People use drugs, legal and illegal, because their lives are intolerably painful or dull, wrote the author and farmer and environmentalist Wendell Berry. “They hate their work and find no rest in their leisure. They are estranged from their families and neighbors. It should tell us something that in healthy societies drug use is celebrative, convivial, and occasional, whereas among us it is lonely, shameful, and addictive. We need drugs, apparently because we have lost each other.”

I think a great deal of my life in recent years has been my search to find one another, to seek my community, to end my loneliness and disconnection, my estrangement from the world. Somehow, I knew that my salvation lay in nature, in community. I took valium for 30 years and was addicted to it, I do not take it any more or need it any more.

I found Maria, I connected to the natural world and the world of animals, and both have been healing to me, as is my farm. Here in a small town in upstate New York, in the sometimes lost world of rural America, I have found community. We may not always love one another, but we know one another.

Community is reinforced, every day, in the rituals of life. We often need help, and people here coming running. Sandy Adams, who sells us the excellent hay from the farm she and Brian run together,  come several times a year to fill our barn. If we are not home, they simply bring it or stack it, they trust us to pay them, “no rush,” they always say.

I remember in my other life in New York and other cities, if you weren’t there to pay, you didn’t get what you bought. No one knew anyone else, no one trusted anyone else.

Sandy knows her neighbors, if she needs a cup of sugar, she just goes into their homes if they aren’t there and gets some. When our donkey Simon had a stroke and died in the pasture,  our driveway filled up with neighbors, I don’t even know how they knew. When Scott Carrino is overwhelmed in his busy cafe, he sometimes asks me to deliver his bread for him in different parts of the county. I am  happy to do it.  I can’t count the number of times Jack Macmillan has rushed over her in h is truck to bail me out of some crisis. Ed Gully took a dead bear out of our pasture and  home with him.

I have come to embrace the rituals of life here, they are the tapestry of community, of being known. When Brian and Sandy deliver the hay, we come out to see them and pay them, and we have some “pickup” time, which is what I call it.  These conversations always seem to happen around a pickup truck.

We always make time to talk to one another: about the weather, our children, the cost of things, our newly purchased used generator for bad storms, animals.

Brian and I talked about how neither of us ever wants to retire, or go to Florida. He hears the same stories I hear, the farmers who go to Florida don’t seem to last long down there, they don’t know how to do nothing. We are different people, we are probably not likely to be close personal friends, but we know and respect each other, and care about each other.

Brian’s family has farmed his land for hundreds of years, it is in his blood. He told me the story of his great grandfather, who had a heart attack. “In those days,” he said, “they just told you to sit around and not do anything.” So that’s how my grandfather took over the farm, he said.

Brian and Sandy gave up dairy farming when milk prices began to drop (they have stayed low),  Sandy was a school teacher for many years. Now they grow corn and sell hay. They also raise goats.

Their visits are precious to me. Maria and I stand with them by the pickup when the hay is loaded, and we catch up and talk about our lives and the vagaries of life. Sandy is going to watch over our farm when we go to New Mexico in October., we couldn’t ask for a more competent or reliable person.

Oddly enough, I have a lot in common with farmers, even though I am not one and have no wish to be one. We are self-employed, often the mercy of others, we live closely alongside animals, as people have done for thousands of years. We are connected to nature, work hard every day, do not ever take long vacations, and never have much money. All good talking points.

Brian and Sandy are definitely people among the people I would call if I needed help. Between them and the Gulleys and the Macmillans and Jay Bridge and my friends Scott and Lisa, there is not much we could not handle.

I appreciate the farmers I know so much, there is something so very real and grounded about them.  They must find me strange, but they have accepted me and I feel comfortable with them. I am grateful to have found community here.

I don’t fool myself into thinking I am a native or “local.” I don’t need to be accepted in that way. What I want is to be known, that is the essence of community.