Easter Story #1

When I was a kid my mom was the only person in the family who regularly went to church. I don’t think she was particularly religious, but she is very social, and she likes to sing. Also she went to a really groovy church.

It had folding metal chairs and homemade, colorful felt banners on the walls that said things like “God Loves You” and … OK, wait, I don’t think the banners actually said “I’m OK, You’re OK”, which was the title of a bestselling self-help book at the time, but in my memory the images are mixed up.

The assistant minister was also my mom’s therapist, so there was a very psycho-analysis, self-help vibe here.

The minister, Stuart, was amazing. He was funny and intellectual and personable. When I was 9 or 10 I would sometimes go to church with my mom, usually with a book in hand, and I would read through a lot of the service. But when Stuart was giving his sermon, I would usually listen, because he was funny and interesting, even to a ten-year-old.

Once he told this story about a girl he’d known at this other church where he’d been the minister, named Holly. She thought that when people said “Hallowed be thy name”, that they were saying “Holly be thy name.” And she was like, Yeah, I know.

But then she started wondering why no one else got recognized like that. I forget how he got there, but his point, as I remember it, was that her confusion—Holly for hallowed—was entirely appropriate because all of our names were hallowed. We were all hallowed and blessed and loved by God.

Looking back, I realize how very Presbyterian this was!

Sometimes my mom would urge me to come to church with her because something special was going to happen. Once, I think it was All-Saints Day, Stuart was giving a sermon about the importance of various saints, and someone stood up (it was the assistant minister’s wife, Penny, who had once been an actress), and started arguing with him. She didn’t want to hear about all these saints or something like that. And then some other people started standing up, too, and agreeing with her, and arguing with Stuart. (I remember one guy was on crutches and had a leg in a cast, which just seems so late-70’s Did he have a ski sweater on too?) It was like a leftover moment from the 70’s street theater days!

Again, I forget how they arrived there, but the point of the whole production was that we were all saints, which was the general message of the church. We all have God within us. We are all hallowed, just like Holly.

It feels a little culty when I think back on it, but it was really nice.

Another service I remember is Easter Sunday. I think I have a few different years mixed up in my mind. But I remember at a certain point in the Easter service people would turn to the person sitting next to or behind them, and one of them would say “Have you heard?” and the other one would say, “He is risen.” And then they would shake hands or hug. Throughout the congregation, everyone was murmuring this exchange and hugging or shaking hands. Why does this memory make me cry a little bit? It was so lovely.

***

Easter story #2

In April of the first year of the pandemic, we had a record number of sheep born. I think the total was 30 lambs that year. The timing could not have been better.

One of the ewes had triplets, and one of the three lambs was not quite done being in the womb. Her hoofs were still soft and translucent, and she was weak and shaky. Her mother wouldn’t let her nurse. She was so tiny and frail!

So I took her inside for the night. I don’t like taking babies inside, especially as I was still hoping the mom would accept her, but the temperature was going below freezing and it was too risky to leave her out there.

Here’s me bringing her back in the morning. (You can see she’s already like, Yeah I’m staying with you.)

Her mom did not take her back.

So she became a bottle baby. I still brought her in the first few nights but after that I made her stay outside. In my opinion, it’s better for an animal to be with its own kind, from as early as possible. Even if the mother won’t accept her, sometimes another ewe will. Plus, baby lambs are not cute in the house. They don’t curl up and sleep through the night, and they’re entirely unhousebroken. And it just makes a better sheep or goat or horse or whatever if they grow up with their own kind. So as soon the cold spell passed we kept her outside with the sheep.

We named her Sugar.

Keep in mind, this is all when the world was falling apart. May 2020. June 2020.

Sugar became kind of like a safe zone. I made the decision not to talk about politics on my IG feed. I just talked about Sugar. I’m sure you won’t be surprised to find out how many people loved that. People were already tired of all the darkness and wanted a happy story about a saved, adored lamb. They were really rooting for Sugar.

She became obsessed with all of us, but especially me. She reminded me of the song “Mary Had a Little Lamb”. She would everywhere with me.

And she very quickly got really confident and pretty happy. She became a real little personality.

This is one of my favorite videos of Sugar, trying so desperately to get over a rock wall to get to me. All that urgency in a tiny, abandoned lamb. The Rolling Stones seemed appropriate.

Happy Easter everyone! Have you heard? He is risen!

xoxo Larissa

PS: ICYMI, I wrote about saving a lamb from slaughter for The Free Press.)

The problem: Foxes were killing our chickens.

Our old dog Cleo, a mutt who’d been rescued as a puppy from a junk yard in Brooklyn and discovered her protective instincts once we’d moved up to the farm, had handled this situation for years. In her prime, we could open the back door and shout, “Get the fox, Cleo!”, and she would thunder out the door and down to the barn area to find out why the chickens were making a fuss. Even in her final days she would hobble around the farm, watching for predators.

But Cleo died.

And it didn’t take long for the woods to take notice. I often feel like we are living on the border between the natural world and civilization. Any time we let up on our defenses or even just look away for a minute, the natural world—the vines, the predators, the rot, the chaos—moves in to reclaim the neat little corners and expanses we’ve staked out.

In the case of the chickens, this meant three or more attacks a day. Our chickens are free-range during daylight hours, and at dusk we would shut them into the coop. This protocol was failing. The chickens were being attacked during the day, even very close to the house or the barn, and at night the predators were getting into the coop. One of our favorite hens, Mahoghany, was taken. She was a friendly little brown hen my mom had raised. She preferred to eat while sitting on a lap and taking food from humans. Children could scoop her and walk around with her. Is it possible the fox or the fisher cat had pulled her through the chicken wire? There was gore and also feathers that suggested this although I don’t know how it’s possible.

Sometimes I caught glimpses of a fox, brazenly watching me from the other side of a fence. It was hard to leave the property because we knew we’d come back to piles of feathers and traumatized survivors. We were overwhelmed and frustrated—when suddenly I connected our problem to the fact that our neighbor had a litter of Maremma puppies. These Italian livestock guardian dogs are not for shows or pet homes, but 100% working dogs, bred for centuries to care enough about the smaller animals within their realm that they will guard them 24/7 and fight to the death if anyone threatens them.

So we got a puppy. All the puppies had a different color collar to tell them apart, and the color was used as their temporary name at the breeder’s farm. We kept our puppy’s name, Blue.

We’d never had a working dog before. I assumed he would be sort of an automaton, mindlessly driven to protect the flock with no real thought or feeling. He was actually the opposite. Breed descriptions say that Maremmas are hard to train to typical dog commands because they have been bred to think for themselves. Every Maremma owner I’ve known will talk about their brains—and their tremendous hearts.

Even as a puppy Blue seemed thoughtful and curious. He watched me do things. I joked that I was going to teach him how to use a drill. It was like we’d brought a guy onto the farm and he was learning the ropes.

Here are some things Blue has done.

He killed a hawk. Airborne predators aren’t a natural adversary for the Maremma, but Blue was guarding chickens; hawks were a threat. I read in a chat group how to teach him; whenever I saw a hawk circling in the air, I would shake my fist and yell at it. Blue would watch studiously, looking at me, then up at the hawk, then back at me.

One day a hawk got into the chicken coop. My son happened to be there and saw Blue run into the coop; he caught the hawk, shook it hard, and then trotted over to my son and dropped the dead hawk at his feet. Commando operation: complete. Within seconds.

He killed a fox. I came out in the morning to find Blue with a cut on his nose. I went down to the barn area, where I discovered a dead fox. There have been more since then.

He didn’t kill other things. What astounds me about these dogs is not so much that they are such efficient killers—although that is impressive—but even more that they know what not to kill. Hawks and chickens look fairly alike, but he doesn’t hesitate. When he was still a very young dog, Blue once trotted up to me me with a vole or some other kind of small rodent, perhaps still alive, in his mouth. He looked at me intently. This one can go, right? He had to figure these things out.

He very quickly learned how to be incredibly good at his job.

But as Thomas Sowell says, there are no solutions only trade-offs. Or as my husband has said for years, the solution always brings a new problem. They are different problems. But they are still problems.

For one thing, we now have a population problem. We have too many damn chickens.

We especially have a lot of roosters. We often slaughter them and turn them into soup or slow-cooker chicken tacos but our hens breed on their own, and about half of the chicks they hatch grow up to be roosters. They just keep coming. You’re thinking, why don’t you schedule a day and just slaughter them all? Well, talk to my husband. At heart we’re both still soft city people and he doesn’t really like slaughtering the chickens, and neither do I, so we put it off.

The other problem is bigger and much worse, and harder to solve. Blue gets out.

Maremmas are known for this. They see their territory as vastly larger than the paltry area inside the fence that they are meant to patrol. And the actual property line? Immaterial. He’s operating on an ancient sense of territory burbling up from his bones. He’ll find his property line at the edge of the earth when dragons roar back at him, and only upon encountering them might he slink back to our farm chastened. Otherwise, until further notice, he’ll be back in a while. He’s got stuff to do.

We don’t want him to leave our property, but Maremmas are stupidly athletic. We’ve all seen Blue scale a five-foot gate, easily.

For the last six years we’ve been in a kind of an arms race with him. He gets out; we figure out where he got out and build that gate higher. He gets out; we run another electric line. He gets out; we install a feed lot panel over a horse stall.

Now it’s escalated. He’s been breaking out and harassing a particular dog and the guy who owns that dog is mad. Fairly.

We’ve spent this Mother’s Day weekend making our barn area into a fortress. I wonder what the trade-off for the new fences will be. They’re unattractive, took a lot of time to build, and cost money. Will that be enough?

Also we’re still not done.

I adore this dog.

He’s expanded my understanding of what a dog can be. I feel honored that we get to work with him. But it is like we’ve imported a cavalier from an ancient era and we have to make him understand that the reach of his realm is from this fence to that fence, period. He doesn’t get it.

He’s on a chain until further notice. It’s beneath his station but the only option for now.

RIP Blue.

We sold some sheep to neighbors who want to start a sheep farm. I rounded up the sheep they wanted, and they drove their trailer across the pasture and up to the sheep shed, parking about 50 yards away

I looked at the distance skeptically. “Uh, could you get the trailer a little closer?” They were worried about tearing up our pasture; I was worried about our bodies, because moving unwilling sheep hurts.

We got it closer and went to get the sheep. My husband is nursing an arm injury so he stayed with the trailer ready to usher the sheep through the gate at the mouth of the trailer. The other three of us went to contend with the milling writhing mass of wool inside the pen.

Here’s how we catch our penned, partially feral sheep: crouch down, hold your arms out in a relaxed airplane position, advance slowly toward the thrumming crowd, make a selection, pounce, sink your hands into the dense thicket of wool and HANG ON. Here’s what almost always happens next: the sheep will run. Either you have a good stance and can halt the sheep; or you may lose your footing and get dragged. Sometimes you can still make an arrest from your knees. It’s almost never graceful.

After you’ve got the sheep in a good hold, you straddle it and walk it to the trailer. Here’s the problem: the sheep doesn’t want to go.

This is hard work, and potentially dangerous. One sheep is fine, but when you have a few to move it’s hard. You are likely to end up breathless, sweating, bruised, sore, exhausted, and in some cases injured. You can get kicked in the face, leaving a filthy gash. A young ram once butted me on the inside of my thigh at close range and left me with a six-inch bruise the color of a merlot grape.

Here’s the obvious thing: we all knew it would be the male half of the couple who would go in and catch the ewes. This is reality on a farm. Of course it would be. He’s taller and has more bulk than his female partner or me. Everything I ever believed about feminism, all those times I did the heavy lifting, packed the car, solved the math, parallel-parked the truck, whatever, all those ideas get politely asked to sit out certain tasks. Later, we whisper to these ideas as they mill around the farm. We know you can do it if you have to. But we had a job to get done that required physical strength and bulk and we all silently elected the best person for the job do it, and that was this guy here.

He’d never caught sheep before. He loves animals and didn’t want to scare them. But you have to act decisively. You approach slowly so they don’t run — and then you grab, like a predator, all the while not slamming your head on the low-hanging beams of the shed or getting dragged underfoot and trampled or kicked by frenzied sheep.

He did it! He caught the first one, a wild-eyed black ewe I call Curly. We opened the pen to let them out, and then I crouched over in front and took a handful of wool on either side of her shoulders, and we walked her over to the trailer, me shuffling backwards and mostly there to keep the ewe from running while my neighbor did the hard work of moving her forward step by step. We got her in the trailer. Just four more.

But he was already worse for the wear: dirtied and breathless and covered in sweat and probably a little bruised. He bent over with his hands on his knees, breathing hard.

When all five sheep were in the trailer, it was a triumphant moment. He’d done it! His partner praised him like crazy! It was lovely to see how proud she was of him. I knew the feeling.

It’s one of the beautiful things about farming. First, that there are these clear, hard challenges. Challenges so difficult and essential that for ages there were competitions and entire cultural traditions around who could do them best because they are so important and you want to praise and celebrate and emulate the people who do them well.

And then, if you’re lucky, you’re doing these grueling, essential challenges with a willing partner. And you need each other. And, sure, OK, maybe the woman on your farm is the brawny one and the man is the one with the delicate fine motor skills, or maybe you are two men or two women, or maybe your partner is your network of farming friends. But the reality of who is best at which task is unswayed by your ideas of how the world should be; and by the end of a farm day you just need the job done.

New farmers (and maybe everyone, doing anything): you’re going to argue about how to do these jobs. You’ll argue so much about huge important things and also about stupid insignificant things. You’ll find your partner’s opinion about where to place the water trough or how high to fill the water infuriating and insane. (Your partner will think the same of your opinion.) And you may never solve some of those.

