Sometimes Chickens. Sometimes Feathers.
There comes a time on a farm when you have to celebrate. In order to keep going, in order to keep shoveling piles of hot, steaming cow manure that are so loose and fresh they fall off your shovel onto your boots, in order to bathe in a bucket for four days because your cow accidentally turned on the water spigot in the barnyard and drained your well, in order to walk by the cemetery where you buried your first calf only 4 months ago— you have to take time to celebrate.
Like anything on a farm, celebration takes a lot of preparation. It takes more work. It takes more manual labor, more wheeling of wheelbarrows and more hauling of things in the back of a truck. To arrive at the landmark of the celebration takes months of planning which a farm absolutely does not have time for. Even amidst the celebrating you must milk the cows and feed the chickens. You must take the time to google why your rooster’s tail feathers are suddenly falling out (molting due to fall weather). You must wash the shit off the dark brown, blue and white eggs you sell to your customers. You must help your father and his girlfriend decipher the ceramic eggs from the real eggs in the chicken coop. Daily chores still exist amidst the Great Times of Celebration. The farm continues.
I was not expecting our Farm to Table Dinner this past weekend to feel like such a celebration. Not only a celebration but something that I can only compare to what I felt during my wedding. One of our Farm to Table dinner guests said, “Jen, you are having a wedding — a wedding for your farm.” I think they might be right. Our farm got married this weekend. Perhaps Heathar and I married the farm this weekend. Perhaps we vowed to love it forever. To be there for it in sickness and in health. To stand by its side in the cold, in the ice, in the burning sun, in the glorious, yellow, blooming Chamisa fall and in the rainy, muddy spring. Perhaps we took unconscious vows this weekend and invited forty of our friends and family to witness us serve our farm and celebrate its production in return. The wedding officiant was the tall cottonwood tree that stands in the back of our house — its dead and twisted branches reaching high above the actual leaves of the cottonwood, standing on end as if electrocuted by genius. As if it was about to have a great idea. The wedding attire was ironed, button-up purple cowboy shirts and long, flowing earth-toned dresses. I wore my most New Mexican vest, with The Virgin Guadalupe embroidered on the back. Heathar wore a backwards baseball cap. We all were ourselves that night.
Just like a wedding, we feared the rain. We put up turquoise tents for the band to protect their instruments from the rain and we prayed to the clouds to stay full until after our guests left. We prayed to our cow to stay pregnant until our guests left. We prayed to the roasted chickens to stay warm as they laid wrapped inside butcher paper and snuggled up to one another in our cooler. We cast our eyes upward and craned our necks guessing at the patterns of the fall weather in the high mountains. Everyone had something to say about the weather. Some of our dinner guests swore it would rain and some said, “What’s a little rain?”
On the morning of our dinner — the biggest event we have had at our farm to date — our farmhand (I won’t tell you his name because he is not allowed to work for anyone but me) showed up and offered his help. We didn’t ask him to come. He didn’t charge us for his work — he just came. I don’t think that he would call it love, or even like that I use the word love to describe what we did, but to me, it was love. It was care. It was generosity. It was true kindness. It also, saved our asses.
I put him to work for three hours doing tasks that were far below his level of capability. He hung lights for our dinner, he made a cat door in the barn for our kittens and he laid out green flags in the guest parking area. My father shoveled piles of wood chips from one area of our farm to the other creating mud free, outdoor dance floors and walkways. My father’s girlfriend curated beautiful table settings and even cleaned our bathroom. And later in the day, our neighbors came and brought flowers from their garden and arranged them in vases that we put all over our farm.
I finally feel that Heathar and I have lived somewhere long enough now that our community is starting to track the events of our lives. They know when our family is visiting, when a cow is sick, when I am out of town and when we are having a big event. This is only something that can happen with time, with the repetition of living a life in the same place together — with driving by one another on the road and with inhaling the rhythms of the others around you.
As our thirty-five guests arrived for our dinner, I could feel we were ushering them into something important —something that would change them, change us. It felt important to me to be able to welcome each guest, hug them and thank them for coming to our property. I wanted to physically greet each person who arrived: You, in particular are here. It matters that you, in particular are here. Welcome. Yes, our event was about creating amazing food from our farm and honoring the harvest of our land and our cows, but for me, it was also about helping everyone create community and connection. As I walked around that night, serving tables, I saw people reaching across the table and handing one another their phones so they could exchange numbers. I saw them hugging one another goodbye. I saw them handing one another blankets to wrap around their shoulders as the night cooled down. My dream is to be the place where people meet their best friends, lovers and the people they will call their family. If that happens on our farm, I will be happy.
As happens when I am around large groups of people, I get so excited by and caught in the social and relational dynamics that it is always hard for me to focus on what I am supposed to be doing: pouring wine, popping champagne bottles, clearing dishes. I become enthralled in the dynamics of connection and it is all I can feel. I lose my place in the logistics and become absorbed into conversation, interaction and the rhythm of connection. That night, sometimes I was at the bar “doing what I needed to be doing” and sometimes people poured their own wine. Some wine bottles ended up on people’s tables and some people didn’t have the right salad fork. These are not the important things.
Before I was a farmer, before I was a therapist, before I was an astrologer, before I was a writer — I was a server. I have worked in restaurants since I was fifteen — starting with being a hostess at Spaghetti Factory where I would hide loaves of garlic bread in the host stand and eat it in between seating guests. I loved being a server because I loved connecting with people. Serving people food, for me, is about serving people a chance for connection. It is not all that different from therapy, only there is sourdough bread involved. I am realizing that perhaps I wasn’t just a server because it was an easy job to get and I liked having cash in my pocket but perhaps there was a deeper pull to the madness of restaurants. A pull that will serve me now and serve our farm. A pull that will help me craft and cater an experience for our farm guests that helps them not only feel fed, but emotionally and spiritually full.
Similarly to our wedding, after our farm dinner, I felt satisfied. I felt content. This is not a feeling I feel often. I am more familiar with second guessing myself and feeling confused about the choices I am making rather than content. But something came over me as I walked through our smiling guests, as I watched people get up from their seats and start dancing with one another, as I went into the kitchen and saw our team cutting up slices of thick mozzarella and busty heirloom tomatoes, as I saw our team stacking wood for the fire and flipping corn on the grill, as I saw our team lining up bowls of raw milk vanilla bean ice cream and sneaking shots of Mezcal — I felt content. I felt settled. And after moving over sixty times in my life, this is another feeling I am not super familiar with. The feeling of contentment didn’t wipe away the hard work we did to prepare for the event, I just didn’t mind the hard work and exhaustion at the end of the night. I don’t mind that we didn’t have any countertops while we prepared for the dinner because we decided to remodel our kitchen while we got ready for our biggest event of the year. I didn’t mind that we didn’t have any cabinets. I didn’t mind that our kitchen walls were not painted.
On the farm, and of course in life, there are moments of satisfaction and moments of grief. There are moments of frustration and desperation and then there are moments of contentment. For now, I will savor this, particular moment — however long it lasts. It seems that on a farm we are always waiting for “the other hoof to drop”. There is a calf coming. Rose seems to have a slight cold. There is a winter coming. There are kitchen cabinets lost in the ethers of Home Depot but as our farmhand says, “Sometimes chickens. Sometimes feathers.” This is a time of the chicken. I’ll take the dark meat. I’ll take the leg. Let’s celebrate the time of the chicken. The chicken is here.
