“For Tea” & Farm Dreams
Turning 40, goat doodles, and yet another cat pic
My favorite pictures are those with other people, but since I didn’t want to take the time to get their permission you get me and only me… (1) Post-spiked baby hair (2) Cookies at Grandma Jan’s (3) Best Goblin King impression (4) Melissa Joan Hart and I might be related? (5) Birthday party at ChiChi’s—I was not a fan of that hat (6) Backpacking the AT—5 days, no shower no problem (5) Work and whiteboards (6) 30th Birthday (7) 4th Wedding Anniversary in Door County—on rare occasions I have been known to clean up okay (5) Yay, muscles (6) Very helpfully and intelligently pointing at something I forget (7) Winter writer wear courtesy of Lucas for this most recent Christmas
“For Tea”
I finished this month’s book, The Dirty Life, over a peaceful weekend in Door County to celebrate my fortieth birthday. Honestly I spent a lot of time on the cabin’s plush sofa, putting my feet within Lucas’s reach so he would absent-mindedly rub them as he was doing other things. (It worked. Often. I want to replace our couch immediately.)
The weather shifted from 20s to high 40s during our stay, and the final morning we were there (my actual birthday), snow routinely thundered off the metal roof. The sun beamed through the windows, a strange accompaniment to what sounded like a storm.
The day before, I went for a walk through Ridges Nature Sanctuary while Lucas went for a run. The snow was still compact, if lopsided from the many footfalls prior to mine, and more of a workout than it looked. Though some of my concentration was dedicated to surfing those frozen miniature hills, a good deal of my thinking focused on how much I hated the sound of the word “forty.”
In my head the word sounds like a congested foghorn blasting out across a turbulent sea: FOHHHR-TEE. Or it just lays there in a weird awkward lump like an old winter coat that fell off the hanger years ago, forgotten, collecting dust and cat hair and dead pill bugs at the bottom of the closet: FOHR-TIE. So first things first in this new decade, I have to rebrand forty for myself: For-Tea. Said with flair, perhaps an extravagant wave of the hand. An invitation: “For tea.” A party of one, for one.
No, my book’s not ready yet. I lost some weight but not as much as I wanted to. I thought I’d have figured out “serious adult woman hair” by now (movies and TV set an impossible standard). I have not progressed my art skills beyond amateur doodles. I still get migraines sometimes. My gut seems to be trying to remake itself (acid and other things) under the stress of the current onslaught against critical work, the foundations of our democracy, and basic project management.
BUT.
My book is really (seriously, truly) coming along. For a long time I didn’t feel that way. That changed with this edit. It was worth sticking it through to see how far I could go. I have 52,000 words of my final revision. Pretty soon I’ll have it all. I know I’ll learn more and hopefully keep improving with the second book, but I’ll feel confident that I gave book one my all.
I’m more fit than I’ve been in a long time. I eat lots of vegetables (my optometrist gave the whatever-doohickies in my eyeballs an A+ because of the variety of vegetables I eat).
Time spent on my hair is less time spent with words. Reading the words or writing the words is probably always going to win over my hairdo. To those of you smarty-pants who say, just listen to audiobooks while you do your hair, I say: I need tutorials. There would be significant preparation and full attention required. I already trim my own bangs, that’s daredevil enough.
The doodles make me happy, regardless of that with-more-time-I-could-do-better-than-this feeling. And I can admire professional artists with pure joy and no envy. We stopped at Plum Bottom Gallery while in Door County and viewed the nature-inspired paintings by McKenna Kornowski. The day I feel financially comfortable enough to buy a gallery piece is the day one of her works graces my office wall. In the meantime I’ll buy up all her greeting cards and share the joy with you.
I may still get migraines, but I get them a LOT LESS. The book The Way Out helped me so much with that. If you’re dealing with any kind of chronic pain, I recommend giving it a shot.
As for the bigger picture, I tell myself that so many of our stories are full of heroes and people taking on difficult things to protect the people they love. Those characters didn’t achieve their happy endings from the comfort of their armchairs. They often don’t wear capes either, but some wear great t-shirts. This one is one of my favorites, a take on Brian Gibbs’ quote: “Gratitude and reciprocity are the doorway to true abundance, not power, money or fear.” Sound like anything we’ve read lately? (If you don’t know who Brian Gibbs is, you can check out him out here.)
Really, gratitude and reciprocity are what make a great life at forty too. I’m grateful for the path I’ve traveled, for being a work in progress with a book in progress. And as for reciprocity, all I have to do is look back at the last few months with a new writers’ group, or in our backyard about to come to life with spring, or at my texts with family as we work on a get-together, to know that’s absolutely true. “For tea” may be an invitation for one, a chance to put my life into perspective, but it’s all the lovely people, plants, and creatures in my life that make that perspective positive.
