I. Arriving

In her 1999 manifesto on love, bell hooks writes: “we would all love better if we used it as a verb." She implores the reader to understand love not as a feeling, but as an act of will, an intention and an action. The first time I exercised love as an act of will was November 2020, when I decided to leave Ann Arbor. I was barely twenty and had spent most of my life making the decisions expected of me; I expected my junior year of college to be yet another spent fulfilling requirements toward graduation, the last clear goalpost guiding me. Any deviance from “the plan” — though it wasn’t a particularly well-thought out one, a liberal arts degree pointing nowhere in particular — had never crossed my mind until about three months into my semi-isolated existence in Ann Arbor.

Like many reaching for normalcy amidst the pandemic, I had settled into as much of a routine as I could: running the same 1.9-mile loop around the stadium whenever it wasn’t oppressively cold, reheating the same cup of black coffee between Zoom classes, writing about virtual events for the student paper, sitting on the floor of my room for a change of scenery to eat a quesadilla stuffed with spinach (for health) while watching some objectively terrible Netflix show. Save for my neighborhood walks and the occasional kitchen run-in with a housemate when I washed my dishes, my whole life existed between me and my laptop. One day, it occurred to me that if I were the object of some Truman Show-esque surveillance, my existence would be comparable to that of a mouse or some other caged animal, twenty-two hours a day confined to a rectangular room. Yes, my mind wandered as far as I could manage, from ancient Greek philosophy to yes, I admit, god-awful Emily in Paris, but an outsider would only see a girl stuck on a loop: sit at desk, lie on floor, lie in bed, repeat. Even my walks and runs were mechanical, circling the same blocks over and over with no energy to venture outside my comfort zone.

So when I realized I could leave — and not only leave in the sense that I could simply neglect to enroll in winter classes and no one at the university would bat an eye — but actually leave, pack my bags and refuse to return until the sun stayed out past 4 p.m. again — I did. And I didn’t realize until later that this was in and of itself an act of love, a commitment to my spiritual growth more purposeful than any other decision I had ever made. I had never felt very compelled to resist the status quo, and would hardly describe myself as spontaneous, but once I had envisioned that bird’s eye view of myself in my room, unmoving, I couldn’t shake it, and I knew I couldn’t survive the bleak grey of winter here — I wouldn’t make myself.

A few months later I arrived on a goat dairy in Eatonville, Washington, armed with a pair of overalls, a box of protein bars, and the knife my dad gave me for Christmas when I turned 18. Two friends of mine, Sarah and Bella, had worked here over the summer and were excited to join me, promising to show me the ropes of goat farming in this place so far from anywhere I’d ever lived. For the next few months, we’d share a “cabin” that lacked insulation but had a twin bed, a bunk, and a couple of propane heaters that probably weren’t entirely safe to use indoors but kept us warm enough. Our cabin was one of six that made up “Internville,” the space where all the “farm interns" offering their labor in exchange for room and board bunked in between the pig pasture and the chicken coops. The owner of the farm, a gruff man named Scott with a provocative sense of humor, lived in the house at the center of the five-acre property. Attached to his house was a garage-turned-common space equipped with couches, a television, and a kitchen area complete with oven, fridge, and stove. This was the space I’d get to know the other interns: a thirty-year old accountant taking a “gap year” from her life, a masseuse-in-training with a mullet and a soft smile, a wilderness survival school dropout with a tiny dog and a love for heavy metal music. The rest of my time would be spent interacting with over a hundred milking goats, six farm dogs, five pigs, two alpacas, and a couple hundred ducks and chickens.

Love: "the will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's growth."

bell hooks
All About Love, 1999

My half of the cabin.

Goats in the pasture; Mt. Rainier in the distance.

On the farm, the laptop that had once contained my only hope for stimulation would remain stowed away in my cabin. My schedule, once crowded with Zoom calls and virtual, meaningless deadlines, would be replaced by the piece of paper Scott taped to the fridge each week, listing who would be responsible for each daily task that kept the farm running. Though my days varied, sometimes crowded by double milking shifts, other times filled with monotonous, thoughtless tasks like egg washing, I quickly felt comfortable in the rhythm of farm routines. Days previously measured by the opening and closing of Zoom tabs and nights carried forward only by the momentum of my fingers on the keyboard began to wake up to new sensations — the pungent smells of farm animals and all the strange sounds they made, the chill of morning frost and the squelch of mud under my boots, the ache of my muscles at the end of each day — all the unmistakable indications of life I had somehow forgotten.

