He put on his raincoat and boots and dashed out to the mailbox. It was his day off, but the nursery at which he lived and worked was waiting for some rare seeds, ordered from overseas, and after all the trouble of international trade laws and customs, he wasn't about to let them sit in the cold, damp mailbox any longer than they had to.
The mailbox was welded to an old shovel in the ground and was emblazoned with the words, "Nightshadow Nursery." The "O" in the name was a fat, red tomato. Avery opened the squeaky door of the box and did not find any packages from Norway; he grabbed the pile of envelopes and solicitations and quick-stepped back into the house, shaking himself off on the porch.
It was all bills and advertisements that day, except for the long white envelope with his name on it. It was addressed, in script, to "THE Avery Mason," and had Erika's Portland return address. The stamp featured Calvin and Hobbes, his favorite comic characters. He poured his second cup of coffee and headed back to his bedroom to open and read it immediately. Coffee and a letter on a rainy day:
"Avery-
How goes the growing in these winter months? And what, exactly, creates a nightshadow? Is it like a normal shadow, cast when the moon is full and the evening is bright? Or is it the opposite, a ray of light cast when it's pitch black outside? I suppose it would be like a bright, glowing aura, visible only when there are no fluorescent or solar distractions.
The rainy months are here, obviously. I should be surprised if this letter makes it to your hands dry. But the weather is suspiciously warm and I wonder if we will ever have that late winter freeze. At this point all of the fruit trees in the city seem to think it's time for Spring. They are waking up, budding, blossoming, and I fear that we'll lose our fruit crops this year when the temperature drops and freezes the poor flowers right off. I should stock up on apples before they become as valuable as oil.
Why is it that half the people our age are heading back to farms right now? Not even heading back, just heading to them! Most of us were not raised on farms. We have no land, we have no childhood memories of our mothers making jam and our fathers chopping wood. Despite that, our entire generation seems to be advocating for food, spending their vacations working - for free! - on farms around the world. Why do we drift to the soil after twenty-some years on concrete? Why are we fascinated by worms when we have been educated on the Internet?
It bothers me sometimes. There is too much shouting. There is too much "anti-everything". There is too much rhetoric and roundabout rambling advocating for changes in our food system.
I'm no exception. I'm from Boston for Crissake. But for some reason I decided to learn about food and soil. While my parents told me about economics I was fascinated by cation exchange capacity, nematodes, and nitrogen fixation. I was fixated on goats, though before moving here I'd never seen one outside of the tiny ones at the zoo (which are still adorable, mind you).
Too much yelling. That's the problem. I'm no advocate for big business in agriculture, but I know that it must exist. I know that there are good reasons that five-thousand-acre wheat farms exist, that ten-thousand-chicken barns are all over the country. More people eat food than grow it, so somebody must produce, produce, produce.
Yesterday, despite the rain, there was a march in the city, protesting big agriculture. "Down with corporate farms!" the signs said. "Get small or get out!" "Bring the culture back to agriculture!"
And yet, most of the young people, the folks our age, want to create our small farms and stick around the places in which we're comfortable. There must be a thousand CSAs around Boston now. Hundreds around Portland, who-knows-how-many supplying San Francisco and Seattle with vegetables and meat.
But something in the equation doesn't look right to me. If every new farmer sets up shop near the cities and in these hubs of support, what happens in the midwest? There is so much land out there! So much fertile, deep soil! I mean, the plains are where this whole mess began, with thousands of small homesteads. Where did they go? Most of the farmers went west with the dust bowl, and more of them left with each generation. Now it's all giant farms, run by small families, and the families are getting smaller out there.
If we (I say "we" meaning our whole freaking generation) are going to advocate for small farms, homesteads, and the breakup of the massive farms around the US, I think we need to go back to the Midwest, the plains, the prairie. We need to get out of our comfort zone and see what we can do on those massive, open canvases of grain. The biggest complaint, at least amongst the farmer wannabes that I know, is that they can't afford land. What if we all go where land is cheap, and we go together?
What must happen next is this. We need to clear out of the cities. We need open spaces. All of these people want to farm and feed the world, but can't find the land to do it from. We need to repopulate Kansas.
Keep in touch!
With love and greenbeans-
Erika"
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