difference between Doja Cat and Doechii? I scan until I like something and then hang out on that spot on the dial until something I don’t like comes on.

On a country station, I heard a song called “How it Oughta Be”. There’s a line about how a “buggy of groceries” shouldn’t cost so much. It struck me. Among all the other lines about fried chicken and the anthem, a wish for groceries to be cheaper.

Cheap food. Sounds nice. Probably a great campaign slogan. Then you and I could use that money for other stuff. But my initial reaction to that line was disappointment. All of my time nowadays is in direct opposition to the idea – the illusion – that food can actually be “cheap”. Somebody, somewhere is paying full price.

That actual price? How we’re all paying – tax subsidies to big ag, leaning hard on chemical inputs to increase low-cost efficiency, seeing farms turned into factories.

Maybe the money SHOULD be for food rather than other stuff. Here’s the deal about that song – the way it ought to be – according to me here on the food front – is that we give real honor to ourselves and that buggy full of food by making the best possible food choices - local ones, regenerative ones, humane ones.

Now that’s the serious bit – here’s a musical themed diversion. Warning, I find farming to be a country/Americana affair so that’s the leaning here.

Here’s the playlist for an average farm day (check it out here on Spotify - no, I’m not making $ off this):

• Making the plan for the day over a cup of tea: Blowin’ Smoke by Kacey Musgraves. Reminds me of waitressing – getting ready for a shift, getting your game face on, you’ve done this all before…Manic Monday is not a bad choice here either.

• Feeding the pigs: Since you’ll be on and off the ATV for this one, it can’t be anything too complicated because you’ll lose parts of it to the engine noise. So this can be mostly about a feeling. I tend to your angry girl singers here – Criminal by Fiona Apple or Tori Amos most anything. Can’t go wrong with Delta Dawn here by Tanya Tucker.

• Weeding the flowers: Here’s where you bring in the old classics – The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, The Bellamy Brothers, Don Williams. My dad’s favorites from back in the day. Top three from this category:

1. Fishin’ in the Dark – Nitty Gritty

2. Tulsa Time – Don Williams

3. Old Hippie – Bellamy Brothers

• Mowing on the tractor: Amarillo Sky by Jason Aldean. I’m not crazy about Mr. Aldean, but this is a perfect mowing song and it’s about driving the tractor. Two thumbs up for this one.

• Social media check-ins/writing: This gets challenging; it needs to keep me at the desk but not distract from the task at hand. Often, the soundtrack is terrible TV in the background but I can also get down with a playlist a friend made for me so that I can be a little surprised. My friend Nate made one recently that is largely acoustic but also largely chill. My favorite from that list right now is The Bastard by Whitefield Brothers.

• Washing eggs: Almost every day, eggs get washed. It’s the Groundhog Day of our life. Usually, I turn on a baseball game or something on the house speakers for this. For baseball, it’s the Cubs. For music, it’s usually Leonard Cohen or Lucinda Williams, especially Car Wheels on a Gravel Road.

• Prep for Saturday’s market: I’m in the freezers, I’m in the trailer, I’m back in the freezers. Motorcycle Drive-by – Zach Bryan.

• Walking the dogs at sunset: More Zach here at the end of the day, when, hopefully, you found the time to take a sunset walk with the farm dogs - Pink Skies

Any farming classics that you shovel/mow/feed/weed to that I missed? Please share! Have a musical and productive week full of great choices.

Now that I’ve had a minute to reflect on it, I’m struck by both how long and how short that is. We’ve done a lot in those years but also have lots left to do.

An accumulation of days, to-do lists, dinners, water lines, pork chops. I can’t even imagine doing all of that again.

And then I think about all the things to be done. It’s an onion with an infinite amount of layers. Just keep peeling.

Some similarities between farming and marriage. Always work to be done on both. Another farmer said that their days consist of doing chores and finding things that are broken and then fixing those broken things. Repeat. A day without finding a broken thing is a gift but an anomaly.

A pattern of daily maintenance and the wear and tear of existence.

This is a bit of a weird segue way into a book about WWII but such is this weird life. I read, upon several trusted friends’ recommendations, Kurt Vonnegut’s Mother Night, a short novel about created reality. Mr. Vonnegut summarizes the novel early on - “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be." The direct analogue from the story to the present is with media, as the protagonist, Campbell, in the novel is a Nazi propagandist but also a spy for the U.S. Lots of bad, some good, to oversimplify things dramatically.

How does this relate? That’s why we read, why I read. The philosophy of it. What is my micro from that macro of the book? And how does that relate back to the well-worn paths of these days?

One thing always leads to another. Always. Another layer of the onion emerges. One choice offers another set of choices. Saying yes to one route automatically says no to others, sometimes thankfully. Please see marriage. Also, farming though. Sometimes I make the terrible error of thinking I’ve solved the problem only to realize that yes, I did solve that problem, but that solution allowed this other problem (and often its friends) to surface. The universe is hard to control. The universe is impossible to control. Messiness will always win. The 2nd law of thermodynamics - processes naturally move toward disorder.

In summary today, happy anniversary to you all, whatever reason you might have to celebrate. If the well-worn path helps control the entropy in your life, lean into the path. But something will break inevitably. I’m rolling with it.