Chapter Eight
Eight
The hike, it turned out, was to be the last family hike for a very long time—indeed, for the rest of this novel, with one late, notable exception.
Autumn had done what it had come to do; the trees were bare, the fields were brown, and now each morning Giuseppe came in from trenching Rumphius’s beleaguered yard coated in cold November mud.
Just when it occurred to the Krzelewski-Petrosians that they had arrived woefully underdressed, the school announced an upcoming clothing sale.
Everyone made a big deal about it, which the transplants found charming, a remnant of communal small-town life, until Miranda explained the ruthlessness, the deals and elbows.
She had outfitted her own family for years—yes, she had saved thousands of dollars—but her interest was more than personal, she had studied the sale, even writing about it in “Community Threads: Tracing Social Change Through Clothing Labels,” in The American Journal of Economics and Sociology.
For the sale provided a unique data set, thanks to a decades-old policy at Greensbury Elementary of requiring all parents to label their children’s clothing, a policy that meant, as the more durable clothes changed hands repeatedly, that each acquired a palimpsest of provenance: you could sometimes trace a good ski bib back through four or five children, and so it could be said one acquired not only clothing but an entire history.
The sale did not disappoint. If they shivered together on their arrival, by the time they left, the thickly bundled children were nearing heatstroke. But just as thrilling were the stories of their predecessors, which Miranda told them when she stopped by to parse their spoils. There was:
MacKenzie Baker (jacket, Olive), the daughter of the first-grade teacher and the bus driver.
And Frances Vrooman (gloves, Olive), daughter of Ted Vrooman, of Vrooman’s Small Engine Repair.
And Jake Morgan (beanie, Wesley), whose mother, Anita, was the town doctor, known to the girls as “Dr. I-Really-Shouldn’t-Tell-You-This Anita.”
While Wesley’s jacket once belonged to Tyler Lamoreaux, whose mother was a pharmacist—or used to be a pharmacist, until corporate pharmacy benefit managers destroyed Greensbury Drug. His father was a guide up at the Whisperbrook resort, a Boy Scout of a man.
See—he had even recorded their phone number.
“Hugh?” asked Miles, recalling their walk. “Big guy? Ponytail? Rescued Beyoncé?”
“It’s Beyoncé now, is it?” Miranda asked. “But yes.”
Still, their best find was Olive’s snow pants, patched with bunny patches, bunnies who were also wearing ski pants with their own bunny patches, ad infinitum.
They had once belonged to Katy Blevin, daughter of Melvin Blevin, one of the Witness Protection farmers’-market crew, and, before her, to Mira Gupta, daughter of a visiting professor of mathematics, and, before her, to M.
Flaherty, who was Maggie Flaherty, the daughter of Candace Flaherty, probably the most famous person in Greensbury, star of the homesteading blog Farm Candy.
“Don’t tell me that you haven’t heard of Farm Candy?” said Miranda.
Miles and Kate shook their heads. They knew what was coming, and sat back and let their country education resume.
—
Candy/Candace had come out to Greensbury with her family about a decade earlier, began Miranda, author of “Little House in the Big Internet” (Journal of Marriage and the Family), pulling out her iPhone to show them Candy’s site.
This was during peak first-wave Vermont lifestyle blogging, 2005–2011, when it seemed like you couldn’t turn a corner on the Internet without coming across a mauve-colored website featuring a smiling woman with a child under one arm and a piglet under the other.
Most (73 percent) came from the city, said Miranda, and most were the primary source of family income (68 percent), their husbands having found that farmwork was harder than they’d imagined.
In fact, a majority (82 percent) had been broken by the country, such that a careful reader at the end of the first wave would have noticed that, while the sites remained, the homesteaders hadn’t, and most were back collecting from their affiliate links in Philadelphia or Brooklyn.
This was right around the time of the second wave, vloggers mostly, turbocharged by YouTube and Instagram, which was when Candy began to kill it.
She’d come to Vermont at the end of the first blog era.
Farmer Candace began as a hobby (her husband was an assistant football coach), firmly in the “Pies and Muffins” subgenre, before beginning to branch out into “Crafting.” It was around this time that her husband was fired following a dismal season, and decided he’d try his hand at dairy farming, for no better reason than there being a dairy farm for sale just up the road.
This went about as well as would be expected, continued the author of “Dream Barn: Urban Fantasies Meet Rural Realities” (in press).
Soon Candace decided to document the whole disaster, taking a skilled-wife-saves-hapless-husband angle, which probably destroyed their marriage, but did wonders for her following.
Farmer Candace became Farm Candy; the rest, as they say, was history.
“Farm Candy Plants an Apple Tree.” “Farm Candy Patches the Roof.” “Is It Really Strep?” Not surprisingly, her husband was none too fond of having his failures on such public display.
