Farm Life: Part II

Sunday pickling project

     Farm life, phase two! : gone is my incessant reading, 8 PM bedtimes, cooking experiments, carefree attitude toward the future, free time. Also, the majority of aches and pains, lack of social life, boredom in the fields. Marked by a trip home and subsequent sororal visit to the farm, a shift has occurred for me in most aspects of the pace and tone of my life here.

     Mostly, the change is caused by concrete differences. First of all, the workload on the farm has increased with the volume of the harvest needing to be done. Squash and cucumbers, tomatoes, and basil really started to thrive, green beans are ready, carrots and potatoes need to be dug. Combined with the departure of two apprentices, the increased workload has taken its toll.

     Additionally, a summer romance has taken up not only a good amount of my free time, but the majority of my spare thought-space as well.

     This decreased extra time, as well as the general sense of busy-ness, has changed my once-productive farm lifestyle. Most alarmingly, I’m scarcely reading a thing anymore. I finished my first books (Omnivore’s Dilemma, Love in the Time of Cholera), and have casually started and quickly discarded another set of books (Gone with the Wind, A Book of Salt, Seven Pillars of Wisdom) purposelessly. If I read, it’s in the form of low attention-span magazine or newspaper articles that either appear in the el (apprentice common space), or on my internet radar.      Correspondingly, I’ve also stopped writing. (Devoted followers of this blog have probably noticed a precipitous drop-off in posted entries.)

     Relatedly, I’ve given up on a lot of cooking endeavors. Initially, I made bread, butter, fritters, pickles, and horchata. Each week’s new harvest meant new things to cook. With my loss of enthusiasm for reading and writing, though, disappeared my will to spend Sundays cooking. Instead, I spend a lot of time daydreaming and eating eggs or raw vegetables.

     Not everything is lethargic waste, though. When the shinyness wore off weeding and harvesting, I slowly started bringing my ipod to listen to during more solitary activities. With this came a flood of excitement for all the podcasts I’ve never before had time to listen to. I’ve also, by necessity, once again taken a serious interest in my future and have begun applying to various internships and jobs.

     Overall I spend less time doing productive things, but I use the time well. As my new pace settles (and my fleeting romance flets) I hope to re-incorporate at least a bit of the farm-life things I did in the beginning of the season. In the meantime, however, the new pace is dizzying, but good.