It was such a wretched season on our New Hampshire vegetable farm, what with the cold wet spring, and the limping collapsing draft horses, and the cold wet limping collapsing farmers, that we were glad to say goodbye to the whole year.
Once our CSA vegetable distribution was finished up, and our horses were settled into the winter paddock, and the limpers and collapsers had recovered, all we had left was cold and wet, which we've solved by sitting by our woodstove.
We sit by the stove, and ask ourselves probing questions, such as "Now why are we doing this again?"
Then we refuse to give ourselves a pep talk about fresh food and sustainable farming and local economies and healthy environments. Instead we pretend that farming doesn't exist. What fun!
It is so much fun that we take ourselves to a nice concert in South Hadley, Massachusetts. The concert is in a pretty little Episcopalian church, clean and bright and dry and tidy, which reminds us not at all of farming.
We listen to the wonderful Scandinavian folk'appella group Kongero. Four women with stunning voices sing in Swedish for two hours, and it doesn't matter that we can't understand a word of the lyrics, because certainly they are not about farming.
The singers do take pity on the mainly English-speaking audience, and tell us a little in English about their group. They say that kongero means spider, in a Swedishish-Norwegian dialect, and that a music reviewer suggested that they were one voice with eight legs.
Although we still don't know exactly why the group choose kongero for a name, we can only assume that the Swedish have great love for spiders. We are also a little concerned that spiders, especially the big beautiful slightly scary garden spiders, are veering awfully close to, you know, farming.
Then one of the singers introduces the next selection, a very old song. A very old . . . cow-herding song. Uh-oh. She even translates the verses.
Then she tells us how she spent her summer working at a living history museum. It was a historical farm of the late 1800s museum. Oh, geesh. Not only that, she was the goat-herder. Not only that, it was a beautiful song.
Well, we gave up pretending that farming didn't exist. Instead we had a nice little chat at intermission with the goat-herding singer, about our nice little CSA farm with our nice not very little draft horses and our nice many-sized vegetables, and she told us that she grew up in a 24-person northern Swedish village, on a small farm with chickens and sheep and pigs and cows and horses.
She said that in Sweden, too, agriculture has been taken over by big corporations, but that little farms were coming back. Oh, nice little farms, keep on trying! was the general gist of our conversation.
So there we two New Hampshire farmers were, right back to farming, and we were even feeling kind of happy about it. If only we could sing as beautifully as a spider when we were herding our (virtual) cows and our (virtual) goats and our (very real) horses and our (very real) vegetables, we'd be doing pretty well.
Originally published in the Monadnock Shopper News, Jan 10 - Jan 16, 2024