But there will also be those moments when you’re both out in freezing sleety rain and your jacket is leaking icy water down your back and your fingers are numb with cold, but the fence has to be fixed or the ponies caught or the sheep penned, and the job needs both of you. Or there’s a brutal heat wave and you’re shearing a sheep who couldn’t be caught on the day the shearer was there, so it’s on you. Sweat is dripping off both your faces and the stronger one of you (even with his injured arm) is holding the sheep still with audible effort and you —the nimbler more precise one—you’ve got the massive old-fashioned shears—giant metal scissors—and are slicing through the wool as fast as you can without catching any soft pink skin and your hands ache from squeezing the heavy shears and you’re kneeling in wet sheep manure on your bad knee from that time last year when a horse threw you, and you will feel this for days and no one would ever call this the best part of life.

But it actually is. It’s glorious to work together for the same goal, doing the things you are each best at. To have no choice but to do so. And very few occupations will ever outpace farming for this end.

***

We had some new kids on the farm last weekend. This is always dicey.

A big part of my farm stay business (in which families rent a cottage on my farm and send their kids down to the barn to do farm work with me for two hours every morning) consists of return visitors. I have several core families who come back year after year, often staying for a week.

I love these return visitors in part because they know what I’m offering, and they’ve still chosen to come back. I don’t have to worry that we’ll be too scruffy and rustic for them. You never know who’s going to see the Airbnb page and think a farm visit sounds nice and show up expecting something fancy.

Even more important, these returning kids know the drill. They’re trained and ready to go! I just have to meet them at 9 am and then I have conversations with them for the next two hours while we do the essential farm work and then find cool projects to work on. There’s no nonsense to deal with. I don’t have to show them how to pull a wagon or hold a rake or turn on a hose. We just get to work.

Once we’ve done the barn chores, which takes about an hour, we have choices to make With new kids it’s more of an assembly line and I’m constantly tapping the clock. OK, kids, it’s 10 am: crafts or ponies? With returning kids, we can be more freewheeling and spontaneous. They often have specific things they want to do, based on their romantic ideas about a farm, or memories from past visits.

Last summer a kid got it into his head that he wanted to pick some apples and make a pie. We have a few old apple trees on our property, but I don’t prune and tend them, so I wasn’t sure what we had. We walked all over the farm looking for apples, chatting about nature and life. If this were a new kid, I’d worry that we were wasting time getting so far off the regular curriculum and the kid might miss out on some essential foundational task. But with this kid, who’s been coming here since before Covid, it’s what we do.

I was pretty sure the two apple trees and the one pear tree in my garden hadn’t produced that year, but we checked. Nope.

There’s a huge half-wild apple tree next to our woods that used to produce a big messy crop of mealy yellow apples. We used to gather them off the ground for our pigs, when we had pigs. So we checked that, but it didn’t have any apples.

Then I remembered a tree in the sheep pasture, so we walked all the way over there and out into the far corner and found the best apple crop I’d seen in a while on any of our trees.

We picked all that we could reach from the ground and the next day we brought out a step ladder and picked more.

They were extremely tart, but edible. So we took a bunch to my house and made an apple pie with this kid’s little toddler brother, which was very amusing, and the pie came out great. The parents aren’t bakers; none of them had ever made a pie before, so this was cool!

Another family’s three boys spent years building and repairing our earth oven. This required hard digging through rocky soil to get to clay in the substrata, which we would excavate and mix with sand and straw and dried manure to patch the outside of the oven and build up its insulating properties.

Then we would build a fire and make pizzas in the oven. (When I mentioned to the kids that the inside of the earth oven can get as hot as 900-degrees, one of the boys commented, “That’s hotter than the surface of Venus.” I looked it up later; he was right.)

Another set of return kids (two siblings and a cousin) are wildly creative. One year we made elaborate, gorgeous crowns for the ponies out of flowers from my garden and then staged a wedding for the ponies. This is all driven by them. I just keep up and offer suggestions here and there.

This year they came too early in the summer for the flower harvest, so we made felted crowns instead, and looms with the early summer flower crop.

These return kids are all so delightful to me. We do these in-depth projects, but also random things that I might do even if kids weren’t there, like building new nests for the hens to prompt them to lay eggs in a better spot than on top of a six-foot cabinet, or taming chicks to eat out of our hands, or trying to train the goat to wear a harness and pull a sled, and so on. I have loved these kinds of projects since I was a kid and I still love them, so it works out. Also sometimes it’s real work like clearing out a neglected stall that’s a foot deep in rotted straw or moving our un-herdable sheep to a new pasture. But I need the kids to have some foundational knowledge of the farm and its associated skills. I can’t do these spontaneous things with newbies who can’t hold a shovel or have to be coaxed past every manure pile we pass.

***

Given how much the kids have to learn even to do the basics, new families always make me a tiny bit anxious. Who are these people? How hard will I have to work to make sure they all (kids and parents) follow my rules? Will I like the kids? Some kids are hard to enjoy. So are some parents.

The first day is the most challenging. It might be hard to imagine how thoroughly overwhelmed most kids are upon arrival to a barnyard. There’s a giant dog, there are little feathered dinosaurs running around screaming, there are enormous goats (“Donkeys!” more than one new kid has said pointing at the goats) straining to get through the fence to them, and there’s poop. It’s a lot for a city kid to process.

Also, I’m the boss, and the kids don’t know me or maybe just aren’t used to following rules or being polite. My rules are first about safety for the animals and the kids, and second about making sure I have a good time hanging out with the kids.

I have had a few kids who required that I squat down to their eye level and have a conversation. I’ll ask:

“Whose farm is this?... (Kid, reluctantly: “Yours.”)

Who makes the rules?... (Kid, practically rolling their eyes: “You do.”)

Who follows the rules?...” (Kid, giving up: “I do.”)

Once we’re solid on who’s in charge, we can get to work, but following the rules is only one issue. Even very composed or polite kids are hyped up, distracted, unfocused, and clueless on that first day. Some are terrified, even to a clinical degree, of dogs or birds. They’re almost all totally freaked out by the prospect of shoveling pony manure, or even being in sight of it. “That’s poop!” they’ll shout, stopping in their tracks as we walk across the pasture, pointing at a pile of dried pucks of pony manure several feet away. One four-year-old girl recently started out shoveling manure pretty bravely, then froze, appeared to completely shut down, and started crying that she wanted her mom. But even that kid was back at it the next day. The first day is the worst, and after that the kids mostly get in line and we have a great time. Fortunately for all of us, that transformation is highly enjoyable for me to orchestrate and then observe. It’s a little Captains Courageous plot every time.

So I had this new family last weekend, and they immediately turned out to be special and didn’t need transforming by me, and I want to try to share why. It wasn’t because the kids said please and thank you like robots. (They didn’t.)

1. First the logistics. They were two families whose children are friends. One family stayed in our main Airbnb, and the other family stayed in the tiny house, which is newly available for rent. This was great!

We’ve been trying to get this house ready for renting for a couple years now. It’s very tiny (140 sf) and very rustic and has no wifi or cell, and you have to walk about 200 yards to get to the bathroom, the kitchenette, and the wifi signal. It’s like glamping. I loved having the two families there and hope we get more groups like this. I think it’s really great for kids to have a little gang to run around with, and I imagine it’s fun for parents to have a weekend experience together but still have their own space to retreat to. (Also, truth: it’s more money for me, which makes it more worth it for me to keep doing this.)

2. The parents were rugged! We accidentally left a few mousetraps in the kitchen on the day they arrived. Normally we’d take traps out before guests get there, but we forgot. That evening we remembered, after the guests had arrived and settled in, and I texted them, profusely apologizing. They were unconcerned and in the morning happily showed me a sprung trap with a dead mouse in it. Unfazed. I like people like this.

3. Their four kids in total, ages 4-7, were a glorious chaotic mess. There was crying. There was arguing and intense negotiating over who got to go first to do whatever. There were moments out of nowhere of extreme kindness, followed seconds later by more crying or crossed arms and pouts. It was like hanging out with the Little Rascals. One girl wanted to be the leader down the path to the gate, so she stretched her arms out and wouldn’t let anyone pass as she slowly minced her way down the path with everyone else bumping up behind her. At one point three of the kids ran across the pasture, just for the fun of it, as one of them randomly screamed, “Everybody wins and nobody loses!” They were so cute.

4. Despite the intensity of their interpersonal dynamics, I loved these kids. They were enthusiastic and open to new experiences. The seven-year-old confessed that although he’d shoveled manure the day before, he really didn’t like doing it. I suggested he keep an open mind because my experience was that most kids ended up enjoying it, and plus it had to be done. He agreed and we did the work. (I’m not sure where he ended up with it, because at the end I thanked him for his work but didn’t check in with him on the specifics of how he felt, because I don’t actually care if he liked it. He did the work, and that’s what matters.) (But I’d bet, based on almost every other kid I’ve hosted, that if he comes back next year he’ll look forward to this task.) They were like sweet old-fashioned kids. They wanted to climb the gate, and try to outrun the sheep while carrying a bucket of grain, and ride the pony even though it was the first time for most of them and they were scared.

They were also so sweet to me. A few hours after the second day of farm camp, one four-year-old wandered over to my house. “We found dinosaur bones!” he told me when I opened my front door. “You want to see them?” Throughout the day, as I did my own thing, occasionally popping out into my backyard or down by the barn, every now and then I’d hear one of the kids, from the other side of the thick screen of foliage that separates our houses, shout, “I see Larissa!” and they’d all come running to tell me something totally random. (I don’t in any way require or seek this kind of attention from four-year-olds, but it was very sweet.)

Their parents were lovely and rugged and that is probably a big part of why their kids were also lovely and rugged. But another part might be that these kids seem to be having low- or possibly no-screen childhoods. On the third morning one of the kids told me he’d named all the new chicks. “All ten of them?” I asked incredulously. He nodded happily and explained with a big no-front-teeth grin: “The mom is Bellina and the babies are all Dorothy.” The dad told me that this is from the Wizard of Oz series of books.

Well, that’s a win right there. So many kids I meet are more likely to find inspiration in video games and describe them to me in detail, and to name animals after video game characters. I don’t think these factors are unrelated.

I hope these kids become regulars. I was sorry to see them leave!

A little hen went off on her own and came back a few weeks later with nine chicks orbiting around her like a solar system of tiny puff balls. This never gets old. It’s like a magic spell has been realized. There is nothing and then—poof!—chicks!

I set up a pen in the chicken coop and eventually trapped them in there for a few days because I didn’t want them wandering all over, especially because two of them seemed to be having a hard time keeping up. These little hens are incredible, protective moms, but they’re also tough. The chicks have to keep up or they get left behind.

Now they’re back out on their own, but they still keep close to the coop, for now. Within a few days, like all our mother hens, they’ll wander farther and farther. They’ll appear in our front yard, way out in the pony pasture, even out by sheep, a busy little troop in search of food “We have to keep an eye on them,” my husband said of these ones. “That group is special.” He says this every year about the bantam families, joking a little, but it’s also true. They’re special. We have to keep an eye on them. (We count them every day and report back to each other. “I saw the white hen with all the chicks. I counted all nine.”)

The only hens on our farm who consistently produce chicks are the bantams, the minis. Most chickens in general don’t reproduce anymore. Yup, even chickens are having fertility issues, although they are definitely not having a reproduction crisis. They just can’t do it on their own. The modern chicken was bred for eggs or meat; they’ve been hatched for this purpose, in an industrial or hatchery setting for the last 100 years. These birds are fantastic testaments to the miracles of the modern world: bred in massive quantities, advertised in a glossy catalog, available for shipping to my local post office almost throughout the year. They grow up to look like they are supposed to according to their breed standards, and to lay eggs in the color, size and frequency as advertised. Incredible.

But they are unlikely to reproduce. Maternal qualities are not selected for in this setting and have largely fallen by the wayside. These hens don’t go broody (broody: the hormonally-driven state of wanting to sit on eggs for the 21 days it takes to hatch chicks). On the rare occasions when the life force bubbles up from within and they do go broody and actually sit for 21 days and might possibly, almost accidentally, start hatching chicks, they get it all wrong. We’ve seen them shove the chicks out of the nest, leaving them to die while they continue to sit on their nice nest of eggs, or they’re just terrible mothers and the one chick they manage to hatch barely survives and sometimes doesn’t survive. We’ll hear the chick loudly chirping in the early evening, so we’ll go down and find the mother hen obliviously sleeping up on a high roost while her chick wanders around below, frantically calling for her.

But mostly these hens don’t even get the urge to brood; they just lay eggs steadily without the messy interruption to the egg-laying regime that maternity causes. It’s quite miraculous on its own merits, from a feed-the-population point of view.

But we’ve lost some other miracles in the process of creating that one.

By contrast, our bantams are excellent mothers, perhaps because they were never bred on such a massive scale. (Bantam chicken: a smaller version of a standard breed.) Mini chickens are more of a curiosity or a hobby than a stable food source for the world’s populations. So they still brood, they hatch, they mother.

They are incredible mothers. They teach their chicks to eat, making a particular, soft, repetitive cluck when they find food. It’s baby talk! Hens talk baby talk to their chicks!

This is actually not that surprising. I read once that prairie dogs, being super-prey to a long list of predators, have evolved a fairly complex language system. They can actually communicate to each other that the ‘man with the hat’, for example, is heading this way as opposed to the ‘man without a hat’. It makes sense that chickens, being similarly vulnerable to a long list of predators (everything eats chicken), would do something similar with language. In fact, hens have all kinds of different vocalizations.

The mothers murmur to the chicks, then scratch in the dirt as the chicks watch, and stand back as the chicks give it a try. They cluck to them and the chicks all run to mom and burrow into her feathers. The chicks have a particular piercing cry when they get left behind and call to their moms.

***

I was watching this new little family group and one of the chicks stretched. It spread its tiny wings and reached one of its tiny legs straight back. I was transfixed. It was a beautiful, graceful, useful movement by this tiny insignificant creature who needed a good stretch. I have seen human babies stretch when they are unwrapped from their swaddling cloths and it is cuter, sure, but not by much.

