"You and I, we know the secret to life. It's butter." – Chef Didier in the movie Last Holiday

A few weeks ago Brent came home from work with a jug of raw milk he had bought from a local farmer. This was an exciting day in our house. And, of course, we knew what we had to do: make butter. Now there are many fancy, new-fangled ways to make butter using things like blenders and what not, but we decided we had to do it the same way I had done it in first grade when we passed a mason jar full of cream around the table and each took a turn shaking it. If first graders can do this, we thought, surely we can too. And we did – with the help of my mom and uncle who grew up watching my grandma churn butter on their farm and a consultation with The Up-With-Wholesome, Down-With-Store-Bought Book of Recipes and Household Formulas.

First we had to pour the cream off our milk – and call my uncle in Kentucky to find out how to tell when we're done. Pour it until it stops looking thick, he told us, about a pint or so. Poured some of the cream on the raspberries our friend Susannah had brought and poured ourselves glasses of milk while we were at it. Decided that it did indeed taste "cowier" than regular milk as Noel Perrin had described in First Person Rural.

Mabel, our chief buttermaker, got the ceremonial first shake. Then we passed it around as we stood around our pellet stove talking about life, God, and Vienna. Fifteen minutes of shaking and a consultation with the book to see if we were done and we had butter. See?

Took it out of the jar and pressed more of the buttermilk out, got impatient and decided to eat it as it was. We slathered it on some slices of homemade English muffin whey bread and enjoyed.

I think we may have to get that dasher built for the churn I inherited from my grandmother. Oh, if we could only have a minature milk cow.

When I first started traveling to New York City for work, I was fascinated by the glamour of city life.  I stayed in fancy hotels (at least by my family’s standard!), ate in very nice restaurants (ditto), and spent my free time just walking around, being a part of the energetic rush of the city.  By my third visit though, I wasn’t really having fun anymore.  I was tired of the intense hurry everyone was in.  I was becoming annoyed with how impersonal and self-obsessed the culture felt.  I was disheartened by wandering through stores that not only could I not afford, but I was discovering, I had no desire to even aspire to afford.  So on my most recent business trip, I decided to take my family along for entertainment.

I only had to work Friday, so we’d have all day Saturday to ourselves.  That Friday, despite some of the best sushi I’ve ever eaten and a pair of designer knock-off sunglasses from a street vendor, my experience was still about the same.  I found myself in the middle of Manhattan just wanting to run screaming out of town.

Given all that frustration, I think I was well prepared for and deeply in need of Saturday’s discovery.  Heading down toward Greenwich Village to have brunch with some friends, my family and I got off the subway in Union Square and after struggling to wrangle our double stroller up the  handicap-inaccessible exit stairs, walked into the middle of the largest farmer’s market I’d ever seen.   We were surrounded on every side by apples, chicken and quail eggs, micro-greens, mushrooms, bunches of freshly cut pussy willows, potted tulips, goat cheese, and maple syrup.

My mood changed instantly as we walked back and forth through the market, visiting farm stands from upstate New York, Pennsylvania, Connecticut and even Western Massachusetts.  I felt certain that my dear wife, LeAnna, would soon grow sick and tired of hearing me repeat, “This is amazing!  I love this!  This is fantastic!  Do we have room for pussy willows in our luggage?  We don’t right?  Really, there’s no way we could pack them …”  But if she was annoyed, she never really let on.  What I suspect is that she herself was drawn in by what was, for us, an exciting, refreshing discovery.

It was only after 20 minutes or so of wandering drunkenly through the market that I realized the irony of it all: I was in New York City, one of the so-called greatest, most culture-rich cities on earth, and my happiest moment all weekend was when I found a farmers market.  It reminded me of a book LeAnna just read in which the main character is a New York dwelling yuppie whose grandparents come to visit.  When they arrive, they insist on going to the Applebees in Times Square.  She pushes back, arguing that they have every culinary opportunity open to them there – why would they choose to eat somewhere they could eat any other day of the year, in any suburb in America?   If I’m remembering correctly, her grandmother responds, we want to eat there because your grandfather already knows he’s going to enjoy it.  Was I like that, I wondered.  Am I some provincial kill-joy whose favorite part of traveling is the part which reminds him of home?

The answer, of course, is a solid maybe.  But I’m okay with that because it seems to me there’s a bigger principle at work here too.  More than this moment just being about my particular preference, I believe that I, and if I may be so bold, all people are actually made for a meaningful connection to the land.  That there is something about us as people that’s inherently programmed to long for that sort of connection.  And I suppose that’s true in regard to the land, meaning the natural world, in general, but is perhaps even more true in regards to a particular piece of land.   

What I think that means is that people were originally made to be tribal – to live in one place where they know not only the land but the people who live on that land.  In that system, their destinies were all tied together – the destinies of the people together, and the destiny of the land.  But the modern world has done away with that.  We’ve created this thing called the city.  And the assumption, at least the way I was educated, is that you would find the city that best allowed you to fulfill the so-called American dream , namely financial achievement, and you would “Go west, young man,” until you achieved it.  The problem, of course, being that this entrepreneurial legacy has effectively created a homeless generation, disenfranchised not only from their people but also from the land by which their people were known.

