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

There was something else, too, and I don’t know why nobody talks about it. Marriage asks you to let go of a big chunk of who you were before, and that loss must be grieved. A choice for something and someone is a choice against absolutely everything else, and that’s one big fat good-bye.

Grow it right, and you feel insanely rich, no matter what you own.

Remember that you control what you choose to believe in,” I said. Anyone could look at our farm lives and see toil and squalor, or look at the same lives and see purpose, abundance, and joy. Same plot points, different story. “Very different things can be true simultaneously, and choosing the one with the better narrative is often extremely helpful.

I thought about how I must look, wet, red-fingered from cold, cutting a hole in a perfectly good barn for no reason. “I don’t want to tell you what to do,” Shep began. This, I’d found, was a very common statement in the North Country. You’re not considered rude if you don’t return phone calls, or if you get drunk while working, or fail to show up as promised, but telling someone how to do something is bad form and requires a disclaimer.

I wasn’t asking him to guarantee that we’d be rich, I just wanted him to assure 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?

I wish every woman could have as a lover at some point in her life a man who never smoked or drank too much or became jaded from kissing too many girls or looking at porn, someone with the gracious muscles that come from honest work and not from the gym, someone unashamed of the animal side of human nature.

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.

Farming, I discovered, is a great and ongoing war. The farmers are continually fighting to keep nature behind the hedgerow, and nature is continually fighting to overtake the field.

But raw milk from a Jersey cow is a totally different substance from what I'd thought of as milk. If you do not own a cow or know someone who owns a cow, I must caution you never to try raw milk straight from the teat of a Jersey cow, because it would be cruel to taste it once and not have access to it again. Only a few people in America remeber this type of milk now, elderly people mostly, who grew up with a cow. They come to the farm sometimes, looking for that taste from their childhood.