June 18, 2021 – from The Croft in Boyne City, Michigan
My check engine light came on last night while driving through Harbor Springs, Michigan. Expect the unexpected. Sometimes I whisper this to myself when things don’t go as planned on the road, other times I say it in my head and chuckle audibly. I can do hard things. Fortunately, I’m staying in Boyne City for two weeks and have time to make repairs if necessary. So, this afternoon, after conducting two interviews with farm service providers and speaking with two dear friends, I drove to Petoskey to have the auto parts store check my codes.
“Where ya headed?” James, the friendly redhaired attendant, asks.
“Washington,” I reply with a grin.
“State?”
I chuckle. “Yep.”
“You campin’ out in the back of this?”
“Not yet,” I reply.
“How many days you takin’ to get to Washington?”
“2 months.”
He ran the codes- knock sensor, left front wheel tire speed, battery high voltage. I take note of the codes and will research them later. A new battery probably wouldn’t hurt. The car is pulling left a little bit at high speeds. Highways in Michigan sometimes call for 75 MPH and a 60 MPH minimum. I prefer the back roads when I’m not pinched for time.
“Nothin’ too serious,” he assures me, “as long as you aren’t having any symptoms.” Am I having symptoms?
I thank him, and he wishes me safe travels, radiating kindness as he turns to go back to the store.
I saw some bikes and furniture for sale on a flat bed trailer on my way into town, so I stop there on my way back to Boyne City. It’s at the top of a grassy hill in farm country. An older woman wearing a white baseball cap is working in the garden as I pull in the driveway. I park and pull on my sun hat. She approaches.
“Hi,” I smile with my eyes bright, the way the dancers in Boyne City smile, their bodies aligned and poised, their feet grounded. “I’m Emma.”
“I’m Annie.”
We get to talking, ‘bout the rain last night, ‘bout the bikes out front, ‘bout her farm out back… ‘bout how we both grew up on a farm.
“I’m eighty years-old now and live down the road a piece,” nodding to the south. “My two older brothers live in the old farmhouse here,” she gestures up the drive that’s running west. “We grew up here. Only have 6 beefers here now.”
The farm looks well. The pasture, maybe fifty acres divided into eight-acre paddocks, is lush but not all gone to seed. There’s a variety of species of grasses and legumes. The barn’s stones are holding together, and her roof is straight with shingles in-tact. “Your farm looks happy,” I say. “Y’all take good care of her.”
Annie smiles gently. “We put the farm in a land conservancy so it wouldn’t be developed into houses like up there,” nodding to the north. This is lake country, with tourism and development moving in. Suburban communities sprawl in the middle of what were once fields, fields that were once forests. I’m surprised to not see crops or pastures throughout these hills like we have in New York State. I wonder if sheep used to roam these hills.
Annie tells me more about the garden, which at 10 x 20 feet is about one-quarter the size of the lawn we’re standing on, a lawn about which she proclaims, “This used to be Ma’s potato patch. We had Mom and Dad and five kids to feed, so we had a lot of potatoes. I do what I can with the garden now.” Wow, you’re eighty. I see a couple rows of corn, a couple rows of potatoes, some squash and beans. She waters them by hand, dipping a watering can in a 5-gallon bucket that she fills with a hose from the house. “It rained last night. I won’t have to water today.”
I think of my grandmas, gone for years now, who gardened ‘til their hearts gave out. “Garden’s lookin’ good!” I tell her.
Annie smiles.
She tells me more about the history of the farm, how her parents used to make a go of it. I wonder… Since eighty year-old Annie and her older brothers were unmarried and are all still on the farm, have they ever known anything beyond this place? Did their parents let them have a say in how the farm was run? What was it like for Annie to be the youngest person on the farm, the youngest woman in a farm family? What was it like to be in an occupation dominated by men? I, too, am the youngest in a farm family, not inhabiting the dominant gender of this occupation. The sociologist in me is still activated from the morning’s interviews. This is not an interview. I refrain from asking questions.
I tell her a bit about my internship this summer. “The organization helps farmers in crisis and transition, so we’re working a lot with families who are trying to figure out how to pass the farm on to the next generation.”