"Living simply makes loving simple. The choice to live simply necessarily enhances our capacity to love."

bell hooks
All About Love, 1999

II. Feed

Morning feed shifts are when I love the farm the most. If there’s a good sunrise, I won’t miss it, and I keep my eye out the window as I boil water to pour over my coffee grounds, the garage quiet save for the sound of the coffee dripping steadily into my mug. Though Mt. Rainier is often obscured by the clouds this time of year, mornings are the best chance for clear enough skies to see her, and if I’m lucky I’ll walk outside to find her glowing in the bright pinks and reds of early morning. Even when it isn’t nice out, the mountain’s presence is a welcome reminder I’m far from the flat greys of Michigan.

My fingers quickly grow pink as I begin the morning’s tasks, fiddling with gate latches and carrying a metal pail to each chicken coop, gently nudging hens and hoping I won’t get pecked as I carefully place their eggs in my bucket one by one. The ducks pose a greater challenge, and I hold my breath as I open the door to let them out of their enclosure, my boots sticking deep in the layers of wet muck I dread shoveling out. I’d had high hopes for the ducks, remembering stories my dad had told me growing up of how his pet ducks had followed him around, but these ones move erratically and run away at the sound of my footsteps. They vacate their enclosure the second and I arrive, leaving me to crouch and extract their large, oblong eggs, some buried so deep in the layers of mud and duck poop I feel like I’m excavating fossils. By the time I’m done with this task, my back aches and my arm is sore from my attempts to prevent my pail from touching the ground. I hobble outside, waddling with the bucket between my legs to meet the relief of the soft, clean grass outside and breathe a sigh of relief the task is over.

I drop the eggs I’ve collected off at the farm store, where they’ll be hand-scrubbed in a few hours and carefully placed in cartons for market or deliveries. After checking the chicken and duck feeders, I’ll make my best attempt to carry an awkwardly large fifty-pound feed bag from the shed without dropping it to refill them. Lifting the bag feels impossible on my own, but it’s the kind of impossible that isn’t much of a choice — my job is to feed the animals, and this is how it gets done. There’s no one to hear my complaints that it’s too heavy, there’s just me, the bag, and the distance between myself and the feeders. So I lift the bag with the best form I can manage and hobble back to the chickens and the ducks.

Next I’ll head up to the barn to refill waters and start separating alfalfa flakes for the goats. The music coming from the milkroom next door reminds me I’m grateful to be moving at my own pace in the quiet of morning. I take time to say hello to my favorite goats, check on the pregnant ones, and make sure no one’s getting bullied before lugging their water buckets to the spigot outside. I cheat by pouring some of the partially full buckets into one another so I have fewer to carry, but there’s no getting around the trucking in and out of the barn, inevitably splashing a third of the water I’m carrying over my boots and drenching the bottom of my overalls. Every once in a while, a hungry goat from a different pasture will sneak between my legs, catching me in a moment of vulnerability before I can yank the heavy barn door closed. The barn cats just watch in amusement as I chase the goats around the barn, yanking them by the collar while they feast on the unguarded alfalfa. On the way out, I’ll stop to pet Princess, the oldest guard dog on the farm, a Great Pyrenees who’s made up entirely of fluff, and her younger counterpart Abby, who makes a bed for herself in stray alfalfa before I have a chance to sweep it up. It's hard to imagine these two defending the goats from a coyote attack, as they remind me more of my own fluffy white dog than fierce guardians.

Abby in the haystack.

Princess.

Princess napping on the job.

Once I’ve replenished the barn, I haul a wheelbarrow of hay to the back pastures for the goats who aren’t being milked. One goat, Daphne, hangs out in the back pasture alone, the only one who doesn’t seem to mind the cold. She follows me around, chomping at the back of my wheelbarrow while I try to outpace her, the wheelbarrow bouncing ungracefully behind me along the uneven pasture. I stuff alfalfa in one stall filled with Nigerian dwarf teenagers, too young to be milked, and the rest in the breeding pen, full of women in heat and a single stinky buck. I peek over the stall door to glance at the waters and hope they won’t require refilling. No matter how sneaky I try to be getting in and out of the stalls, Lizzo and Maverick, the dogs who guard this section of the farm, find me immediately. The dogs are as tall as me when they stand on their hind legs — a stance they take often, greeting me by placing their muddy paws on my shoulders, eager for attention and food. They're as beautiful as they are terrifying, full of more energy than they know what to do with, their only training their farm dog genes. I have about a fifty percent success rate of getting in and out of these stalls without Maverick escaping to run around the back pasture and rile up the alpacas.

The alpacas are also guardians of this farm, though you wouldn’t know it by how easy it is to startle them. If I’m lucky enough to get close, I’ll extend an arm out toward them, shaking a handful of leftover alfalfa in an offering, my head turned in the opposite direction in promise that I won’t hurt them; I won’t even look at them. Most times, I give up and drop the hay on the ground for them to munch once I’m long gone. But just once, I gain enough trust to feel the alpacas eating out of my hand. The dogs' love comes easy, but this feels sacred.

