Weeks 1 and 2

• Cleaned the farmhouse top to bottom (with more than a little help from my friends).


• Introduced Charline, a lovely young woman from Quebec City, to the farm while the farmer was away.


• Fed and watered 35 chickens twice per day.


• Gathered eggs, then washed and packaged them for sale.


• Hollered at Gypsy, a sweet, old Golden Retriever, for stealing and eating eggs.


• Hollered at Gypsy for stealing into my room and eating my cat's food.


• Planted several flats of spinach, lettuces, and beets.


• Weeded carrots and beets, inadvertently weeding out some of the beets.


• Watered rows and flats in the greenhouse with a watering can because I didn't realize there was a hose.


• Planted 2 rows of onions alongside garlic that was already in the ground.


• Spread loads of mulch on said onions and garlic, 6 beds of strawberries, and a 15x30' area.


• Used a broadfork to aerate the soil in that area, then trenched 4 rows with a hoe and spread worm castings around, before planting sugar snap peas.


• Chased chickens off the new pea patch.


• Chased chickens off the onions, garlic and strawberries.


• Chased chickens out of the greenhouse.


• Chased chickens back into their own blasted yard.


• Severely cut back 2 enormous hedges of eleagnus.


• Pounded fence posts in for a new chicken area using this awesome crazy 18lb tool.


• Loaded oak logs on and off trailer for shiitake mushroom operation.


• Drove golf cart to and fro, with and without trailer.


• Harvested shiitake mushrooms.


• Helped lift 4 12-foot logs into place as part of terracing what will be the kitchen garden.


• Won a rooster-human standoff initiated by a foolhardy rooster.


• Cursed house-loving ladybugs and ants.


• Cooked a biryani so bad I could barely eat it.


• Played soccer with Charline in a pecan grove.


• Gazed in wonder at Venus, a Cheshire cat moon, Orion, the Big Dipper, and the Pleiades.


• Taken daily walks in the woods with Mozell, the cat who often acts like a dog.


• Slept like a baby every night.


• Loved every minute of my work.


• Missed my community and friends in Bed-Stuy.

Technical Difficulties

Out at the farm we enjoy the satellite interwebs. We enjoy them so much that it doesn't bother us that watching 1 hour of rich media results in our pipe being squished to the size of a pipe cleaner for the next 2 days. No, that doesn't bother us at all, precious. We adore driving 20 minutes to McDonald's to buy a $1 sweet tea in exchange for a free hour of real broadband wifi.

Damn internet provider peoples.

Happy Lilly Ledbetter Day!

Despite what we're often taught in school, injustice isn't corrected only by the actions of charismatic leaders, elected officials, or military might. Those folks are responding to demands made by ordinary people.

Lilly Ledbetter is one of those ordinary people. She worked here in Alabama as a Goodyear tire plant supervisor and discovered just before retirement that she'd been payed less than her male colleagues. Arguing gender discrimination, she sued and a jury agreed. Yay, right?

Unfortunately, no. W's guys on the Supreme Court overturned the lower court decision, saying she should've filed suit within 180 days of getting her first paycheck. Who the hell knows what their coworkers make in the first 6 months on the job or ever?

Congress recognized this absurdity and passed a bill that President Obama will be signing into law today - the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.

Change happens because ordinary people stand up - sometimes alone, sometimes with their neighbors - and say enough already. In today's New York Times column, Gail Collins shares the stories of several women who changed the working world by standing up for themselves and other women.

Miss Lilly, you make me proud of my home state, exemplifying the best that can come of my people's history of dogged perseverance. I wish I could hug your neck.

More Info
The American Prospect Talks with Lilly Ledbetter

Jesus is My Co-Pilot

Big George's Sign

If I Ever Need a Bondsman

I love the South's penchant for nicknames. My family engages in the same practice that brought us a bail bondsman like Weedy Varner in Anniston. I have great-aunts called Sip and Dank, and one great-grandfather went by Grandpa Eight Mile.

Signs of Spring

On my way to feed the chickens this morning, I saw the first daffodil of the season blooming just below what will be the kitchen garden.

New York, I don't miss snow and ice.

We'll be back to the upper 40s and low 50s in a couple days, but for now it feels like spring and I'm grateful.

A Jacksonville House

Girlfriends

In high school and college and post-college I had lots of guy friends. In my 30s I discovered the deep and lasting love of girlfriends, and now I have both NYC and AL posses.

Before I left NYC my dear friend Jane threw me a "go forth and be bold" party. She also always, always, always offers quietly powerful insight that's often turned me around or made me hold on or allowed me to let go. Holly, a Brit who refuses to say "tater tot" and loves to visit Alabama to shoot guns, has had my back on too many occasions to count. Cheri, Sarah, Amanda, Kirsten, Nancy -- all enrich my life in different ways.

