Gimme the Dirt… On the Power of Stories

Summer is winding down now. Our windows are open to the evening breezes, and stepping outside to put on our barn boots in the dark morning hours feels refreshing. Once early chores are finished, it’s almost disappointing to head inside, so we don’t. Instead, we get ourselves cleaned up and sit on the porch, watching the first cows meander into the pasture. We savor the morning light sparkling off the pond while we sip our coffee. Rain or shine, the nicest days are defined by “Farm Day,” which happens here every other Thursday with a young family very close to us. On Farm Day, work slows, and a batch of some sort of cookies or cakes or donuts is served on the porch, just the perfect fuel for visiting the animals, picking whatever the garden has to offer, and wandering the farm looking for pollywogs, animal tracks, or interesting birds. When the snack wears off, discoveries made, eggs collected, and calves petted, quiet time back on the porch to play with farm toys commences. And then, when the joy of the toy tractors, farm animals, and plastic fencing has run its course, I raid my large collection of children’s books to read a story – my way of extracting snuggles without coercion. For me, there is likely nothing more soothing or satisfying on a soul level than reading a beautifully created book aloud to a child resting heavily on my lap.

I went back to school as a middle-aged adult, and part of my study was Children’s Literature, an area many don’t realize is a legitimate and important field. A number of books in my collection were beloved to me as a child, then to my daughter in her childhood, and now adored by a new generation. Reading these classics aloud is sometimes difficult for me – the nostalgia attached to them makes me teary, and curious young eyes turn toward me as I stop reading to grapple with my emotions. Thinking about children’s books draws me to the tomes on my shelves, and a theme becomes clear as I peruse the titles: stories of animals occupy the majority of them. Margaret Wise Brown’s classic The Big Red Barn is an eternal favorite because both my husband and I read it to our children when they were young. We discovered this when I was unpacking my books onto shelves as I moved into our farmhouse to start our new life together. There on his bookshelf was his copy, a second one on mine.

“The hens were sleeping on their nests,
Even the roosters took a rest.
The little black bats flew away,
Out of the barn at the end of the day.”

It’s hard to get through the words without remembering my own little girl nestled into me as I rocked her and read aloud in the twilight bedtime hour, before this farm was a part of my life.

“And there they were all night long,
Sound asleep,
In the big red barn.”

When we spruced up the barn here, its natural wood board-and-batten siding was aged to a deep, lustrous gray. We decided to paint it red, in part because of this story, and when I stood on the ladder, my clothing splattered and smeared with red paint, I repeated the lines from this book in my head. The connection to this children’s story is alive here on our farm: the little cow moos, the chickens cluck (well, the roosters make much more noise than that!), and at night, they all curl up peacefully to rest; there are even sweet little bats who flutter around the night sky. In fact, two of my favorite places to be are in the dairy barn in the dark, listening to our cows’ deep breaths while they digest their supper, or in the chicken coop with my flock, their soft coos and purrs a peaceful counterpoint to hectic days. In these quiet moments, Wise Brown’s prose are words I literally live by.

Once, during Farm Day, one of my young friends decided to be picky about her snack. Her mommy was frustrated, I was frustrated, and her little brother was starting to mirror her – a circumstance most parents know is the beginning of the end for peace and quiet. In a last-ditch effort to keep said peace, I reached for another storybook that was mine as a child (years ago, this one, too, I read to my young daughter). Bread and Jam for Frances, by Russell and Lillian Hoban, is the story of a picky badger named Frances who only wants to eat bread and jam. The lunches her mother packs for her to carry to school are elaborate affairs, with accessories like a lace doily to spread on her desk, a tiny shaker of salt to sprinkle on her hard-boiled egg and even a vase of violets for ambiance. Frances has a little sister, Gloria, who’s just learning to eat real food. It’s Gloria who’s on my mind when I watch our calves as they encounter lush hay for the first time: “‘Oh!’ said Gloria…she liked to practice with a string bean when she could.” Calves definitely need to practice with their hay, and it’s adorable to watch them do it. The takeaway from the story is that limiting one’s diet to only a few items can lead to boredom, grouchiness, and an utter lack of the special joy that comes from preparing and consuming interesting and delectable meals. It reminds me how fortunate I am to live here, where nutritious, delicious food is available to me all year ’round.