Etta guarding the Nigerian Dwarves.

Maverick (left) and Lizzo (right).

The task of heading down to the front pasture to feed the youngest Nigerian dwarves comes with the presence of some other guard pups, Etta and Mudd. Etta is my favorite, and I consider her to be the most trustworthy of the farm dogs. She’s older, wise and calm, but still strong enough to put her younger partner Mudd in her place when she terrorizes the tiny goats by chasing them around for entertainment. Mudd nips at me playfully, still a puppy — except this puppy has some real teeth, and though she’s objectively adorable, I find myself walking as quickly as I can to finish this task.

By the end of my shift, the rest of the farm is awake. I take my time during these tasks, considering them an opportunity to get to know the animals a little better. As I head back to the garage, I'll glance behind me one last time to see if Mt. Rainier is still visible or if the grey skies of winter have obscured her once again.

Alpacas enjoying stray hay on a frosty morning.

I find that on the farm, I move much slower than I’m used to. In All About Love, bell hooks writes: “as we begin to simplify, to let the clutter go, whether it is the clutter of desire or the actual material clutter and incessant busyness that fills every space, we recover our capacity to be sensual." As I move through the tasks of feed shifts, I feel it all: the birds chirping each morning, the warm nuzzle of the goats, the intensity of the pink skies signaling the start or end of a day. Each hour stretches longer than a week of life in Ann Arbor — time that passed in a series of deadlines, of waiting-until-the-weekends only distinguished by game days and holidays. But here, every moment contains something to be noticed: the way the morning frost on the alpaca’s backs catches the sunlight, the sound of Scott's son laughing on the trampoline, the way it feels to peel off my outer layer, caked in mud and dirt, at the end of the day and let hot water wash over me.

The life in which my academic goals consumed me feels so far away here. There was nothing tangible in my academic labor, just hours spent hunched over a screen, hoping the number returned would be an impressive percentage, a bump to my GPA to prove I was doing something good. On the farm, my successes are something I could hold in my hand, as real as the eggs in my pail. “When the asleep body, numb and deadened to the world of the senses, awakens, it is a resurrection that reveals to us that love is stronger than death,” hooks writes. In the quiet mornings, with no timeclock, no report card, nothing to measure my output or productivity or success, I feel my senses reawaken.

"When we work with love we renew the spirit; that renewal is an act of self-love, it nurtures our growth."

bell hooks
All About Love, 1999

III. Milking

Twice daily, at 7:30 a.m. and 5:30 p.m., a couple of us trek up to the room next to the barn for “Milk Club.” Though not a particularly lucrative practice, the raising, breeding, and milking of dairy goats is the primary objective of this farm, home to over a hundred Nubian, Nigerian Dwarf, Alpine, and Lamancha goats. In the winter I spend on the farm, there are 80 goats eligible for milking, their names all listed on the whiteboard in the milking room, divided by pasture. It takes anywhere between 90 minutes and 3 hours to complete a milk shift, coaxing the goats inside in groups of eight until every name is checked off the board. My partner and I set up a soundtrack, John Prine if I’m working with Jamie, Taylor Swift if I’m working with Sarah, and begin rounding up the goats.

Though we’re dealing primarily with the backside of the goats in the milking process, this task is anything but impersonal. It requires not only knowing every goat’s name, but knowing their personalities to know where they might be hanging out in the barn, how to coax them up the ramp, whether they’re likely to cause trouble and break into the food bin. Some goats, eager for the food awaiting them, are nearly impossible to keep out of the milkroom, their hooves banging on the doors and their narrow bodies slipping through the barn door faster than we can keep count. Others are more loath to enter the milkroom and must be tracked down and guided inside by a steady hand. Once eight goats have filled the stand, one milker begins scooping grain for each goat and checking off names on the white board while the other begins the milking process.

New moms waiting to be milked.

Image: Angela Zhou

New moms waiting to be milked.

Image: Angela Zhou

As I spend time in the milkroom, I become better at identifying goats by their teats than by their faces. It sounds odd, but I rely on this ability to assist me in the milking process — I know which goats have sores that need to be handled gently, can recognize when a goat is low on milk or so full that they need to be hooked up to the machine immediately. Most important is knowing when the goats with real attitude have entered the room. There’s Boss, who reliably spends the entire milk shift banging her head around senselessly and bothering the other goats, but is relatively low-maintenance from behind, and Eena, who is nearly indistinguishable from the other Nubians until she makes a beeline for the feed bucket and has its lid off within two seconds of entering the milkroom. Tabla is one of the alphas in the herd, and the most important to keep an eye out for: she needs to be milked the moment there’s food in front of her, otherwise she’ll start kicking. Being at eye level with a kicking goat’s behind is never fun, and attaching suction cups to their teats while trying to hold them still may as well be impossible. It takes a while for me to get used to manhandling the goats, but I don’t have much of a choice, as I soon realize that being assertive is the only way to get this task done.