I have these moments all the time. Just sheer wonder at the beauty and the miracle and the mystery of the natural world.

***

I wrote about coming of age for The Free Press. Among the comments were some reactions to the fact that I went to boarding school: some intrigued and some dismissive, like how can I talk about resilience and optimism when I was a privileged kid who went to boarding school? So now I feel like it’s my duty to clear up some misconceptions about boarding school.

Here’s some information to begin with: not every boarding school is Choate or Exeter, attended by children of the elite. It sounds rich and fancy to go away for school, but there are all kinds of boarding schools and all kinds of reasons to go. In the 80’s, especially, there was an entire category of schools for quirky strange kids who couldn’t function in normal public school or at home or maybe just couldn’t deal with the thought of four years of high school at home. And the schools didn’t cost $50K per year the way they do now. Tuition was something like $5K, and a significant portion of that could be covered by a scholarship or work study.

My brother and sister and I all went to boarding school. This wasn't because we were a high-achieving preppy family, or rich. We were neither of those, but we were WASPs, sure, and boarding school was probably in our DNA. On my father’s side, my grandfather and his oldest son both went to Hotchkiss, a classic prep school. His youngest son didn’t want to go to Hotchkiss and went to another boarding school. (My father, the middle son, went to a private day school.)

But for my generation, boarding school was less a way to follow tradition or get to the Ivies, and more of a solution to problems each one of us was having at home. And we were also probably all ready to move on, get life going, have some more experiences.

My brother was the first. He went to a school in Northern Vermont which in my mind should have been called The School for Wild Boys and Girls Who Might Have Actually Been Dyslexic. My mother found this school in the classified section at the back of the New York Times Magazine at a moment when she was desperate for ideas about what to do with her extremely bright, creative, and downward-spiraling 15-year-old son. The school turned out to be like summer camp, or even a holding tank, for kids who were just like him: bright and creative but couldn't function in regular school, or in their home life.

My brother ended up with the key to the art room and could go there any time he wanted, day or night. He got English credit by building a cabin in the woods, which from what I remember he and his girlfriend then lived in; but also he and his best friend had the leading roles in an exquisite (by my memory as a 12-year old) production of “Rosenkrantz and Guilderstern are Dead”. (He and his friends all wore the ragged velvet costumes for months afterwards and continued talking to each other in the endless questioning style of the play’s dialogue.) Every winter during intersession, the school would load up a school bus and drive the kids down to Mexico for six weeks. I remember reading the packet the school sent to my parents regarding the trip. The boys had to cut their hair to ABOVE THEIR EARS, the girls had to dress modestly, and there would be NO DRUGS. Mexican prison was described as a definite consequence to any drug-related infraction.

They had to make a big deal about all this because kids in boarding school in the 80’s, and this one in particular, all seemed to be stoners, hippies, and Dead Heads. Whenever the Grateful Dead played within 100 miles or so of the school, my brother told me, there would be meetings and fervent announcements: School is not cancelled. Do not go to the shows. But regardless, campus would be deserted. Even some teachers would go, apparently. My brother dropped out before he finished high school (to follow the Dead, I believe), but my family went to the graduation maybe the year before he graduated, when he was technically, I guess, a junior. I remember at least one graduating kid in dirty bare feet and overalls and a giant scrub of bushy hair, other kids in fancy dresses and suits. I also remember a lot of sobbing moms hugging their kids, and a view of Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom rolling out behind them.

By the way, this was the era of places like Vitam, too. Drug-addicted or otherwise out-of-control kids would be sent to lockdown rehabs just for teens.

Vitam famously gave the kids “haircuts”, as a way to make them abandon the hippie lifestyle and submit to authority. The 60’s era was just behind us. There were still middle class kids taking drugs, trying to drop out, turn on, etc. There was a question of what to do with these kids. Schools like the one my brother went to, and Vitam, were among the solutions offered.

(Incidentally, when I was a sophomore at my boarding school, my Dead Head boyfriend was unexpectedly nabbed by his parents one weekend who told him they were taking him out to lunch and instead took him to rehab. Word filtered back to us that he’d had to get his hair cut; we whispered about it with horror. I never saw him again.)

My brother’s school closed in 1988, after the headmaster got charged with embezzlement and absconded to Mexico. Other allegations about the school came out, too, regarding drug use and sexual misconduct. The 80’s were a mess! But, 45 years later my brother is still friends with many of the kids he went to school with.

My sister went to a experimental Quaker boarding school in southern New Hampshire. There were around 20 kids in the entire school. A Quaker friend of my grandmother’s took a liking to my sister and offered to pay for her tuition to go here. He thought she would be a good fit. My sister checked it out and she liked it, so she went. Was that all it took? Well, also our parents had been divorced, and our mom had a new boyfriend, and our home life wasn’t great. Maybe we were tired of commuting every other weekend to another state to see our dad. Or we were ready for some bigger adventure than four years of high school at home could offer. I do know for sure that we both felt out of place in our wealthy conservative suburban school. Going to boarding school to get away from wealth seems crazy, but that’s how it was. What we all found at boarding school was a more diverse mix of people and more importantly, a more alternative culture than we had in our town.

At my sister’s tiny Quaker school, kids lived in family-style houses on a campus that also housed a farm. The farm had sheep and maybe chickens, but as far as I knew wasn’t a major part of the curriculum. But they did do very cool things like an exchange in Costa Rica, where my sister worked on a women’s farm cooperative. And the Quaker aspect was real; some kids came from practicing Quaker families, and when I visited, everybody gathered for meeting and songs on Sunday morning. It seemed groovy and funky and earnest in the way that natural food stores used to be; kitchens smelled like yeasted bread, and there were foods like sprouted mung beans and home-processed maple syrup. At least that’s how I remember it.

There were not your classic prep schools.

My school was technically a prep school, which was not too surprising because I was the preppiest kid in my very off-beat family. Of course I went to a preppy school. I didn’t go to wear loafers and shetland sweaters and get to Dartmouth, though. I went because I was insanely depressed and filled with self-loathing and the tiniest flickering little match flame deep inside me told me that I might feel better if I changed the scenery, and boarding school seemed like the most do-able option.

It was a small (130 students) outdoorsy school in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. We started every school year with a hard three-day hiking and camping trip in the mountains. In winter, classes ended at 1pm so we could all pile into the school’s rickety old bus and drive to Cannon Mountain to go skiing. All the teachers skied and sometimes you’d ski with them. (There were talented athletes there specifically for the skiing—and kids like me, who learned how to ski once we got there.) On really cold days you’d hide in the lodge drinking hot chocolate, and the teachers would come chase you out and back onto the slopes.

In the spring we could do white water canoeing.

I did that one year, and one day ended up capsizing while going through some really intense rapids. It was April; there was still snow on the ground in shady areas and the rapids were comprised of icy runoff from the mountains. This particular stretch was so lengthy that my canoe partner and I couldn’t get out for a long time, and just went rushing down the river, our heads bobbing up and down in the river, utterly shocked by the cold. I was dressed in cotton socks and cotton long underwear instead of wool-everything, as we’d been instructed, and they had to get me under blankets in the van to warm me up so I didn’t get hypothermia.

There were cool outdoorsy things like that, but it was not an academically inclined school. It was actually a terrible choice for me, because I was academically inclined, but too lazy and distracted and interested in partying at age 15 to admit it. I chose it because I thought it sounded cool; and my parents were used to me making my own decisions and didn’t really get involved. When I asked him to write me a reference, my public school English teacher told me it was not the right place for me, and he turned out to be right. After the first English class I took at boarding school, sophomore year, I went to the head of the English department and asked if there was a harder class I could be in. There wasn’t.

We all got into a lot of trouble at this school. This is the thing about all those Northeastern prep schools, even the good ones: there were tons of drugs and so much sneaking around. It felt like one long cops and robbers game. Everybody smoked so much pot. Bongs, which always had names, were the most popular method of delivery because you could smoke in your dorm room and control the smoke. We had “chuff towels”, to blow the exhale into: rolled up towels with brown hickey marks all over them. All of this had to be hidden, of course, including the absurdly huge bongs that some kids had. But of course you could also to out to the woods, to variously named locations like Picnic Rock or the Nut Dreg to do drugs there. And we all took weekends by junior years we were all taking weekends to local motels to drink and smoke freely.

On weekend nights on campus, everyone was sneaking out. There was a night watchman, but you waited until he passed and then ran from shadow to shadow to get to the other dorms. You scratched on a door or tapped on window so they knew it was a kid not a teacher. Sometimes you’d climb into a window and discover a crowded room, with a party already happening. Sometimes, hanging out in my four-person suite sophomore year, there’d be a scratch and we’d let in whatever group of kids was wandering around at 2 am looking for a party. I remember two boys brushing snow off their jackets, chatting for a bit, and then heading back out. “We’re gonna see what’s happening at Solar [another dorm].”

Once, someone gave my roommate and me some pot brownies. The dosage in pot brownies is impossible to gauge. Plus brownies are delicious! You were guaranteed to eat too much. It was formal dinner night; we had to dress up and sit at assigned tables. On the way to dinner, the high hit me. I was walking in to the dining hall and was suddenly unable to talk, a fact I realized when the dean of students, standing in front of me, suddenly turned around to greet me. My mouth went dry and my voice seemed to be echoing as I spoke. I got away from him as quickly as I could and found my seat. It was horrible. I was at least as high as I’ve ever been and exactly where I didn’t want to be, but you couldn’t leave. Attendance was mandatory. At one point, while the chaplain was speaking and I was spacing out, I happened to zero in on one guy’s face across the room. Everyone else was a blur, but this kid’s face was in focus. We stared at each other intently and then he smiled, barely, and slowly nodded, as I grinned idiotically and nodded back. Yup. Then we both looked across the room to a triangle point, and another face came into focus. That guy stared back at both of us, nodding and smiling. Yup. I never ate pot brownies again.

That first year, most of my close friends got kicked out. My three roommates—Mari, Sally, and Martini (a nickname; I forget her real name) all got booted. My boyfriend left for rehab, and another kid I was friends with got kicked out, a really sweet, messed-up freshman boy. He and I took Ritalin together to stay up late and study for a geometry exam. But then he kept taking it and finally broke into the dean’s office to steal more and got caught. Also Mari’s boyfriend, and Sally’s boyfriend, and my very cool and strange friend Nelly who introduced me to the book Interview with the Vampire, which was still very underground and unknown. And a whole bunch of other kids. I did, too, towards the end of the year. It was one of the worst years for expulsion. I think it was a turning point as the culture at large moved away from letting kids smoke on high school campuses and viewing sex and drugs as normal, age-appropriate occupations for teenagers. The rules got tighter. The school would ban cigarette smoking on campus when I was a senior, as schools all across the country were doing, which also meant removing the Butt Hut, a shack on the edge of the woods where you were allowed to smoke cigarettes, and where everyone also smoked pot.

I came back for my junior and slowly started turning myself around, but it took a while. Here’s another memory: Every year, one morning toward the end of winter semester, the bell for classes would ring—and then it would ring again. New kids would look around with bewildered expressions while the other kids would start leaping around and shouting. It was Mountain Day! Classes were cancelled and we’d go skiing all day. Everyone tried to hoard drugs in preparation for this day. This year, after Mountain Day was announced and we were all back in our dorm getting dressed to ski, I went into one girl’s dorm room to borrow some mittens or ski goggles or something like that. Suddenly, two boys sauntered in, which was against the rules. They had LSD or mushrooms, or maybe it was just pot, and they were there to share. Right as they were passing it around, our dorm head walked in. BUSTED!

We went to Mountain Day anyway, and the next day were all called into the dean’s office to face the consequences. Absurdly, we argued with him. I had just been elected student body president, and I was outraged that we were being busted for something so silly as borrowing ski equipment! “Oh, so just because it looks bad, we’re getting in trouble, even though we weren’t doing anything wrong?!” (Um, except violating an actual rule about boys being in the girls’ dorms. Oh, right, and actually passing around drugs, although the dean didn’t know that.) I remember he looked right at me and said, “Yes, Larissa, what things look like matter. And as Student Body President, that’s something you’re going to have to start realizing.”

I had nothing further to say.

I like to think back to what I could have done differently in my life and what different paths I might have ended up on, had I just made a different decision here or there. So I often wonder if I should have gone to boarding school. My public high school got better, everyone said. Around junior year it seems like the cliques relaxed their hold a little, and the kids got a little less obsessed with Ralph Lauren polo shirts and CB jackets, and whether someone’s parents drove a Mercedes or a BMW. My mom and I got along so much better after I went away to boarding school, but maybe that would have happened anyway, even if I hadn’t gone away. But at the time, going away felt like the only option for me.

By the way, all three schools my siblings and I went to are now closed. Do kids just not want to leave home anymore?

This guy was making a film about my brother’s school.

Here’s a 2007 documentary about my sister’s school.

Here’s a NH Public Radio story about my school closing.

Dear Kids,

Thank you for coming to my farm! I’m so glad you’re going to do farm camp with me. We are going to take care of the animals and also do some activities. Some of it might seem strange or scary at first, but I promise everything will make more sense as we go along. My overriding goal is for you to master the skills and knowledge to become an expert on the farm.

But before we get started, a few things…

1. The basic rules are really easy. Be nice to me. Be nice to the animals. That’s really all I ask. You can stop right here if you want to, especially if you’re still little, like under four or five, but if you’re bigger and want to know more, keep reading.

2. Let’s get this one out of the way: we’re going to scoop poop. I realize that in the city, if you encounter poop on the sidewalk it’s a big deal and you have been taught to avoid it at all costs. But we are on a farm, and poop—it’s called manure—is a fact of life. You have to adjust. This takes most kids a little effort. But some kids really lock on to it. Listen, the sooner you can get past complaining about how it smells and how it’s gross, the sooner we can get on with it. We’re doing real work here, and afterwards you can feel so proud and satisfied with the work we’ve done to take care of the animals and the farm. Most kids end up loving this chore. But some don’t.