The list of children’s books that are quoted in my head on the farm each day is long – Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (“I’m Augustus Gloop. I love your chocolate.”); Harry the Dirty Dog (Harry fell asleep in his favorite place, happily dreaming of how much fun it had been getting dirty.”); Pumpkin Moonshine (“Sylvie Ann saved the pumpkin seeds. Next spring she planted them. The vines grew up and ran all over the cornfield.”); The Story of Ferdinand (“He liked to sit just quietly and smell the flowers.”). But the ones that mean the most to me in my adulthood are those that have a direct connection to the places I’ve lived and visited. Miss Rumphius by Barbara Cooney is set in New England; my favorite pictures are those depicting a building in the Romanesque style, which happens to be the library from the Massachusetts town where I lived for part of my daughter’s childhood and where Cooney herself called home. The main character leaves fields of lupines in her wake, and the moral of the story is fundamental to my own belief system: “You must do something to make the world more beautiful.” There are poetry books, including several versions of Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses and Joyful Noise: Poems for Two Voices about insects, along with a 1967 reprint of the original British classic Olde Mother Goose. There are series organized in groups on my shelves: Old Mother West Wind, Little House on the Prairie, and Anne of Green Gables. Every book that resonated with me as a child has a connection in one way or another to the farm life I now live as an adult, whether the main characters are wild creatures I encounter in real life, farm animals I interact with, or the natural world that is so beautifully conserved on these acres.

Of all the hundreds of books on my shelves, none resonates as deeply with me as Virginia Lee Burton’s The Little House. If I had to pick a favorite from both my child and adulthood, this one is it. The author and I have several things in common, notably time living in Boston, early careers in the arts (she was a dancer and artist, I was a classical musician), and most pertinently, a deep and abiding love of the countryside, and a passion for land conservation in order to preserve rural culture. The story of Burton’s little house is at once tragic and joyful: a house set in the countryside and filled with a family that loves her soon finds herself surrounded by the city as urbanization takes hold. Burton’s drawings are as appealing to this adult as they were to five-year-old me. In her drawings of farmland, I see our own small farm. In her every sketch of the sun, I see the sky exactly as it looks, from its rise over the Shawangunk Ridge to its setting over the Catskills. She depicts the changing seasons precisely as we experience them on this farm. But nothing hits home more deeply, especially now, than her drawings of “progress.“ The little house that once sat by itself upon a knoll surrounded by the countryside is swallowed by the encroaching city, and this story parallels our own experience now. Noise and light pollution make savoring a quiet country evening a practice in futility. We find ourselves surrounded on all sides by houses and people; once our view was leafy, with uninterrupted rolling hills as far as the eye could see. The happy ending for the little house in this story is sweet: she’s picked up off her foundation and moved far away to the countryside. “Once again, she could watch the sun and moon and stars…The stars twinkled above her…A new moon was coming up…It was Spring…and all was quiet and peaceful in the country.”

The solution for us just isn’t as simple, and the message is troubling: if we want to again be in a peaceful, quiet, rural place we will need to move. This place we call home is no longer the countryside of even ten years ago. Adapt or leave: the decision is painful because we love this place so much. Farmers are resilient and flexible since we need to work with variables we cannot control – weather, animal behavior, governmental policies, to name a few – but in order to function, farms require land. And when land is being swallowed whole by development, farms (and the farmers who live and work on them) go extinct. It’s a struggle to know what exactly to do: stay and try to educate people while also trying to survive as a farm or pick up stakes and go. We think about this conundrum all the time, and talk about it, too. Stevenson’s poem “Farewell to the Farm” echoes in my head daily:

“To house and garden, field and lawn,
The meadow-gates we swang upon.
To pump and stable, tree and swing,
Good-bye, good-bye, to everything.

And fare you well for evermore,
O ladder at the hayloft door,
O hayloft where the cobwebs cling,
Good-bye, good-bye to everything!”

This book is perhaps better left closed for now. Maybe, I can instead turn to my bookshelves and the vast collection of children’s books they hold. There’s wisdom in those pages. Perhaps that’s where we will find our answer.

Photos courtesy of Rebecca Collins Brooks 

Rebecca Collins Brooks is a farmer, writer and farmstead cheesemaker at Hilltop Farm in Accord, NY.  She is the creator and founder of The Meeting of the Milkmaids, a gathering of women working in the cheese and dairy industry. In addition to a small herd of dairy cows, she and her husband Barton raise Wagyu beef, selling meat to customers directly off the farm. Her best friends are two terriers, Winston and Molly; and Sylvie, a truly brilliant barn cat. You can visit the farm by appointment to see where truly good food is grown.

Connect with Rebecca via Instagram @catskillwagyu, on Facebook CatskillWagyu

Check out > INSIDE+OUT’s Spotlight on Catskill Wagyu at Hilltop Farm