The Dirty Life

I am pleased to welcome Laura Harrington, author of the fabulous Alice Bliss, today sharing one of her favorite books.  My review of  Alice Bliss is here… 

Here’s Laura:

 A review of The Dirty Life by Kristin Kimball

I heard about The Dirty Life from a neighbor of Kristin Kimball’s.  She had just been to a standing room only local event where Kristin was reading.  She was so enthusiastic about the book that I ordered multiple copies to give as Christmas gifts before I even had a chance to read it myself.  Of course, giving one copy to my husband ensured that I would get a crack at it too.

Beautifully, artfully written, this debut memoir is completely captivating. 

Single, in her 30s, living and working in New York City, Kristin Kimball began to long for family and home.  On an assignment, she interviewed a young farmer named Mark working in New Jersey.  They fell in love and even though Kirstin knew nothing about raising vegetables, let alone pigs and chickens and cattle and driving horses, she and Mark found a farm in Essex County, NY and began to build their dream.

“This book is the story of the two love affairs that interrupted the trajectory of my life: one with farming – that dirty, concupiscent art – and the other with a complicated and exasperating farmer.”

Kristin and Matt’s dream became their plan:  to grow everything needed to feed a community.  Ambitious, romantic, and devilishly difficult, they decide to grow and raise a “whole diet” of beef, pork, chicken, milk, eggs, maple syrup, grains, flours, dried beans, herbs, fruits, and forty different vegetables.  They work with draft horses instead of tractors, resurrect old farm equipment long dormant in their neighbors’ barns, and Kristin discovers the wrenching and exhausting satisfactions of physical work.

Based on the premise that good food is at the center of a good life, The Dirty Life will seduce you, inspire you and give you an entirely new appreciation of all the intelligence and skill required to bring food to your table.

My favorite quote from the book comes from a chapter where Kristin and Matt are struggling. They are running out of money and have an endless list of chores, building projects, fields to harrow, and animals to take care of.  Everyone they meet is telling them that they’ll fail, that no one is interested in local or organic food, and even if they are interested, they can’t afford it.

“When we would talk about our future in private, I would ask Mark if he thought we really had a chance.  Of course we had a chance, he’d say, and anyway, it didn’t matter if this venture failed.  In his view, we were already a success, because we were doing something hard and it was something that mattered to us.  You don’t measure things like that with words like success or failure, he said. Satisfaction comes from trying hard things and then going on to the next hard thing, regardless of the outcome.  What mattered was whether or not you were moving in a direction you thought was right.  This sounded extremely fishy to me.

“This conversation played out many times, with me anxious, Mark calm, until once, as we sat together reviewing our expenses I was almost in tears.  I felt like we were teetering over an abyss.  I wasn’t asking him to guarantee that we’d be rich.  I just wanted him to reassure me that we’d be solvent, that we’d be, as I put it, okay.  Mark laughed.  “What is the worst thing that could happen?” he asked.  “We’re smart and capable people.  We live in the richest country in the world.  There is food and shelter and kindness to spare.  What in the world is there to be afraid of?”

Kristin and Matt’s farm now feeds one hundred “members” who come to the farm to pick up their share every Friday.

What are you reading and where are you going?