The milking itself is fairly simple: clean the goat’s teats, dry them, and “strip” them before attaching the suction tubes that bring the goat’s milk into the giant metal tanks resting on ice. Stripping the goats is the process of squeezing a small amount of milk out of each teat by hand in order to get things flowing. It’s the only part of the milking process that was anything like I’d imagined, and of course, I seem to be the only person on the farm who lacks the touch to get the milk out. Over my first few shifts, my partners showed me the motion over and over, explaining their various strategies to no avail. I felt like a 17-year-old boy fumbling around in someone’s underpants for the first time — I knew the anatomy of the situation, and I was touching everything I was supposed to be touching, but somehow I just wasn’t seeing results. I ended up irritating even the most docile goats, and was left wondering if I was somehow physically inept at this seemingly simple objective. But like anything on the farm, I didn’t have much of a choice about not being able to do this. After failing and failing better over the course of four consecutive milking shifts within a 48 hour period, I eventually became adequately adept at stripping the goats.

In the milkroom.

Images: Angela Zhou

After we’ve successfully collected every last drop of milk, it’s my job to transport the now-full metal containers to the processing room while my partner cleans the milk room. I wheel them down in a large cart to the door next to the garage entrance, where I change out of my muddy boots into the oversized white Crocs waiting for me. I can hear the chatter of my friends cooking in the garage next door, and I long to be done with my task. But first, the culmination of the hard work my partner and I have put in over the past few hours: transferring the milk into the large temperature-controlled tank that will store the milk until it’s bottled the next day. I psych myself up to lift the containers, arms shaking as I do my best to pour as steadily as possible and avoid any splashback. Every time I do this part of the task, I question if I have the strength to lift the milk high enough. But I do it nonetheless.

Once I’ve finished this job, I’ll return to help mop the milk room, top off the goats’ waters and turn off the barn lights. Though it won’t yet be eight p.m. when we’ve finished, I’ll sleep soundly that night.

Image: Angela Zhou

If working on a goat farm was anything like school, the milk room felt like a test. I might be able to turn a blind eye to a half-full food bin at midday feed or crack an egg in the sink without anyone knowing, but milking the goats was the real work of the farm, the true purpose I was fulfilling. And I wasn’t that good at it. Yes, I eventually learned how to strip the goats with fairly consistent success, and I even got down the techniques for getting those last few drops of milk out when the goat becomes restless and annoyed with the friction of the suction cup on her teat. But if I were being graded, I would probably be pulling a B minus. The goats overwhelmed me — I couldn’t handle them with confidence the way everyone else could, and up until the very end, I simply couldn’t bring myself to pull on their tails to get them to move when they would stubbornly drag their heels in the mud and no amount of pushing could budge them toward the milk room door.

I’ve never been very good at doing things I’m bad at. I never stuck it out in organized sports or art, never thought about pursuing science or math beyond what was required. I gravitated instead towards whatever earned me praise, whatever felt conquerable. And I wanted to be good at milking goats, I wanted to complete this task with ease and grace. But each time I walked into the milk room, there was that old stench of fear: if I couldn’t do it perfectly, how could I do it at all?

bell hooks writes: “the desire to be powerful is rooted in the intensity of fear.” She explains the way this desire is rooted in American life in our cultural values. “Awakening to love,” she warns, “can happen only as we let go of our obsession with power and domination.”

Working on the farm provided an escape from these oppressive values I had come so accustomed to. But I felt lost without them. Here, there was no measurement to evaluate me, no hierarchy to assure me of my place. There were just tasks that needed to be done. In the milk room, my lack of power felt blatant, not only in comparison to my more experienced coworkers but to the goats themselves. My dependence on extrinsic measures of achievement was as blatant as my lack of confidence in the milk room.

My discomfort with my own mediocrity in the milkroom was hard to shake. But one day, when I was hanging out in the pasture between shifts with my friend Sarah, nuzzling our favorite goats, she mentioned that on top of the week’s chores, Scott used to write: “Number One Chore: Love the Goats.” As soon as she said it, it struck a chord in me. I had been so worried about impressing my coworkers, so preoccupied with my own ego, I hadn’t even been paying attention to where that desire for success was coming from. I had been missing the point completely. Because the most important thing wasn’t how quickly I finished a milk shift or how many tries it took me to get our most stubborn goat up the stand — it was that I approached these tasks from a place of love. Being the most powerful person in the room didn’t matter; caring about the goats did. From that point on, whenever I got distracted by my own selfish desires to prove myself worthy, I reminded myself the reason I was here: to love the goats.

