Free Bootstrapper: From Broke to Badass on a Northern Michigan Farm by Mardi Jo Link Page A

now I waken
.
    —CHRISTINA ROSSETTI , “A Daughter of Eve”
    September’s warm days are gone; there’s frost on the pumpkins in the mornings now, and my shoulder is tight to the wheel of the rhythms that dominate our days. It’s a restless cold I feel under my jean jacket and work gloves. Work is getting done, though;and moping, in any form, is a distant memory. But so is the summer garden.
    While the boys are at school I come home early from work and can tomatoes and dilly beans, harvest spinach, peas, beets, cauliflower, and heavy armloads of squash. Not the unexpected and freaky squash that won the bakery contest, but the regular varieties I planned for and sowed just before the full planting moon back in May. That feels like someone else’s life now, someone else’s plan.
    At the bus stop one morning, Luke informs me that Einstein believed the concept of time was a fiction, dependent on our silly human need for a past, a present, and a future.
    “Don’t think about that for too long,” Luke warns, climbing the steps of the school bus and about to recede behind the louvered door, “or your head will explode.”
    With Will in elementary school, Luke in middle school, and Owen in high school this year, for the first time the boys now ride three different school buses, have three different start and end times to their day, and I am wooed by three different PTAs. If anything is going to make my head explode, it’s contemplating all of that.
    Though I am not, it turns out, exactly PTA material.
    The elementary school’s parent group is mulling field-trip opportunities when I show up to their meeting, fresh from muddy garden chores and eager to help. I missed the curriculum committee, but I can at least plan a field trip, can’t I?
    I think of those dozens of sets of idle hands and young backs with willing dispositions, cafeteria-provided snacks, and free transportation. And are you kidding me, of course I have an idea. They can spend the day at the Big Valley and learn how to weed, muck out empty stalls, compost aging horse manure, and shellovergrown beans. They can core tomatoes, blanch broccoli, and trim back perennials. They can
work
. It’s perfect!
    My obvious excitement at this brilliant use of public-school resources is, surprisingly, not returned by the rest of the parents, and a vote is taken. All in favor of a puppet show say aye, there’s a full chorus of ayes, and I never attend another PTA meeting.
    While the boys are at school, I stay away, and today mull over Luke’s advice about time and know that Einstein must not have been a gardener. He must not have had to put food by for his family for the winter. If he did, he’d know that time is as real as dirt and rain, and in the north you need four good months of it to turn a dime-sized seed into a blue Hubbard squash the size of a Thanksgiving turkey.
    If time really is just a fiction, then why do I feel like there’s never enough of it?
    I snap the blue Hubbard off its frost-wilted vine and carry it downstairs to join its colleagues in the root cellar. Stacked in pyramids in the cool dark like swollen bottles of fine wine are a couple dozen butternut, acorn, and delicata squash. Carrots will stay sweet in the garden until the soil around them takes a hard freeze, but then I’ll pull them up, trim their tops, and pack them in cardboard boxes filled with bags of sawdust left over from the stalled remodeling project and store them down here, too.
    Last night the boys and I picked all the green beans that grew too large and tough to eat whole, then I spent an hour sliding my thumbnail along their seam and plucking out the seeds. These are much like the dried beans you can buy at the grocery store, but softer and better tasting. They can be sautéed in olive oil for succotash, added to soups, mixed into stir-frys.
    In just a few short weeks I’ve gone from contemplating thebeauty of mythical TV ranches to finding a use for old string beans. Two