3. I’m pretty strict. This is my farm and these are my animals and I want to keep them safe. Even more so, I want to keep you safe. So the rules are tight. If you don’t follow my rules, or you don’t listen, I usually just stand back and wait. Most kids very quickly come to see that my rules make sense—and that within the rules there is a lot of breathing room. Some kids spend more time coming to this realization than others, which gets boring for everyone else, including me, so please try to hurry up. We’ve got stuff to do.

4. Our goal here is not “fun”. So, when you say, on your first day, as we stuff a hay net for the ponies or scrub out a water trough or rake up dirty hay from the barn floor, “This isn’t fun”, you’re missing an essential fact. You’re on the farm to work, not have “fun”. I am half joking because most kids end up thinking all this work is fun, but I’m also not joking.

Here’s a secret of life: some of the best things in life are not necessarily “fun”. I don’t know why grownups talk about fun all the time to children, because even your parents know this. It’s why they brought you here instead of to the circus. You are here to work. You may think the work is fun. Or you may think it’s fun for a few minutes and then get tired of it before it’s done. Or you may always hate some of the specific chores we do. It doesn’t matter. The animals have to be fed and the stalls cleaned and the troughs scrubbed, so that’s what we’re doing.

5. While we’re doing farm camp, your parents are up at the house getting a break—from you. Let’s leave them alone. Your parents work very hard to be able to afford to bring you on interesting vacations like this one, and also at being parents to you 24/7. We try to leave them alone during farm camp so they can take a nap or go for a run or just sit around not wiping noses and filling water bottles and tying shoes and fixing snacks and settling arguments and so on. Here’s another truth bomb: rested parents are nicer parents. So let’s respect your parents’ need for rest, and stay focused on our need to get this work done.

This means: before you come down for camp, make sure to eat your breakfast, go to the bathroom, and bring your water bottle so you don’t have to bother them while they’re relaxing. (Oh wait, here’s a wild idea: why don’t you take care of filling and remembering and carrying your water bottle?) You’ll see them in two hours and they’ll be so happy to see you, because they got a chance to rest and remember how much they miss you when you’re gone!

6. Every day at the end of farm camp, I will always say thank you and good-bye to you, and I believe you should do the same to me. I know this can feel stressful. I think some kids feel overwhelmed, especially when we say good-bye on the last day, or maybe, on any day, when you’re hungry and feel like you must run inside and get food RIGHT NOW or you will DIE. But I promise you the farewells are over quickly, and literally all you have to do is say three words: “thank you” and “bye”.

I used to let kids walk away without saying these things, often ignoring their parents’ requests that they do so, but I’ve come to think that everyone is happier in the end if a polite, quick good-bye ritual happens. When it doesn’t, parents seem embarrassed, and I am left with an irritated feeling toward the kids. I suspect kids don’t feel good about it either.

What I do now is, I’ll start the exchange: “Thank you for all your help!” If they don’t answer, I’ll say, “Now you say thank you back to me.” And when they do, even if they’re hanging their heads, or running up to me to shout it, I’ll say, “OK, bye! See you tomorrow!” And they’ll usually say “Bye,” because the’ve gotten through the thank you, which seemed like the hardest part but was actually so easy! And that’s it! Done! And then the next day it’s usually no big deal. (I never tease kids for getting it together, like, “See? That wasn’t hard, was it?” We just move forward.)

7. More about being polite. Here’s another secret: polite kids get more from grownups they’re not related to. Your parents have to do stuff for you no matter how you behave. But that’s not the case for people who aren’t your parents. Tutors, instructors, counselors, and people like me often give extra time, extra treats, and extra privileges to kids who are polite and enjoyable to be around. When kids are rude or unkind at my farm camp, I’m watching the clock. At the clock turns to 11, I’m saying my goodbyes. With kids who are lovely to be around, I enjoy myself and often forget the clock and go over time, often way over time.

Also, you know how sometimes grownups say something can’t be done when you can tell very well that it can be? Like riding the pony through the woods, or sitting on the back of the goat or climbing that fence? Kids who are agreeable and nice to be around get those things far more often than kids who are not agreeable and nice to be around. This might not be fair, but it’s just a fact of life. Give it try. Look adults in the eye and say please and thank you and try to do a good job at whatever you’re doing and see what happens. (Here’s another wild idea: you can even try this with your parents, who, don’t forget, work very hard and bring you to interesting places like this.)

8. You might get hurt while you’re here. Or stung. Or bumped or bruised. This is just how it is on a farm. It’s really not a big deal to get a little sting or bump, and it’s part of why you’re here. I fact, I hope you will get a little bumped or bruised! As you drive away from the farm to head home, I hope that you will look down at your bruise or your sting or your band-aid and think, yup, I worked hard and, maybe even, I’m kind of a tough kid. I can handle things like that.

Of course, I am very concerned about kids getting really hurt! This is why we have strict rules. But encounters with minor pain or discomfort are an essential part of becoming a big kid and then a teenager, and finally an adult. And you can handle it!

9. You also might get a little scared here and there. I don’t want you truly scared, and I don’t want you ever in real danger. But our goats are big and can be overwhelmingly friendly. Riding the pony with no hands on the saddle or at a trot can be daunting. Watching a herd of sheep running at full speed straight toward you can make your heart race and you may find yourself running for safety. And we have lots of climbing challenges, like checking for eggs on top of a tall cabinet, that are hard and scary for lots of kids.

I think these are important experiences for children—especially when you learn to assess the situation and make a good decision about whether or not you should stand your ground! I’m so proud of all you kids when I see you getting nervous and, even if you run away at first, assessing the situation, overcoming your fears and stepping back out.

(Of course, some of you kids are wild things! In that case I think it’s valuable for you encounter some mild responses to your boldness. You might fall off the pony if you go too fast, or the sheep might mob you when you insist you are big enough to go into the pasture with a bucket of grain. We can find some good challenges for you, like running from the goats with a bucket of feed. See how you like that! Or, hey, have you met the electric fence? Remember, though, none of this is fun.)

Did I scare you off? I hope not. And don’t worry, all of these points come up through activities and quick exchanges, not lectures!

Thank you and goodbye.

Larissa

Once, in college, I was hanging out in an art studio with a few other kids, and this blond, sort of cute guy came across a pair of white men’s briefs that had been coated in plaster so that they were stiff and shaped like they were being worn.

He put the underwear on his head like a hat, and then he wore them like that for a while.

It was crazy! We couldn’t stop laughing!

Except not really, because he couldn’t pull it off. Instead of showing us that he was a weirdo who did bizarre things due to some unfathomable urge from deep within, it was more like he was demanding a reaction from us. It was difficult for me to look at him because I couldn’t handle the pressure of his neediness. I could see the pleading in his eyes to validate the absurd position he’d put himself in. I had to leave the room.

“Too Much” has the same problem.

I wanted to like Lena Dunham’s new show, which aired this week on Netflix. I was a huge fan of her first show, “Girls”, which ran 2012-2017. But “Too Much” is missing everything that made “Girls” interesting. It’s literally unwatchable.

In “Girls”, Lena Dunham's strange eccentric charisma enabled her to do and say almost sociopathically self-centered, oblivious things on-screen and it was both interesting and believable. (Many of us had that friend.) We got a long hard look at her and her generation's broken personalities, and the discomfort and scramble of being young and wanting so badly to become something that you're not.

I’m not entirely sure what the difference is between a guy putting underwear on his head and it not working, and Dunham having her character spend an entire episode with her chunky body in a small green bikini and Dunham seeming just as needy for a reaction but also belligerent and shocking and somehow even a little subversive. I don’t know where the line between boring/desperate and interesting/desperate lies. It’s like art and obscenity and beauty. You know it when you see it.

In "Too Much", the eccentricity reads like underwear on the head. The main character, Jessica, exhibits the same afflictions as Lena Dunham’s Hannah. Jessica is also self-absorbed, overweight, needy, and inappropriate. But Jessica is missing Lena Dunham’s actual internal weirdness. Jessica comes across like an indulged neurotic girl from Great Neck who has too much money to spend on clothes and is convinced you should find her interesting and weird. She’s a little like Shoshanna in “Girls”, but not as believably weird. We’re actually told that Jessica’s wacky prairie nightgown collection is something we should appreciate. It’s explained to us. We’re meant to be delighted by it.

The show is also structurally bizarre. The cute, talented, sweet love interest appears on the first night of the show and is immediately smitten with a narcissistic girl in a tent dress whose main personality seems to be issuing jaunty barbs that she thinks sound cute. Not believable, and where is the tension? (Also it bugs me that jet lag doesn't exist on this show; everything inconvenient to a ten-show plot line has just been eliminated, all the burrs and nubs that ground a show in reality just gone.)

OK, I couldn't get through the second episode, so who knows, maybe some plot snags appear? But too late.

One of the worst demands the show makes of us is that we automatically agree that a lovesick girl in a voluminous sailor-suit dress is going to make a total stranger, who is attractive and talented and sociable and would presumably have lots of options, fall in love with her almost on first sight. What are you, fat-phobic? How could you doubt that? I can absolutely believe that the guy would like her. But that he would become instantly so smitten that he walks her home, follows her to the hospital, spends the night, stays the morning, etc etc is not real. Not when there appears to be no sexual energy, just an ongoing string of jaunty barbs—oh yeah and Jess’s cray-cray outfits!

A friend told me that she thought the sex scene between Jessica was uncomfortable because “we’re not used to seeing overweight women have sex on screen.” I thought it was uncomfortable because there was zero sexual energy between the two of them, and Jessica was making wisecracks throughout the act, which was just entirely weird. On “Girls” Hannah’s relationship with Adam starts out so deranged and sad that you’re cringing watching Hannah allow herself to be a booty call for this irritating Brooklyn hipster. (It reminded me of a few friends. Ugh, too real.)

But the sexual attraction was believable, even if it was dark and slutty. Hannah was desperate for validation and attention and sex, and Adam was a horny young guy willing to hang out with this girl who would let him do whatever he wanted. Then their characters developed and the relationship grew and it was believable because a) the freaky mutual attraction seemed real and b) despite being all kinds of difficult and inappropriate, Hannah was a compelling and magnetic personality and it was entirely possible that Adam would find himself returning to her again and again—just like us, the viewer.

Also, Adam Driver is a force on his own. This guy in “Too Much” is so cute and sweet but seems to have been chosen to make sure that Jessica keeps the upper hand at all times. This is a Girl Boss show. (**yawn**) Couldn’t they have made the guy a little weird or awkward or interesting?

The career aspect falls flat, too. When "Girls" started, the main characters were all losers at the beginning of their careers. That was part of the strife: the temp jobs, the weird bosses and co-workers, the more successful friends, the ache to do something important. On “Too Much”, Jessica is already recognized for her talent, even though all we've seen of her work life is that she panics and runs off set when a star takes a liking to her.

So they send her to London to produce an important commercial. That makes sense.

"Emily in Paris" (in which a Gen Z influencer is sent to the Paris office to give a modern jolt to the stuffy French team) made more sense, and that's saying a lot.

Ultimately I think making a great show is really difficult, and while many people are talented, very few are actually bold, strange, and truly eccentric; and their shows/art/creations are the ones I’m interested in. But Lena Dunham is all those things. So what happened? I like to think that Lena Dunham’s vision was corrupted by backers and producers in the Netflix assembly line.

I wish she’d had made a series about a middle-aged former star struggling to be relevant while dealing with her weight and her impending mortality. That would have been interesting, and real.

Dear Parents,

Thank you for bringing your kids to my farm. I can’t wait to take them through farm camp! In those two hours they’ll spend with me, I hope they’ll learn a lot of facts about farm animals, feel some pride in caring for the animals, and possibly master some new skills.

A few things, though.

1. Camp starts at 9 am with feeding the animals. The animals are hungry. If your kids are late that’s fine, but be aware they’ll miss out on some of the activities. The animals get fed at 9.

2. Your kids might be a little freaked out at first, especially if they are shy, very young, on the spectrum, or have never been around so many animals. Don’t worry about this! It’s normal and I’m not offended. This is why I don’t offer one-day visits, why I love three-day visits, and why a week of farm camp is the best. From day one to day three is like night to day. By the third morning they understand the sequence of events, and they’ve achieved some mastery and competence over a few things. (Me; “What’s next?” Them: “Feed the ponies!” Me: “What do ponies eat?” Them: “Hay!” Me: “Where’s the hay?” Them: [already marching to the barn]). They also trust me and my rules, and they are ready to get to work. I love watching this transformation. It’s beautiful to see—and also my job gets easier. The kids who come back year after year are the most fun; I just show up and tag along with them.

3. We start with feeding corn scratch to the chickens. Even toddlers can take a handful of scratch out of the bucket and drop it on the ground. Bigger kids can be more intentional and start assessing the situation, looking for chickens on the periphery, making sure everyone gets fed. Shy kids can hold on to their parent’s leg and get acclimated. It’s an ice breaker. Wild kids are corralled back in to the activity at hand. When that’s done we go on to the other animals.

(Sound OFF on this video unless you want to me hear me shouting WOWWWW!)

4. Please don’t tease your children—as so many parents do—about the fact that they might have to clean up poop. There is really nothing comical or debased about shoveling manure. It’s not something your child should feel embarrassed about. We are doing real work, and there is value in manual labor, caring for animals, and working together. Besides, when you tease them about it, you make my job harder. Now I have to jump up and down and run in circles convincing them that this very mundane and obvious chore is not a mean trick we’re playing on them. Most kids end up loving this chore. (It’s actually fun and so satisfying.)

