I live in a house with roughly 35 other girls, so there is always somebody in our dining room. On Thursday afternoons when I get back from the farm, my housemates have taken to their favorite game to play over their grilled cheese lunches: "what was Sonya doing today?" They can usually make these judgements based on a number of indicators. Red hands? She must've been picking beets. Smell like garlic? Getting garlic ready for seed. Soaking wet? Hosing down buckets and baskets for produce... the list goes on.
This Thursday when I got back from the farm, the only guess my housemates could muster was: rolling around in the mud? It's true- I had been digging potatoes and I was downright dirty. There was mud caked onto my jeans, dirt underneath all my fingernails, and even some mud streaks on my face. I might've been wrestling with the pigs.
All of this dirt got me thinking about one of my favorite aspects about working on the farm--the physical labor itself. In a regular semester on campus I am always in and out of the gym, trying to stay active, but the activity on the farm is something different. There is something deeply satisfying about spending a few hours working with your hands and allowing your brain to take a little bit of a rest (or, depending on the day, giving it a little bit of time to think on its own). This is one of the things I love most about the farm, and one of the things I will miss the most as the snow creeps in. The simple satisfaction of digging hard, letting my brain relax, and finding buried treasure in the form of a potato.
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