Tuesday, June 12, 2012

Dahling I love you, but give me park avenue

Day 10

Today I've consumed mass-produced cranberry juice, mass-produced seltzer water (not even Poland Spring, which is a cheat, but seems local), and leftover Indian food from a restaurant I am certain gets its supplies from Sysco. And, I totally made a zombie noise this morning as I picked a pair of socks off the floor.

I'm a hypocrite.

cows
I know people can live exclusively on locally grown and raised produce and livestock. I'm not one of those people. I have no interest in raising chickens for their eggs or turning my backyard into a vegetable garden. I don't want a milking cow or goat. I don't need pigs mucking up the backyard. It's just poop. It's day after day of cleaning up poop.

I can, however, make smarter choices about what foods I purchase and consume. This is about making small changes, along the lines of parking in the farthest parking spot from the grocery store to get in a little extra legwork. And, buying bread from the bakery and fish from the...fishery?

I run into trouble with meat. Curtis Custom Meats in Warren, Maine, is a local favorite, but it's a bit of a drive and, to be honest, it scares me a little. Actually, now that I think about it, unless a butcher has an open glass storefront on Main Street with a jolly Sam in a white apron behind a giant glass counter, I'm probably going to be a little scared. Add a huge barn and a Norman Bates house, and I'm downright terrified. I think I'll put my husband in charge of the meat.

That's what she said.

Moving on.

When I was in college, my boyfriend kept a small farm in Bradford with some friends. They had a Jersey cow for milk; ducks and pigs for meat; two soon-to-be-steak baby bulls; a goat to keep them on their toes about fencing; and some sheep for god knows what reason. They had turkeys and I think I vaguely remember chickens too.

That damn cow had to be milked twice a day, every single day. Then the pigs' stalls had to be cleaned--they had a 400-lb mama pig and a litter of mini pigs, all of which smelled like bacon and were super freaking cute. Next, the various fowl had to be fed. After breakfast, we'd fix fencing or repair some type of machinery or stack wood--why is there always wood and why does it always need to be stacked? That, and bricks. There's always a pile of bricks at these places.

A good portion of the day seemed to be spent getting the baby bulls back into whatever pen they had escaped from. More than once, the fellas would come home to find a giant black ornery f*cker in the middle of the driveway staring down the headlights of the pickup truck. I blamed the goats.

Once, while boyfriend and his roommates were away, I watched the farm for a few days. My memory has them sailing off to the Caribbean or skiing out West, but it's probably more accurate to say they were at a farming symposium in Vermont.

farm fresh or tick central?
I decided to attend the symphony in Bangor and I was forced to drive the 45 minutes back to the farm in a terrible ice storm because the cow needed to be milked. In my haste and due to my relative inexperience with driving, I drove off the icy highway into the median strip at about 50 miles per hour. I was fine. The car, however, was missing a wing and was considered totaled.

I just don't fit in at a farm
I got a ride back to downtown Orono with a statie (Go Troop E!) and had to call a friend to come get me and drive me back out to the farm. That friend did me a big favor by getting out of bed in some of the worst weather we'd seen all winter. Even now, when someone asks me for a difficult favor, I draw on that memory before I say yes. I was a selfish little prat in college and though I can't repay that particular friend, I can certainly repay the cosmos or the universe or...aw hell. I try to be a nice person because someone was nice to me.

It was that weekend, however, that I realized I should come clean about my feelings regarding the farming lifestyle with my critter of a boyfriend who was about to receive a degree in sustainable agriculture.

We broke up. Then we got back together. Rinse. Repeat. Rinse. Repeat. These days, you might see that same critter of a man driving to the butcher for me because we ended up getting married. Twenty years later, he's traded in his poopy Carhart trousers for fishy Simms pants but he's still good with the animals. I've traded in the symphony for art openings but I still love music. Farms? Still gross.

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