Here in AL my core girls are Anna, Val, and Kyes. Since Kyes married Karen, she's also become an increasingly important part of the crew. This weekend my girls came through for me.

I love working here at the farm, but the house itself is more like a sty. Between adjusting to being alone in the country, tending to mom, then coming back to a nasty house, well I was more than a little disheartened and depressed. Or I was until Anna (not in hat) rallied Val (in hat) and the two of them came up and helped me clean this place top to bottom.

We swept, mopped, wiped down cabinets, windows, and doorframes, cleaned the oven and cooktop, scrubbed out the refrigerator, went through 2 containers of Arm & Hammer pet odor remover on the carpets and furniture, washed out garbage cans, dusted, lemon oiled wood furniture, rearranged and made up Charline's (the new volunteer who arrived today) room - and then we tackled the bathroom. Oh, and in our spare time we took care of the chickens, dogs and cats, planted 3 flats of lettuces and spinach, and weeded the greenhouse.

Now I'm happily tired because for the first time since arriving I can actually cook and eat at the house without getting a queasy stomach. And seeing as how I'm here to grow food, being able to eat it is pretty damn fundamental.

That's what girlfriends do -- take care of your fundamentals.

Crackers

Cracker Barrel is a guilty pleasure of mine. Guilty because the company has a lousy as hell reputation when it comes to treating people right whether they're African American, LGBT, female, or some combination thereof. I justify my hashbrown casserole by telling myself the company has been forced to institute some changes since I worked there at 16 and experienced sexual harassment firsthand (and punched the manager in the solar plexus in front of witnesses. Asshole.).

And it has changed. Or at least the walls have. I've been in a couple locations recently that actually had old advertisements and photographs of honest-to-goodness black folks on the walls amidst all the nostalgic whatsits. Who knew black people were part of the "history and heritage" of the South?

While I thought of posting this evidence of Cracker Barrel's acknowledgment of black people's existence, I think this faceless white man on a tractor says something deeper about the whole scene. He was on the wall too.

Black Eyes and Sock Monkeys

Obviously something was wrong. No one calls me at 5:30 in the morning.

Turns out mom fell out, so I've been in Georgia for the last couple days trying to help her find out what's up. Poor thing has a black left eye. Looks like Petey from the Little Rascals. At least we got to watch the Inauguration together, though I think it hurt her a little to cry.

On a happier note, we opened late-to-arrive Christmas presents from my brother and his family (Thanks, USPS). I got the coolest pajamas ever -- sock monkeys! As god is my witness, I'll never be cold again!

When I returned to the farm last night, the animals and I were happy to see each other. Mozell, never much of a lap kitty, didn't leave my side until morning.

So Many Things Could Go Wrong Here

Leaving Up North

It took two days and a pair of forgotten gloves to get my first blister. At nearly 50 degrees, my wool gloves didn't seem necessary, and I hadn't yet uncovered the baggy yellow work ones. I was making a bed and then planting peas -- laying mulch, broad forking the ground, digging 4 rows with a hoe, and laying in worm castings before dropping the peas in and covering them -- when it happened. Just a small blister underneath my right index finger, but it's the first of what are sure to be many external and internal changes I'll experience over the next six months here at the farm.

Dad and I drove everything home to Alabama last Tuesday to Thursday, waiting until Friday morning to unload the truck at a storage unit I rented online when I was back in NYC, near the end of my most recent 3-year tour. We hauled a small stash to the farm, where Farmer Simon helped us unload and rearrange the furnished room in his house where I'm living.

I kept my bed with me, but a bed and some books are a far cry from the comfortable 1.5 bedroom home I made in Sarah's rowhouse in Bed-Stuy. Most folks who head off to farms like this are in their early and mid 20s. They don't have homes to store. They don't have set ways to change, or at least ways as set as mine are at 37.

Simon left for the inauguration Saturday and won't return until Tuesday week after attending a sustainable ag conference and taking some side trips. I feel lucky to have this time alone in the house to adjust. Unpacking and cleaning help make a place at least a little your own.

But I'm not just adjusting to the farm or living in someone else's home. I'm also adjusting to being back in Alabama, the state where I was born, one that I love and despair of in sometimes equal fierce measure. I moved from a strong African American community in Brooklyn where I was a comfortable part of the white minority, to a rural part of northeast Alabama where I'm told the swimming park down the road doesn't welcome black folk.

Despite Barack's election, bigotry and racism are alive and well across the country, including NYC, but when its presence is made clear in Alabama, it feels heavier to me given our history. But what friends and I call the "liberal underground" is also alive and well here, ready for me to tap back into. I'm making hooking up with those folks, folks like Simon, part of my reentry program.