A friend of mine sent me a gorgeous birthday card with this quote in her equally gorgeous handwriting:
“We are mites on a plum and the plum is a planet circling an unremarkable star on the outskirts of an ordinary galaxy which contains 400 billion other stars and is one of 100 billion other galaxies. Nobody you care about, or who cares about you will be alive in 100 years. Nobody will remember your successes or failures. To let fear devour your short time here is to not understand the most basic law of the universe: your insignificance. Why would any of us not enjoy ourselves and not love others with abandon?”
— Carl Sagan
Those words gave me good goosebumps. Here I come, forty.
The starting sketch for this is so old… done sometime when we lived on the east side and still had chickens. I had to change the tail because it was so fluffy it looked like I’d drawn a skunk! We didn’t have chipmunks right outside the window for an easy anatomy lesson back then. Lucas is the “Gray” goat (he’ll eat just about anything) and he’s been using what he calls my chipmunk cheeks as stress balls for as long as we’ve been together.
Farm Dreams with The Dirty Life
Kristin Kimball journeys from city to farm in the course of her book, The Dirty Life. Many of us share a fond fantasy of growing our own food and enjoying the peace of the countryside, but Kimball gets pulled in by her future husband’s big dream, and the reality she faces is messy, both on the farm and in her relationship. The book follows the couple from first meeting to their wedding and beyond, and even though I picked up her book for the farming, I liked her introspection about her relationship the most. I highlighted page 211, why farming is like a relationship, and 248, what it means to make a choice to marry someone and the larger “loving-kindness” present at her wedding with her family and community.
Have you dreamed of having your own farm? Did you name it? Decide what to grow on it? (Let me know in the comments below!)
I have had many idle daydreams of farm names. Also bookstore names. And coffee shop names. Maybe I need to pick a lane. Or find a way to merge all three? When I was younger I first wanted to turn a barn into a restaurant, then abandoned that idea for running a pen pal cafe, where we would put old stamps and letters and postcards inside resin on the table tops, and of course connect you with real live pen pals. I still think this should exist. Handwritten letters are so satisfying.
What was your favorite part of The Dirty Life?
Her references to seed catalogs as farmer porn—relatable to the humble backyard gardener too—had me laughing out loud. See page 119 for that gem.
Did you lose yourself in a seed catalog or at a garden store this winter? What did you get?
We got eggplant, zucchini, cucumber, orange bell pepper, lunchbox pepper, cabbage, kale, 2 types of tomatoes, 3 types of lettuce + a bonus lettuce from one of the seed companies, bush beans, zinnias, a hummingbird flower mix, and more I can’t remember. First up for seed starting is eggplant this weekend!
Further Reading
If you enjoyed The Dirty Life, here are a few more books I read when doing research for Felix, one of my main characters (a farmer).
Old Farm: A History by Jerry Apps (beautiful photographs)
Farm Girl: A Wisconsin Memoir by Beuna Coburn Carlson (a childhood in the time of party telephone lines)
Pastoral Song: A Farmer’s Journey by James Rebanks (beautiful prose, charts the difference in farming from his grandfather to his father to himself)
Wilding by Isabella Tree (a captivating look into what land can be)
Do you have any books on farmers or farming you’d recommend?
Let’s Take Action
There is so much heartbreaking stuff going on right now, and if you want to talk about it, I’m here for it. Our representatives have a job to do, and a lot of them are not doing it.
Have you contacted your reps? What do you find the most challenging about it?
The hardest part (at least for me) is knowing specifically what to say. Reading articles and talking with others helps, and there are scripts out there that can give us starting points. First draft or fifth draft, phone call or email, let’s just not be silent.
Here are some options that have messages ready for you to send:
Annie enjoys February sunshine and the reduction of my inner turmoil after I contact my representatives
March’s Book
The Backyard Bird Chronicles by Amy Tan feels like the perfect book to welcome spring. And, by complete coincidence but good fortune, I slated this book for the same month that the Aldo Leopold Foundation discusses the book with the author!
Save the Date
The Backyard Bird Chronicles with Amy Tan
March 6, 7:00 - 8:00 pm CST
This is a virtual event, so anyone can join—just be sure to RSVP online so you will get the necessary link to watch live or view the recording. See more info and sign up here >>
And if you’d like to pair The Backyard Bird Chronicles with one of Tan’s fiction novels, I suggest The Hundred Secret Senses, one of my all-time favorite books.