Milking.

Sunshine and Bethany in the pasture.

There’s a song I love that makes my heart ache every time I listen to it. It was co-opted by Tik Tok last summer, but I still keep it close to my heart and pretend it’s mine and mine alone. The lyrics describe a yearning so true and so deep I’d often wondered when, or if, I’d find a person to whom I could attach the song and its descriptions of such deep love.

On one of my last milk shifts, I was getting a bit sentimental, moving slower than usual as I fed the goats and letting the affection I felt for them wash over me in warm waves. And suddenly I realized I’d found the love I had been looking for, that no one fit the lyrics better than them:

I love everybody

Because I love you

When you stood up

Walked away, barefoot

And the grass where you lay

Left a bed in your shape

I looked over it

And I ached

I love everybody

Because I love you

I don't need the city, and I

Don't need proof

All I need, darling

Is a life in your shape

I picture it, soft

And I ache

It was so clear: the goats were the ones teaching me how to love. The goats were the ones who I admired, whose mere presence brought me peace, who showed me the soft embrace of a slower life. My time with them brought something out in me, a childlike attitude I had all but forgotten, an impractical sensibility with no use for productive output but essential for my ability to love. If, as bell hooks wrote, healing was an act of communion, it was the goats who showed me the way.

"The choice of love is a choice to connect—to find ourselves in the other."

bell hooks
All About Love, 1999

Throughout All About Love, bell hooks refers to love as “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.” There was no time that commitment to nurturing another’s growth was more apparent than the moments I witnessed between goat mothers are their babies.

Initially, I was mesmerized by the idea of kidding season. The mere concept of being present for the birth of another living being was guaranteed to be something unlike I’d ever experienced. Sarah, Bella, and I became obsessed with the idea of witnessing it. We spent hours checking on the pregnant goats, so full of anticipation we'd routinely convince one another a certain sound signaled that a goat was in labor. In reality, it wasn’t until a couple weeks into my stay on the farm that the first goat gave birth, an event I was devastated to miss while at the farmer’s market. In fact, I missed the first several births, as did Sarah and Bella, despite all our best efforts to be there. The farm interns who had already been through a season of births would roll their eyes at my friends and I, ensuring us that there would be plenty. But we were convinced we were missing something magical.

When I did finally end up in the stall with a goat throughout her entire labor process, it was about as glamorous as you might expect: hours spent crouched in the cold, unwilling to leave even to pee for fear I might miss the moment she needed me most. Adrian was a first-time mom, the daughter of matriarch Rocky — Scott had a penchant for goat lineages with coordinated names. She was young and still skinny, with narrow hips foreshadowing a difficult birth. My fellow intern, Jamie, had called me into the barn between shifts when she overheard Adrian making noises indicating the time was soon. Jamie had been on the farm an entire year and thus considered herself an expert in the matters of goat birth. Unlike my friends and I, she had an eerily reliable sense of predicting when the births would happen. So when she told me it was Adrian’s time, I trusted her, and settled in to join her for several hours of watching Adrian’s every move in preparation for the birth.

When she finally started pushing, I felt the adrenaline building in my body. I envisioned myself a goat doula, Jamie the midwife; she with the medical knowledge to guide the birthing process, me Adrian’s spiritual guide and support person. I hadn’t spent much time with Adrian before, as most of the time I spent with goats was in the milkroom and she was still a teenager, but over the next few hours, I'd feel more connected to her than any other goat on the farm.

It wasn’t an easy birth. I’d envisioned both of Adrian’s babies coming out with ease, Jamie and I taking turns catching them and delivering them to Adrian so she could lick away the fluid from the amniotic sack. But as Adrian pushed and pushed to no avail, it became clear that Jamie would need to assist her. When the sack broke with no baby emerging, it was my job to hold Adrian down, her body contorting in pain as Jamie reached inside. Jamie closed her eyes as she felt around, blindly trying to differentiate hoof from head and find a body part she could pull on to safely retrieve Adrian’s baby. I’ll never forget the expression on Adrian’s face in those unbearable moments. I knew I was powerless to relieve her suffering, so I did the only thing I could think of, repeating over and over that it would be over soon, promising her baby would be okay. She held my gaze, eyes wild with pain as I repeated the empty words, willing them to be true.

Jamie got the first baby out safely, but she wouldn’t be able to save the second. Sarah arrived in time to take the first baby and get him dry and safe, keeping him separate from his mother so as not to distract her from fact that she had to keep pushing. I once again held Adrian down as Jamie tried desperately to retrieve the baby that never had a chance.

