I became friends with our Mimosa tree sometime during the pandemic when the world slowed down long enough for us to ponder things like the way the sun angles itself on the front porch at golden hour. I became friends with a tree at the same time I attached myself to a volunteer pumpkin vine that spread itself right outside our front door, which is actually the side door of our home. Instead of ripping the plant from the ground and tossing it in the nearby compost bucket, I let it unfurl across a small patch of grass until it bore fruit because that felt a little like hope when the world was on fire. When my city-dwelling friends reported an apocalyptic landscape––boarded up businesses and empty streets, and the whine of ambulances racing across the city to cart thousands of people to ICU beds and chilled rooms for the dead, I remember being so thankful that we lived on a farm with wide open spaces and room to breathe. I remember watching the mimosa tree in awe as it swelled into its summer splendor. The fan-like blossoms, itty bitty pink mohawks, spread from the top of the tree to the tips of its branches. I stood under the tree barefoot trying to capture its blossoms on camera, the sun casting gold all over its shape.
In her book Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer tells the story of Nanabozho, the Original Man. She writes,
“Nanabozho was counseled by many plants too, who shared gifts, and learned to treat them always with the greatest respect. After all, plants were here first on earth and have had a long time to figure things out. Together, all the beings, both plants and animals taught him what he needed to know.”
For the first time, I felt kinship with a tree, and willingly entered into relationship with it. I told people that the tree was my friend, without irony. To soak in its beauty was medicine. Fun fact: mimosa blossoms and bark are actual medicine known for tempering anxiety and depression. Albizia julibrissin1 is a literal mood lifter. I didn’t know that when we first encountered each other. For me, the mimosa tree kept time when days blended into months blended into years. It reminded me that beauty is inevitable in the natural world as is rest, death, and rebirth. The tree conveyed that time passes, wars rage, and the world is full of grief. We grieve over and over again, and yet we bloom and create in spite of it all because that is what we are made to do. Pandemic times brought a visceral presence into focus. We were all finding ways to be in place. I vowed to never lose sight of the beauty right in front of us.
But time and the obligations of being a human under capitalism means we have to do certain things to live, like keep the lights on and the water running. We have to run to the store for more toilet paper and pay taxes and politely answer emails. As a business owner, it means financially supporting the people who choose to work with us. My husband and I make a million tiny decisions a day, juggling the demands of three businesses we created out of our passions, which is its own privilege and gift.
I am grateful for haphazardly falling into a life that allows me to work autonomously in the vocations of my choice, with the people I want to spend my days with, in a place where we can finally root ourselves. But the work, the work, the work, can be blinding. I see the mimosa tree tsk-tsking its pretty pink head. Don’t forget where you come from. Don’t forget what we are here to do.
When I first moved to North Carolina, I was two and half(ish) years without alcohol and drugs, a nearly 30-year old woman who was just beginning to settle into her skin as a sober, honorable woman. I was on the cusp of learning who I really was after flailing for most of my twenties, trying to wrest satisfaction outside of myself, slipping in and out of identities, friend groups, and relationships with an effort that might have been better applied to building a future for myself. I moved here with loose plans, with communications work at a digital marketing firm that allowed me to work remotely. I decided I would be an adult woman, a person who went to networking events and socialized well, and woke up early to attend marketing panels and lunch & learns. But the steady work I brought to North Carolina dried up and the rent needed to be paid and my partner at the time was struggling to make ends meet with his own business, and so I returned to restaurant work, something I had relied upon for nearly a decade: first as an aimless party girl, then as an aspiring career woman, and in that moment as a person who needed an income.
The beauty of restaurant work at dinner-only establishments is that I had my days. When I was drinking and partying, I used those daytime hours to sleep until my next shift, nurse a hangover, or maybe not sleep at all! But in this new chapter, I woke up early and ventured out into the world. I resolved to plug into my creative passions–– to write for the sake of writing, grow a backyard garden and visit farmers markets, take pictures, and let my whims lead my way. I started a blog called The Sunnyside Up (lol at this sweet little name), which I referred to as my exercise in happy living. I bought cookbooks and baked cakes and read food blogs and the local alternative weekly, a paper where I eventually had my own column. I volunteered at the Urban Ministry Center, counseling houseless individuals, guiding them to services they needed whether an ID card or a detox center. I gave myself permission to explore. In those days, I remember distinctly wishing for a life where I could use my brain and body in equal measure. I longed for a creative life and practice, where I could delve into a writing life, but also enjoy the fruits of physical labor. I think that’s what attracted me to the work of farming. It appeared an honest day’s work, a nobility in nurturing land and soil and feeding one’s community.
