Okay. So…
This is the part where I tell about me. Well, I hate to
brag, but I’m a pretty shifty sort of character. By day, I’m a mild-mannered
apprentice to an organic farmer (though he prefers to be known by his quality,
not the term ‘organic’, so SHH!). By night, I’m a business major, compulsive
knitter, and rogue writer.
Like I said: Sketch Factor is high.
I suppose it took some serious work to get to this level of
Sketchiness. You might even say it started pre-birth, when mom and dad took it
upon themselves to read to me in utero, grooming me for an auspicious place in
the agency when I was older. Although I’ve yet to see any conclusive studies as
to the effects The Very Hungry
Caterpillar has on developing embryos, I imagine that they will eventually
find a way to blame childhood obesity on it.
Post-birth, my chances for normalcy scarcely improved.
Having been brainwashed into a love of reading, I developed Stockholm’s
Syndrome for the written word that carried into my elementary school years.
Here it was that I learned that I loved nature, hated math, and how to write
cursive. To this day I can’t print words right to save my life, but in the
agency, such a skill was unnecessary.
By now, I had a sleeper agent to back me up in the form of
my younger brother, Sawyer, who is my junior by three years. Despite the implication that one day he would
have to kill me and assume my identity, we were very close friends from the
beginning. He and I trained together, took our meals in the mess hall together,
and had each other’s backs during the rise and fall of N’sync. But our bond
would soon be tested through further development in 2001. Mom and dad took 9/11
as a convenient excuse to bring their little victim-turned-underling home.
And then the homeschooling started. Cue Twilight Zone theme
song.
Years of intensive training later, with plans to start
accumulating clinical hours needed to win one of the fifty spots in the
Veterinary Program of NCSU, I was ready for reintroduction into the world. The
immediate predictions were that I would bring the veterinary medicine program to
its knees under the onslaught of my domicile-fueled knowledge base.
Little did my parents know, I had been flipped by another
agency of a decidedly greener nature.
The Little Voice in me said I wasn’t enthused by the
prospect of cutting open animals for a living, someday, even if it was with the
intent of helping them. It whispered that there was a better way to impact the
world, and my own happiness. In a room with a single bare light bulb swinging
wildly overhead, it showed me candid Polaroid photos of myself tending a fugly
2’ x 6’ garden box, merrily plunging my fingers under the landscape timbers in
search of earthworms, delightedly holding a firm green tomato. I was caught. My
escapades as a double agent were over.
Shockingly, mom and dad not only loved their nervously
explaining traitor: they supported her with unconditional love and excitement.
Apparently, this sort of thing was genetic, and unavoidable. Although the
agency would suffer the loss of me in the veterinary field, they knew and
understood the risks. Greenthumbedness strikes blindly, and without warning.
The agency accommodated, and opened a sector devoted to
forays into plants and dirt.
Enter mission one: the Moores.
The Moore farm was a family-run affair with ten acres, three
of which were used to grow typical Southern vegetables like corn and lima beans
for my boss Sue Moore and her plethora of relatives. I still am not confident
that I can name them all, as their code names were quite uncrackable.
Mission two was radically altering. An apprenticeship with
The Little Herb House opened my eyes to the wonders of those smell-good things
that heal, soothe, flavor, and incite cats to imitate rockstars on acid. Don’t
do herbs, children. The effects stay in your hair forever.
Mission three was a stretch of my courage. Summoning every
ounce of my grammar-Nazi tendencies, I wrote a short article about fall
gardening that landed me a position writing for The Cleveland Sentinel. Although the newspaper was set to
self-destruct by the end of a year, I accumulated around thirty writs of
excellence that were published, along with photos of my own taking.
Mission four was the best by far and the one I currently
hold: working apprentice at Double T Farms, owned by Tom and Teresa Kumpf. It
started along with my second semester of college, but we’ll get to that saga in
a minute. After spending a warm day planting a quarter acre of onions, trying
to keep pace with a Latina fellow worker, I limped home and told mom, “I think
he wants me to quit.” So, being the ornery thing I am, I did the opposite. I
learned to pick, wash, pack, weed, analyze, swear, hypothesize, and plan under
the affectionately gruff tutelage of Tom, aka, Overlord. Overlord sees all. Overlord
knows when I cut a head of lettuce wrong, or miscount the chard, or plant
something too deep, or lop off arugula with a hoe. But Overlord is incredibly
patient, and with time, the corrections are not as frequent.
I attended college at Johnston Community College. My first
day of semester was…sweaty. I mean, I did most of the sweating, because sitting
in such proximity with strangers was disconcerting, and totally against my 8
years of programing as a homeschool agent. Fountaining from the strain, I
carried on. One semester, then two (during which I started to work for Overlord
– erm, Tom), all the way up to five.
Upon realizing how far I’d come from the shy, well-spoken
girl fresh off the agency training grounds, I stared at the degree in my hand
and thought, “Huh. This thing needs a buddy.” Back into the fray I dove.
Business degree, here I come.
Somewhere along the line, I looked at my previous mission
handlers, my genetic predispositions, and my own heart’s desires and realized I
wanted to own my own business someday, preferably with vegetables, animals, and
herbs of the non-smoking variety. My inclinations for the good, green, tasty,
smell-good, ecologically responsible, healthy, and natural things in life
continue to shape how this business looks in my head.
This blog is devoted to
chronicling the development of that business.
