Have you ever had your wisdom teeth removed? If this has happened to you, and you received painkillers to deal with the aftermath, and you badly needed the painkillers and you took them every four hours (to the minute), did you ever forget to take them when the requisite amount of time had passed? Do you remember feeling entirely fine, splayed on the living room sofa watching reruns of the x-files while you spooned protein shakes into your useless mouth, and then suddenly without any warning, realized that your whole mouth was actually throbbing and you were in an acute amount of ungodly pain and you needed another painkiller NOW?
If this has never happened for you, at least now you have an accurate description of the last few months of my life, minus the actual painkillers.
I’m talking about feeling really good, feeling at peace, above water, motivated, interested, optimistic, and just feeling really okay– and then realizing all at once that you are batshit loco from the excruciating pain that has been slowly throbbing upwards that you were too in la-la land to notice.
Today two crewmembers told me that they think I’m not nice and I talk down to them.
***
I am tired.
The muscles in my lower back have reawakened to farm work like bees after a long hibernation; moving slow and surprised to find they still exist. They are, however, making up for lost time. I am now acutely aware of my lower back muscles.
The heavy, grunty, sweaty part of farming began again this week. The plus side to working for a farm education program is that I get to grow vegetables with youth, but I also get to spend three months of the year very far away from this kind of work, and, because I’m on salary, I don’t have to worry about how I’m going to eat. The downside is that when the work begins again in the spring, I have been sitting on my ass for twelve weeks, I feel like cold spaghetti, and I want to invest in the heavy machinery that will do this work twice as fast and twice as effectively. You know, or die.
I know eventually the soreness and full-body shock will wear off and I will once again revel in digging hole after hole after hole for tomatoes, cultivating old and new beds, and showing off my burgeoning farm guns while I carry random shit around for other people. In a month or so, I will contentedly fall into feeling so tired I cannot think, because it is the only way I know how to relax, and I will collapse onto my bed and fight the urge to sleep with my farm clothes on, and I will sleep better and deeper than I have slept all winter, when I spent my days looking at seed catalogues and lesson plans and facebook.
At my first real farm job at Farm Girl Farm, we worked 72 hour weeks. We weeded, planted, and harvested (and most other gerunds you could think of) until lunch, when we would shovel as much food as possible into our mouths, down another cup of coffee, and go back to work until sundown. At the end of the day I would have barely enough energy to hold my right foot to the gas as I drove home. When I am not sore in the ‘you don’t use your body enough shame on you’ kind of way, feeling tired is like coming home.
***
How did I get here?
How did my resume become loaded with phrases like “proficiency in greenhouse propagation” and “extensive knowledge of heirloom tomatoes suitable for cultivation in the Pacific Northwest”?
When did this stop being weird?
If I were actually a farmer, wouldn’t I be growing something right now instead of sipping a latte and writing on this legal pad?
Today I prepared a bed for planting with three youth in my program. We whisked the bed (4′x35′) with digging forks for over an hour. We pulled out grass and poplar roots, dug out rocks, and aerated the soil (by hand) to a depth of eighteen inches. We dug until all of the blisters our palms had grown tore open under our garden gloves. After we unloaded eight wheelbarrow loads of fresh, new compost onto the soil, raked it in, shaped, and smoothed the bed, we stood back to audibly admire our handiwork.
“I hate digging”, one person said, “but this bed looks HOT”.
We took a break to have a snack (thanks for the capris sun pacific cooler and chocolate pudding snak paks, emergency feeding program!!!), and we ended the day by transplanting in the garden for the first time.
“This is how you pull a seedling out of its tray”, I demonstrated. “Turn the tray over, squeeze the cell, and pull the plant from the base of the stem, shake, and pull”. The baby bok choi lept into my palm and the youth let out a collective, irrepressible ‘ooh’.
I worked next to one young man on our end of the bed. He watched as I collected half a dozen bok choi from the tray while he struggled to free his first. “Damn, you’re fast”, he moaned.
Three years ago I stood in a greenhouse for the first time, watching farmer Laura pluck tiny lettuce babies from their tray. When I attempted to copy her movements for the first time, I fatally maimed the first three seedlings I groped for.
When we moved outside two days later to transplant large, sturdy tomato seedlings, I spent the entire time staring at Laura’s backside: we would start side-by-side in two rows, and she would speed down the row, leaving a perfect trail of perky, new tomato plants in her wake as I struggled to find a transplanting rhythm: dig a hole, sprinkle the compost, grab the plant, loosen the roots, plant the plant, cover the hole, crawl eighteen inches forward, and begin again. I would reach around to find that the tray of tomatoes had fallen too far behind, or my rows would be crooked, or I would run out of compost, and I would stop for a minute to reset myself and begin again to the sight of Laura ambling down the path on the other side of me to begin her next row. I spent the entire summer sighing and whining “wait for me” and convincing myself to just finish one more row and not quit my job.
“It gets easier,” I explained to him. “I’ve had a lot of practice”.
His frustration was palpable.
“Plus,” I added, “I have really small hands. That probably makes it easier. Don’t worry; you’ll get it.”
written at all different times
Tags: aggravation, bok choi, cultivation, education, farming, gardening, relaxation