5. You are welcome to drop your children off or stay for the entire time, or any combination of the two. Just remember: Your children are braver, stronger, more polite, and more agreeable when you are not around. This means they’re more likely to take full advantage of the experiences offered to them if you are not here. Some parents want to come, or their kids don’t want them to leave, and that’s all fine! (Another problem: I tend to chat too much with the parents!)

6. If you do come, please follow one of our most basic rules: Parents aren’t allowed to do work in farm camp. The farm camp curriculum was created for little children, not adults! When adults do their own farm camp (and they sometimes do!), we have different activities, harder activities! So for you to pitch in and do work meant for children, especially in response to your children hanging back, is not helpful.

I know that most parents are trying to be polite and jumping to action when their kids hang back, but here’s the big secret: I don’t actually need help finding the end of the hose. I can stuff the hay net with hay very quickly by myself. Ditto with scooping grain into the bucket. I can do all that. But I’m doling out age-appropriate activities to the kids so that through the act of work they can interact more meaningfully with the farm. Don’t worry about them seeming rude. Often kids just need time to process the request. If they’re being evasive about working, I’m fine with waiting while they figure out that it doesn’t hurt to do work, that it’s actually fun, and that the sooner they get this done, the sooner we go onto the next thing. Parents jumping in to do the work rob their kids of these realizations.

7. I will almost never contradict you regarding things you say to your children, but that doesn’t mean I agree with you. If you tell them to get off the rock wall, I won’t argue with that, even if I think balancing on the rock wall, and possibly falling, is a great activity for kids and part of what they’re here to do. If you tell them they’ve watered the tomato plants enough, I won’t argue with that, even if you’re wrong and they need more water. As long as it’s not a real safety issue, I have a general policy of not contradicting parents’ rules because, well, they’re your kids. You know better than I do about your kids. But I know more about the farm. Just be aware that parents are often wrong in what they tell their kids about the farm, and, seriously, I can manage it.

8. Pronouns correspond to biological sex on the farm. Using the wrong pronoun either out of ignorance (“He’s laying an egg!”) or preference (“That pony’s so pretty, I’m going to just call her a ‘she’.”) will get a cheerful correction from me every time. I’ve had kids argue with me, especially about our docile and pretty male pony and our bossy, loud female pony. The sweet one really is the boy, and the bossy one really is the girl. Crazy, right? I just keep correcting them, every single time, and eventually they give up. Biological reality is part of what we’re learning here.

9. We still operate in the rain. The animals have to be fed even in the rain. We can do most of our chores under barn roofs and don’t have to get soaked. But really, showing up in the rain is part of the curriculum.

10. Your kids might incur little bumps or scrapes or get a little scared. They might get chicken poop on their boots, or even on their hands. A goat might step on their foot or overwhelm them. They might accidently touch an electric fence or even get a bee sting. This is part of the curriculum: tiny, manageable amounts of apprehension and discomfort. If I could make these moments happen in a safe and perfectly controlled way, I would. But I can’t. So I make sure all my animals are docile. I am maniacal about real safety—for example I don’t want any little feet stepped on by a pony, which would really hurt. And I pick up toddlers and preschoolers who are overwhelmed by our goats. I don’t want anyone to actually be afraid or truly hurt.

But if we’re lucky, something very slightly scary or ouchy or dirty will happen. We can only hope.

See you at 9 am!

My grandmother had three sons (one of them my father) and said this was the way to go. “Girls scream too much,” she told my sister and me repeatedly when we were little. (To be fair, we were easily wound up and much too comfortable in her house.) “That’s why I only had sons.”

We were close enough with her that this kind of obnoxious comment made us more indignant and outraged than hurt. We argued with her, probably screaming a bit.

When I graduated from college, my older brother (who had not gone to college) recorded my graduation ceremony with a video camera that I’d gotten as a graduation present. When I showed the video to my grandmother, she couldn’t stop talking about how smart my brother was.

“He just took it right out the box and started it up?” she asked, incredulous. On her TV screen, I was walking across stage in my graduation cap and gown and shaking hands with the president of the college. “He was always so smart,” she went on. “He could figure out anything.” I finally turned off the video so she could tell me about the salt water aquarium he created one summer when he was eight or nine. Or was he just six? And how he used to be so charming to the guests in her bed and breakfast. They were always so impressed with his vocabulary, and so on.

I wasn’t as close with my other grandmother, and her praise of boys over girls (especially my brother’s accomplishments over mine) used to infuriate me. He was growing like a weed, she would gush to friends. (“I’m growing, too,” I’d protest—and get shushed.) It went on for years. In response to my grandmothers’ and seemingly everyone’s preference for boys, I adopted a reflexive pro-girl stance. Girls are cool! They can do anything boys can do—sometimes better!

Plus boys were the worst, right? They were always causing problems in class, they hated reading, and they came in from recess breathing hard with incomprehensible trails of sweat snaking down their dusty faces. Boys were gross and the only reason anyone would prefer a boy over girl was because of, as I eventually learned, the Patriarchy.

I soon discovered all kinds of horrifying and mostly true facts about how boys were treated versus how girls were—not so much the annoying facts of my experience, but real, historic, worldwide horrors. There were countless reasons to embrace my campaign to appreciate girls. I trumpeted this campaign for years, insisting, for example, that I loved my female bosses (true) and that friendships among women didn’t have to be catty and competitive (sometimes true). When I got pregnant with my first child, I desperately hoped for a girl. Because, ew, who would want a boy? I wasn’t the only one; I had friends who cried when they found out they were having a boy (especially if it was their second baby and they already had a boy). I felt sorry for my friends who had only boys.

A few things have led me to reconsider my anti-boy stance.

• Becoming a boy mom.

• Living on a farm.

• All the talk about toxic masculinity with no mentions of heroic masculinity.

• Reports about the declining status of men in the West.

It’s time to start plugging the boys.

Given the sinking status of boys and men, I’m now compelled to defend them the same way I once defended girls and women. (I’ll always stick up for the underdog.)

No one is more surprised than I am to discover that I think boys are amazing, and not just the ones who like doing girl things like reading or listening, but specifically because they are boys. Boys are cool not in spite of being boys but because of being boys. Their very boy-ness is spectacular.

It turns out it wasn’t just the Patriarchy that made traditional cultures love boys. Boys are actually extremely valuable. I have discovered this firsthand on my farm.

Not all boys, of course. There are always outliers. Some are lazy or dreamy or artsy. But the majority of boys fall into a general pattern. Here’s what I see:

• Boys like to work. Especially if there are two or more. If you have three boys, forget it, you could build a barn. You could move a mountain of manure. You could roll a giant hay bale across the pasture and back, just to see how fast it could be done. If you were an old tribal or agricultural family and you had six or seven boys? It’s not some underground deep state system that decided to call you rich. It was facts on the ground.

• Boys love to compete. If you have a task to be completed, and some boys on hand, here’s what you do: give them a challenge, set them against each other, or just open the stop watch on your phone. It will be done. “Here, boys, crumple up this newspaper and put it in the fire pit.” Immediately they are imitating basketball players, scoring goals, narrating the play, and trying to beat each other’s scores. They will turn the most menial task into a contest and at a certain age they’ll compete with themselves. Sometimes, when they “win”, even against themselves, they’ll put their arms up and do a little victory swagger or a make a raspy microphone breath.

• They love mechanical things. We have a bunny pen that lets us all sit inside and hang out with the bunnies. It’s made of metal wire and has a little door with an interesting latch. Many boys around two to four years old can’t get past this latch. Forget the cute bunny that they could hold on their laps; this right here is a complicated gate latch. Toddler boys will open and close it, observing how the door swings open and shuts again, as if it’s the most interesting thing they’ve ever seen. Perhaps there are little girls out there who would rather operate a gate latch than hold a bunny, but in many years of running my farm camp I have never met one. Not a single one. Even the gender-non-conforming girls, with short hair and dark gray jackets from the boys’ department who want to climb gates and touch the electric fence—even those girls would rather hold a bunny than examine a gate latch. The other day a five-year-old boy stood with his back to the pony we were brushing, examining a tape measure. I’ve never met a girl who would rather interact with a tape measure than a pony.

• They want to be heroes. Carole Hooven writes in her book T that around the world four-year-old boys play at being heroes.* I see this. Boys of all ages who come to my farm hear about a problem, and they want to fix it. But around four years old they are especially into it. Of course, four-year-olds are not logical or experienced, and they don’t understand money or cause-and-effect, so their ideas are terrible. I’ve seen complicated drawings of fox-killing machines and chicken-saving devices that cover the entire sky over the farm. I’ve heard about giant metal fences that go up past the tree tops and Elon Musk-level robot tractors that would cost a trillion dollars but would prevent any unnecessary deaths of my chickens. It doesn't matter. I love their heroic visions.

• They seek risk. The electric fence is mesmerizing to them, and they want to touch it. (Some girls want to do this, too.) When I had a dangerous ram in one pasture, it was common for boys to brighten up when they heard about it and beg to go in there. “Watch out for that mailbox,” I’ll say about an old mailbox that we use for little challenges in the riding ring. “It’s got bees in it.” This warning makes some boys run toward the mailbox. I sometimes give kids a bucket of feed and challenge them to get across the pasture with the sheep or goats on their heels. The animals really want the bucket. The terrified joy on the faces of the kids makes me think it’s a deeply essential experience. Some girls like to do this, but it’s mostly boys.

• They’re also sweet. In addition to everything I’ve just said, boys are also sweet and protective and like to feed bottles to lambs and say, “Aww, cute,” about baby animals.

They’re just incredibly cool, and I love boys. Recently a family visited our farm. They had two boys, and the mom was pregnant with a third—another boy. My eyes lit up when she told me this, because some of my favorite families have three boys. I can imagine the heartbreak of not having a daughter, but there’s something so special about a big family with all boys. You’ve got yourself a little nation. Get ready to build some bridges and move mountains.

Here’s a video of a boy happily outrunning our sheep. He doesn’t always get away from them, and that’s why he loves it. It’s an actual challenge with some real risk!

*If I recall correctly, I read this about 4-year-old boy heroes in T; but I can’t find my copy of the book to check.

There’s always a moment, the night before the shearer comes, when I want to cry.

It’s usually around 6 PM. My husband Chris and I are in the middle of our sheep pasture, which at that moment seems like a vast echoing plain of hopelessness.

The sheep? They are huddled in the farthest corner of the pasture, behind the pine trees with the low-hanging scrubby branches, as far away from us as they can get, protected, watching us warily. We are exhausted, hungry, and irritated with each other.

The shearer wants them penned and ready when he arrives, usually around 7 am the next morning. And we can't get them in.

We’ve had bad shearers and we’ve had good shearers; for the last five years we’ve had a superstar. Jimmy is an accomplished tradesman, a consummate professional, a nice guy, and a generous purveyor of sheep knowledge. We strive to be excellent clients so he’ll never get tired of us. To this end we act like Seinfeld and co at the Soup Guy’s place.

Whatever Jimmy wants from us, we’ll do.

The main thing he wants is for our sheep to be penned and ready for him when he arrives—and bone dry, if it’s rainy out.

But our sheep are Shetlands, and we don’t have a herding dog.

So this is hard.

Shetlands are a small old-fashioned breed. The phrase wild and wooly was certainly created to describe them. They are an “unimproved” breed; in the early 20^th century when breeding science matured and went into overdrive, many domestic breeds were altered—improved—to meet modern industrial demands. Cows were bred to produce vast quantities of milk; chickens to lay eggs almost every day or to reach slaughter size in a matter of weeks. Sheep were bred to be a standard color (white) and huge, for both the wool and meat markets.

But Shetlands and a few others were left alone: unimproved. They can birthe independently, don’t need their tails docked, and live longer than the improved breeds. In the breed description they are described as “thrifty”. (I love this about the sheep world: I picture some old guys in wool hunting coats and tweed caps and Shetland sweaters at the turn of the century coming up with these descriptions, like: “Aye, they’re a thrifty lot! Put that down in the books, Declan!”)

They’re also somewhat feral. Even the tame ones are ready to turn tail and run. Sweet bottle-fed babies grow up and change their minds about me.

All of this means they’re hard to pen. “Shetlands don’t herd,” Jimmy said to me once. And it’s true. Unlike the school-of-herring quality you might see in other sheep, Shetlands peel off and split up. Another farmer observed that my sheep don’t band together. “They’re all over the place,” he said. “I don’t like that about Shetlands. I need my sheep in one tight group.”

If we had a Border collie, of course, it would be simple. But we don’t have one.

I find the canny survival instinct of this breed so impressive. My sheep would survive on the moors! But it makes the night before a shearing so stressful. It always seems like we will never get them in. After several tries it seems hopeless and our tempers are ready to burst.

Once I had some visiting kids trying to herd a few of our sheep back into the pasture. The 6-year-old girl wanted to pick some flowers and use those to lure the sheep in. The 4-year-old boy just wanted to chase them. They debated their methods intensely, with no resolution in sight. “This is exactly how it goes with my husband and me,” I said to the parents. “Except we just invest a little more emotion into it.”

We finally prevailed over the sheep, as always happens. We used the Giant Stick Method. We each got a massive stick and were finally able to slowly, slowly pressure the sheep toward the pasture gate. If they start running they will bolt in every direction, so you have to go slowly. But you also have to be ready to dart left or right to dissuade the would-be bolters. Bit by bit, we got them out of the pasture gate, and I raced to shut the gate behind them.

They had to cross a grassy corridor and go into a pen outside of our barn. We pressed them towards it. They went. Chris shut the pen gate behind them, just in time.

Then we pressed them further, still with our giant sticks, through the stall door and into the barn. THANK GOD.

The relief of that moment, as you shut and latch the barn door, is hard to describe. The success of it, the quiet thrill and satisfaction. Yelling “SHUT THE GATE!” turns to a deep long sigh. All will be right in the world. We are superheroes. We did it! After double checking that everything was secure, we headed inside for dinner.

