For the last month and a half I've been living on an organic farm in Stockbridge, MA, a small town about 10 minutes from New York, 20 from Connecticut and 45 from New Hampshire. After a few chilly months working as a hostess in Cambridge, I remembered my WWOOF-USA membership, made a few quick phone calls and scurried my way to the New England countryside. Before I moved to Maui I joined WWOOF-USA, a network of organic farmers and volunteers looking for opportunities to learn about sustainable agriculture, hoping to find an opportunity on the island. It came to naught, until a couple of months ago when I was desperate to get out of the city. Katherine was equally desperate for help on her farm in Stockbridge and had just joined the WWOOF network herself. After leaving many messages at potential farms, most of which went un-returned, I talked to Katherine, the owner of Solid Rock Farm and an industrious horse-riding instructor with a whirlwind of information and energy.
I had just left work and gotten off a two and a half-hour bus ride from Boston when I first met Katherine and was met with an embracing chaos. Katherine graciously invited me into her home where everything seemed to be moving or changing hands constantly. Piles of horse, cat, chicken and dog food lived in a corner in the kitchen below beaming photographs of her children, siblings and parents. Packages of more food and grain were stuffed into old-fashioned tin garbage cans, "to keep the rats out!" Katherine said with a smile and kept going. Horses... horse trinkets, horse paintings, horse statues peaked from beneath stacks of paper, the windowsills, and the magnets of the fridge. The counters were covered in pots and pans, packages, papers and dishes. The laundry room was filled with riding pads and girths, towels, and winter clothes tossed aside as soon as the weather warmed up. She apologized for the clutter in the kitchen as we passed through, explaining that her mother came and reorganized her kitchen about once every five years. As Katherine detailed various projects on the farm to me I caught glimpses of vibrant finches eating at the bird feeder in her window. She kept chatting energetically as she led me through her dining room, which had been turned into a temporary greenhouse. She handed me a clipboard to take notes on as I scrambled to keep up with her. I had barely been in the door five minutes but I was already beginning feel overwhelmed and a looming sense that Katherine's ambitions would require colossal strength, patience and motivation to tackle.
As Katherine led me around the farm I couldn't help but notice the nostalgic charm of the land and the barns, the main house, older than the United States itself. In 1762, Larry Lynch bought 55 acres of land from a Mohican whose Christian name was Solomon. Together Solomon and Larry Lynch worked the land for an unrecorded number of years. Part of the main house of Solid Rock Farm is still the original built in 1762. It's multiple fireplaces and shuttered windows evoke images of winters spent collecting firewood hidden beneath several feet of snow and candle-lit reading sessions next to dying embers. The new part of the house, built in the 1950's isn't nearly as well insulated and hasn't weathered the decades as gracefully as the original homestead. Solid Rock Farm sits on 13.5 of the original Lynch acreage, which was dissected when the Mass turnpike was built in 1952.
As we walked around the property Katherine introduced me to all of the animals: 12 chickens, which turned out to be roosters predominantly much to our surprise, two rescued miniature Falabella ponies named Clair and Luna, a grey cat named Max, two geckos, two cockatiels, a canary, and an aquarium of tadpoles. Later during my stay we would acquire two dogs, Remi and Kona, a morbidly obese tabby named Calvin and another rescued pony, a mustang mare named Misty. Sometimes while working out in the garden I would point to a strange bug or grub or worm I had never seen and Katherine would collect it into one of her plastic reptile containers and tell a story about it. Then she would keep it in her makeshift classroom with food and water for a day or two just so that everyone could get a good look at it and learn it before she released it back into the wild. That's what she did when I saw my first cocoon and when two little girls stumbled upon an injured Cecropia moth on freshly mowed grass. I had never seen anything so small and majestic at the same time. The moth laid eggs. Katherine let the moth go and now its baby caterpillars are leaving droppings all over the classroom table, ballooning in size every day.
Walking around the property was refreshing after being in the house, and as we went Katherine had me jot down notes of the various things that needed to be done. Eventually, Katherine brought me back inside and showed me the room that I would be staying in once I moved. The room had a couple of boxes and a chest-of-drawers that was falling apart and filled with uncased VHS movies. It also had a bathroom, piled high with boxes and clothes and clutter. The bathroom, she said, hadn't been used in 20 years, which is exactly how long she'd been living there. It hadn't been working when her family moved in, so they just used it as storage. She brought me to the room next to mine and opened the door and out leaked the stench of juvenile body odor and stale alcohol. I then knew that it was her youngest son, Lincoln's room. He was 20, absent, and had an insatiable appetite for beer. She pointed to the mess inside reproachfully but with a smile. We continued on. The weight of the clipboard dangling in hand, already with an extensive list of would-be projects I would tackle, began to feel too heavy. The prospect of living with rodents and a strange alcoholic I had never met in the midst of this chaos unnerved me. To top it off, Katherine had to leave for several hours and left me with the list to brainstorm while she was away. When she got back, I was gone.
The upside to working at Solid Rock was that it was right around the corner from my boyfriend, Julian's house. This I didn't know until I got there. But we decided after, that it would be best for me to seek an opportunity elsewhere. The next week in the city, I halfheartedly tried to find another living situation. Boston had everything you would need in a city, but to me the streets were grim and the noises and rough scents overwhelmed my senses. I hadn't found a community yet the way I had so easily in Maui. It wasn't my city. I kept thinking about the farm with its pandemonious insides and all of that land that needed to be tilled and all the people Katherine desperately needed to get her farm up and running. My talents went unused at the new restaurant I was working at but I recognized that with a little adaptation on my part, I could blaze my own path and learn something new in the process. So after my final apartment prospect fell through and my reluctant declination to play as concert mistress for a local orchestra, I nervously decided to give Solid Rock Farm my undivided attention for the summer.
