This is definately one for the rehersal dinner

It's a beautiful spring here in Mayberry. Flowers are bloomin', birds are singin', new life is burgeoning everywhere. And the kindergarteners are learning about babies. Frog babies, chicken and duck babies, bunny babies.

(You parents in the room can see where this is going, right?)

Yep. Now they are curious about people babies. 

Aeron asks me, solemnly, "Mama? How do people babies get into their mama's tummy?" 

Oh, lord. I'm so not ready for this. "It's very complicated, sweetie. We'll talk about it later." I'm thinking, like, in 5 years or so. 

"Later, like in 10 minutes?" she asks. 

"No, some other day. When you are older." 

"I know how." pipes up Claire. "The mama keeps eating and eating and then the baby shows up."

I am a whiny, candyass wimp

I picked up "The Dirty Life" last Saturday, while Miles and I were on a anniversary getaway. It's a memoir, as the subtitle says, of farming, food and love. I finished it Sunday night, because I just couldn't put it down. Kristen Kimball writes of her life as she leaves a career as a travel writer, NYC (and her rent-controlled apartment!) to start a CSA in upstate New York with a farmer so idealistic, he doesn't believe in building a house using nails. Now, that's one hell of a leap of faith. 

Kimball describes, in picturesque, gory detail, the realities of running a farm. Yeah, it looks all bucolic driving past on the road, but running a farm means daily dealings with numerous varieties of animal shit, being at the mercy of the weather and the needs of those animals and the inescapable nature of death. Often, death you dealt with your own hands. 

Oh, and the work. Intense, physical, hard, astonishingly dirty work. Milking cows by hand as they do their best to kick you. Hauling buckets, harnessing draft horses, planting acres of potatoes in the dark, slinging bales of hay around, weeding 40 different kinds of vegetables with a hoe. Kimball reports incidents of being run over by a steer and knocked over and swarmed by hungry, biting pigs.

What could possibly be the compensation for such drudgery and grossness, I hear you ask? I can tell you in one word: food. Delicious, organic, I-grew-it-myself food. Kimball, a vegetarian for 13 years, tried her future husband's homemade pork sausage, had two helpings, and that was the end to any restrictions to her diet. She wallows in root vegetables that could make a grown man swoon, drinks maple sap straight for the bucket, glories in fresh milk and cream from a sloe-eyed Jersey cow named Delia.*

Now, comparing oneself to others seems to be a persistent trait in the human animal. We just can't help it. "Am I prettier than her?" or "Does he make more money than me?" or "Am I the worst dancer here?" It's a pretty useless hobby, when you think about it. What damn difference does it make if she is prettier than you? 

All that said, as I read this book, I still couldn't help but think that I am an absolutely useless, whiny human being who would die after one normal day of Kimball's life. I moan about how hard it is to keep a suburban house tidy, or how tired I am after a day of wrangling a couple of kindergarteners. Puh-leeze! This woman works herself to exhaustion every single day, and loves it. Really. Kimball swears she loves the dirt and the chores and working herself 'til she drops. The mud, and blood and sweat and gore seems to make her feel alive. The physicality of the sore muscles, the intense gratification of flavorful foods you produced yourself, are their own rewards. 

Something to envy.

*She loves the man who doesn't believe in nails, too.