Writing as Farming
I didn’t know the word for blood memories1 or ancestral knowledge when I first encountered them. I was maybe fourteen years old and my mother had made me furious. As punishment (probably) she left me home alone and sent me to the garden to weed. This might not have been so bad, except it was late spring and “the garden” was an untilled side of an Appalachian coal country mountain. My mother is a great gardener, actually, but this particular garden was hard-pressed to exist at all. We didn’t have a till2, so dirt needed turned by hand. Eschewing the work, my mother simply turned what she needed to plant and left the rest for another day. As I stalked out there in my fury with my dumb little pitchfork and shovel, I decided I was going to do more than weed, I would till3 her fucking garden.
This is me in a nutshell. I’ll go above and beyond even for my punishments. I want things done “the right way”, and it’s a struggle to leave things chaotic. It’s pure dumb bitch energy, but I’m working on accepting it. So as the shit brown 12-passanger Chevy G-series van drove away, I thrust my pitchfork into the hard-packed mountain dirt and began to turn.
I knew it wouldn’t be easy, but I thought my rage would make it easier. It did not. There is no rage that makes the process of turning never-turned ground easier. I had to bite the earth with the pitchfork, then stomp on it’s prongs to even try to get it in deep enough to turn. Then, when it would sink no further, I had would bend it back, twisting the handle to try and lift the dirt. The earth came up in tiny, dusty chunks, woven together by grass and weeds and reluctant to be torn apart. So I’d begin again, in the same spot. I worked and worked until finally I had opened up a square foot of earth. By that time, I was sweating and breathing hard. But I kept going.
My rage eased off, and I picked the weeds to catch my breath between attempts. As the wind poured off the mountain ridge above me, into the valley, it caught the scent of that fresh-turned spring dirt and filled the air. I took a breath, and suddenly, I knew who I was.
I was a farmer.
Now, on one hand, this is laughable. I was fourteen and the thing I hated most in the entire world was farming, haying, gardening and the care and keeping of animals. I dreamed of couture. I poured through every page in my gifted Lucky Magazine subscription (RIP to the best magazine ever created). I was a quintessential queer country kid who wanted nothing more than to leave the farm forever and go to the big city and become famous. I wanted to, quoting myself at this time, “die alone and surrounded by my books and papers”. I wanted to live in a brownstone and marry an old man who died and left me all his money. But as I sunk my pitchfork back into the earth and the smell of that rich black soil and sharp green bite of grass and weeds wafted over me, I knew, that regardless of what I did, I was a farmer. I could smell the soil of Alsace. I could smell the family farm in Red Bank Township. I knew it like nearly nothing I’ve ever known. Even then, I thought, oh these are not my memories, this is something in my blood. And my blood sang despite myself.
say it in a pan-atlantic accent, my ancestral home
say it in a Pittsburgh accent, my ancestral home
I wrote a book this year, but I have no idea how. I had a running start as I’ve been working on it for the last two years, but I hadn’t even come close to finishing a draft and this time I was re-writing from the start. While trying to finish a draft, I was dealing with the darkest, hardest situation I think I’ve ever gone through. You can survive a lot on your own, but when it’s your kids you’re trying to ferry out of the underworld, the stakes are somehow even higher, hope even harder to come by. I was only 12 weeks post-partum4 when I first went to court and we had to recess for his crying to be fed. Over the time where I’ve finished this draft we had court, therapy, hundreds of hours of phone calls, our finances were destroyed and I still had to hold down a demanding, full-time job. I have no recollection of how I wrote, but I have several recollections of crying that I’d never manage to write a book again while pecking away at my sentence or two before I fell asleep in exhaustion. Somehow, that worked. I finished the best draft of my life.
Now I’m onto revisions, having promised my agent a finished copy by the end of the summer, and life isn’t any lighter, any easier. If anything I crested the road we’ve been on and realized it was not ending, that it twisted for miles and miles more. That we might never be out until they all reached the age of eighteen. It’s been the most hopeless I have ever felt. And still I open my little document and stare at the pages I’m revising and I have no idea how I’ll manage or what good this will even be, but I sink my pitchfork into the dirt and turn.
You see, I am a farmer. I go out to the field everyday, rain, sun, sleet, hail, wind, drought, bugs, storms—it doesn’t matter, I’m out there. I touch my plants, the ground. I do it dead-eyed, half-asleep, wide awake, full of joy. Farming requires constant doing. Constant maintenance. Constant belief that the little acts matter, even if you have no proof of it. It also requires seasonality, and the way I work has always been in seasons. Farming is drudgery, and so to is the work of art. But my blood sings. I know who I am, there and maybe only there. I thought I escaped my ancestors, and they laugh at me because I still cultivate, plant and harvest because I must. It is the process, the labor, the life-cycle of it that is worth it to me. Some years I may sell my harvest and breathe a little easier, but for a lot of years recently I have had no crop wanted by the auction houses. I’ve gone home with my limp harvests and sat at the kitchen table grim-faced and trying to figure out how I’ll keep going on the barest of tools, the meanest of land. And yet, I can’t imagine doing anything else. This is my idea of a life well lived. I am my own under that sun.
So I go put on my hat and go out again.
A term coined by Kiowa author N. Scott Momaday, where memories are passed down genetically to the next generations.
“till” here is a noun for a tool, a rototiller. In the olden days, a plow.
“till“ here is a verb, for breaking or turning over the ground to create loose aerated soil suitable for planting
Only my older three are involved in this situation, but it’s been extra hard having a newborn when it happened.