Earnings Season #8
The country calm, distant but coming closer, reminds her a little bit of Marin, Mill Valley.
She still hasn’t responded to Jane.
“Hey, Lil!” Tanya, one of the full-time staff members who oversees restaurant partnerships, waves at her from down the road.
Her box braids are pulled back into a bun under a red bandana, ready for the day’s work. “We’re over in the greenhouses! There’s
coffee and food if you want it, we start in ten.”
It was a big deal, getting invited to the workshop intensive. Part annual strategic planning off-site, part professional development,
it’s usually geared only to the permanent, full-time senior staff. Congregating in one of the greenhouses, armed with coffee,
pastries, and more Carhartt clothing than Lili sees on an average day on the Lower East Side, their workshop facilitators
go over the schedule. This week’s intensive includes a deep dive into aquaponics, regenerative agriculture, the latest innovations and techniques to apply back in the city, adapted for their urban context and zeroed in relentlessly on growth for the next year; this is what she’s always loved about the farm, its marriage of ambition and impact, maximizing productivity and ecological benefit, balancing necessary financial returns with real investment in the future.
There are twenty or so people attending, most of whom Lili knows from working shifts across all their locations in the city,
from Greenpoint to Battery Park; the volunteer who’s everywhere, they used to call her, laughing, back when she first started in undergrad.
Looking around, she can’t help seeing fresh ideas, new questions, more avenues: hardier crossbreeds of jewel-toned little
gem lettuces that’d weather the winter well in their in-ground hoop houses in Brooklyn, tomato varietals particularly well
adapted for vertical space, soil regeneration techniques that could be ingenious if they finally instituted a large-scale
community composting program with backing from the city.
Over the course of the day, as they move from greenhouse to fields to orchard, she keeps asking the staff questions.
“Have you seen much commercial viability, selling those varietals wholesale?” she asks, when they head out into crop rows
of heirloom onions.
“What’s the failure rate if you try to extend into November, for one last harvest?”
“Has direct-seeding worked much, or is it too finnicky for these seeds?”
“I mean, is there potential to commercialize some of those cover crops, come spring? Not tilling all of it? People in Park
Slope love winter peas and lentils, they’d go crazy for it.”
“Any success with the artichokes?”
“And the bacteria, what’s the best way you’ve found for monitoring that?”
“That’s genius—that’s a crossbreed with cucumber?”
“Could you see the scallop squashes possibly adapting well for a recirculating system, without any impacts to final product
taste? I mean, they love nitrogen, right?”
“Lili, let the man speak,” Eileen laughs, affectionate, when she’s interjected yet again.
“No, actually, she covered it,” concedes David, the head research farmer at Blue Acres who’s taking them through their experimentation fields, full of heirloom and hybrid vegetables.
“That’s the next stage we’d like to trial, for sure.
Squash are such heavy feeders, they’d balance out an aquaponics system really well. ”
Lili’s face burns a little, but she loves this; she loves this. Dirty knees, garden shears, the scent of greenery under the heavy heat, popping cherry tomatoes into her mouth like
candy as they walk through the field rows. She volunteers to help the Blue Acre farmhands thin out trays of seedlings during
workshop breaks, and she sprints over to explore the apiary when the beekeeping team offers to show her their setup. By the
time they conclude for the day, she’s grinning with an exhaustion that feels like happiness.
When she gets back to the house in the late afternoon, her friends are wrapping up work, too; they’ve thrown open all the
windows—“It got too stuffy,” Amina explains, “and Jackie was yelling too much”—and are painting the sides of the house, brightening
up its chipped clapboard with a fresh coat of paint. Lili heads to the overgrown garden, stifling her smile as she refrains
from informing her friends that they’ve used two drastically different shades of white paint.
Late sunlight filters through the gnarled apple trees, as she kneels in the dirt. Even after a full day in the fields, she
loves the substantial sense of accomplishment as she digs up the aged garden crops, ripping out aggressive weeds.
“You should get chickens,” she tells Jackie when she helps her uproot the worst of the long-seeded kale that’s almost taller
than her.
“Chickens?” Her roommate frowns.
“Yes, chickens. They eat weeds, and you’re going to have years of weeds with this garden, even after we’re done. You’ll have
to keep on eye on them, but it’ll be worth it.”
“Alright,” Jackie concedes, looking amused. She pushes back her damp, sweaty hair with her forearm, hands clad in dirty garden
gloves. She’s already got a bikini top on, denim cutoffs, ready to go swimming. “You’re the expert. I can get into being a
chicken mom, I guess.”
