"The Dirty Life: On Farming, Food, –and Love"

Scribner, by Kristin Kimbal

The night freelance writer and vegetarian Kristin Kimball met her future husband, she helped him slaughter a pig. The next morning, she ate a double helping of sausage and, as she says, that was the end of her life as a vegetarian.

After a whirlwind courtship involving a lot of good meals made from food grown on the farm Mark was running in Pennsylvania, Kristin agreed to move with him to upstate New York to start a farm of their own. The plan was to provide all the food customers needed for a year for a fee of several thousand dollars per family. They also planned to do all the work on the farm without machinery, using draft horses in place of tractors.

"The Dirty Life" covers the Kimballs' first year on the farm, with a prologue and epilogue summarising the seven or so years since. It is both a romance and an anti-romance — hard labor and pure exhaustion can kill just about anyone's desire — and Kimball is very upfront about both her and her husband's shortcomings. That's part of what makes her memoir so memorable. In this "know your farmer" era, she doesn't sugarcoat or skirt around the challenges and hardships that organic farmers face. It might be best summed up with phrase Kimball uses near the end, "to do outpaces done" — always.

She and Mark began planning their farm the winter they got engaged. They married at the end of the first harvest. As Kimball writes, it was nearly "a marriage of celebrity-level brevity." Between the engagement and wedding ceremony, she learned to milk cows, drive a team of draft horses and slaughter pigs. She slept in a farmhouse that was "a travesty" once inhabited by 16 people just out of high school. They left holes in the walls, NASCAR stickers on doors and phone numbers written on the walls. But there was no time to fix up — or even clean — the house, between the planting, weeding, harvesting and caring for livestock.

By the time the wedding rolled around, both were exhausted and "nothing went smoothly, the consequence of no advance planning." The day after the wedding, they pressed guests who remained in town into a crew to help pick pumpkins before the first frost. That done, both bride and groom got sick.

Within a month, Kimball had left for a two-month writing assignment in Hawaii.

What saved her marriage, she writes, was the farm: "I found that what I missed first was not Mark, not the animals, but the dirt and the work."

When she got home, she "dug in as deeply as I could."