Back when my daughter was expecting their child, needless to say we all were excited. Kara Fizbeauchamp, my daughter-in-law, wrote “When Your First Grandchild is a Farm” for me and framed it within one of her paintings of garlic growing. I wanted to share it with you as the farm has always been a centering place and creative signpost for me.
When Your First Grandchild Is a Farm
by Kara Fitzbeauchamp
A grandparent is intimately involved in the birthing of a farm baby. It’s unclear how long a typical birth takes, but you’re on call or active duty for the duration of the pushing, screaming, crying, and cursing. Unlike the human birth, you will find yourself sharing in the physical exertion, exhaustion, fatigue, and dehydration of transitioning the grandchild from gestation to breathing on its own. But like a human grandchild, once the birth has been crystallized, the adventure has just begun.
Perhaps with the human baby, the grandmother is exempt from the primary duties of general care-taking – being free to focus on spoiling, baking for, playing with, adventuring with, singing to, reading to, and primarily having a wonderful time with the new being while mom and dad nap between feedings, cleaning, diapers, tantrums and vomit.
Three of my favorite photos of my two farm (human) grandchildren
Well not so when your first grandchild is a farm: When it’s hungry for transplants, you’ll be spending hours bent over with your hands in the dirt, plunking one optimistic seedling at a time. When parents have neglected daily hygiene routines, you’ll be out there weeding like there’s no tomorrow. You will find yourself shoveling a much larger volume of feces than a human baby could ever cumulatively collect in diapers. It’ll expect you to build, make, and sew it all sorts of toys, like wash stations, harvest bags, compost bins and flower beds.
Old wash station with harvest bags, and planting onions in the snow with Kara at the old farm.
On top of all this, the farm grandchild is oblivious to the weather, so you’ll have to do these things in the rain, snow, wind, heat, sun and maybe once a hurricane.
Winter at the farm, and the damage from Hurricane Irene at the old farm (photo by Adam Ford).
Yes, you will have more work with a farm grandchild because the farm parents cannot do it all themselves – it’s simply too big. (If someone alerted farm parents to this phenomenon, they may have used better farm birth control).
But just like human grandchildren, the joy it provides melts the burdens of raising it: Weekends outside reveling in the blessings of the earth; reconnecting with dirt, that essential medium transporting us to childhood where life is a series of sandcastles to build and cookies to eat; impressing yourself with your body’s ability to physically toil the way it did when you started a family of human babies; watching the farm grandchild grow and mature into a beautiful, abundant, resilient multi-species system that may one day inspire other farm baby births.
Carrots recently washed waiting to be packed for the cooler. Photo by Adam Ford.
And you’ll eat!! You’ll eat the most rewarding, colorful nourishment because that needy, demanding, high-maintenance grandchild gives back delicious gifts. (This is an advantage of a farm grandchild because you would be in serious trouble for eating a human grandchild.)
Rows and rows of tomatoes growing in one of the long high tunnels. Photo by Adam Ford.
The magic of being a grandparent is that you don’t know who that being will be, but you will love the hell out of it. And lucky you – not everyone gets to grandparent an ecosystem.
The glorious ecosystem that is Evening Song Farm, CSA. Photo by Adam Ford.
As I mentioned earlier, the farm has been a centering place and creative signpost for me throughout the years. When my job consumed too many weekends, I would head up there and just weed and weed and weed. Their business card of carrots stacked high at farmers market was my inspiration for the first carrot fabric picture. To this day, the carrot art pieces are my top seller in the On the Farm Veggie Collection.
Interested in purchasing carrots (or another vegetable) for your home or as a gift? Contact me.
Thank you to Adam Ford, an amazing photographer and author. He has captured those littlest details of both the big events and day-to-day doings of the farm over the years. Choosing which photos of his to purchase was so challenging.
And a special thank you to Kara, for the wonderful gift of her art, seen below, and this written piece.
