Farming’s supposed to be all hard work, but you wouldn’t know that from the way I move. I’m kinda slow and sometimes meandering, nimble with my hands but suffer from a short attention span. I wake up late and wander between fields. I take long lunch breaks and snack on tons of tomatoes in secret. I play with the kitties and we follow each other around.
In my defense, I still get my tasks done – in counts of seven, when I can. Seven scoops of soil to go into the seeding trays. Pushing the broad fork back and forth seven times before pulling it out. Dumping out the rotting fruit into the bed of compost and breaking it down with the shovel seven heavy hits at a time. Taking tally of my steps and counting to seven over and over again while I pull the harvest behind me along the long driveway.
The counting is loud because most days are quiet. On the days I don’t put on music, I let myself listen to nothing, until my ears are filled in with the blue from the sky. I hear things scraping all around me–from the clouds, from my sweat–and after a while, the sparrows’ song sounds just like screaming. There are some days where I never open my mouth–breath moving solely through my nostrils–and the voice box in my mind is worn and tender. There’s a lot to take in, so I slow down a bit more.
But I’m allowed to do all this, so slowly, because I’m working alone. Me doing a slow job is still better than no work being done at all. My boss hired me because he can’t be on the farm every day, and he needs the extra pair of hands to keep up with the plants during the summer, when the heat keeps everything rolling and growing. On especially lonely days, I fantasize about quitting dramatically, leaving forever with the trunk of my car filled to the brim with one last harvest, and the rest of the farm left to the reign of overripe fruits and overgrown weeds.
When I work by myself, it’s hard to deny my existence as a little god. I keep looking at my hands–made real by the nicks and scrapes on the skin–pushing and pulling on all sorts of things. I see everything that I’m capable of changing in a day’s worth of work; this all feels truest when I’m alone.
And when big rains move me indoors or deep roots launch my prying pulling body into the air, I’m reminded that I’m in the company of gods much larger, gods that would be relatively unbothered by whether I live or die. Every now and then, when someone from back home reminds me I should be careful out there, I think up worst-case scenarios of my demise. I faint from heat exhaustion, and the soft sandy soil takes me back in with no one around to pick me up; my sweat has already prepped the bed. Or the harvest knife slips in my hand, slices open a vein, and I’m left to bleed out with no breath left to call for help. I have only one thought – where has everyone gone?
Mostly, I just feel ridiculous running around trying to keep up with it all. I’m humbled by gods misdressed in miles of plastic drip tape, showing themselves through thousands of fruiting zucchini. Always, there is so much to hold, and it feels like a grand fluke to get to hold it all by myself.
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On days I’m not by myself, I’m working with Mark. He listens to only classical music, sometimes rock, and often the local Christian radio station; he also drives this really beautiful brown pick up truck from the 70s. Mark has been living off the grid, basically on accident, for the past 20 years and working farm jobs for longer than I’ve been alive—twice over. I tell him about my weekends back in the city and he tells me about the 14 dogs he takes care of. I like asking him about stories from the different places he’s lived, and where he would choose to live if money were no problem (Colorado or New Mexico).
This one time, we spent all afternoon cleaning up hundreds of heads of garlic together. We started with some small talk, but then settled into silence. I start counting in my head again. One, cut the stem. Two, now the roots. Three, peel off the outer layers. Four, I wonder what Mark’s thinking about. Five, how’s he passing the time? Six, I think about which stems in the carton he’ll get to and, seven, which ones I should reach for. We get through the garlic way faster than I could have ever done on my own, thanks to that familiar yet irregularly multiplying magical force that emerges when you work with other people.
“Don’t work too hard,” he reminds me on his way out. I’m left working by myself again, so I take it as another invitation to slow down, like I’ve got all the time in the world, all the while buoyed by my own spirit, til it moves me to soreness.
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