by Sara Franklin
June 12, 2008
I’ve been thinking a lot about neighbors, friends, and communities lately. Moving to a new place where you know nobody at all has a way of making one reflect on such things. But more than anything, it’s a neighbor we have at NoHo Town Farm that’s made me contemplate.
For the sake of this entry, I’m going to call him Hal. Hal is a Northampton old-timer. He grew up in a house right across the street from our little farm, and remembers NoHo’s agricultural heyday. Watching the fields across the street be mowed, plowed, and tilled drew him over to Ben and Oona last summer, and now, it seems, we’ve earned ourselves an honorary crew member.
It’s always something. More often than not, I arrive in the morning to see Hal and Ben talking, leaning against one of their pickups casually, exchanging stories, information, and laughs. Or sometimes they’re bent over one of our temperamental Farmall tractors, trying to figure out exactly what isn’t working that particular day. Hal always seems to have an idea.
When I began at NoHo Town Farm, I thought perhaps Hal was just helping us get through the muddy spring. He was around an awful lot, acting as an unofficial consultant for our myriad of infrastructural projects. But it soon became clear that Hal was going to be a mainstay. And ever since, his presence has only increased.
Sometimes Hal comes just to chat while we weed endless rows on our knees. Other times he shows up with gifts, ranging from ample bunches of wild asparagus from his fallow fields in the meadows of NoHo to handmade weeding tools made out of secondhand steak knives. More often than not, he’s got advice on the weather to offer as well. This makes for amusing conversation between he and Oona, who has recently become obsessed with the local radar weather forecaster. They argue good-naturedly about whether rain will come by week’s end and whether or not the severe weather warnings (read: tornadoes and golf ball-sized hail) will pertain to us. One recent day during an extreme heatwave, Hal spent the morning in our shady CSA shed, shirt unbuttoned, just passing the time. All of us were prolonging our morning slowness, wary of the hazy heat that promised midday highs of 100 degrees. But Hal just sat, happy to be in good company, encouraging us to take a dip in the Mill River during our lunch break. “You must!” he hollered in his rusty drawl.
I’ve never had a neighbor like Hal. And although I don’t live on the farm, he feels like he’s always just around the corner. He’s always ready with a treat at the end of a sweaty and exhausting day or when we’ve just about given up on using the Cub to mark beds because it’s refusing to behave yet again. In my suburban upbringing, we barely knew our neighbors. We smiled at them, sure, but we all went home to our cozy homes at night, content in our little self-absorbed worlds.
Farming, I’ve come to realize, has a way of bringing out the community member in people. For Hal, maybe it’s because he remembers what it was like growing up in a farming family where farmers relied upon one another to get by. Few farmers can afford all the advice, supplies, and manpower they need. A mutual exchange of manpower and free consultation was necessary to get through the season with a successful harvest. Or maybe he’s just lonely. Who knows. But his kindness is touching and utterly unique. So for the first time in my life, I’ve got a neighbor, and even the seeds of a community. Now, to find a way to pay it forward.
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