Afterward, we were all exhausted and sad. Scott carried Adrian in his arms to the stall allocated for new moms and their kids; she either couldn’t or wouldn’t move after all she had been through. I carried the baby, who I'd name Sylvester — a little homage to the Rocky lineage.

I’d never thought much about motherhood before my time on the farm. To be honest, I think I wanted to witness a goat birth for the novelty of it — how wonderful, I imagined, it would be to take part in something so rare. In reality, the experience took so much more of me. The anticipation, the hope, the fear, the awe and the devastation — I was overwhelmed with emotions, and afterward, it was all I could do to curl up in bed and escape into a deep sleep.

Images: Angela Zhou

In truth, kidding season was as rife with grief as it was full of joy. All of the cliches about the miracle of birth began to make sense to me as we faced loss after loss that season. But as much grief as I felt, I was equally moved by the love I witnessed between the goat mothers and their children. I had become so defensive against any notion of a woman’s maternal instincts that I had forgotten that not all of it was misogynistic propaganda. My idea of motherhood, a suburban image associated with yoga pants and parent-teacher associations, was cynical at best. But in each goat nuzzling her kid, I saw something purer underneath it all, something I had almost forgotten existed, a maternal instinct in its most basic form. Here was something that transcended species — there was no mistaking it: here was love, stripped down to the essentials.

Of course, the circumstances themselves were artificial, orchestrated by outsiders. The goats were pregnant because we had intended them to be. After a few weeks of nurture and care, the mothers would be separated from their kids to join the rest of the milking goats while we bottle-fed their babies cow's milk. I had no choice but to ask myself: if this is the most humane way to take animal products — if even on this small, family-owned farm, this process inherently separates mothers from their babies, am I still okay with it? I'm not sure of the answer. But as someone who consumes animal products, I knew I had to face it.

But although the circumstances of these mothers and babies may have been constructed by us, there was nothing artificial about the love I witnessed. After my experience with Adrian and Sylvester, I felt a new kinship to these animals. Adrian lost Sylvester's smell in a matter of days, but I wouldn't forget what she'd gone through, and I cared for Sylvester like he was mine. Though I was powerless to reunite the mothers with their babies, I did the only thing I could: I showed them love.

IV. Kidding

Mothers and babies.

"When small communities organize their lives around a love ethic, every aspect of daily life can be affirming for everyone."

bell hooks
All About Love, 1999

V. Mucking

Living in a communal space, of course, meant a rotating list of chores and responsibilities from taking out the compost to scrubbing the shared bathroom. One chore in particular, however, elicited a communal groan whenever Scott tacked it on to our schedule: mucking the barn stalls.

We’d be divided into groups of four or five, and like most tasks, there was a start time but no end: we’d be done when the job was done. We’d trek out to the stall, kick out all the goats and close the gate behind us, and Jamie or someone would bring out a speaker to play their heavy metal music or whatever else would keep us moving as we hunched over layers of deeply matted goat poop and hay for the next few hours.

The first time I tried to help, I stuck my pitchfork straight down and tried to wiggle it around, looking dumbly at my more experienced coworkers as they lowered forkful after forkful into wheelbarrows. I stood there awhile, putting in just as much effort as them and contributing only sad spoonfuls of mud until Jen finally took pity on me and showed me how to use my legs, not my back, to extract the mud. You had to go in horizontally to remove it layer by layer, kicking in the pitchfork and then squatting low to lift it up. There was no rushing to the bottom, as it was all intricately laced together by the perfect storm of tangled hay, mud, and feces, each layer offering a new smell for us all to enjoy as we breathed heavily over our pitchforks. Progress was slow, and inevitably, someone would have to bring up the fact that we really should be mucking the barns more often. “Scott really shouldn’t let it get this bad,” we’d all agree, though none of us ever volunteered to advocate for more mucking.

Emptying the stall.

Mucking.

Wheelbarrowing.

Images: Angela Zhou

And so began the repetition. Kick your shovel or pitchfork in, squat, lift, deposit in wheelbarrow, repeat. Hold your breath and wonder if it’s a health hazard to be inhaling these goat poop fumes. Volunteer to be the person who wheels the wheelbarrow to the pile of muck outside that’s taller than you just for a breath of fresh air; try not to get the wheel stuck in one of the many mud divots and puddles. On we went until — “Hallelujah!” — our shovels finally struck solid ground and the stall was something akin to clean, ready to be spread with fresh hay that would be matted back down and defiled in a matter of hours.

