There’s a stark sweetness in the breeze as city roads run into country ones, so pungent a friend remarked upon it the first time I brought them to visit another friend’s farm, and again after untangling from our embrace a few nights later. The knowledge that the aroma clung to my curls may simply shine a spotlight on my spotty summer shower schedule (a lake dip counts!), but as a sentimentalist in the truest sense, I’d like to follow the metaphor here, stroll with it before the sun sinks behind the horizon, hastier with each passing day.

I’ve made the one-hour trek out to various friends’ farms countless times this summer, eager to lend a hand with vegetable and flower harvests or other big jobs, like banishing burdock from the fields or threshing heirloom beans on a gloomy day. On every trip out of the city, I pause to savor at least a few moments of blissful fresh air on the way in and out of town, taking my time around winding roads where sandhill cranes pose in ponds, the same country music I’m harmonizing with courses through the passing car’s speakers, and signs boasting fresh corn or local pottery litter the pathway home. 

I arrive at these spaces with hands eager to dig themselves in dirt and leave with extra freckled armfuls of fresh produce, cartons of eggs, mason jars of goat milk or duck fat, the bounty almost too much to bear. I amble across gravel driveways with a belly full of wholesome, lovingly prepared food, like just-picked cucumbers dipped in piles of homemade mayonnaise made with fresh eggs and enough garlic to ward off vampires, or lemony roast chicken stewed with preserved tomatoes raised and harvested a few yards out the cavernous kitchen window. 

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I am well aware that part of the lightness I can feel around the land comes from the privilege of being able to leave it.

katy hackworthy

author

While appreciating every moment I’ve spent in these precious spaces, I am well aware that part of the lightness I can feel around the land comes from the privilege of being able to leave it. I am certainly not a farmer, but I am a friend of more than a few, and I feel richer in heart and spirit for the compassion, skill-sharing, and community they’ve shown me. I’ve seen and heard the hardships they face, many of which I can’t begin to understand, and I wouldn’t begin to pretend to. They’ve set the table for me and many others I know, and the more time I spend around those tables, the more I want to tend to the part of myself that expands with each opportunity to learn what it means to love the land we steward and live in a way that embodies that love.

Like the sweet summer breeze stuck in my hair, it’s these images I cling to when I think of the past few months, and how they healed something in me I didn’t know needed to be tended to. These trips have not only been touchstones in a time of deep change, but a practice in slowing down I so desperately needed, a destination not rooted in running away, but grounded instead in encountering myself with more truth and intimacy than ever before. It’s not just the air that feels fresher there, but I do, and as the leaves change color, and the breeze becomes cooler, I’m committed to learning more about what those changes mean for me, too.