HOMEGROWN Life: The Farmer and the Fisherman

Reader Contribution by Farm Aid And Homegrown.Org
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Sometimes I wonder how things would be different if I had decided to start a farm in another part of Maine, away from the coast. But then I wake up after another night of waiting for goat babes to arrive and am graced with the remnants of wintertime. I take my coffee to sip outside on a cold granite bench engraved with a memory, and there I’m calmed by the seas and the sun, which definitely has risen by now. The surf is pounding, crashing over the rocks, and I can feel the sea spray floating through the air. It’s all so soothing and beautiful.

Living in a fishing village, I am surrounded by men and women who, like me, spend their lives wading in muck — only theirs is generated by fresh catches rather than by some breed of domesticated beast. Their days are filled with backbreaking work, lifting heavy traps full of prized crustaceans rather than bales of fresh local-cut hay. They haul nets laden with fish or shrimp rather than bucket loads of grain or water. They slog around in muck boots and Grundens rather than Carhartt’s and, well, muck boots. Farmers layer their Carhartt’s over a barn sweater so full of holes you wonder how it has any warming effect left. Fishermen cover their sweaters, made of sturdy Maine-grown wool full of “grease” to shed the sea spray, under waterproof bibs.

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