Day 3: The Swing Of Things
A pop-up newsletter + photo diary penned from a farm in Ireland, running daily.
ICYMI, this is a pop-up newsletter chronicling my adventures working on a farm in Ireland, running daily for the next week. Read along with your morning coffee. We’ll be back to regularly scheduled programming and format in September, just in time for my annual unsolicited advice birthday edition.
The joy of company, in and out of the garden
I wake smiling from a dream. In it, I have a surprise run in with my former partner I wake smiling from a dream. In it, I have a surprise run-in with my former partner after many years apart. He’s wearing the same clothes he used to wear and I am not bothered by the style, or lack thereof. I tell him I’ve changed a lot since he’s seen me last. I’ve seen a lot of the world. Yet in some ways, I’ve remained the same. We have an ordinary conversation. I am sincerely glad to see him.
This makes the start of the day ever more pleasant. I do my morning visualization and meditation, have my muesli with cow’s milk—so far, I’m taking to cow perfectly fine—and head out to the garden. I meet one of the garden’s two employees, an Irish girl from a few towns over. Today, she is my boss.
We get to chatting. I tell her I’m from New York. “To be honest, I’m a bit afraid of cities,” she says. I get that. She compliments my weeding from the day prior, and, I assume as a treat for the job well done, assigns me my first task: to pick all the apples from a fallen tree. We’ll bring apples down to the horses later.
“I’d pick it clean, then,” she says.
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It isn’t as easy, or as pleasant, as I initially expected. The tree has fallen, so I must climb into the thicket of branches to reach the apples worth picking. I pick them in handfuls, four in each palm, tossing them into the bucket stuck into the wheelbarrow nearby. Sometimes I fill my hands too much and drop half of what I picked; other times I miss the bucket entirely, chucking apples straight onto the ground.
I think of my early years in New York, taking the train up to Fishkill Farms every October. We would dress in seasonally appropriate tones, burnt orange and olive green, sporting wide-brimmed hats, posing for the shot and coming home with loads of apples. Never too many, though, for I would find a baking project to use mine right up. My friends still talk about the apple upside-down cake I made from a haul five or six years ago after one such trip.
Standing waist-deep in a fallen apple tree, chucking handfuls of apples into a bucket, is a very different thing. I finally understand the sentiments of the matriarch of the estate: there can be such a thing as too many apples. At least the horses will be pleased.
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Once the apples are gone, I am given the task of assorted weeding—around the edge of a flower bed, and then in an empty bed next to it, and then around the perimeter of some vegetable beds if I get that far. My new garden guide shows me what is and isn’t a weed. Ferns are sort of weeds, but the old master gardener, retired last year at 80, loved them, so he planted them everywhere.
“I used to hate ferns, but I don’t mind them so much now,” she says. I decide I don’t mind them, either. Especially because they’re hard to pull up.
I ask why there are flowers and leeks in the same bed, right next to each other. Companion plants, two different species that work well for one another, that do things the other needs. I find this sweet. There are also sacrificial plants, the ones strategically planted as a distraction for the bugs, leaving the prized crop intact. Sinister. I like it.
My setup today is much more comfortable, for my garden guide gives me a little pad to kneel on, like a tiny yoga mat for my knees, and a spade to dig with. I mention my sore, ugly hands, destroyed from the day before. They are covered in scratches and swollen, caked with dirt. There’s such thing as forever dirt, she tells me. It gets so deep into your nail beds and pores that it never really comes out.
Today, I decide to wear the gloves.
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Almost immediately, I am in a quiet mental zone. I feel far less resistant than yesterday. No racing thoughts. The first bit of weeding goes quick, easy, yanking right up. The second bit, which looked easy, given its nearly empty status, is hell. Rather than tall, loose weeds, the weeds in the “empty” bed are like low-lying vines, clinging stubbornly to the ground. I must use the spade to dig each time I want to get any of the weeds out. Dig and pull, dig and pull. The entire bed is covered in a tangled mass of this stubborn, low-lying weed.
I kneel on the little mat, sit on it, changing positions to alleviate the strain in my back, the pull of my hamstring. Hours in, I discover the buried treasure. Deep in my digging, I pull a thick, white, string-like piece from the dirt. I pull at it and dig around it, more and more coming out. It goes deep. Again and again, this happens, the thick white string emerging from the soil. It reminds me of when you pluck a stray hair and hold it up to the light, that little white satisfying bit on the end, proof you got it at the root. I forgot to ask my new garden guide what this elusive white string is, but I intuitively feel I did something right to reach it.
