** Joelle Rudney’s Polenta (two dots above the e)
1 ½ cups cornmeal
1 cup cold h20
1 teaspoon salt
3 ½ – 4 cups boiling milk (can sub ½ milk, ½ h20 or soy)
Parmesan or any cheese really
butter

Boil milk
Combine cornmeal w/ cold h20 and salt and mash into a paste
Add past to boiling milk and lower heat, beat while cooking
Add hunk of butter, Parmesan and pepper…cook on low heat till it’s your preferred thickness

She managed to prepare a great chocolate nut coffee cake the night before, that everyone tore up with cheap champagne mimosas provided by Sophia and Eleni. I stuck mostly with Dalton’s citrus ice tea, so amazing that I had to tuck a bottle into my travel bag, knowing it would bring me great comfort later at the farm. Alyssa, Dalton, Artimus, CC, Jorge and the 230 Hancock street crew were all present for my timely departure. It was endearingly poetic how my two sweet roommates carried the animals out to the car and gave me my last hugs before I jumped in, waving goodbye while flipping on the windshield wipers and fanning off the condensation on the windows. It still surprises me how easy change really can be.

It rained for hours as I left the city behind me and climbed through the mountains with a fully packed old squeaky Volvo. It rained when I left Atlanta a couple of years ago. It was a rain that I will never forget. I had to stop under overhead passing roadways for temporary shelter from the heavy and hard sheets of rain through the cluster of thunderstorms on the east coast that day.

I arrived at the barn just before sun down on Sunday and learned first thing on Monday that Zucch, the Grindstone and the DeGraff family dog had taken his last long nap over the weekend. I found myself sighing deeply as I saw his stacked food and water bowls on the counter.
The week was full of hard and fulfilling work. I was growing anxious and processing my move and the changes in my life from small things like raising my face into a kiss as the mist fell on me here at the farm, rather than hiding and cowering away from the acid rain of the city to larger things like, thinking about and understanding the changing dynamics of friendships and roommates. I had a couple of days where I got a bit overwhelmed with the changes and how everything fit together, but by Friday afternoon, I was hit with clarity. I knew the bumps and stumbles would come, I just didn’t know what and when they would be. Adjustment is funny that way, in that it sneaks up on you, uninvited at all the wrong moments with all the wrong people.

The weekend was the saving grace of the week, full of continued hard work and a relaxing calmness. I thought about the week past and the hundreds of pounds of asparagus that we harvested, the old heirloom cucumber (oiee), hot pepper (kotchu) and lettuce (sangchu) seeds that I brought back from my grandmother’s garden in Korea eight years ago that I finally planted, the sprouting zinnias I started in the greenhouse, the cheese curd and 10000xxxx sharp cheddar cheese that Dick and I got as we cruised into Pulaski in his 1971 convertible, and the sharper, more wolf like smiles of the dogs just in a short weeks time. I sit and smile lightly now, chucking at how I am. I knew before that I wouldn’t lose my footing, and I am more forgiving now knowing that everyone has their bumps and stumbles every now and again.

