My neighbors' turkeys

Have I told you about my neighbors? 

Nora and Theo, two young, new farmers, live a mile south of me and raise meat animals.  It's almost like we planned to create our own Dudley young farming commune.  Who wants to join us?  Twenty miles south of here in Phoenixville, Connecticut, Arvind and Margherita are making wine, so we just need someone on the bread and the beer and someone on fruits and vegetables.

Aurélien and I didn't actually know Nora and Theo when we found our farm.  But thanks to FarmFresh.org, I found their website and decided to send them an email.  'Maybe we'll become farming friends!' I thought.  That email was the right thing to do.  We've already started trading equipment: 'Use my ladder while I borrow your pickup truck to carry my new-to-me 400-gallon milk tank from Connecticut back to Dudley.  Oh, I got your pickup stuck in my field?  Um.  Can I make you dinner...?  Arvind can you come help me get this damned tank out of my field?'  Yeah... so maybe my neighbors have been more helpful to me than I have been to them, especially when it comes to encouragement. 

Nora is thrilled that she is pretty much through with her first year of farming.  Everything is new, she explains, so everything is exhausting.  After Thanksgiving, she confessed, she's not doing anything.  For a while.  Nora tells me that my first year will be the hardest so everything is only going to get easier as routines are established.  Arvind, along with offering my Dad and me the use of his tractor, reminds me that I can not and should not try do everything - fix everything there is to fix on the farm - in the first year.  Which is what I was trying to do before I burnt out. 

So while I feel utterly useless and in too deep, it has been a great reassurance to know that a few people are here keeping me from drowning.  I had the pleasure of lending Nora and Theo a hand just before and during the holiday as they needed a farmsitter to be able to spend Thanksgiving away from the farm.  Meanwhile, I decided to break my toe a week before my farmsitting commitment because I like to make things especially hard for myself and others, obviously.  Thankfully, my mom jumped on the opportunity to help me help Nora and Theo and I was very impressed by her fearlessness in the face of farm menagerie.  If you don't already know, none of this would even be possible in the present it weren't for my parents.  

These things came spewing out through my keyboard when all I wanted was to tell you that Nora and Theo got written up in the National Young Farmers' Coalition Blog and I'm very proud of them.  It's snowing in Dudley and it's a beautiful day in the neighborhood.