Farm to Tablet: On Hoarding Time
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In this, the least relenting month of winter, the seed catalogs arrive. Out my window, a white expanse. A pasture of frozen footprints—humans, chicken, dog, sheep. Pines cradle the snow in ascending tiers, deciduous branches stoop beneath exoskeletons of ice. This morning, the chicken's water was frozen so fully I could not crack it or turn it out. When the flock finally ventures from their coop, they will content themselves with eating the snow.

I can hardly imagine the summer now—the ewes' woolly hair against my bare knees, my shoulders pink, my boots splattered with mud. But the seed catalogs shock me from my winter stupor with their zinnia blossoms, purple carrots, tiny tomatoes as orange as the sun, striated eggplants. These harvests are a good eight months away, more or less, and at the tail end of much labor.

As someone who prizes efficiency in every effort, it still perplexes me that a personality like mine should choose to work a small farm. My past modus operandi was to set a goal I hoped would impress, determine the most direct method of reaching it, and wear myself out accomplishing its end. I would cross the finish line exhausted and generally disappointed at wherever I'd arrived, invariably finding that I could not rest there. I had hoped, once again, that that time I would finally collapse into a pile of my own enough-ness, but of course I never did. Part of me now understands that I was trying to harvest self-worth from soil in which it could not grow, while another part of me is still scanning my surrounding landscape for fresh proving-ground.

Overachievers reap heaps of praise, but this praise only feeds the bankrupting belief that their measure of accomplishment and their measure of worth are one and the same. This belief never allows us indefatigable do-ers to stop. It turns everything to a purpose. It proves a supremely uncomfortable way to be because it is not a way to be at all, it is only a way to do. All being is jettisoned as waste.

Enter farming. Enter the four years I have tried and failed to grow canning tomatoes. Enter the three years I have nurtured the asparagus, which we will finally get to harvest this spring. Enter the two years it's taken us to get our livestock operation to the point where we can butcher our own meat. Enter the pests that ravage the brassicas, the confounding failures of all our potato attempts, the pH imbalance of the soil, the frozen compost, the greenhouse that the winter winds whisked away. Enter the endless weeding and watering and the half morning spent catching sprung rabbits. And all of this, my efficient inner-taskmaster reminds me, for items I could have purchased at the market for a tiny fraction of the time and none of the effort.

Why am I doing this again?

Homesteading sometimes feels like a trick I have unwittingly played on myself. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I think it actually is. Part of me is the merchant from The Little Prince who sells pills that quench thirst. When the little prince asks the merchant why he is selling the pills, the merchant responds that they save a tremendous amount of time.

“Computations have been made,” the merchant declares. “With these pills, you save fifty-three minutes in every week.”

“And what do I do with those fifty-three minutes?” the little prince asks.

“Anything you'd like,” the merchant responds.

“As for me,” the little prince says to himself, “if I had fifty-three minutes to spend as I like, I should walk at my leisure toward a spring of fresh water.”

In all of my past striving, I, like the merchant, have made my meticulous calculations, hoarded my minutes. I have poured them into the exploits I judged as most likely to increase my impressiveness, which I regarded as my worth. I neglected pleasure, leisure, even friendship.

But now, in my fourth decade, my own little prince is awakening. She is asking, “But what do I do with all of these minutes? What do I do when I realize that I will never find Enough at the end of any achievement because it is already here?”

Here, I think, is what I do. I sit down at the kitchen table on a gray January Sunday, the ground outside flint-hard with frost. I take out a fresh piece of notebook paper, open Johnny's Selected Seeds. Next Christmas, I decide, I would like to gift others tea leaves I have grown from seed, tea that I have weeded, watered, harvested, rinsed, and hung in my pantry to dry. It will be a gift one year in the making, a gift into which I can pour my hoarded minutes, my hours. It is still doing, yes, but it is doing of the most inefficient sort. I will practice taking the most time, the longest route. At the end, if I am successful, I will offer humble handfuls of crushed leaves, to be drunk, for pure pleasure, on a winter afternoon many, many months from now.