February 2013 Selection:
Single, thirtysomething, working as a writer in New York City,
Kristin Kimball was living life as an adventure. But she was beginning
to feel a sense of longing for a family and for home. When she
interviewed a dynamic young farmer, her world changed. Kristin knew
nothing about growing vegetables, let alone raising pigs and cattle and
driving horses. But on an impulse, smitten, if not yet in love, she shed
her city self and moved to five hundred acres near Lake Champlain to
start a new farm with him. "The Dirty Life "is the captivating chronicle
of their first year on Essex Farm, from the cold North Country winter
through the following harvest season--complete with their wedding in the
loft of the barn.
Kimball and her husband had a plan: to grow
everything needed to feed a community. It was an ambitious idea, a bit
romantic, and it worked. Every Friday evening, all year round, a hundred
people travel to Essex Farm to pick up their weekly share of the "whole
diet"--beef, pork, chicken, milk, eggs, maple syrup, grains, flours,
dried beans, herbs, fruits, and forty different vegetables--produced by
the farm. The work is done by draft horses instead of tractors, and the
fertility comes from compost. Kimball's vivid descriptions of landscape,
food, cooking--and marriage--are irresistible.
"As much as you
transform the land by farming," she writes, "farming transforms you." In
her old life, Kimball would stay out until four a.m., wear heels, and
carry a handbag. Now she wakes up at four, wears Carhartts, and carries a
pocket knife. At Essex Farm, she discovers the wrenching pleasures of
physical work, learns that good food is at the center of a good life,
falls deeply in love, and finally finds the engagement and commitment
she craved in the form of a man, a small town, and a beautiful piece of
land.