In New York, there are no doubt innumerable pockets of rich community.  At least historically, there have been ethnic settlements, artistic neighborhoods, and co-ops of friends and neighbors.  Yet at the same time, I can’t help but marvel how in the midst of all that concrete and glass, all that glitz and glamour, people still long for a connection to the natural world.  In addition to the farmers market and, of course, Central Park, corner shop after corner shop is filled year-round with amazing flowers – a bit of life, nature, and beauty in the city.

Even on the somewhat blustery day we were there, people were filling the tables in the not-particularly-attractive-at-this-time-of-the-year Bryant Park – eager to be out of their offices, in the sunshine, near a few trees (leafless though they still were).  This all, to my mind, is more than simply a coffee break, or with cut flowers, the desire for something beautiful on one’s dining room table.   Instead, even subconsciously I believe it’s a longing for a sense of place long lost to most of us.  

My wife grew up in rural West Virginia on the same farm where her father and grandfather grew up.  She is shaped by the mountains she played on as a girl.  They inform who she is, what she values, and how she understands herself.  When we were first dating, for reasons I didn’t even understand at the time, I would refer to her as LeAnna-of-the Mountains.  Thoughtless though I was at the time about issues of place and of identity, I still understood on some visceral level that the woman I love is defined by her people and by her land.

So that Saturday, in the middle of New York, I was responding to something more than just a pleasure-filled taste of my preferred type of culture.  Instead, I think, I was, in the middle of millions of people, and towering sky-scrapers, feeling the call and pull of home.  It was very much the same as the experience of being abroad and hearing someone speaking your native language.  I was, for a brief moment, among my people.  I still deeply long to move to the country, to raise my children on a piece of land by which they will ultimately both be known and know themselves.  But in the meantime, perhaps my family and I can be content to connect with our tribe wherever we find them.  And now I know that when I travel, home is only a subway stop away.

I’d be glad for any of your own thoughts on this! 

Although our city has been so cruel as to outlaw keeping chickens in your backyard (it’s breaking Brent’s heart!), we do have some livestock working for us. In January, Brent ordered a pound of Vermont Wiggler worms from a worm-farmer (www.greenmountainsoil.com) in Vermont to begin vermi-composting. It was my job to wait for the mail carrier to come, so our worms wouldn’t freeze on the front stoop. This made for a tense few days when I was waiting for 1,000 worms to come via the U.S. Postal Service. Of course, the day they did come, I was putting the girls down for a nap and missed our mail carrier. When I looked out the window, I saw him still in his truck on the corner.  I threw a blanket over the baby and went running down the street in my slippers. He opened up the back of his truck and freed the worms. 

Our poor animal-lover child, who has had to endure a childhood populated by two untouchable and frankly downright crazy cats, was particularly excited about the worms coming.  A few days before they arrived she began asking, "Worms coming to our house, Daddy?" "Yes, Ella." "I play peek-a-boo and aprise them." She continued later, "Worms coming to our house, Daddy? I bark at them. Daddy?...I can't wait for the worms to come to our home." 

At this point we were beginning to wonder if Ella knew what worms actually are, so we asked her.

L: Ella, do you know what worms are?
E: Yes, they're animals.
L: Do you know what they look like?
E. They're animals. They make noises. They quack. 

We began to worry that she might be in for a bit of a surprise. The worms were sadly quack-free, but Ella still thought they were cute. We set the worms up in their own bin in our kitchen. Brent drilled air holes in a plastic tub and filled it with damp, shredded newspaper and dubbed it the Vermivilla. The idea behind a vermi-composting bin is that you bury your food scraps in their bedding material.  Over a few months, or so we’re told, they turn all of this into the most vitamin-rich organic fertilizer around.  This “fertilizer” is really something called worm castings which is, you guessed it, worm poop.  However, as long as you’re not overfeeding your worms, the box only ever smells like rich, moist soil, but warning, do not feed your worms a large amount of semi-rotten cabbage before going away for the weekend.  If they don’t finish it by the time you get home, your house will smell very much like, well, very rotten cabbage.  And let me tell you, that’s not pleasant. 

It’s a little-known fact that besides vegetable scraps, worms also like a bit of entertainment. The day after our worms arrived, I found Ella sitting beside the Vermivilla reading the worms Green Eggs and Ham. Which frankly sounds a bit like the kind of book a worm would enjoy. 

Now they’re happily living in our kitchen eating our vegetable scraps, coffee grounds, and egg shells, which Brent grinds up in the food processor. We’re hoping for some lovely compost by spring. In the meantime, Ella has taken to introducing them to our guests, “These are my worms,” she says. “They eat my junk.”

Brent says that maple syrup is God’s first gift to New Englanders for surviving the winter. I think that that’s true. There’s nothing like seeing those first buckets on the tree to cheer your spirit on an early March day. It always puts me in the mood to reread Miracles on Maple Hill by Virginia Sorenson, the same wonderful children’s book that inspired Brent to tap all the trees in his back yard when he was in middle school.

