Good morning.
The pigs, in their glory, in their wisdom, in their piggishness, have gotten out of their pen twice in the last week. Pen is generous—it is more of an area where some panel fencing gently suggests they remain. Please. These two hogs—a sow and a boar—are big and not exactly in love, but they have history. They mated last winter and had a stillborn litter of one. Maybe they don’t carry that sadness with them as they uproot the metal t-posts and 6-gauge steel that surrounds their mud puddle home, but I wouldn’t blame them if they did. Loss is hard, even for a pig. Springtime on the farm has a great measure of loss. It was a surprise to me when we first moved here. Spring lived in my mind as early-blooming stone fruit, bar patios, baby animals, and green grass. Here, in the barnyard and the field, it is those things along with their counterbalance: the mixture of mud and shit that there must be a German or Estonian word for that doesn’t translate to English; the death of a newborn goat, frozen on an unexpectedly cold and snowy April night; the loss of a favorite doe to a breach kid and a fatigued uterus; 1,400 pounds of escaped swine pocking the still-tender spring lawn with their indiscriminate hooves. This season, not the brutality of winter, the weight of summer, or the mortality of fall, is the one that breaks a farmer. The spring winds that blow down a hoop house full of sprouting bulbs. The guilt and second guessing and feeling of inadequacy that floods when an animal dies. The middle-of-night waking and pulling on of galoshes to check on pregnant does in the barn who seek the privacy of night to kid. The slurry of mud and manure that you come to take as an insult. When my fissures start to show and the breaking in me begins, my doubt about the entire practice of farming is revealed. I can’t help but see the imposition a farm is on nature. The things we try to force, the things we try to put in order. The everyday push against what the earth would rather have happen. My penchant for over-philosophizing looms large, and the idea that this kind of living is a more simple or good or wholesome kind of living becomes dispiriting to me. I wanted to live on a farm to be closer to my food, to have more freedom to use land, to pursue a kind of romance, and to listen to the quiet yet clear voice that said “you want to do this.” Country living has been lesson after lesson in how difficult it is to do something well, how the good things in life, the simple things we think of when we picture the farm with the slamming screen door on the back porch, the border collie running through the field, the dairy cow moseying through thick clover, the deep speckled brown of a hen’s fresh egg, are our projections. They are our hopes. The food and friendship, the skill building and growing things, the repairing and making things are lifelong pursuits that are worthy of our time and attention—so worthy!—and they are also so hard. They are battered by the current of working full-time jobs, the mercurial and destructive weather, the need for money for equipment to manage the land, the need to push your body and your mind and your emotions to the point of fragility. In my experience, getting what’s good about farm life comes with getting what’s difficult. And as good as the goods get, the bads get as bad. Oh Jesus Christ, Jake, okay, we get it. Farming is hard, so do something else. Having lived this close to the raw materials of life, I’m not ready to put distance between them and me. I would still rather hold the ore of life in a dirty hand than buy the cut stone.
Some Things I Consumed This Past Fortnight
Tracy K. Smith’s Life on Mars. This collection of poems caught my eye when ThriftBooks.com recommended it after I bought Diane Seuss’s Pulitzer-winning book of poems. Smith’s poetry was less accessible to me, each page led me into more confusion. If I hadn’t come to peace with not having to “understand” poems long ago, I’m not sure I would have finished the book. But then something shifted. The next page opened like a fissure and I found something. A chunk of ore. Something to hold onto. And the next page. And then there it was—one of my favorite poems and one that has haunted me since 2012, when I first read it but did not know the author or book it was from. It was just sitting there like a small nest in the grass that you might not see if you hadn’t, just then, looked down. I went back and read each poem again, and again, with the new knowledge that Tracy K. Smith had written that poem that I have loved and thought of so much.
A rented yard dumpster. Cold and snowy though it has been, spring is still springing, and the urge to purge is strong. The farmyard was in need of plenty of sprucing up, but the pole shed was my main target. There were things in there that came out of our moving van almost nine years ago and haven’t been touched since. They hit the dumpster along with my box of high school memorabilia, and many of the little odds and ends and scraps and unused pieces of projects that have accumulated over the years. I might need them someday, I had told myself. But after nine years, someday has not come. Don’t worry—I’m still completely unorganized and inefficient. I just have a bit less stuff now.
Mary Gaitskill’s interview in The Paris Review. Reading this interview was a painful and confusing experience. I have to admit I am not familiar with her writing, but I know she is a famous author and I was excited to read her interview. Gaitskill came across as honest and blunt, as well as confessional. She showed vulnerability and a relatable air of being unsure how life puts us where we end up. The difficulty I had was with what I perceived as her cavalier attitude about her writing. Granted, she has had decades of validation and income and awards to buoy her. I found myself feeling foolish about how seriously I approach writing sometimes—how I feel so much pressure to have my writing represent me and my value. Gaitskill made it sound like one of her curious pastimes. And oddity she liked to indulge. I felt embarrassed and envious at the same time, and what I hope might have been a shift in my attitude about why I write or who I write for. More to come on this topic, no doubt.
A Tous les Jours ballpoint pen. I love cheap trashy pens. I love gas station pens. I love pens from the dentist’s office that weren’t given a single thought. The pens I keep around are catchpenny duds, and I love them. This week I fell for a well-designed pen disguised as an everyday nib, the Tous les Jours ballpoint. It has the wooden shaft of a perfect Ticonderoga pencil with the interior metal casing and cartridge of a classic spring-loaded ballpoint pen.
It is the best of all worlds. But there’s a catch. The Tous le Jours comes with a 0.5mm tip. I prefer the classic 1.0mm. The proprietary cartridge size and spring length prevent interchanging cartridges. But I am nothing if not persistent, and I found a successful modification. I’m in love.
A stiff gin and tonic at @stcroixcollective. So pleased to have them as neighbors.
Mario Mathy’s Jumping Dance synthesizer epic.
Baby goat snuggles. The first kids of the season were born last week. Two does have freshened and now two more are in the kidding pens. Still two more await. We will be rich in milk and meat this year.
Cheers and thank you. I am feeling especially grateful for all of you who make this newsletter possible. Reading it and supporting it mean so incredibly much to me.
Cheers,
Jake
"Shmud" for shit and mud? I didn't realize until I read this post how strange it is that we don't have a word for it.
I’ll be doing some pen research. I’ve got a bank pen, another local business pen and a bic round stic in my bag currently. Right now I lean toward the bic round stic.