(6:39 a.m.) and food insecurity
(6:39 a.m.) and food sovereignty!!
(6:39 a.m.) ok bye! xx
Standing, Lili doesn’t realize she’s pressed send on the message—the kisses—until it’s already gone through.
She freezes.
No, no,no, that wasn’t—fuck—she shouldn’t have—
(6:40 a.m.) Have a wonderful day, Lili.
It shouldn’t make her smile, breath released—grip loosening around her coffee cup and phone—but it does. His words, his name.
As she walks back into the house, she tucks her phone into her back pocket. There’s the sense of a secret in her smile, some bright feeling in her body, and the only lack she feels is in wishing that instead of texting him, she could have heard his voice.
Jackie is indeed not giving them a free vacation.
After breakfast, she starts the others inside, while Lili darts out for work, grabbing her battered Klean Kanteen with sunscreen-greasy hands as her friends plan how to take on the tiny old house: sorting through closets, separating chipped plates and rusted cutlery, beating out ancient rugs, taking down watercolors with cracked frames, patching up holes in the wall. Music plays; someone put on their Spotify, Ray LaMontagne in the morning. Backing out of the driveway—choosing to take the old Subaru that Jackie’s parents keep up here, rather than Jamie’s sleek black Audi;I’m not sure that’ll give the right impression,she’d informed him, dryly, when he offered her the car for the week—Lili hears rising shouts of an argument from the backyard as Jackie criticizes Amina’s approach to clearing rain gutters.
It’s just under an hour drive to the farm: Blue Acres, a gorgeous property tucked among apple orchards, ablaze with thick green color. It’s well-known for working with prominent chefs in the city, combining serious scaled commercial operations with decades of organic farming experience. The Subaru’s manual transmission makes her feel like a teenager again; she hasn’t really driven since California, and she almost misses the turnoff, trying to shift the sticky gears.
But as she parks—cutting the engine, slamming the car door shut—she hears the hushed patter of irrigation, sprinkling over the field crops in the softer morning light; in the rows closest to her, she spies brassicas, beets she’d bet are Chioggia. 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 includesa 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 alwaysloved 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’dlike 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; shelovesthis. 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.