When Jimmy arrived in the morning, it was pouring rain—but no worries! Our sheep were penned and dry!

I confessed to him, as I brought him into the barn where the fat wooly herd of sheep were milling around, “We’re really proud of ourselves that we got the sheep penned last night, and they are BONE dry.”

“You should be proud!” he said, laughing. “I’m proud of you!” He often boosts our egos by telling us stories about other jobs he’s shown up for in his long career as a shearer, with soaked sheep out in the rain, runaway rams, broken fences, and so on.

Jimmy and Chris got to work setting up the shearing station while I hung out with the farm stay kids who are visiting this weekend. The rain was steady and heavy, so we were in the barn raking up hay. I knew the kids’ dad was on his way down to the see the kids and watch the shearing.

But I wasn’t expecting him to come through the sheep stall.

Suddenly all the sheep were stampeding out of the barn, right into the rain. Those sheep see an opening and they are like a fleet of torpedoes. You cannot stop them. Jimmy and Chris were yelling and I could see flashes of their rain coats as they were leaping over sheep trying to get ahead of the rush that was storming out of the barn.

“I’m sorry, I’ve got to go!” I shouted to the mom and kids, dropping my rake and running out of the barn.

This was devastating. If the sheep ran into the pasture, we’d never get them back. And if they got too wet, Jimmy might decide not to shear them. He’s usually booked out through the shearing season. We’d probably end up having to hand-shear them with our old-fashioned shears, a project that would take hours and hours for the two of us to do all 18 sheep.

By the time I got out into the pen, Chris, Jimmy, and the visiting dad all had herding sticks and were attempting to keep the sheep from bolting in every direction. I grabbed a stick off the ground and joined in. The visiting dad had been posted in a key spot and was blocking them from running up the corridor toward another pasture. We all closed in on them, tightening them in a group, and slowly, slowly eased them back into the pen, and shut the pen door.

(It’s so enjoyable to have a pro like Jimmy on hand. We didn’t even have to talk. We just all knew what had to be done and how to do it.)

Now we would push them into the barn. But they weren’t going. Mad singletons kept darting off from the pack, only to be pressured back into the fold by one of us. One ewe made a kamikaze dash for the gate and got tangled in welding wire, then disentangled, and convinced to rejoin the herd. I snuck into the barn, moving low and slow so as not to scare the sheep, and turned off the bright lights—set up for shearing—that were possibly repelling them.

Finally we got them in. They were only a little wet. Jimmy said it was no problem. I reassured the dad that it wasn’t his fault. (I don’t expect farm stay guests to intuit protocol, so if something goes wrong, I take the blame and try to figure out how to be more clear next time.)

It all worked out and I think the dad had a great time helping out in our emergency. “That was actually kind of cool,” he said. “I know,” I said, because it is. It’s exciting and satisfying to work together like that, especially when you’re successful.

After Jimmy was done with our sheep, I drove with him over to my friend Susie’s farm. She lives alone and has one giant 250-lb pet sheep named Lily, so I usually go over to help out. There was drama here, too, as her sheep almost got out as we were shooing her horses out of the barn. Jimmy and I had to run around the barn to another door to pressure them back in. I was glad I was there!

After shearing day, I’m always exhausted and relieved. I’m amazed we’ve pulled it off. And I’m always so grateful to Jimmy.

But my next dog is definitely going to be a Border collie.

Here’s Jimmy shearing our wether, Tucker. Happy Sunday, everyone!

Our old dog Cleo, a mutt who’d been rescued as a puppy from a junk yard in Brooklyn and discovered her protective instincts once we’d moved up to the farm, had handled this situation for years. In her prime, we could open the back door and shout, “Get the fox, Cleo!”, and she would thunder out the door and down to the barn area to find out why the chickens were making a fuss. Even in her final days she would hobble around the farm, watching for predators.

But Cleo died.

And it didn’t take long for the woods to take notice. I often feel like we are living on the border between the natural world and civilization. Any time we let up on our defenses or even just look away for a minute, the natural world—the vines, the predators, the rot, the chaos—moves in to reclaim the neat little corners and expanses we’ve staked out.

In the case of the chickens, this meant three or more attacks a day. Our chickens are free-range during daylight hours, and at dusk we would shut them into the coop. This generally effective protocol was failing. The chickens were being attacked during the day while they were out and about, even very close to the house or the barn, and at night the predators were finding their way into the coop. One of our favorite hens, Mahoghany, was taken. She was a friendly little brown hen my mom had raised. She preferred to eat while sitting on a lap and taking food from humans. Children could scoop her and walk around with her. Is it possible the fox or the fisher cat had pulled her through the chicken wire? There was gore and also feathers that suggested this although I don’t know how it’s possible.

Sometimes I caught glimpses of a fox, brazenly watching me from the other side of a fence. It was hard to leave the property because we knew we’d come back to piles of feathers and traumatized survivors. We were overwhelmed and frustrated—when suddenly I connected our problem to the fact that our neighbor had a litter of Maremma puppies. These Italian livestock guardian dogs are not for shows or pet homes, but 100% working dogs, bred for centuries to care enough about the smaller animals within their realm that they will guard them 24/7 and fight to the death if anyone threatens them.

So we got a puppy. All the puppies had a different color collar to tell them apart, and the color was used as their temporary name at the breeder’s farm. We kept our puppy’s name, Blue.

Blue very quickly grew big enough that he was able to understand and execute the duties required of his station. I joked at the time that we hadn’t gotten a dog, we’d gotten a guy. He was so smart and capable. And we stopped losing chickens.

But as Thomas Sowell says, there are no solutions only trade-offs. Or as my husband has said for years, the solution always brings a new problem. They are different problems. But they are still problems.

For one thing, we now have a population problem. We have too many damn chickens.

We especially have a lot of roosters. We often slaughter them and turn them into soup or slow-cooker chicken tacos but our hens breed on their own and about half of the chicks they hatch grow up to be roosters. They just keep coming. You’re thinking, why don’t you schedule a day and just slaughter them all? Well, talk to my husband. At heart we’re both still soft city people and he doesn’t really like slaughtering the chickens, and neither do I, so we put it off.

The other problem is bigger and much worse, and harder to solve. Blue gets out.

Maremmas are known for this. They see their territory as vastly larger than the paltry area inside the fence that they are meant to patrol. And the actual property line? Immaterial. He’s operating on an ancient sense of territory burbling up from his bones. He’ll find his property line at the edge of the earth when dragons roar back at him, and only upon encountering them might he slink back to our farm chastened. Otherwise, until further notice, he’ll be back in a while. He’s got stuff to take care of.

We don’t want him to leave our property, but Maremmas are stupidly athletic. We’ve all seen Blue scale a five-foot gate, easily.

For the last six years we’ve been in a kind of an arms race with him. He gets out; we figure out where he got out and build that gate higher. He gets out; we figure out where he got out and run an electric line there. He gets out; we figure out where he got out and install a feed lot panel over a horse stall.

Now it’s escalated. He’s been breaking out and harassing a particular dog and the guy who owns that dog is mad. Fairly.

We’ve spent this Mother’s Day weekend making our barn area into a fortress. I wonder what the trade-off for the new fences will be. They’re unattractive, took a lot of time to build, and cost money. Will that be enough? Also we’re still not done.

I adore this dog.

He’s expanded my understanding of what a dog can be. I feel honored that we get to work with him. But it is like we’ve imported a cavalier from an ancient era and we have to make him understand that the reach of his realm is from this fence to that fence, period. He doesn’t get it.

He’s on a chain until further notice. It’s beneath his station but the only option for now.

We start farm camp with an easy chore: feeding corn scratch to the hens. Even a toddler can grab a handful of corn and toss it, and the older kids can handle a metal feed scoop and begin roving further and further from the feed bucket (and their parents).

This is necessary because most visiting kids are a little freaked out at first, or at least unsettled. The chickens are loud and busy, the ponies are glaring at us from the paddock, and the goats are screaming for their breakfast from inside the barn. It’s already a lot. We work our way up to the poop.

“Are we going to have to clean up poop?” an eight-year-old boy asked recently. For some inexplicable reason, his parents had teased him that this was going to happen. His six-year-old brother was equally nervous. (Parents who come to my farm: please don’t tease your children about work they’ll have to do here. It makes my job harder.)

The tradition of sending an urban kid to the country has been around for a long time. Like frail and sour Mary in The Secret Garden (published in 1911), a child sent to the countryside could expect to breathe fresh air, behold a wondrous but unflinching natural world, and be toughened up by the good country people who wouldn’t indulge a sophisticated child’s demands.

I’ve capitalized on this tradition with what I call farm camp. In this set up, families rent my Airbnb cottage and go about typical weekender business: hiking, shopping, grilling in the backyard, lounging in the hammock, etc. In the morning, for an extra fee, they have the option of sending their kids down to the barn for farm camp with me.

This is a two-hour class on farming. For the first hour we feed and care for the animals. In the second hour we have choices. We can do pony rides, wool crafts, bunny time, explore the woods, and so on. Along the way we discuss animals, chicks, insects, goat behavior and even farm economics. The kids learn all kinds of shocking things that until about ten minutes ago in the span of human civilization were completely obvious and known, such as: what happens to our lambs when they mature (they are slaughtered), what a dead animal looks like (for example, when we find a drowned chipmunk in the water trough), how bad the sting from a nettle is (not very), what mating looks like in the chicken world (interpretations vary), and so on. In this venue, dealing with poop is a given. And it’s the hardest thing, requiring the most effort on my part to get the kids on board.

I understand that in the city poop is a big deal and something to be avoided at all costs. I understand that it’s a bit shocking to hear for your entire short life that poop is bad, don’t touch the poop, get away from the poop—and to then come to a farm and be expected to confront the poop in myriad ways.

“That’s poop,” a kid will say, stricken, pointing at a pile of horse manure in the pasture.

“He’s pooping!” they’ll shriek when the goats, who practice elimination almost conversationally, suddenly, casually, emit a tidy cascade of poop pellets while standing right next to us. (In his classic farm memoir Goat Song, Brad Kessler writes, “A goat’s anus would open like the aperture of a camera and produce perfectly round pellets, one by one.” It is in fact sort of a remarkable event.)

But poop on a farm is called manure and it’s an element and a resource and a reality. And if it’s the dried manure of a ruminant like a goat or a pony, it doesn’t smell bad. But try convincing kids of this fact. Even some return visitors will reflexively complain that the dusty pony manure in an open-air paddock is so noxious that they can barely breathe. (For those who don’t know: the odor of fresh horse manure lessens within minutes of arrival into the world, and when it’s dried is totally innocuous and—mingled with other barn smells like saddle leather, spicy hay, and horse sweat—arguably quite pleasant.)

This is not the impression you’d get if you saw first-timer kids. You might see them in the pony paddock ostentatiously holding their noses and wailing that it smells. Or going frozen and freaked out as they encounter dried manure in the pasture that we are walking across. “It smells!” they’ll shout. But it doesn’t smell. Chicken poop and dog poop smell and are gross, which is why I don’t ask kids to help me in those areas. Dessicated pucks of pony manure in the pasture are not worth getting upset over.

Many kids get past it quickly enough that with a little prodding and rational explanations we can keep going. Nearly half take a little longer, and every now and then there’s a kid who just cannot deal with it. In almost all cases this kid is making a point. We host lots of sensorily-sensitive kids, and I can’t think of a single one who couldn’t adapt to this task. The hold-outs are usually showing off for younger siblings, or else they have been so teased by their parents that to give in would feel like a loss. (Again, parents: please don’t do this.)

Most kids come to see the clarity in our poop protocol. I make a big point of keeping the handles of our tools clean, for example, redirecting kids when they just drop a shovel to the ground. (We lean rakes and shovels against the wall so the handles stay clean.) I teach the kids not to hold the dirty end of the tool up in the air. And when there is a fresh, steaming pile of poop that does actually smell, I’ll deal with it. When the kids have hauled the full wagon out to the manure pile, I’ll step in to do the dirty work: pulling the wagon up on to the pile and dumping it. In other words, this is not a punitive or cruel task. I actually think it’s enjoyable; and most kids eventually agree with me. In fact, it’s common to hear kids say it’s their favorite part of farm camp. They feel the satisfaction of getting a job done, and maybe even triumphant that they’ve done something so off-limits in their normal life.

I can’t argue that shoveling pony poop will cure anxiety and depression. Well, maybe I can. I find it immensely satisfying and calming to interact, often through labor, with the land and animals. And I also believe that manual labor is a valuable endeavor on its own merits. It’s the essential value in what I’m offering to these children on these weekends.

Most of these kids will grow up to be professionals, likely in high end jobs. They won’t do manual labor of any kind. They might not have a summer job scooping ice cream or bussing tables. The way things are going, they might not even use a vacuum cleaner or a lawn mover. But I believe there’s dignity inherent in any kind of work, including manual work, and I think it’s worthwhile for the kids to have this experience, now more than ever, in an era when most kids aren’t even asked to take out the garbage or wash the dishes.

Shoveling poop is not as poetic as Dickon teaching Mary to whistle to the birds or as useful as the housemaid insisting Mary learn to dress herself. But our modern dilemmas call for their own remedies. Mucking stalls may be the perfect antidote to our increasingly virtual reality and its attendant anxieties. And besides, it’s just poop. We still have to work our way up to the the talk about where the lamb in our freezer came from.

You can read more about my farm camp in this piece I wrote for the Free Press.

It’s late February, and my kitchen island looks like a bomb went off: a splatter of seed packets, plant labels, and plastic pots. I love starting seeds: the smell of the soil, the planning, the hope and excitement when the little sprouts first appear.

But last year I didn’t do seeds, and I neglected my garden all spring. Why was that? It took me a minute to remember. Oh right… I was getting ready to detonate a different kind of bomb.