A week after my introduction to Solid Rock Farm, Julian and I drove down the Pike with my mattress and box spring haphazardly tied on top for four hours. More seasoned movers honked and signaled us along the way as my mattress lifted dangerously like a sail in the wind from the roof of Julian's Jeep. We joked about the challenges waiting for me on the farm and about Katherine's mystery son. Once we got there I raced to my new room to shuffle things around to make room for my things but the room was bare. When I opened the bathroom, the clutter that had been piled high only a week before was gone. Next to the commode you could see a quaint porcelain sink and a large claw foot tub. Everything worked. Excited and confused, I ran to find Katherine.
"You didn't have to do that," I expressed. "That was really generous."
"Well," she smiled, almost giggling, "We really need you, and I really believe that you can't outgive God."
And despite the numerous challenges that I've faced and we've faced since my upheaval and arrival, Katherine has proven that to me over and over and over again.
I had just left work and gotten off a two and a half-hour bus ride from Boston when I first met Katherine and was met with an embracing chaos. Katherine graciously invited me into her home where everything seemed to be moving or changing hands constantly. Piles of horse, cat, chicken and dog food lived in a corner in the kitchen below beaming photographs of her children, siblings and parents. Packages of more food and grain were stuffed into old-fashioned tin garbage cans, "to keep the rats out!" Katherine said with a smile and kept going. Horses... horse trinkets, horse paintings, horse statues peaked from beneath stacks of paper, the windowsills, and the magnets of the fridge. The counters were covered in pots and pans, packages, papers and dishes. The laundry room was filled with riding pads and girths, towels, and winter clothes tossed aside as soon as the weather warmed up. She apologized for the clutter in the kitchen as we passed through, explaining that her mother came and reorganized her kitchen about once every five years. As Katherine detailed various projects on the farm to me I caught glimpses of vibrant finches eating at the bird feeder in her window. She kept chatting energetically as she led me through her dining room, which had been turned into a temporary greenhouse. She handed me a clipboard to take notes on as I scrambled to keep up with her. I had barely been in the door five minutes but I was already beginning feel overwhelmed and a looming sense that Katherine's ambitions would require colossal strength, patience and motivation to tackle.
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| The front of the homestead from the "L" garden |
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| Katherine's daughter Chantal with the two Falabellas |
Walking around the property was refreshing after being in the house, and as we went Katherine had me jot down notes of the various things that needed to be done. Eventually, Katherine brought me back inside and showed me the room that I would be staying in once I moved. The room had a couple of boxes and a chest-of-drawers that was falling apart and filled with uncased VHS movies. It also had a bathroom, piled high with boxes and clothes and clutter. The bathroom, she said, hadn't been used in 20 years, which is exactly how long she'd been living there. It hadn't been working when her family moved in, so they just used it as storage. She brought me to the room next to mine and opened the door and out leaked the stench of juvenile body odor and stale alcohol. I then knew that it was her youngest son, Lincoln's room. He was 20, absent, and had an insatiable appetite for beer. She pointed to the mess inside reproachfully but with a smile. We continued on. The weight of the clipboard dangling in hand, already with an extensive list of would-be projects I would tackle, began to feel too heavy. The prospect of living with rodents and a strange alcoholic I had never met in the midst of this chaos unnerved me. To top it off, Katherine had to leave for several hours and left me with the list to brainstorm while she was away. When she got back, I was gone.
The upside to working at Solid Rock was that it was right around the corner from my boyfriend, Julian's house. This I didn't know until I got there. But we decided after, that it would be best for me to seek an opportunity elsewhere. The next week in the city, I halfheartedly tried to find another living situation. Boston had everything you would need in a city, but to me the streets were grim and the noises and rough scents overwhelmed my senses. I hadn't found a community yet the way I had so easily in Maui. It wasn't my city. I kept thinking about the farm with its pandemonious insides and all of that land that needed to be tilled and all the people Katherine desperately needed to get her farm up and running. My talents went unused at the new restaurant I was working at but I recognized that with a little adaptation on my part, I could blaze my own path and learn something new in the process. So after my final apartment prospect fell through and my reluctant declination to play as concert mistress for a local orchestra, I nervously decided to give Solid Rock Farm my undivided attention for the summer.
A week after my introduction to Solid Rock Farm, Julian and I drove down the Pike with my mattress and box spring haphazardly tied on top for four hours. More seasoned movers honked and signaled us along the way as my mattress lifted dangerously like a sail in the wind from the roof of Julian's Jeep. We joked about the challenges waiting for me on the farm and about Katherine's mystery son. Once we got there I raced to my new room to shuffle things around to make room for my things but the room was bare. When I opened the bathroom, the clutter that had been piled high only a week before was gone. Next to the commode you could see a quaint porcelain sink and a large claw foot tub. Everything worked. Excited and confused, I ran to find Katherine.
"You didn't have to do that," I expressed. "That was really generous."
"Well," she smiled, almost giggling, "We really need you, and I really believe that you can't outgive God."
And despite the numerous challenges that I've faced and we've faced since my upheaval and arrival, Katherine has proven that to me over and over and over again.
So good to hear about your journey Shari and so proud of you for continuing to take steps for a more rewarding life everyday. You are an inspiration. All the best to you and I LOVE the hair video :)
ReplyDeleteIt's Wanda btw
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