He left Candy and the kids, and moved to Colorado with an assistant of media relations, with whom he’d been having a five-year affair, according to Dr. I-Really-Shouldn’t-Tell-You-This Anita, who’d been treating both parties for a communicated condition.
But Candace doubled down. Now not only was she a homesteader, she was a single-mom homesteader, an abandoned single-mom homesteader, left to face the elements on her own.
Her channel blew up—it was nuts. There was a while when you could find her house just by following the UPS trucks delivering all the free shit people sent her for endorsement, and by now she’d saved more New England trowel makers, heirloom-tomato farmers, and rabbit-hutch builders than you could count.
The irony of course, continued Miranda, was that Candy, who was originally from Greenwich, Connecticut, couldn’t grow a thing, couldn’t fix a thing; the sole reason she had so many followers was that she showed a lot of cleavage.
Her comments section was basically a visual glossary of sexual harassment, a semiotician’s dream really: heart emojis, fruit emojis, lip emojis, &c.
, &c., not to mention other forms of online anonymous male eloquence that Kate and Miles could probably imagine.
And though she should have told the creeps to fuck off, continued Miranda, Candy just replied with her own kiss and blush emojis, and so had built her empire.
The other half of her genius was in camera work, because her place was a disaster.
You couldn’t see it in the videos, but it looked like a cross between a plane crash and the forest in The Lorax.
Sanitation had lost count of the number of times they’d been called because of “Farm Candy Does Septic” or “All You Need to Know About Propane.”
“And if you don’t believe me,” said Miranda, “you can ask Mark Baker, the health inspector, the father of Penny Baker the kindergarten teacher, and the grandpa of MacKenzie, of Olive’s jacket.”
Anyway, they should sneak over to Farm Candy’s Potemkin palace sometime, just for a little schadenfreude, she said.
“ ‘Farm Candy Plucks a Chicken,’ ” said Miles, who’d found the video on YouTube.
“Oh, God help me. No,” said Miranda, grabbing his phone and scrolling swiftly down. “Here: ‘Farm Candy Bakes the World’s Best Brownie.’ Or ‘Farm Candy Patches Ski Pants.’ Hey, look, there’s your ski pants. And there’s the patch!”
—
For weeks, the weather flirted with snowfall, but when it was cold enough, the sky was clear, and when the heavens opened, it was too warm, and by the end of the year, they’d had a single day of sleet that they called “snow” to make themselves feel better.
Increasingly, Miles heard their new friends speak of warming trends, and winter’s disappearance.
Might it not snow at all? he wondered. He knew the direction things were headed.
But this was even worse than he had feared.
Then the holidays came and they flew to California, to see Kate’s parents.
Olive watched A Charlie Brown Christmas on the airplane.
Anyone who didn’t believe in global warming needed to watch A Charlie Brown Christmas, thought Miles, because if numbers weren’t your thing, if science didn’t do it for you, then here was proof, from 1965.
Children skating on a giant frozen lake.
Skies filled with snowflakes. Christmas streets and woods and houses covered in drifts of gorgeous white.
Actually, while they were gone, it did snow, but then a warm day melted it, and they returned on New Year’s to find the hills still bare and brown.
School began again. Wesley completed the construction of his first Cosmos galaxy, and began, in a new spiral notebook, the creation of a second, on an earth far from its star, where winter was eternal.
And then and only then, as if the heavens were only waiting for the permission of the Creator, it happened.
—
The children were sleeping when it began.
Should we wake them? their parents asked each other, standing at the door, watching the snowflakes drift down through the light cast from the windows.
For they had school tomorrow, and Olive had art club, and Wesley had been invited over to a friend’s house.
But then Giuseppe, rising from his sprawl before a baseboard heater, trotted over to the door.
For a moment, he stood there, sniffing at the air, before he turned to Miles with a look of suspicion. “Snow,” said Miles, in case the dog was asking what to call it. Giuseppe took two steps outside, stopped, barked, then ran back in.
Again he looked to Miles.
“Snow,” said Miles, winking at his wife, who, in kindness to the bewildered animal, was trying to keep from laughing. “Just water in a slightly different package.”
The dog turned back to look outside, again considering, took more steps forward, nose twitching at the air as he approached the edge of the porch. Again he barked. Again he looked at Miles. As if this were a miracle of his master’s making.
“Snow,” said Miles once again.
By then Kate had run to get the children, if only so they could see how funny it was to watch the dog.
Wesley took the stairs two at a time, Olive clung to her mother’s neck. They dressed in the vestibule, pulling their ski clothes over their pajamas, stepped out into the glow cast by the porch light, looked up at the flakes materializing out of the darkness, falling onto lashes, onto tongues.
Not enough to make a snowman, even a snowball, but enough.