February of last year I was stewing in anger and irritation over various current issues, mostly having to do with wokeness and the slow, seemingly inevitable death of my tribal homeland, the Left. Also October 7 and the Tentifada phenomenon. And lingering fury over the Central Park birder incident. And some other things.

In early February some tweets started going around about an essay written by a woman who claimed she’d been raped by a well-known writer. The woman complained about the rape on Twitter, tagging the national magazine where he often wrote; and with no trial the magazine summarily dropped him from their roster. I was already angry about everything—and now here was Western Civilization coming undone. The serious crime of rape was going to be tried on social media. Due process, whatever.

I read the essay that had sparked this course of events and found it melodramatic and narcissistic and dishonest. There have always been essays like this, but now it was being taken seriously. Someone was publicly accused of rape, and the only way for him to respond was on social media: to defend himself and apologize and grovel in a public display of contrition for a crime, on Twitter. When he didn’t do that, he lost work, and his name was tarnished. This was crazy. Additionally, the woman’s essay seemed to be advocating for a kind of permanent disability through her unproven victimhood. This was a perfect storm of issues that were infuriating me.

So I wrote a response, using my own experience of being raped 30 years ago while living in Italy. It was one of those essays that just pours out. When it was finished I looked up Quillette’s submission guidelines and emailed it to them. I didn’t show the essay to anyone or even tell my husband about it until that night, hours after I’d sent it off.

Quillette is based in Australia, so I thought, Imagine if I wake up and they’ve responded! And then I thought, Don’t be an idiot. They’ll take days to respond and will probably say no.

I prepared myself to try The Free Press when Quillette rejected the essay.

In the morning, still in bed, I picked up my phone and opened my email. Someone named Jamie had emailed me. Dear Larissa, thank you for submitting your powerful and provocative essay… We’d like to publish…

Holy crap!

The good thing was, I was thrilled by the prospect of publishing an essay about the darkest, most humiliating time of my life. There was no, oh no what have I done? I was ecstatic! I had always planned to write about this experience—it’s a wild story, and the experience had led me to develop strong opinions about rape, trauma, and recovery—opinions that are absolutely not in vogue. And now I was finally going to publish my contrarian thoughts, and in literally the coolest publication. (Except for the Free Press, of course, an equally cool distant relative.)

Originally the plan was to publish the essay I’d submitted with light edits, but, suddenly, the editor, Jamie Palmer, suggested a full rewrite and expansion. We ended up drastically overhauling it, expanding it from 2500 words to 9000 words. It took nearly a month. Shaping it but also verifying almost every single word.

On that first morning, I pulled a fat, bulging folder from the back of my file cabinet, which I’ve kept for 30 years, but had hardly even opened. It held court documents, police reports, newspaper clippings, letters, and journals from the weeks and months following the rape. I scanned the police and court documents and newspaper clippings and sent them to Jamie. He began the process of having them translated from Italian. Over the next several weeks I went through my journals. We both combed through books and magazines I’d read 30 years ago to find the quotes I remembered and to construct this complex essay that would: critique the modern feminist response to rape; dispute the integrity of this other essay; tell my story—both the rape and the recovery; and offer my prescription on how to respond to sexual assault.

We were so thorough. For example, in one part of the essay I mentioned a Newsweek cover article I’d read in February 1993, about the Bosnia gang rapes. Reading this devastating article a month after I was raped had made a profound impact on my emerging stoicism and sense of perspective, and I devoted a few paragraphs to explaining it. But Jamie emailed me: There’s no Newsweek cover article in February or March about the Bosnia gang rapes. He then immediately emailed me again, noting that, oh right, back in the magazine era you often found old magazines lying around, so he had thought to look back a few weeks. He attached a screenshot, from an Ebay auction, of a Newsweek cover with a story about the Bosnia rapes— from early January 1993.

I wrote back, I wish I could see the article, and then I detailed some of the points I remembered that had made a huge impression on me at the time. Moments later he emailed me again, with the article attached. I don’t know how he’d found it, but he did. The points I remembered were there in the article.

We also couldn’t find the passage I remembered from the Camille Paglia book I’d owned at the time, Sexual Personae. I pored through that book over and over, looking for the passage. But then I happened to read in my journal, from 30 years ago, that I’d babysat for some Americans and had borrowed another Paglia book from them, Sex, Art, and American Culture. I emailed Jamie; he owned the book and immediately found the passage I remembered.

We fact-checked everything, including, for example, the name of the hospital I’d gone to; the police report used a different name than the one on Google maps, which baffled me until I learned it was a nickname. We confirmed almost all of my memories in the newspaper articles and police/court documents and journals, none of which I had read in 30 years. Some things, like the police reports and the newspaper articles, I had never fully read.

This was the one discrepancy we found: for 30 years I had believed that my screaming during the assault had resulted in a passerby calling the police, and that the police had thus arrived at the park in time to see my rapists leaving the scene of the crime, and given chase, which had ultimately resulted in the two men being caught, tried and convicted. My argument for the value of agency in an attack rested partly on this chain of events. But the newspaper article said that the two men were chased by police because they were driving erratically, already many blocks from the scene of the crime. This was significant, as I’d always felt a bit heroic for having been the one to summon the police, however indirectly. I actually didn’t believe the article; the newspapers had filled in other random details to connect what facts they had from the police scanner and reports; but I couldn’t find proof, so I let it go.

But at the last minute, I found it in my journal: my lawyer telling me the police had said someone had heard me screaming and called the police. I hadn’t invented it! We made a slight amend to the essay.

I made a map to explain to Jamie the course of events, which were so clear to me but not to him—my apartment, the scene of the rape, of the car crash, of the hospital—and he ended up using the map in the article. I Zoomed with my old roommate from that time, who still lives in Italy, and we went over every Italian word and expression and convention.

During the month it took to rewrite the essay, I would wake up in the middle of the night already tangled in thoughts about it; wide awake, in the dark, I’d just continue the thoughts. My husband told me I was talking in my sleep. The closer we got to the essay being finished, the more anxious I got. I was still excited, but I had to wonder if I was being naive. Was this a mistake? I was going to be outing myself as a critic of feminism and the left, and also sharing such a deeply personal, humiliating story. When Jamie asked me for photographs to illustrate the piece my anxiety hit new levels. There would be no hiding. (I was amazed though to find a perfect photo, taken a few weeks before the rape. I look so innocent!) (Also a bit high—I was 23 and in Amsterdam, back when weed was illegal everywhere but there.)

My husband read a few incarnations of the essay as it progressed, but he is a reckless type who is always up for a fight. He can’t imagine why I might worry about blowing up my social circles or professional reputation. Good. Let me them freak out. Let them LOSE their MINDS, would be a typical response to my fretting about a set of friends or family reacting to my views. He’s also not an editor; he categorically loves everything I write, which is so sweet but isn’t much help when I want to know if an essay is working.

I sheepishly asked a friend who has a long history in media and editing and writing, to look at it and just tell me if I was crazy to let this run. He did not think I was crazy and made some accurate predictions about how it would land. He also put me in touch with his friend (now my friend), who was once in the rape activist world and gave me some essential and specific feedback. They were the only people who looked at it other than my husband and of course Jamie, the editor. So it really felt like a blind landing.

In early March I went to my father’s birthday lunch, and soberly let everyone know what was coming. By then I thought the essay might get some attention, and I was quite sure I’d be mobbed and cancelled, not only for trashing modern feminism, but for doing so in the pages of Quillette. “People are going to say I’m right wing,” I warned them. I didn’t care if that happened, but I felt I needed to warn my very progressive family.

The piece came out in late March. There I was, my 23-year- old self staring out from the pages of Quillette. And everything changed. It landed so hard. It turned out I wasn’t the only one who was mad. People were so hungry for the kind of common sense, stoic response to trauma that the piece was shouting for, and for a defense of due process. It blew up. It was absolutely mind-blowing. I’m still star-struck and boggled at the thought that people I respect and admire so much have read my essay, some of whom I got to meet and ended up doing work for. It’s how I got the attention of Bari Weiss, who DM’d me to pitch her. Several essays later I’m a columnist for The Free Press.

This was going to be an essay about seed-starting and the changing seasons. But as I was musing about why I am so happy to be starting seeds, I began thinking about why I didn’t do seeds last year. Why didn’t I? Oh right. I was sleeping four hours a night and working on this essay even while asleep, putting together another kind of seed bomb.

This year, I’m back in the garden frame of mind! It has been a long, cold winter. Today I smelled wood smoke from my stove while looking out at a blindingly white landscape of snow that looked like glazed marshmallows and heard the sound of melting snow dripping on my roof. Those three elements mingled into a very specific sense memory: winter is coming to an end. It’s sugaring season! (We don’t tap our trees, but if we did, we’d be getting busy now.) The other day I found a nest of six fresh beautiful clean eggs deep in a hay bale in the barn. The hens are laying again. I can do chores at 6 PM, and it’s still light! The hose has begun thawing, which means pretty soon we’ll stop having to carry 5-gallon buckets of water down to the ponies. Every day gets us closer to spring.

It’s going to be an amazing garden year. I have big plans.

Hopefully a good writing year too! I have a few things in the works.

If you want to read the Quillette essay it’s here.

I get lots of questions from the kids who visit my farm, but this little boy was unusual. Just three years old and so inquisitive! The only problem: sometimes he got distracted and didn’t really listen to the answer.

His parents didn’t think it was cute. “Samay!” They admonished him. “You asked a question. Listen to the answer!” To a three-year-old. The Gentle-Parenting Judge that lives deep inside my soul bristled.

While filling the water trough, the boy got distracted and began waving the hose around, making figure eights in the water. Again, his parents admonished him. “Samay! You are working, not playing.”

His parents were Indian-born Manhattan professionals. I was struck over and over again by how much they shaped his behavior. They were gentle and loving; this boy was clearly adored. But this was how parenting worked in their family. It was a direct contrast to the extremely liberal, no-rules, Sudbury-style upbringing I myself had and mostly gave my kids.

There was a time when I would’ve been deeply critical of these parents. Let the child explore! The child is never wrong! The child must be nurtured at all costs!

But one of the bonuses about running a farm stay—in which families stay in my rental cottage and bring their kids down to the barn to do farm work with me— has been the opportunity to enjoy a front row seat to an endless variety of parenting styles. Since I have so many regulars who return year after year, I get to see how these kids develop under different parenting styles.

My biggest take-away: there’s a wide window to what’s OK when it comes to parenting. Next biggest: strict but loving parenting leads to kids who are enjoyable to be around.

One family was so strict that I was a bit appalled. I thought they were cold and remote to their children. They were European. They talked to their very small children as if they were adults, for example explaining animal slaughter with no sentimentality, pointing to an adorable baby pig and saying, “You liked that ham on your sandwich yesterday, didn’t you? Well, this is where it starts.”

I kept my mouth shut, of course, but I thought they were harsh. One day, the third year they came, I went into their cottage and hung out with them, working on some project with one of the kids. It was a close up view of the family. The dad was helping the older kid with a school project, a sort of a town she was building. Yes, he had a clipped, cool, often ironic manner with her. But what I remember the most is his body language: relaxed and engaged, bent toward the project, waiting for her decisions and then helping her execute them. This was a dad who loved his kids and was deeply involved with them, and just had a different manner than I was used to. I withdrew my criticism. (I didn’t see the family for a few years and then one year they returned with their now middle-school-aged girls. I had such a good time talking with their confident and lovely tweens!)

Here are some things I’ve learned from other parents, that go entirely against the Gentle Parenting norms I grew up with. These parents all sound so strict! But these families yielded some of my favorite kids: polite, curious, engaged, lovely people.

Let me know in the comments what you think about these takes. Too strict?

• You can force your kids to do family activities, like going on hikes, and you can insist on decent behavior.

(This is from one of my favorite families ever.) One mom described the hike they took: her seven-year-old daughter marched furiously ahead of the family, shouting, “I HATE HIKING!”

“That’s fine,” her mom, “but if you don’t stop ruining my hike there’s no ice cream afterwards.” The daughter stopped shouting. She hiked, still unhappy but no longer shouting. The parents got their family hike. The girl got ice cream.

• You can say no for any reason at all—in fact you probably should.

A family was packing up their three boys and assorted luggage into the car. It was a scene of barely managed chaos when one boy, about seven years old, noticed the cellar door that faces the driveway. He stopped short. “What’s in there?” he asked. My inclination would have been to encourage his curiosity and exploration. Not this mom.

“Not for you,” she said flatly. “In the car.”

Irrational Fears are just that: irrational

Most parents either stay for the whole farm camp session, or they at least come to make introductions and see that their kids are comfortable. Not these parents; they dropped off their seven- and nine-year-old kids and went out for breakfast. I learned from the seven-year old that she had an irrational fear of birds. “We have to cross the street if there are pigeons,” her brother told me. And yet the parents dropped her off at a farm that has about a bazillion chickens. “I don’t know about this!” the girl would say, clutching my arm, when we had to pass a chicken, which happened about every five minutes. She was there for six days, I’m not saying we resolved her fear but she got a lot of experience being in close proximity to birds with nothing bad happening. She did a great job.

Hungry? Lunch is in two hours.

Most parents follow their kids around with snacks and water. I’ve even seen parents holding the water bottle to their kids’ mouths while the kids are engaged in some activity; the kids swallow a few sips without skipping a beat. So when a 6-year-old told me he was hungry, I took him back to his parents in the cottage to get a snack, assuming the parents would want to feed him. Nope. The mom sent him back out. “She said lunch is at 12, and I can wait an hour,” he said.