Long hours, hot days. She’s up early, roaming the farm before workshop programming starts, talking to the field crew and helping with maintenance tasks: harvesting kale, twisting off carrot tops, packaging up produce for CSAs.
Back at the house, her friends steadily make the space fit for a new life, bagging up the former owners’ residual belongings for donation, dropping off old furniture at the Salvation Army in town, replenishing the kitchen with fresh spices, oils, and tea.
The storage pile of firewood grows as they get competitive about who can add more to the shed; Amina sketches a piece of Jamie and Jackie snoozing in the hammock together after a particularly long day, their long limbs ungainly like children’s in sleep.
It’s a comforting blur of anticipatory summer nostalgia: the taste of campfire, burning wood, mismatched coffee mugs, tree trunks warm under her palm, lake water on her skin.
Once the garden is clear, she seeds a few fall crops: new kale, radishes, kohlrabi, carrots, oregano, things she’s seen Jackie’s
parents cook with. Earth accumulates under her fingernails, her hair still damp from morning swims. Around her, the scent
of soil and sunshine grows.
With it, memories of seasons in Marin. In Jane’s vegetable garden, she’d helped Robert harvest the last of the winter vegetables
each spring, and sadness wells in the recollection, her rejected request to visit, but also—memories of her childhood, the
feeling of loss. Expected, familiar, an old injury that she usually knows how to accommodate and ignore. Now, however, it’s
no longer a numbness of enforced distance; she feels soft in her ability to brush against memories—unbidden, at the sight
of thyme seedlings in the greenhouse, her mother’s favorite herb; remembering how her mother would braid her long black hair
before they’d cook dinner, the sizzle of oil, her father chopping the fragrant stems as he let Lili rip apart kale for salad,
his distraught laugh when she’d poured a whole packet of sesame seeds into the bowl: Alright then, some kale with our sesame salad, I suppose—ah, no, Lili! Don’t put more—okay, fine, yes, more—Aisha, I hope
you’re in the mood for sesame—
That there is an end to pain—it’s an idea, rather than a belief, but it’s tied to that night with Aleksandr, the sense of
falling headfirst into herself. It’s not in the foundation of her, and it’s not something she can trust yet, but she can begin
to test her weight against it. The ability to let sadness and pain wash over her, as she kneels in the dirt, as she rides
shotgun while James drives them all to the lake and the rush of air, trees, sunlight, and late summer heat makes her think
of other places, other times: redwoods, froth of Pacific waves, bridges over bays. It’s so new, but she feels like she can
breathe through it, a little.
When they fall into bed each night, she feels tired in a good, earned way.
“You like him,” she teases Jackie. They’re curled up in bed, facing each other across their pillows as they dissect Simon’s latest texts. He’s working late and hasn’t replied in a few hours. Out in the hall, they can hear Jamie and Amina brushing their teeth, in the shared bathroom.
Jackie groans, covering her face with her hand. “I do,” she mumbles. “I do, and it’s stupid—”
“It’s not stupid,” Lili counters. “He seemed really wonderful, and smart, and kind, and he’s the one who keeps reaching out
to make plans—”
“I just don’t think he likes me very much.” It’s a whisper, quiet: uncertain, where she so rarely sees Jackie anything but
radiant.
Lili frowns. “Hey,” she says, grasping for Jackie’s hand and pulling it away from her face. “I saw how he was looking at you,
at Amina’s show. Like he was stunned you were with him. Got this adorable little smile whenever you’d quickly glance at him,
then look away. He likes you, honest.”
“Fine,” Jackie concedes, looking unenthused.
Lili raises an eyebrow. “Wow, what excitement.”
“Ah, yes—he looked at me! A betrothal is coming, posthaste! The man—can you believe it—gazed upon me—had the audacity—” Jackie breaks off, laughing. “Sorry, I can’t breathe—the audacity to smile at me! Do you think
I’ll recover from the scandal? My reputation? Fuck, my ribs hurt—”
“Walsh, I will kick you out of this bed,” Lili warns, but Jackie is laughing so hard she’s wheezing. Lili can’t keep from
laughing, too, and her laugh feels easier, lighter, brighter than it has in years.
Every morning, when she wakes up early to head to Blue Acres, she puts the rusty moka pot on the stove and looks through the
house’s packed bookshelves—remnants of the old owners, who had been professors at NYU, literature and history. Paging through