Today’s count: five wheelbarrows full. Near double yesterday’s work. No one asks because why would they, but I am quietly pleased with myself. A good little gardener in the making.
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In the kitchen after my shift, I discover what I think is a small, oddly shaped piece of bread. I cut into it and realize it is not at all bread, but some sort of meat. I eat a piece, then another, then another. Gardening makes me hungry.
It turns out to be homemade biltong, beef jerky’s superior cousin, made from filet from the local butcher. You salt the meat, let it sit for hours, brine it, let it sit overnight. Once the weight is reduced by 50%, you can choose your spices for coating—nutmeg, clove, coriander, whatever. Then you dry it, low and slow. If you live somewhere hot, you can hang it up to dry. Some air fryers even have the function, or so I am told.
I decide I will purchase an air fryer that can dry meat when I return to New York. The idea of sad bagged jerky suddenly seems sinful. I can hardly stop myself from eating the entire filet.
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Something I’ve noticed about this household is the way they find a use for everything in the kitchen. An old chicken carcass from dinner is used to make stock. Excess fruit is used to flavor kombucha. Fruit is made into jams, compotes, juices, sauce for the evening’s meat.
I have also discovered the heretofore hidden magic of the AGA. When I first arrived, I sent two of my best friends in New York some photos of the house. They noticed the fabled stove straight away. “Is that an AGA?” I checked the label; it was.
This one, the traditional model, is on at all times, warming the kitchen. Over dinner, my hosts and the older Aussie gentleman share stories of their respective AGAs growing up. A younger sister used to bring sick baby lambs into the house, warming them in the special warming compartment of the stove. A father used to dry his boots in the stove. The children would toss stray homework papers into the gas-burning stove. All AGAs.
A multi-use appliance, no doubt.
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I arrive for dinner at our regularly scheduled time of 7pm but find the kitchen empty. I can smell the food, however, which brings me back to childhood—the last time in life where the end of a day was marked by the smell of someone else laboring for my mealtime benefit in the kitchen. Bliss.
Taking advantage of the spare time, I bring my book out front and read a while. The air is decidedly cooler. If this were New York, I would say it feels like fall. In Ireland, it’s just summer. I admire the way the light hits the ivy on the estate’s facade and find myself wishing I knew how to paint. This would make a lovely canvas.
Just before dinner, I visit the horses in their stables. I’ve convinced myself Olive remembers me and loves me as I love her, but I think she’s really just after the apples. I feel like a proud mother, feeding the horses the apples I picked that very morning, from inside the tree. Only two each this time, for I Googled it, and four apples for one horse is, in fact, too many.
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For dinner, we have pork loin with sauce made from the day’s apples—not too sweet, roasted just so—with cauliflower coated in turmeric and potatoes from the garden. I never tire of potatoes, especially not sliced and slathered in good Irish butter. I don’t believe anyone who claims to prefer sweet potatoes to the old-fashioned variety.
Dinner starts quietly, just me, the family matriarch, and the Aussie gentleman. Eventually, the father returns home, and the daughter, and now the table is as full as it's been since I arrived. I listen to the family share stories, and I ask the Aussie gentleman enough questions so that he is soon telling the story of a last-minute trip he once took to Los Angeles. He went to see a singer he’d admired for many years, discovered by way of a DVD of a choir show he had rented. The other singers in the choir were good, sure, but nothing like her. She had that spark. She was just lovely.
Until this point, I hadn’t gotten much out of him. I assumed he was the quiet type. But during this story, he animates. He recounts the flight from Australia to Los Angeles booked only days out at exorbitant price point, a long travel day culminating in a Christmas concert starring the woman he’d flown across the world to hear. He’d followed her on Facebook for years after watching that original choir concert DVD, which is how he discovered the show last minute. He even got to chat with her afterwards.
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I think to myself: everyone has their light-up point. If you haven’t yet found it, you simply haven’t asked the right question.
M
Bits and Bobs
The aforementioned famous apple cake, right in time for your fall trips to the orchard.
The title of today’s newsletter reminded me of this very good song.
A reasonably priced, well-organized creative writing course with some impressive teachers. Worth considering!
A Quote From A Book I’m Currently Reading:
“She would have loved to love him; she felt some kind of wishfulness, some deprivation. If there could only be some change, some movement—in her, outside of her, somewhere between them—some incalculable shifting of perspectives that would bring him wholly into focus, mind and spirit, as she had been bodily in focus now—she could love him.”
-The Last September by Elizabeth Bowen