Starting in 2005, my sister Sally took over a small farm in northern Maryland, part of an inheritance from our parents. Sally had never farmed full-time before. Her lifelong interest in gardening was scant preparation for this late-middle-age career transition from more sedentary work. Especially the first few years, Sally struggled. She wanted to run the farm as a biodynamic one, paying special attention to the cycles of seasons, sun, and moon. Gradually, she got an acre or two into biodynamic production. She rented the rest of the land to nearby more conventional farmers. She built up a cadre of part-time volunteers. Her work was more than full-time, with scant occasions for the travel she had enjoyed earlier in her varied careers. Her internet access was spotty at best, so we kept in touch through phone calls and letters.
For a biodynamic farmer, “cross-quarter days” are especially important in deciding harvest and planting schedules: Halloween (Samhain), Groundhog Day (Imbolc), May Day (Beltane), and mid-summer, around August 1 (Lammas).
This November, I’m posting six years’ worth of cross-quarter day letters, through multiple changes in government, a global pandemic, and major changes in our respective personal circumstances. Please read along…
Saturday, May 1, 2021 (Beltane/May Day); from Jinny in Cary, NC to Sally in Taneytown, MD
Dear Sal,
Happy May Day! It looks as if this may be the final one we spend in North Carolina. An offer we made on a small house in San Diego, not far from son Jason’s, has been accepted. Closing is to be later in May, probably done virtually due to both pandemic and distance. Jason and granddaughter Ada subbed for us today on a partial home inspection of the “new to us” place, a 2-bedroom, 1 1/2 bath single story detached house with a small yard and a privacy fence. It’s about three blocks from Jason’s, built as part of a planned community of about 700 houses in the early 1970’s. A homeowners’ association handles area landscaping and amenities, including tennis and pickle ball courts, lots of walkways and open space, plus a small open-air swimming pool. The HOA has fairly strict rules about decorating and modifications to the exterior of structures and to landscaping “outside the fence.”
We have a purchase offer on our townhouse here, but there are complications with the financing. I’m crossing my fingers, doing lots of gardening, trying not to over-worry. Somehow when the whole world seems to be coming unhinged, bothering about personal details seems less important. I’ll miss this place, and it’s been good to us. This morning I noticed a hummingbird at one of the columbines I’d planted earlier this spring in a shady area near our back woods. Among the bushes out front, I spotted a small green frog.
Having moved a lot during earlier periods of my life, I should probably be unconcerned about this particular relocation. It feels different in a couple of ways—of course, the pandemic, but also the sense that the house we’ll move into will be our “final home,” barring any later forced moves to a nursing home or care facility. Jason has been a big help, pinch-hitting for us on site visits and home inspections at the California end.
Son Scott and new girlfriend Morgan (whom we hadn’t met in person before) came from Ohio for a couple of days in late April to help us start packing and to relieve us of some furnishings they can use more readily than we will in our new location. It was a somewhat awkward way to meet Scott’s latest squeeze—“Hi, glad to meet you. Would you please put this box over there?”—but Morgan pitched in like a trooper.
Scott has recently moved in with Morgan and her three children from a prior marriage. She shares custody with her ex-husband, who lives nearby and works at one of the local automotive plants. The kids alternate weeks with mom and weeks with dad. For Scott, having three nearly instant “bonus” children, even part-time, may be quite an adjustment. For the short term, he’s being careful to take a back seat to Morgan in decision making for Mylee (12), Brooks (8), and Parker (6). From what they tell us about their rental house, it has plenty of room, but could use a handyman. Its earliest foundations, now mostly covered over, date from 1895. It seems to be pretty far out in the country, as opposed to where we’ll be in San Diego, about three miles from downtown in a fully built out “burb.”
We’ve done a good bit of decluttering and packing already, but will have one final push in the next week or two. Our tentative plan is to hire a “PODS” (portable on-demand storage) unit and to use it to ship a minimum of stuff—Dad’s lamps, rocking chair and bookcase, a durable dining room set, a bed frame, books and knickknacks, plus enough bedding, linens, dishes, and kitchen stuff so we can make do without splurging on more, at least at first. The next time you hear from me will be from sunny southern California.
I don’t remember helping with any of your moves. I do remember that Mom, after hauling a station wagon full of stuff from Maryland to the little house Jim and I shared in Vermont in the early 70’s, explained to me in no uncertain terms that this was her final trip as a “relocation assistant.” She almost had her way. We did use one of the outbuildings at the Lawyers Hill house to store some of our stuff during our next employment misadventure, our subsequent unemployment and “travel therapy” trip along the Mississippi River.
From what you’ve written me about life at White Rose Farm, it’s both gratifying and deeply challenging. I admire the chutzpah it took to transform yourself from someone with a background mainly in counseling and personnel management into a biodynamic farmer in your 50’s. I still have a news article from the Frederick, Maryland News-Post in 2009 in which you explained your rationale for the farm: “It’s [my] job, as owner and operator of White Rose Farm, to keep all the insects happy, as well as the plants, and to treat all the living things as if they have intelligences, ‘because they do.’”
I’m remembering a visit to the farm, I don’t know the year, when you enlisted me to help weed some rows of carrots. My painstakingly slow weeding technique left me “in the dirt,” as I tried to clear the row assigned to me while you polished off three or four. You’ve created a place that speaks both of beauty and of struggle. Hope your struggles are abating for now. Please take good care!
Love, Jin