I went to a workshop entitled Food Sovereignty North and South: People’s control over their own food, where an amazing panel discussion took place on the fourth floor of an English classroom. I saw handwritten posters of the rules of grammar and the count of Iambic Pentameter poetry. It felt like the smell of the first cut grass of the season. Oh so missed throughout a long winter season yet oh so familiar. I sat on the heels of my feet on the floor of the back room. Food sovereignty was more clearly defined as a just system that upheld the dignity of all those involved. I fell in love. I listened to people talk about agrarian reform and methods of protecting and redistributing natural resources and incredibly creative and practical methods of reorganizing food trade. I have learned from a very early age that land was a social entity and I have learned from the implications on cultures who have upheld that and cultures who have neglected to acknowledge that. Thomas Forster of the New School spoke and blew my mind. He is a local New York organizer and food policy teacher who is attending the recent discussions among interest groups, different countries, NGO’s, and the U.N, about local and global food policy and the U.S. Farm Bill. I was able to collect a tremendous amount of resources and tap into many new networks. I met Arthur Getcs, Director of Advocacy of the International Heifer Organization, who was working closely with Forster in the upcoming weeks. I remembered these issues being pertinent and present in the past conferences that I have attended, however the issue seemed more pressing now. Our food culture and politics is not about suggesting or casually supporting a more liberal lifestyle for those people who choose farmer’s markets and CSA’s. Politics now is about life and death, it is about losing your entire livelihood, losing your ability to keep your family together and losing your right to stay, work and live on your own land with your own people. I realized the urgency of the U.S. and global food crisis both in its policies and in its global culture and again, more than ten years later, I can feel that amazing feeling in my belly. That feeling where you know that even in this small classroom, jammed full with people standing, sitting and even on the floor, we were going to change our world. I had pulled out of activism and direct social justice work for many reasons, which I later learned were similar if not the same as some close friends who are also organizers. I switched gears and directed my attention and many years of life to direct client care and social work where the brutal trials of nonprofit culture and bureaucracy drove me to work full time waiting tables in the East Village while riding my bike every weekend either to the beach or through the Catskill Mountains in attempts to recover. It is amazing looking back now and seeing such a clear and organic path and evolution of my plans and experience to the farm that I am on now. Upstate in a badly insulated little camper, running an over two hundred share CSA program into the nearby counties and city of Syracuse with my dogs and cat. Not where I thought I would end up, but my friends certainly had more insight and were not surprised when I told them that I was moving onto an old organic farm.

The food conference really just woke up a part of me that has been not so much in hibernation, but a rather has been a coach on the sidelines, informing and directing my work and decisions, yet not really in the playing field. I am excited of the recent changes in my life and I become more resolved every day that this is exactly where I need to be right now.

After a while you learn the subtle difference
between holding a hand and chaining a soul.
And you learn that love doesn’t mean leaving
and company doesn’t mean security.
And you begin to learn that kisses aren’t contracts

With your head up and your eyes open
with the grace of a woman
not the grief of a child, you learn to build all your loads today
because tomorrows ground is too uncertain for plans.

And futures have a way of falling down in mid flight
And after a while you learn that even sunshine burns if you get too much
So, you plant your own garden and decorate your own soul, instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers.

And you learn that you really can endure
That you really are strong
And that you really do have worth
And you learn and you learn
With every goodbye you learn

I arrive to the open arms of my sweet CC and Dalton household. CC feeds me fish and miso gravy potpie and creole rice for dinner before we all casually walk and smoke with a hawaiian pipe to get wine for the night. Reisling and thick Cabernet. CC ticklishly writes korean words all over my left shin as we write night long lyrics into the long lost but found song book. CC and I spend some time outside smoking Bugler and talking about gender dynamics with boys and girls before we come in and sing Kimya Dawson songs. I spill red wine on a 100% nylon slip of CC’s and she gracefully combines peroxide and dishsoap to take out the stains. I am sitting in my pink underpants and bright green ruggedly cut tank top while I feverishly write tonight. They are here with me, yet I miss them. Dalton, sweet master of ad-libbing, sang some amazing songs with his banjo that CC wished we had somehow recorded. We settled on scratching as much as we could rememeber in the book and are forgiving to what we lost in the moment. “Tonight tonight!” Artimus is out at a show and we wish as a consensus that he was here. The windows are open yet Coon and Mr. Senior Juan wrestle. CC showed me how to post images onto my blog- thus the Russian lady breast poster that I will not remove as a tribute of my gratitude.
I was so talkative tonight about the actualities of farming and about creating intentional communities. I almost felt apologetic about how much I had on my mind in one weeks time. I have come to learn and create some solid ground on what is real and what is possible.

It rained and fell cool this afternoon. Tom who is known to work through a thunderstorm says “it’s not rain unless it washes my clothes.” I on the other hand, stayed inside and seeded some Genevese Basil, several varieties of peppers and learned how to run the sprinkler system in the green house. Sean, a mid forty-year old guy with years of North Carolina mountains under his belt, lives forty five minutes away with his wife and son. He is quiet, independently paced from anyone around and generously helpful. He was saying today how his son is a singer and his daughter is a dancer and Anthony, a nineteen year old farm boy to the very atom that makes up his small frame, playfully chimes in, “ and I’m a farmer!” He works on the most complicated diesel fuel engines on the farm, chases muskrats, rabbits and any other critter with his .45 rifle and always kindly lends me a helping hand. I love the stark contrast of his light blue eyes, baby light blonde hair and the softness in his tone with the dirt black grease that permanently stains his hands. He leans slightly forward when he walks and has a sweetness about him that is very comforting and I am everso thankful that he is on the farm.