You can insist on gratitude

A single mom from Harlem brought her two daughters to the farm. She told me she didn’t grow up with animals and was therefore a little afraid of them, and now her daughters were showing the same fear. She wanted to help them past that—such an important trip! I was so honored to be a part of this. But in the morning the mom texted that they couldn’t make it to farm camp. “We’re having a problem with gratitude over here,” she wrote. She was willing to lose money and cancel an opportunity in order to make sure her kids behaved appropriately. When I offered to reschedule she refused. “They’ve lost this privilege,” she wrote. (We did make up for lost time the next day and I wish I could show the photo of her especially-frightened daughter, who was too scared to even come off the porch on that first day, sitting on our pony, beaming.)

I love seeing these different styles which are often, but not always, coming from parents who grew up outside of the United States.

What do you think? Too strict?

Next up: How I’ve learned to handle kids who don’t listen to me.

PS We are booking for the summer!

My first David Lynch film was Elephant Man. I was too young to watch it, and maybe that’s why I was never a great fan of his work.

I was 12 and with my dad for the weekend in Manhattan. My sister and I lived in Connecticut with our mom. For about two years, while our dad lived in Manhattan, every other weekend we would take the commuter train into Grand Central Station. The conductor used to tease us about our sleeping bags, asking if we were going camping in the city.

My dad was in the Bachelor-in-Manhattan stage of his life. He wore a black cowboy hat and a jaunty striped scarf. He would meet us at the information booth in the middle of the Grand Central lobby and always had events and outings planned, like Shakespeare in the Park, or getting dim sum in Chinatown. He often had a New Yorker magazine lying around his apartment, with plays and movies and openings circled in ballpoint pen. One night we went to Rocky Horror in the Village, the one where people dressed up and acted out the movie in front of the screen.

On one occasion my father took us to see Elephant Man. This was the story of John Merrick, an Englishman who lived in the second half of the 19th century and was known for his extreme physical deformities and the surprising and apparently incongruent fact of his high intelligence. It’s filmed in black and white and directed by Lynch and is very beautiful and disturbing. We saw it in a tiny theater with a steep bank of seats in the West Village. My sister and my dad and I sat near the front, but my brother, who was 17 and usually on tour with the Grateful Dead, happened to be in the city and had met up with us; he sat in the way back. I remember looking behind me to see where he was, and it was like looking up the face of a steep hill.

When the film started the theater went pitch black and silent. The movie was so intense that I forgot it was a movie. I was completely entranced. It was like when you’re in a room watching a situation happen; the whole film was me crouched in the corner of a Victorian England asylum or a carnival or a London station, watching John Merrick being tortured. I felt sick and horrified for most of the film. The scene where the carnivalesque troop of revelers party with John Merrick was so disturbing. Also the scene at the end where Merrick is screaming that he is not an animal as the mob descends on him.

My dad was roommates with an ad executive. They lived in a high-rise midtown apartment with a lime green shag carpet, a white pleather sofa, and floor-to-ceiling windows. That night, I woke up in the middle of the night, squirmed out of my sleeping bag, ran to the bathroom, and threw up.

I was probably already getting sick. Maybe it was the prawns I’d had earlier in Chinatown.

But I’ve always felt this way about David Lynch’s work. It’s all just a little too intense and weird for me. I don’t doubt his genius. I appreciate his eccentric ways. When Blue Velvet was released I was in high school. My artsy friends and I loved it, or said we did. We hailed the Return of Art to Hollywood and said we thought the scene where Dennis Hopper rapes and beats Isabella Rossellini while sucking air from a canister was part of the art. A friend and I argued with her mother that it wasn’t misogyny; it was art.

Around that time we would go to arthouse video stores and rent films that were foreign or off-beat or in some way more interesting than Porky’s or Risky Business, like Being There and Blow Up and Brazil and Hairspray and so on. All of these video stores had Lynch’s first feature film, Eraserhead. It’s described as a “surrealist body horror” film. I used to pick it up and think about watching it. It was required viewing if you wanted to be an artsy eccentric teenager, as I did. But I always put it back. I could never muster the courage to watch it.

I like that clip of David Lynch saying that you can’t watch his films on your fucking telephone. I agree. I think you should watch them in a dark tiny theater and feel the horror, and you should throw up afterwards. I think it’s kind of appropriate.

I’m just not always up for that.

In the city, my boyfriend (now husband) and I lived in an old tenement apartment in Williamsburg, at the time a gritty section of Brooklyn. Our apartment was huge: eight-foot ceilings, four bedrooms, a giant hallway, an eat-in kitchen. We paid $800/month.

But there were also rats and cockroaches, and the chemical paint fumes from the auto body shop next door would regularly seep into the apartment through the kitchen window. When we first found the apartment we had to remove rotted carpets, crack vials, needles, and more than a few desiccated animal and insect carcasses. Even after we cleaned and repainted, it was a hard place to live. Every few months the storefront church down the block would blast sermons in Spanish through a loudspeaker for several days in a row. Down on the street level there was a Chinese restaurant; on the opposite corners a Dominican diner and a pizzeria, ensuring that various smells of greasy foods were always in the air. One patron of the pizzeria had outfitted his jeep with giant speakers in the back seat. He would double-park and turn his system all the way up, sending grinding thumping bass notes up through the walls and floors of our apartment, into our bedroom, at 2 or 3 or in the morning.

I still loved the city, despite all the challenges. (And we later moved to Park Slope, which had its own challenges but no rats or cockroaches.) Until one day, when it was like all the color seeped out of everything I’d once loved and it became impossible to stay.

A few months before we moved I dreamed that there was an apocalypse and we had to escape the city. We had kids by then; in the dream my husband led us, dodging fireballs and gunshots, to a bridge near our house that ran over the Gowanus Canal, a filthy, fetid waterway with oil slicks and trash floating in it. It was the only way out. That’s how I saw the city by the time we left.

But I had forgotten how badly I wanted that pioneer dream even in the early years. Doing the final edits on tomorrow’s event, I remembered this piece that I wrote for the NYTimes in April of 2000—25 years ago! It’s so poignant to look back and see how desperately I wanted exactly what I ended up finding, but could not have imagined at the time how or when or where I’d end up making it happen. Crazy things can happen, even things you can’t at all figure out just yet. (Don’t give up!)

Stay tuned for tomorrow! I’m very excited about what’s coming!

(In case the gift link doesn’t work, here’s the TimesMachine view.)

First: what’s been lost.

I used to be a problem reader. I irritated my friends and my sister because I read straight through sleepovers and road trips; plus, I had that weird-child habit of concentration where you don’t hear people when they talk to you, which according to them was extremely annoying. My teachers used to take books away from me —“You can have this back at the end of the day”—otherwise I’d secretly read through class with the book on my lap.

My freshman year in college I took a book to a party off-campus—and then was embarrassed because a boy in the group I was with looked at me incredulously. “You’re bringing a book?” But I was afraid we’d get stuck at the party and have to sleep on someone’s couch and I wouldn’t have anything to read.

Remember the panicked feeling when the subway doors closed and you realized with horror that you had nothing to read? Or the bliss, when you did have something, of squirming into a tight spot between two people, balancing the book on top of the bag on your lap, and having an hour’s commute to read with no interruptions? Remember buying magazines before you got on a plane and the luxurious extravagance of all that time to read—maybe half of Harper’s or the Atlantic and then when your attention flagged to switch to Allure or Mademoiselle to read celebrity profiles and makeup tips?

When you have kids everyone tells you to read in front of your kids. But some of my worst parenting moments happened when I got engrossed in a book and ignored my children for hours on end. I’d look up two days later to a house in disarray, the kids disheveled and bickering, and nothing to eat.

I wasn’t a dainty, pretty reader of just poetry and classics or a robust muscular reader of, like, presidential biographies. I read indiscriminately, male and female, high and low: as much Judith Krantz as Thomas Hardy, also Kurt Vonnegut, Jane Austen, Steig Larrson, Jodi Picoult. If I didn’t have a book I’d read a magazine or a newspaper. Lacking those, I’d read cereal boxes or the JCrew catalog or a telephone instruction manual.

And then, around 2008, I got an iPhone, and found that it did everything for me that books did… and more. Much, much more.

Just by touching my phone, I was transported to new worlds the way only books and films used to be able to do. I learned answers to questions. I could fill the painful empty minutes at stoplights or in waiting rooms. I had something to do when I arrived to an event early and didn’t want to talk to people. Books had always done all these important jobs, but now my phone did them, too, and better, and I got to mainline the rush.

My addiction to my phone is no surprise, as I do most things with an addictive fervor. When I smoked cigarettes I would wake up, roll over, and have a cigarette in bed. When I still drank, I liked to drink. When I wasn’t reading as a kid, I watched so much TV that my friends used to call me to find out what was on. I knew the (pre-cable TV) schedule by heart. I’m not good with moderation. When I got an iPhone I just transferred my immoderate tendencies to my phone habit. And as social media bloomed into full flower, I was right there with it.

I love social media. I love Twitter, where I have made friends and had conversations with brilliant and amazing people I never would have even gotten close enough to in real life to ask a stammery question—and also where I get to watch news events unfold as they happen. I love Instagram, where I share my farm photos, and where I follow stunningly inventive and accomplished artists and creators. On Facebook I love seeing my friends’ kids grow up and staying in touch with people from my past. I’m still figuring out Substack, but I’m pretty well sold.

So I love social media…but do I need to spend six hours a day on it? And that’s on a good day. The lost time is unreal and totally embarrassing. It’s the addiction equivalent of digging cigarette butts out of the ash tray and hawking two more drags, down to the burnt plastic taste of the filter. Or getting to your temp job and realizing your teeth are wine-stained from the night before. I read once that Fentanyl addicts lose connection to normal endorphin release. A cute puppy or the sound of a baby’s laughter doesn’t do anything for them, because their endorphin receptors are so blown out. That’s where I am. A book requires too much focus, and you can’t scroll frenetically through topics and then jump to another platform when the buzz starts to flatline.

I believe my brain wiring has been rerouted by my social media addiction. Last summer we had a power outage and we didn’t start the generator because we thought the power would come right back but it didn’t. With the modem down I had no access to social media. I picked up a book, The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More, by Roald Dahl. This was a favorite collection of stories when I was an adolescent. It’s an engaging book, meant for 10- or 12-year-olds. As a kid I read it at least ten times, as I used to read all my favorite books over and over. It caught my eye that evening and I grabbed it, thinking it would be fun and easy to read. It wasn’t.

I couldn’t concentrate. The lack of stimulation was painful.

At this point I can’t even imagine becoming so engrossed in a book that I lose all sense of time and look up two hours later to see that the sun has begun to go down and I need to turn on a light, which used to happen to me all the time.

Writing has gotten harder too. Words and phrases and even sentences used to pop into my head, but now I can’t think of the words I want. I’ve become slow and dull.

I went through this same realization a few years ago: I have to start reading books again. I started doing the 50 Book Challenge. I set up an account on Good Reads where you can track your goal, and I tried to read a book a week. I do this challenge every year now. I never make it to 50. I’ll get side-tracked by a book that takes more than a week to read, or I’ll lose interest in a book and won’t officially quit it for a few weeks or it will take me a week or so to find a new book. Still, by year’s end I’ve usually gotten to 40 or 45, which is fine.

But in 2024 I went deep into my phone addiction and I stopped keeping track, and I didn’t finish a lot of books. To be fair, I was attempting a lot of ambitious non-fiction books on topics like Israel, Christianity, the Constitution, John Adams, and so on, which went unfinished. Sometimes just getting through a paragraph was hard, and I always had to force myself to put the phone down and pick up the book. I tried tricks, like leaving my phone on the other side of the room, or shutting it down, or running focus apps that block social media. They didn’t work.

But it’s a new year and I’m taking drastic measures. I have a lot lined up to do this year; I do not have time for an addiction. Just like addicts have to cut off their druggie friends and stop frequenting their old haunts, I’m dumping my pusher, my needle-buddy, and my corner bar, all in one shot: the social media apps on my phone. Here’s my four-step plan:

• I took all social media apps off my phone. I did this gradually. It was so painful, like cutting off my fingers one at a time. Twitter went in October. Facebook in December. Substack a few weeks ago. Today I took off Instagram. I can still go on these platforms on my laptop, but there is something SO different about not having four different warm electric lakes to sink into, all within a hand’s mindless reach.

• I’m reading hardcopy whenever I can, rather than e-books. I think this increases the emotion, the excitement, and the beauty of a book. What’s more, I plan to go to bookstores and libraries to find them. Again, I think this intensifies the pleasure of the experience. Wake up, endorphin receptors! I spent a half hour in Rizzoli Bookstore in Manhattan a few days ago sampling books, wandering the islands and stacks, and it was so different from scrolling on Amazon. I had the same experience at a library recently, remembering how cool it is to randomly pull books off the library shelf and flip through them.

• More fiction. I just read North Woods by Daniel Mason, which I bought at Rizzoli. I loved this book so, so much. It reminded me for the first time in a long while what people mean by the “joy of reading”. The language in this book was so beautiful that it sometimes made my heart beat faster. When certain plot events came together or secrets were revealed, I felt like shouting. With my social media apps mostly off my phone, it was also the first book I’ve read in a long time without the shrill background noise of my phone screaming at me like a carnival barker that it had things to show me, things that would blow my mind. I could feel the life coming back to my brain.

• And I’m going to post about the books I read as I go through the year, maybe a response, maybe just the covers. So far: Huckleberry Finn (started in 2024) and North Woods, and I’m just finishing Strangers on a Train, by Patricia Highsmith (which I’d started before I left for Manhattan, but forgot to bring, which was why I went to the bookstore because—no time to waste!) (I’ve read Strangers before but it seemed like a good re-read. If you’ve never read Highsmith—who also wrote The Talented Mr. Ripley—I recommend!)

Like all addicts, I run a high risk of failure. But the more times you try to quit, the greater your chances. Do you want to join me? We have to resist the mind control of the phone! It’s changing our brains too much. Come on, join my Jedi circle.

What are you reading? What gripping fiction do you recommend? Wish me luck!