Vermont 2012 - Burger Night

Dinner my second night in Vermont was very special.  We went to Bread & Butter Farm for their Burger Night.  The line was huge!  Burger Night is incredibly popular even when the weather was rainy, cold, and grey.

I don't have words for this experience.  It is extremely difficult for me to articulate how important it was for me to be at this farm at this point in my life.  Even thinking about it is making me cry on my keyboard.  I cried on the farm, too.  At the end of our night I spent some time alone in Corie's hoop-house and the beauty of their land, their family, their community just came spilling out of me.

The front half of the line to order

Right: Hoop-house, Left: Pavilion for dining and music

Farmer Corie bringing new lettuce to the burger bar

Their beautiful landscape!

Cucumbers in the hoop-house

The length of the hoop-house

Bread & Butter Farm is located on Cheese Factory Rd.

Corie took a minute out of the chaos of running a farm and pop-up restaurant to talk to us and tell us that the kind of jobs we (those of us in the program) are looking for don't exist.  That we need to create them.  We aren't going to find them in a graduate program or on a job listing site - we need to carve our own paths.

She spoke to us again at the TED-esque conference when she told her story and brought the hundred person audience to tears.  She ended with a slideshow of her family and her farm while her husband performed an acoustic rendition his song "Family Farm" (a 2009 live version below).

Finally, I was lucky enough to speak with Corie one on one later in the week over dinner.  I had been wanting to talk to her personally, many of us did, but I was anxious; she's kind of a rock star.  We talked about farm stuff - Corie studied farming at the Santa Cruz program, then she worked to create the MSU program and once that was up and running she had huge input on the creation of the Vermont Farmer's Training program.  I was able to pick her brain and she gave me a lot of really great advice.  And no kidding about the rock star thing...I was the envy of many other women in the group who wished they'd been able to have her ear that night.

Stephany & Tarot Cards

Saturday afternoon I caught up with a dear friend of mine, Stephany (also known as Edna).  We went to a tarot card reader who lives near my mother's house.  It was quite entertaining and enlightening.  One of my many favorite tid-bits is that apparently Steph and I have lived a number of lives together in the past - during some of which we were lovers - though now we tend to think of each other more as twins.

I met Stephany during our Sophomore year in High School and fell madly in love with her sense of humor and amazing heart.

The class where Steph & I met (and a friend, Natasha)

We, along with our 3rd musketeer Yolanda (who will probably get her own post soon enough), had a number of escapades throughout High School.  We particularly enjoyed hanging out in 24-hour big-box stores and being inconceivably silly.  Steph lived 3.1 miles from me and I would pick her up on the way to school each morning.

Us in a Meijer parking lot (along with Hula-Girl on the dash)

 One of my favorite places to have a Stephany (and Yolanda) is Wheatland each September!  We camp, listen to great bluegrass, eat delicious food, and wear a ton of tie-dye.

Our coordination was unplanned

Steph was in my wedding (and I in hers just a few months before).  She will be an aunty to my children.  She has an irrevocable, unconditional, unapologetic invitation to my life (and house). 

At my bachelorette party

Candid shot of Steph at my wedding

The card reader said she saw Stephany and me pregnant at the same time.  She also said she saw me pregnant, with a girl - a reincarnation of a person close to me to died recently, much earlier than I had planned.  Actually, she said a lot about both of us - some of which I might reveal if it comes true.

Lunch with Angie

This is Angie.
I have an identical picture taken in the exact same dorm.

Today I had lunch with Angie.  Angie and I went to High School together, but didn't really know each other very well then.  We had a few classes together but ran with relatively different crowds.  That last sentence made our High School sound big - it wasn't; we graduated with maybe 130 people.  Anyway, if you told me Angie's name I could tell you what city she lived in and that she liked the color pink and that her boyfriend (now husband) was a really nice guy - but that's about it.  When we graduated I assumed I would never see her again outside an occasional obligatory reunion, just like 125 other people.

In college, Angie and I got together once for a book reading (Anne Lamotte at the Borders in Ann Arbor).  It was totally random.  She had transferred to U of M from an out-of-state college and I had heard rumor of this but it wasn't really on my radar.  I don't quite remember why we met up but we had coffee and went to the reading.  I don't remember much about the actual date but I do remember it was kind of awkward.  But seriously, I was a sophomore in college - everything I did was awkward. (Hah, I'm a 25-year-old grad student and will continue to be awkward my entire life.)  We parted ways at the end of the afternoon and went 4 more years without really seeing each other.

A few years ago we somehow started reading each other's neglected blogs.  I think I was creeping on her and left a comment, to which she politely reciprocated, and so on and so forth until we both kind of realized that we had a lot in common.  Angie was settling into the area and we have similar mindsets when it comes to politics, family-rearing, food, and the earth.  So we got together for coffee again.  Only this time I remember it being fantastic!  It was amazing to talk to someone who knew exactly where I grew up and understood so much about it.  We laughed at the fact that the distance from the west side of the state (where we have a lot of friends and family) to where we live is longer than it is from here to there.  Or so it would seem.  Well, time flew by at our coffee date.  We agreed we should get together again and bring our man-friends to meet and in general just see more of each other.  Then we promptly let a year or so go by before meeting up again.

Today we met at a favorite restaurant of both of ours which we discovered was something else we had in common.  Our two hour lunch flew by as we talked about families, food, farming, and life in general.  We both drank more water than our bodies could hold and continued to talk in separate bathroom stalls before hugging in the parking lot and parting ways.  While I don't plan on waiting a year for another date, I feel that any amount of Angie in my life is just great.  I rarely find someone with whom I can sustain a flowing conversation without being bored or making them uncomfortable (another reason I went into Community Social Work and not Counseling) - but with Angie it's on fire.