I complained as much as anyone, but in truth, mucking was never my least favorite task. Mucking made me feel strong, and useful. I felt satisfaction in every forkful I lifted into the wheelbarrow, feeling the muscles in my legs flex as I repeated the motion again and again, pushing my body to the limit. After all, I’d spent my fair share of hours in the walls of a gym, using expensive equipment to lift arbitrarily heavily things, building muscles for no benefit but my own vanity. Here my strength was being put to use: my physical exertion had a purpose, it was making clear, visible progress, a cleaner living environment for the goats I had come to love so quickly.

I’d felt my body wasting away for the months of lockdown, in so many hours of stillness, a world devoid of any natural cause to move my body. I’d stay in place for hours as the world moved forward, my fingers the only body part moving as I churned out essay after essay, turning in assignments and articles devoid of any meaning to me. Here on the farm, my body fulfilled a purpose other than looking attractive or fitting a certain shape. It was a feeling I had had few times before, pulling weeds in my mom's backyard or helping move heavy boxes. In honesty, I had often leaned on my excuse of being weak to get out of physical labor. But now, I was hungry for the feeling of moving my body with purpose. The repetition of movement slowly drowned out all the thoughts racing around my never-quiet brain until the only thing that mattered became the layers of mud in front of me and my own ability to move them. I let my body take over, and it was no longer an inconvenience, no longer something I needed to control and contort into attractive shapes. It was a tool, allowing me to complete this act of love to the goats, to offer them a clean bed to sleep in, if only for that night.

Last year I abstained
this year I devour

without guilt
which is also an art

Margaret Atwood
You Are Happy, 1974

VI. Garage Cooking

The first night I got to the farm, my friend Sarah stood in front of the fridge, hands on her hips, and took an inventory of its contents.

“You like beets? I’m going to make a salad with these beets.” Before I could admit that I had never found beets quite appetizing and had therefore avoided ever actually tasting them, she was moving speedily around the kitchen, as familiar to her as it was foreign to me, and I found myself washing the beet’s leaves while she prepared a balsamic glaze to roast with them.

“How do you decide what to make? Do you make beets a lot?” I asked, incredulous at her quick decision making. “I just work with what’s in the fridge.”

It had taken me months to get used to the concept of stocking my own fridge, and now here I was, starting anew once again as I assessed the contents of the fridge that was restocked according to the dry erase marker shopping list scrawled on the side of the fridge door. Gone were the hours stalled in the aisles of Trader Joe’s debating the worth of buying organic produce, weighing cost against convenience, calories against prep time.

Now I was in some guy’s garage-turned-man-cave, except it wasn’t a man-cave, it was a farm-intern cave, and I was eating beets for the first time and realizing I kind of liked them. Over the next few weeks, I’d fumble my way through garage cooking, learning to work with the bulk ingredients and bend with the ebb and flow of the fridge. It was most bountiful Sundays and Mondays, full of market goods you had to be quick to snag before they were gone. The most constant items were the industrial size tub of cream cheese and the flat of market mushrooms that we never managed to consume before the next weekend rolled around. The top right shelf of the fridge housed our personal food; everything else was a free-for-all, from the enormous tub of yogurt to the carton of irregular, cracked, or otherwise unsellable eggs allocated for our consumption.

I began to habitually check the market fridge for duck eggs, my mornings defined by the presence of a weird, pearly white oblong shell waiting for me. There was something so decadent to me about frying duck eggs: they look like chicken eggs, but the difference is all in the deep yellow yolk, larger than a chicken egg's and much richer in flavor. I’d fry the egg until the white was set and the yolk was just beginning to turn, timing it just so that when I poked it with my knife I could watch it spill over and soak into my bread.

During quarantine, making a large, late breakfast was my most consistent ritual, and my most reliable meal: spinach pepper scrambles free of cheese; over-medium eggs on toast dressed with sriracha and avocado when I was feeling indulgent. I’d eat on the porch if it wasn’t too cold, enjoying a breath of fresh air and a moment of peace. But breakfast wasn't just a simple pleasure; it was the only meal I ate on a regular basis. Over lockdown, I began to push myself to wait longer and longer to break my fast, testing how long I could stand the gnawing in my stomach before finally giving in. I became so used to doing this that by the time I arrived on the farm, eating before noon felt completely taboo.

bell hooks writes: “when we choose to love we choose to move against fear—against alienation and separation." In Ann Arbor, so many of my decisions had been driven by fear. With so much in flux, I was grasping for control. It felt satisfying in the moment to make choices I felt I could be proud of — after all, I’d been passively consuming messaging about "good" and "bad" food my entire life. I felt deeply ashamed of my processed-food laden, vegetable barren past. I avoided drinking, overly aware of its caloric value. I avoided smoking weed because I was scared to feel out of control around food, even more scared to feel the guilt I knew would come in the morning when I remembered how much I ate the night before. What I didn’t realize was how much further I was isolating myself with each decision I obsessed over. I restricted myself to the point where I couldn’t feel joy around food, only worry and fear.

