LIFE CHANGE:A book about a city girl uprooting to the country resonates with IMEN McDONNELL, who traded New York for Co Limerick
WHAT DO YOUthink it would take for a Harvard-educated, 30-something, Agnès B-wearing journalist from New York City to pull up her city living roots and become a full-fledged farmer? If you ask Kristin Kimball, the author of The Dirty Life: A Story of Farming the Land and Falling in Love, she will say that being an adventure-driven travel writer with a general lack of executive function will certainly do the trick. Obviously a sense of humour goes a long way, too.
Kimball is a writer who decided to trade her single life in the big city to marry a farmer named Mark and turn 500 neglected acres into an organic community farm. Seven years after her life-changing move to Essex Farm in upstate New York, she has written a captivating memoir that follows her adventure from seed to blossom and everything in between.
As a US city girl who married an Irish farmer, I looked forward to reading this book after seeing a review of it in the New York Times. I hungrily read chapter after chapter, each filled with the blood, sweat, and tears that comes with pig slaughtering, working the land with horses, and harvesting enough vegetables and fruits to feed a hungry village. I must confess, compared to my circumstances, I was left feeling a bit like a faux farmette.
Fortunately, my feelings of inadequacy are lifted when I ask Kimball, in advance of the publication of the paperback edition of her book this week, what, if anything, she misses about the city life? Her answers are straightforward and honest, and mirror my own thoughts: Family and friends. The mother tongue of New York City – fast-talking people who curse eloquently, but mostly without malice. Bars. Theatres. A choice of restaurants.
I sigh, and then she says: “You don’t get to change your life without letting go of some things.” I swallow hard and quietly agree.
Kimball’s father wasn’t too pleased with his daughter’s idea of “marriage material”. In fact, he emphatically states that he didn’t provide her with a good education so that she could go and marry a farmer. So did they ever come around to accepting him? “It took them a while to see that my new life made me genuinely happy. I give them a lot of credit for accepting the choices I made, since they were choices they would have never made for themselves in a million years.”
The book is neatly structured, with four long chapters, each outlining the work and wonder of each season on Essex Farm in New York State. In the first winter, they welcome their Jersey milking cow and name her Delia. Then comes the spring, when the sugar bush is tackled, followed by the long hot summer, which is filled with haymaking, taming the wild weeds and a spot of black-pudding making. In the autumn, they are married in the loft of their red barn.
It is interesting that Essex Farm makes an effort to not use fuel-powered vehicles, so they use draft horses for most of their work in the fields. Kimball says that even if she was living a different life, she’d still want to work a team of draft horses. She even goes as far as to say that she doesn’t know if she’d feel as enthusiastic about farming if she had to spend all day on a tractor.
So how did Kimball find time to write this book and keep the farm running, with the constant demand of such long, intense days? After about year three, they were able to hire employees and although she still milked by hand each morning, she was able to steal away to the local fire department and work out of a broom closet office. “Yes, a fire department is less hectic than our farm,” she says.
Are they ever able to take holidays, something that any farmer or self-employed person struggles to do? “We took three days in Montreal recently. Mark won’t fly, it’s too big of a carbon suck for him to feel okay about, so we are restricted in the places we can go together.”
Since Kimball was formerly a travel writer, she has already seen a lot of the places people want to go to. “I’d never say no to sleeping in, but the only reason I want to travel these days is to see how farmers grow food in other parts of the world, especially those who are still using traditional methods.”
The Dirty Lifeis passionate, inspiring, and well written, a page-turner for anyone who has ever dreamed of settling into a very different way of life. Still, I can't shake the feeling that in Ireland, farmers tend to be notoriously private and I wonder if it was the same in America. Does she feel exposed by writing such a deeply personal memoir? "The nice thing about a first book is that you can write as though nobody will ever read it. You only get to do that once."
The Dirty Life
, by Kirstin Kimball, published by Portobello Books, is available now (£12.99/€15). Imen McDonnell blogs at marriedanirishfarmer.com