Annie’s eyes just look kind of far away and she says, “Our parents just didn’t wanna quit.”
“Some of us die in our boots,” I say.
“Ain’t that right,” Annie affirms.
Meanwhile, I’m looking at the bicycles that Annie has in the old flatbed. I don’t really have room in my car for a bike and don’t find one that makes me want to ditch more of my belongings just so it would fit. “If your car broke down, at least you’d have transportation,” Annie says. The same thought had crossed my mind. She drives a hard bargain.
I am getting hungry, it is past high-noon. I start toward my car. “Could you use a trowel?” I ask Annie.
“Why, ya got one?” She seems surprised that a stranger would ask such a question.
I bought some trowels from Fran Noble in Arkport before I left New York State. They are eagerly accepted gifts that I give to some of my hosts. Annie didn’t put me up for a night or a week like other recipients of these trowels, but she extended hospitality with her smile and conversation, and I want her to know that I care about her joys and struggles in the garden and beyond. So often, farmers are invisible, forgotten, though we all depend on them. I want Annie to know I’d remember her. Fran’s trowel, its wooden handle turned on his lathe and a thick piece of steel expertly bent, filed, and coated, was something she could hold of a person who came and left, a person fighting for her people, the farmers.
I hand her the trowel.
Turning it in her hands and examining its size and durability, she makes a downward jabbing motion with it through the air. “This’ll get that ol’ quack grass,” she says with a determined grin.
“Would you like some milk and honey soap, too?” I hand her a bar of Alice’s Home-Made soap from Birdsall, New York. She smells it and seems pleased.
“I always wanted to travel,” Annie says, “but I didn’t get my license ‘til I was fifty. I wanted to leave the farm, but Dad got sick, got cancer, then Mom got cancer, and the nephews couldn’t take the farm over, so here we are.” She looks a little sad.
I want to encourage the travel bug in her, but I know it’s hard to leave the farm, especially when you have animals, when you don’t have someone to look over the place, and at eighty years-old, while the youngest person on the farm, she’s no spring chicken.
“Can I give you a hug?” Annie asks me.
We embrace.
“Go and do some good for the farmers.”
These words strike a resonant chord in me. I heard similar words from my friend Kim when I was leaving her place in Oberlin. “Those farmers are lucky to have you,” Kim said while hugging me goodbye.
Annie looks me in the eye. “You be safe out there,” she says.
“I’m in town for another week. Call me if you’d like to have tea.”
“God bless you,” Annie nods gently, like a genie proclaiming may it be so.
“And may God bless you too, Annie,” I return the gentle nod.
Annie said I am courageous for taking this trip across the country. I say Annie is courageous for staying on the farm. I travel with her in my heart now. I hope that she travels with her trowel from one end of her garden to another with me in her heart and in her hand.
People ask me to document my travels so they can live vicariously through me. What moments of mine would you like to live? Two weeks ago, I left New York State. I spent a night in Cleveland, a week in Oberlin, and a night in Columbus. Now I’m a bard in Boyne. I’m not sure why I waited to write. It just wasn’t time yet to leave the pages of my journal to write something for you to read. What you see of my journey is the tip of the iceberg. There are the mundane, personal, and sometimes painful moments I so often keep to myself. Do you, too, yearn for someone to genuinely listen? What moments of mine would you choose to live? And if given those moments, how would you live them?
Today I had one of those moments where my presence fueled the flame of adventure in someone, one of those moments where our connection fueled the calling in me, the calling to give voice to the farmers of the world. I hope that a connection you and I have, perhaps your reading this, might inspire you to show up with all your presence in a moment, to find home in your body and your breath, to give thanks for Earth who is a part of you, the Life who surrounds you, and the Water who sustains you. I nod gently and say to you, May you share with others the gift of your presence and these blessings in abundance.
I nod gently and say to you, May you enjoy your adventure. May you know that you are a part of mine and I a part of yours. For Life’s the biggest adventure of them all. And here we are, sharing Life.
Learn more about Emma on our Contributors’ Page.
(Photo: Julie Falk: Michigan Landscape in July/ flickr.com/ CC BY-NC 2.0)
- From The Croft in Boyne City, by Emma Tyme - August 5, 2021