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.