Here in Ojo Sarco, the summer nights are still warm and long. After dinner every night, we take walks through our village, the sun casting shadows on our backs and the sunflowers standing as tall as we are. The four of us; Heathar, Andrea (our friend from Mexico), Jack and myself — we walk in a line together down the road, moving from one side to the other when the rare car passes by, waving to each person as they drive home for the evening. Each night, we forget to return the plate our neighbor gave us when she baked us rhubarb pie and we promise that we will remember the following night, but we never do.

Yesterday I finished painting our 400 square foot casita. We’ve been working on painting this casita for the past five months. You would think that painting a 400 square foot building would not take that long, but it has — and we’ve even had many hands to help. In between learning how to butcher chickens, finishing graduate school and keeping a full time psychotherapy and astrology practice functioning, there has been painting. The trim on the outside of our casita is even done and let me tell you, it is a glorious shade of turquoise.

Monumental moments have happened here on the farm this week. For one, the UPS driver (who delivers much welcomed packages right to our front door) and I have become friends. This past week he said to me, “Wow, you’ve really done a lot to the place — it’s looking goooood!” He has been driving up our driveway for the past 15 years and he has seen what the previous owners did not do to this property and what we are starting to do to it. Having his perspective on our work here made me incredibly happy. I felt like it was one of the most validating nods to our dedication to bringing this land and this space back to life.

When we got our 28 baby chicks back in March of this year, they all looked the same — yellow, marshmallow peeps that you could have easily crushed in the palm of your hand (I know that’s kind of morbid, but it’s where my mind goes). When the chicks arrived, we could not tell one chick from the next even though I was desperate to start naming them. Over the weeks and months, some of the chicks began to get colorful feathers, grow waddles and begin to stand out from the others. Slowly, the names emerged from the group — there is Cher and Dino (who looks very prehistoric) and Maria and Sirius Black and Ye-Haw. Cher is the strangest looking bird, she has long, slender grey legs and an awkward neck with a head that appears to have a bob haircut. (I sing her Cher’s biggest hits and she seems to enjoy it.) Cher just stands out from the rest of the flock, perhaps she is born for the stage.

Commitment doesn’t necessarily come easily to me — I have been a gypsy, a roamer, a wanderer, a mover, an unpredictable soul. I have moved close to 60 times in my life, living in homes for weeks and months at a time, housesitting, living in spare bedrooms, staying in yurts, living in homes with seven roommates, sharing bedrooms, living on farms, living on beaches and airplanes, living out of U-Haul trucks, living out of storage spaces, living out of hotels for brief periods…

This week on our farm, we had another first — something I have never experienced before and hope to never experience in the same way again. We had to castrate our male pigs who are now three months old and about 50 pounds each. Being new farmers means that sometimes other people take advantage of that newness and a lot of times, we don’t even realize we are being taken as “green farmers” until it is too late. This is what happened with our piglets and you know, the learning curve is steep for us newbie farmers.