With each passing year, I inched closer to the life I wanted— first as a food writer, then as a food writer and burgeoning farm worker (a gig born of a hopeless crush), then as a food writer and sometimes baker, and now as a baker and writer and co-owner of Old North Farm and farmer’s wife. People might read this, or peer through the narrow lens of social media, and say “What a life!” And it is.
But sometimes, the work is blinding, the cash flow ain’t right, bakery sales at the hometown farmers market tank, and we stay baffled at how we can work so hard and make so little progress. Sometimes the house needs a new roof at the same time the washer and dryer bite the dust at the same time the car battery dies and an outstanding tax bill arrives. Sometimes we stay up late thinking about how we can pivot, adjust, add, subtract, continue, survive. We don’t have children, but this life, these businesses, these people require full-time care. A friend likened this early stage of business ownership to having a perpetual newborn.
After our market shift the other week, which began at 3am and ended around 12:30 in the afternoon, we dropped our market boxes at the house and took off to a Juneteenth celebration in neighboring Kingstown. After a proper summer hot dog, the sounds of Luther Vandross caressing our ears, we walked back to the car to head home. Jamie looked at me in earnest and asked, “How did we get here? Did you drive?”
I laughed because I was that exhausted, too. “Yes, I drove,” I said and rubbed the small of his back.
We went home and napped hard before getting up to meet friends for the evening. A Saturday night hang is a feat, by the way. We feel goopy in our bodies but always appreciate the time with people we love.
Sunday came and I read an essay by Jodi Rhoden that talked of sensible and human things, and of the recent wildfire smoke that plagued the northeast. She beautifully writes:
“When the fires come, let them find me here, in these gardens, with these goats, with these people, with these cherry trees. When the fires come, let them find me writing. Let them find me making pies to share.”
When I read that passage, a quote from Annie Dillard appeared in my brain: “How we spend our days is of course how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour and that one is what we are doing.”
I asked my husband, “Are we conscious of our days, or are we just letting them pass us by?”
I don’t want to forget the times I’d drive on rural roads and imagine you out there somewhere, longing for you. I want to remember the times I’d abandon my freelance work to spend entire days with you in the field. I want to remember the years we spent in a shitty rental, dreaming of a piece of land to call our own. I want to remember our Friday nights, just you and me and some grimy UK drum and bass, making quiche filling and assembling handpies and packing for market and eating late night quesadillas. I want to remember the way you greet me each morning when I stumble out of bed, forever chasing my sleep debt. I want to cherish the way we bicker over menu creation and kitchen organization and how you tell me that a mixing bowl is not a storage container. Don’t let me forget the rhythms, though incessant, of work and work and work followed by a single lazy day, the smell of rain on the farm, and breakfast hash with squash and potatoes.
I thought of the mimosa tree. I want that visceral presence, even in the days/weeks/months that blow past like a telephone pole through the window of a moving car. I want to remember our morning coffees and the quiet of our home on a Sunday morning. I want to appreciate the beauty of the unkempt garden we failed to plant but bloomed anyway. Bless you perennials and the riot of magenta and salmon colored dahlia blooms. Bless the unruly patch of anise hyssop with its fragrant purple buds beckoning the bees to its anise-scented forest. Bless my husband in his white tank top and garden gloves clipping the weeds that have grown taller than us in that feral front garden. I want to always remember that this was love. That this is what we are here to do.
The Mimosa Tree is a native Chinese tree brought to the US in 1745 and cultivated. Though it’s used for ornamental purposes, it is invasive and will spread when given the opportunity.
ON THE FARM: Summer is here, though it rained on the solstice making a somewhat anticlimactic day of the longest day of the year. Then it rained for an entire week. The earth is green and lush now, and the sun will supercharge it all and keep the team running through August.
We’re getting ready for our first summer supper, a five-course meal prepared by Jamie and me on July 22. We’ll showcase the full breadth of summer on the farm. Tickets are available for anyone who would like to join.
WHAT’S GROWING: Tomatillos, tomatoes, peppers, french melons, summer lettuces, carrots, basil (lots!), squash to our ears, cucumbers, and weeds! Okra is on the way.
WHAT WE’RE EATING: A gorgeous hominy stew with sprouting cauliflower, summer squash, and tomatillos. Jamie grew a new tomatillo variety this year, the Malinalco, which is not round like the tomatillos I know. It’s shaped like a pepper and yellow. The hominy came from Willis Farms in neighboring Belwood. They grow and mill corn and still press sorghum the old way.
Cold salad season is here too. Give us all the tomato, cucumber, and onion salads with red wine vinegar and olive oil. My favorite part is drinking the last bits of juice leftover once the salad is gone. For a potluck, I made a fun trifle with all the bakery leftovers— chamomile cream layered with blueberries, raspberries, and salty cornmeal crumble.
Gorgeous! Just gorgeous. ❤️
This entry was a beautiful initiation to my day.