Sometimes I like to think of the farm as my idea of perfection. I walk down the gravel path to the barn and think that right where I am is the place I’m meant to be, with chickens mulling through the grass and the lazy summer sun lingering westward in the sky. I wonder if anything could be more perfect than mid-July, eggplants and peppers and cherry tomatoes.
Sometimes, though, I’m hit with reminders that the farm is not all juicy strawberries and lavender breezes. Sometimes there are days like today, when I haul endless flats of beans up the hill to the compost pile, flats I spent hours seeding, just because it rained too much this season and there was no time to put them in the ground. And sometimes my skin burns and the mud won’t wash off my hands and there are so many weeds in the lettuce or the celery or the chard that it takes hours to pull them out, and the next day they seem to have sprung up again overnight.
It’s days like this that I realize the farm is not some kind of heaven on earth, that the sun doesn’t shine brighter here than other places, that the chickens don’t lay golden eggs and that the people here are still just people. I guess if perfection was something we strived for, we’d be working towards some unattainable goal. On days like today, the farm to me seems more like the leftover vegetables that nobody wants. They’re placed in a basket in the corner, underneath a painted sign- “Farm seconds: small, bruised, or blemished, but still perfectly okay.”
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