growing trust 113truck, we picked all afternoon into dusk, till we were finding the fruits
with our fingers instead of our eyes.
Like the narrator of Kazantzakis’s Zorba the Greek, I have a resolute
weakness for cherries. Annually I take Zorba’s advice on the cure; so far it
hasn’t worked. All of us were smitten, filling gallon buckets, biting cher-
ries alive from their stems. This was our first taste of firm, sweet fruit
flesh in months, since the early April day when we’d taken our vows and
foresworn all exotics. Fruit is what we’d been hankering for, the only dep-
rivation that kept needling us. Now we ate our fill, delivered some to
neighbors, and put two gallons in the freezer, rejoicing. Our fructose celi-
bacy was over.
The next day our hands were still stained red as Lady Macbeth’s, but it
was time to go, or we’d never get our trip. We packed up some gifts for the
many friends whose hospitality and guest beds lay ahead of us: cherries of
course, bottles of local wine, and a precious few early tomatoes we had
managed to pamper to ripeness—by June 12, a record for our neighbor-
hood. We threw bags of our salad greens and snap peas into a cooler with
some cheese and homemade bread for munching along the way. If we
waited around, some other task would start to fall on our heads; we could
practically hear the weeds clawing at the president’s face. We hit the gas
and sped away.
/
Farming is not for everybody; increasingly, it’s hardly for anybody. Over
the last decade our country has lost an average of 300 farms a week. Large
or small, each of those was the life’s work of a real person or family, people
who built their lives around a promise and watched it break. The loss of a
farm is a darkness leading to some of life’s bitterest ends. Keeping one, on
the other hand, may mean also working in a factory at the end of a long
daily drive, behind and ahead of the everyday work of farming.
Wherever farms are still living, it’s due to some combination of luck,
courage, and adaptability. In my home state, Kentucky, our agriculture is
known for two nonedible commodities: tobacco and racehorses. The lat-
ter is a highly capitalized industry that spreads little of its wealth into the