Tom Law is another fellow with a legend unknown to me at this point. I wasn’t sure if he was Amish when I first met him, as he has a wickedly cut white beard and a tall lankiness about him that makes it easy to confuse him with our many Amish neighbors. He was teasing me yesterday about the culture shock I must be going through and how coming from the big New York City with all its big culture was gonna be hard, but he reassured me that “we have plenty of culture up here….Agri-culture!” He smiled wide and walked away chuckling at his own joke. People who are on farms, raised on farms, not only have an internal agricultural clock that will wake them up at three in the morning because they know that the broccoli was put out early and the woodchucks probably were eating them at that very moment, but they also have a genetically given farmers sense of humor along with an undescribable farmers sense of pride and nostalgia that seems to outdate, even themselves. I am overwhelmed by the virtue of it all….growing food and furthermore growing organic food for not only yourself but also for the people around you. It is breathtakingly admirable and I can’t imagine how any good person wouldn’t fall head over heels for a farmer.

The individual days are becoming insignificant and I am easing into a different time. I am lapsing gently into seasonal time….seeding, planting and harvesting, shifting what I do, on literally what the wind brings me. Ralph a chiropractor visits every Thursday to work on all the workers on the farm, a bartering arrangement with Dick and after his session, we loaded him up with Sungold tomato plants for his garden. It is an honest raw exchange of skill for food. It is funny over time, how I have come to really learn my body…stress builds in my jaw and in between my shoulder blades and hard working ache rest in my lower back, while extra weight rests in my feet and hips and sadness, in its subtle presence, lingers in my neck and shoulders. Being on the land and being able to feel my body and hear myself so much more, I am reassured how ready for all this I really am.

As this next chapter of my life unfolds, I find myself already thinking about what to do with all of this and although I am settled here for the season, I am excitedly anxious about what the fall will bring, what direction I will take and where I will go. As I am right now, it is not strange for me to think that I might find myself riding on the back of a whale to another continent, because anything is possible.

I work the greenhouse, moving big large metal seedling holders and realize just how out of shape I am as my left arm just about gives up on me just after the fifth load. My hands are rough already and despite trying my best to keep up with them, I find a gouge on my middle finger of my right hand, a child’s scrape on my left shin and a humdinger bruise with all its magical colors on my left thigh. I unpack and clean my shelter for the season, an old silver camper with wooden interior and porcelain sinks. I then build a fire pit just out the front door of the camper and put a dilapidated wooden table and some chairs out…in anticipation of my first company. I pause and smile, wondering what the season will bring and who my first company might be. I borrow a lighter from neighbors across the street so I can light the stove and take out some pieces of carpet from the bathroom and front step. Who in gods name would do such thing as to put carpet anywhere near a camper?

I manage to have my first scream on the farm, when I began hopping rocks and logs to avoid a swampy corner behind the camper, only to have several toads frighteningly flee and in their staggered sudden movement, I scream….like a girl… in a cliché Hollywood movie. I jump up and laugh hysterically at myself out loud and tell the little buggers I am sorry to have disturbed them. I can feel the night air making its way in and feel it getting colder. Wasps, black flies and moths take their turns to greet me, so I thank them but really only hope that we don’t become the best of friends.

I make my first farm cooked meal from some lettuce, chives, and garlic tops from the green house and make a small tossed salad. I sauté some sliced beets with pepper, garlic and onion and toss it over the green salad with just a splash of soy sauce. As I finish my slow cooked red lentil chili for dinner, I lick my lips and sigh thinking about the dessert that I will have another day….something with maple syrup perhaps?
The stars begin to appear as I make my first farm camp fire. The quietness is overwhelming but I am relieved by the comfort and company that the crackling of the fire gives me and breathe a deep breath of solitude…the peaceful, comfortable kind…the kind you need, even when you are with someone you love.