I personally think it’s quite brilliant that you can turn tree sap into sugar, so much so that for Christmas I asked for a big jug of local maple syrup. My dear husband was the only one who really took me seriously. He went above and beyond and bought me a bottle of homemade syrup from his childhood friend Rosann and her husband Mike who are hobby maple sugarers. They both work full-time at other jobs, and collect buckets of sap during the week from their neighbors’ trees and store it in a tank. During sugaring season they boil all weekend, starting as early as 6 a.m. and staying out as late as midnight, in the mini-sugar shack they built in their suburban backyard, which they call The Maple Hut. They tell us that it takes 40 gallons of sap from a Sugar Maple and 70-80 gallons from other Maples to make one gallon of syrup.

A few weekends ago, we were fortunate enough to go and see The Maple Hut in action. Looking only slightly out of place in its suburban neighborhood, the Maple Hut is everything you’d dream of – old fashioned in design, its rough-sided walls are already covered in vintage maple gear, and as we arrived wood smoke and steam were pouring out of the open windows in its vaulted roof, while the knee-weakening smell of syrup filled the air. Inside, the temperature was downright balmy, as Rosann and Mike shared their story, trading off in their narrative as one of them, summoned by their digital timer, stopped every seven minutes to stoke the fire.

Like Brent, Mike had also tapped trees when he was a kid. So a few years ago, when his friend gave him some sap buckets, he decided it would be fun to tap the trees around their house and see if they could boil some syrup in a turkey fryer. By the next year, they had asked a few of their neighbors if they could tap their trees, too, in exchange for some of their finished syrup. They converted a large barrel into a boiler and spent their weekends boiling outside. The next year Mike bought a fantastic early-20th-century evaporator online and Rosann insisted that they would have to build a shed to house it. And it was then that Maple Hut really came into being.

They started tapping more trees on Mike’s parents’ property as well. Since then they’ve been collecting sugaring gear, both vintage and modern, including a rotary bucket washer, a press filter and tools to help them bottle and cap the syrup. They sell several sizes of syrup – all in American-made glass bottles, granulated maple sugar and maple candy. Of course, we went home with another jug and some maple candy for our Easter baskets.

For a hobby, Rosann and Mike certainly work pretty hard, but one taste of their syrup and I think you’ll agree it’s totally worth it. We can only aspire…

While we’ve only been married for 5 and a half years, LeAnna and I have known each other for more than thirteen. We were next door neighbors freshman year in college and quickly became best friends. Toward the end of our time in college one of us, but I won’t embarrass myself by saying who, became interested in the other and was firmly rebuffed. This Jane Austin-esque rejection set off an excruciatingly long season of what I like to call courtship by committee in which it was guaranteed that only one of us was ever interested in the other at any given time. I don’t recommend it. But after enough years of this, while I was in Boston for grad school and LeAnna was working as an Americorps Vista in her rural hometown in West Virginia, we finally decided to make a go of it. LeAnna moved to Boston, we dated seriously, and were finally engaged and married. I don’t think I’m telling tales outside of school to say that LeAnna’s mother was relieved – and insisted she had known it would happen all along.

While we were in Boston, we became involved with a large, urban church in Cambridge and not only had our lives changed by our experience of Jesus there, but we also became quickly enamored with city life: wearing lots of black, shopping at obscure ethnic markets, and taking the subway.

Eventually, though, we felt called to move back to Western Massachusetts, to a city not far from both the small town where I grew up and the college town where we met. We moved out here leading a team of people to plant a new church. And while the church ultimately closed, we’ve remained here, and in the process have learned, or perhaps I should say, rediscovered some important parts of who we are.

We’d been so focused on our mission for the last several years, that somehow we’d lost track of what we do for fun. We freely admitted to ourselves, or anyone who cared to ask, how astoundingly lame that was. But we just weren’t very good at having fun. And so we set out to figure out what it is that makes us uniquely happy.

What we accidentally stumbled into is an old part of both of ourselves: that at heart, LeAnna and I are deeply geeky, rurally-inclined, old-fashioned people who would rather bake bread than go to the mall and who are digging up increasingly large portions of our miniscule urban lot to cram in just a couple more tomato plants. Furthermore, we’ve always been that way. Perhaps it was all the Little House on the Prairie that our mothers read us as children, or perhaps it was our own small-town, rural pasts and ancestries, but we found out that where we are the happiest is in our home, creating from scratch with our kids.

So we’ve given ourselves over to that endeavor – to learn the skills our grandparents knew, to grow and process our own foods, to connect with other folks who have similar passions, and, while we dream of someday moving from the best-little-farmhouse-in-our-depressed-former-mill-town to a real farmhouse on a real farm, to make the most of our urban life, quirky though it is. And what we’ve discovered so far is that not only do we love it, but our two-year-old daughter, Ella, loves it. And, as an added bonus, we’re living on less money than ever – meaning that weathering the recession has never been so much fun. We look forward to getting to know you and your passions and to sharing some of our journey with you as well.