This October was one of the busiest months, in the sense of pure physical work, of my whole life. Along with being pitchforked into a sudden home redecorating project, one of my sisters and I got part-time jobs at a local farm and pumpkin patch, working several days a week picking pumpkins and gourds, cutting cornstalks, and a variety of other outdoor tasks. I didn’t get very much writing done this month. But I didn’t find it time wasted; on the contrary, I think the mental break and just taking time to absorb new impressions did me good. Working with your hands outdoors, especially if the work is new to you, has a curious way of starting new wheels turning in your mind and making you contemplate all the different angles of what you’re doing. I scribbled a lot in my journal and pondered a lot of ideas both light and serious, and these are a few of the things on which I pondered.

– 1 –

There ought to be a statue of a pioneer farmer in every town from Maine to Missouri.

I thought a lot about my New England pioneer ancestors back in the spring when I was breaking ground for some new beds in my vegetable garden, and working in a farm field brought those thoughts back with even greater force. Having experienced how much physical labor is involved in harvesting vegetable crops even with the assistance of motors and machinery, it’s absolutely mind-boggling to me to contemplate the first settlers of New England (and then westward) clearing dense forests and breaking untouched rocky soil with only hand tools and the aid of horses and oxen, and turning it into cultivated farmland. The average American probably never thinks much about this, and probably even fewer have a real conception of what it was like, since relatively few nowadays have ever done farm labor even in a modern concept. If more people had some personal experience of tilling the soil, perhaps we would have a better understanding of how to celebrate holidays commemorating our forbears.

– 2 –

Pick-your-own is for city folks. I can say this absolutely without malice because I grew up in an enthusiastic pick-your-own family and have loved every minute of it. But picking on a large scale gives you some new perspectives. After picking many, many bushels of pumpkins and gourds, I don’t feel the desire to make a separate special trip out into the pumpkin patch to select some for my own living-room; at that point I’m happy to select them out of a bushel basket. Especially considering I picked a lot of them anyway.

Put it this way: when you pick and cook something you grew in your own vegetable garden, you feel a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction in reaping the fruits (well, okay, the vegetables) of your own labor—and also the slightly magical quality of being able to produce in your own backyard things that our culture is accustomed to getting off a grocery-store shelf. I think pick-your-own gives people some of that feeling of being closer to the soil and the satisfaction of carrying something home from the field themselves, with the rougher edges of dirt and sweat and prickly vines rubbed off the experience. It makes me wonder whether the popularity of pick-your-own means that deep down, even the most confirmed suburbanites have that instinct of wanting to be closer to the soil, if only for a few minutes, no matter what lifestyle they were brought up to.

– 3 –

Around the middle of my second day on the job, before I’d really adjusted to the harder work than I was accustomed to, I briefly considered becoming a subscriber to the philosophy that a woman’s place is in the kitchen.

Okay, I’m kidding. I’m good in the kitchen, but I like being outdoors too. But seriously, I found it amusing that in the era of women’s liberation, there’s nothing unusual in a petite five-foot-three woman doing manual labor. But then I realized I was looking at this idea backwards. Any sweeping feminist assertion that women didn’t get to work alongside men before the suffragette era is just plain silly, because women from agrarian families and societies have been working in the fields all the way back to Biblical times (see the Book of Ruth).

(Alternate version: I now know why old novels always describe peasant women as being strong as a horse.)

– 4 –

I found myself thinking one day, while cutting cornstalks to make the bundles that decorate your front porch or your mailbox, about how many acres of farmland nowadays are devoted entirely to growing pumpkins, gourds, and corn for decorative purposes, instead of actually growing food. Don’t get me wrong: I adore natural autumn decorations, always have, and I think it’s awesome that family farms can take advantage of the market for those decorations to make a living (and many of them do sell summer vegetables in season as well). A million times better to see a farm raising corn and pumpkins for decoration than to see it chopped up and sold for an ugly, soulless housing development. But it is still interesting to think about how much less farmland than formerly, in the northeastern part of the country in particular, is used for growing food. There are small organic farms beginning to multiply in some New England states, which I think is an excellent thing; and I hope a trend toward healthy locally-grown food continues to grow.

– 5 –

Working hard gives you a healthy appetite. And when I say appetite, I don’t mean a nebulous feeling you get around mealtime that indicates you should eat something or you’ll feel rotten later—I mean a real, vigorous, growling appetite of the kind one remembers from childhood, and which makes everything seem to taste better. I’ve noticed, interestingly, that as long as I eat a decent breakfast, being physically active in the morning actually makes me far less likely to have a drop in blood-sugar later in the day, even if I’m ravenously hungry by lunchtime or eat my lunch a little late.

– 6 –

It’s amazing how much more you can accomplish when you don’t care how dirty you get. In fact, on a farm this attitude is necessary if you’re going to accomplish anything at all. Clasping a muddy potted plant to your heart requires much less effort than holding it out stiffly away from you to avoid the wet and the dirt. Wearing good sturdy boots and tramping straight through the mud eliminates vast amounts of time and thought that you’d otherwise be devoting to looking carefully where you place your feet.

(As I remarked to my sister one day while we were tossing wilted plants on a compost pile, your average child would love a farm job: you get to throw things and get dirty.)

– 7 –

It is, indeed, a truth most truly acknowledged that everything is grist to a writer’s mill. Since so many of my stories have a rural setting, I appreciated the chance to spend some time in places like a cornfield, for instance, and pick up some of the practical sensory details, like the texture and thickness of the stalk and the way part of its root system is above the soil like the roots of a mangrove in miniature. I cut a particularly big stalk one day and noticed how sturdy it was at the bottom, and my writer’s brain immediately wondered if you could use a thick cornstalk as a weapon and filed it under “I need to do that in a story someday.” If some months or years hence you read a scene in one of my books where somebody gets clubbed with a green cornstalk, well, now you know why.

– 8 –

You can’t hurry.

No, you can’t be lazy and expect to make a living from the soil, but neither can you rush things. You can’t rush the seasons, you can’t rush the weather, you can’t rush growing things, you can’t rush livestock; you can’t make any of those things move faster than their own nature and their Creator ordain them to move. And you can’t push yourself too hard trying to futilely outrace any of those things, or you’ll wear yourself out. I think it would do a lot of people good to be put in an atmosphere where rushing profits you absolutely nothing, and where, as you learn to adapt yourself to the pace of your surroundings, you have time to let your eyes rest on the sky, and the hills, and watch the birds passing overhead and the sun twinkling on breeze-stirred leaves and grass.

* * *

Yes, farm work is hard work. But it’s good work. It makes you sweat, stretches your muscles, and covers you with dirt; but it also strengthens your muscles, puts fresh air into your lungs, and when you turn back and look at a field you’ve picked over or an array of overflowing bushel baskets you’ve filled, it gives you a sense of something worthwhile well done. I’m glad of the work, the experience, and the new perspectives, and I feel that any time I go back to the fields I’ll still have something more to learn.

photo by myself