Maria and I use an old pitchfork to clean out the hay in the barn and dump it into the pasture. I am kind of obsessed with keeping a neat barn, I don’t really know why, I don’t keep a neat anything else. When I use the pitchfork I feel especially connected to the farm, it touches something inside of me that feels old and timeless.

I suppose we were all farmers once, we all lived on a farm, it is inside of all of us. Maria said the same thing yesterday, “the pitchfork wakes something in me,” she said, “I think I was a peasant once.” I like that, the pitchfork brings out the peasant in me too, and my grandmother told me often that we came from hardy peasant stock. Back to the future.