20 Quotes by Kristin Kimball

There is no such thing as escape after all, only an exchange of one set of difficulties for another. It wasn't Mark or the farm or marriage I was trying to shake loose from but my own imperfect self, and even if I kept moving, she would dog me all the way around the world, forever.

We drove out of New Paltz heading due north. Squeezed into my tiny hatchback, among our boxes and bags, were my dog, Nico, the hens, and the humming hive of bees, its openings covered over with tape. The dog eyed the hive, the chickens eyed the dog, and if the bees weren't nervous they were the only ones.

Maybe most important, farm food itself is totally different from what most people now think of as food: none of those colorful boxed and bagged products, precut, parboiled, ready to eat, and engineered to appeal to our basest desires. We were selling the opposite: naked, unprocessed food, two steps from the dirt.

I unlocked the door of my apartment, where the only movement, while I was gone, had been the light moving across the walls from the morning to evening and a scuttling roach or two, and the air inside smelled of loneliness. The ache got eased a little the next day, after I'd picked up my dog from my sister, gotten sucked back into the slipstream of the city. But only a little. And soon it spread, until the word home could make me cry. I wanted one.

It's not the deprivations of winter that get you, or the damp of spring, but the no-man's land between.

Everything ends. The natural order of things is immutable. Seed, flower, fruit, decline, death, decay. Seed. Each stage has its own drama and its own particular beauty. If you can see it, you can accept it. The parts are graceful, and so is the whole.

This humble wish seemed impossible. It was so different from the life I was living, and no one in my circle had those things, or wanted them, or would admit it if they did. I thought I could acknowledge the ache and learn to live with it, the way you live with the pain that lingers long after you've broken a bone, the kind that foretells a shift in the weather.

‎A farm is a manipulative creature. There is no such thing as finished. Work comes in a stream and has no end. There are only the things that must be done now and things that can be done later. The threat the farm has got on you, the one that keeps you running from can until can't, is this: do it now, or some living thing will wilt or suffer or die. Its blackmail, really.

Farmers are professional hopers.