But with my days starting so early and requiring energy and strength, I couldn't keep it up. And I was no longer alone — here in the garage, eating was a public act, and I couldn't hide in my shame any longer. Following the lead of those around me, I started eating breakfast every the morning, pretending it felt natural. I was surprised to find myself hungry again by lunch, no longer able to substitute hummus and baby carrots for a meal. By the time dinner came around, there my hunger would be again, making it impossible to avoid my friends' suggestion that we eat. Even though I knew my body needed fuel to complete the tasks required of me, I was in awe of my own hunger — I had denied and tested it for so long that I had completely lost touch with it. I knew that if there was any place for me to repair my relationship with food, it would be here, away from the impulse to control that had taken over my life.

If there was anywhere to let go, it was in the garage. Because I wasn't the one buying groceries, I had no choice but to release control over the ingredients I consumed. There was no coconut-oil-subbed-for-butter, maple-syrup-subbed-for-refined-sugar, whole-wheat flour nonsense in the garage. And though controlling my food intake had brought me comfort in the chaos of the pandemic, I knew that it would isolate me here. In the garage, food offered a way to connect with the strangers I shared a space with. I didn't want to say no to food someone offered me. I didn't want fear to keep me from connecting with others.

hooks writes that “it is the practice of love that transforms... as one gives and receives love, fear is let go." Sharing food with others allowed me to shift the way I felt about what I consumed. The more I thought about food as a way to connect, the more positive I felt about it. I began cooking with my friends, learning their favorite foods and traditions. I bonded with a coworker over baking, taste-testing every batch of her various cookie experiments. Sarah and I volunteered to cook a few farm dinners, laboring for hours to see the smile on our friends' faces as they enjoyed our food. Before long, I didn't feel like I was faking it anymore, and I began to look forward to cooking and eating, feeling like I was reuniting with a lost love as I experimented in the kitchen and remembered the simple joys of bread and butter. Bite by bite, I surrendered my fears.

Image: Angela Zhou

Cooking farm dinner.

Image: Angela Zhou

In the garage.

"Is there any practice less selfish, any labor less alienated, any time less wasted, than cooking something delicious and nourishing for people you love?"

Michael Pollan
In Defense of Food, 2008

VII. Market

Saturdays and Sundays are market days, and there’s something about them that feels like Christmas. Saturday market shifts mean Friday nights spent loading the van with six impossibly heavy industrial coolers, three stuffed with glass bottles of goat milk, another three filled with chicken and duck eggs. Alongside them go the tent, two tables and tablecloths, wooden signs, tent weights, buckets of bleach and a giant cooler of water.

I wake at 6, pack a PB&J for the road and hastily make a cup of coffee to go before my partner and I hop in the frosted over van and begin the hourlong trek to Seattle. I’m wearing my ‘nice’ clothes — the ones that don’t smell like goats— long underwear, the thrifted jeans I’ve been stabbing with thread in an attempt to learn embroidery, a heavy duty coat to go with my gloves and beanie, and the one pair of boots that aren’t covered in mud.

I'm not done waking up before the hour-long drive is over and I have to help my partner parallel park into our designated spot at the market and we have to leave the warmth of the crappy van heater to begin unloading. We’re here almost an hour early, but setting up is still a race, as my body moves at half its normal pace in the cold. Numb fingers struggle to set up the payment software on the iPad, limbs refuse to stretch long enough to reach the top of the tent and clip the legs in properly. In the blink of an eye, the clock strikes 7 and the local food enthusiasts of the Pacific Northwest are filing through.

For the next eight hours, I’m answering questions about whether our products are organic (no, because we don’t have organic feed) or pasteurized (no, but our animals are pasture-raised), whether we have duck eggs (sorry, we sold out at 7:30) and whether people actually drink raw goat’s milk (apparently, there’s enough of a market for it in Seattle for our operation to break even — something about probiotics and gut health). I’ve never been a salesperson before this, but I find it comes naturally when I’m able to point at some of my favorite goats on the poster behind me and confirm that yes, I actually do milk them. I might be a little fuzzy on the details of the grain we feed our goats, but I'm happy to describe the way they graze the pastures lazily and from what I can tell, pretty happily.

At first, I’m shocked people are willing to pay such high prices for eggs — I’m used to buying three-dollar 24-packs at Costco, but this Carhartt-clad crowd doesn’t seem to think twice before putting down $9 for a dozen duck eggs or $7 for a dozen chicken. But customers speak excitedly about how these eggs are the best they can find, and I’m proud to tell them that I picked them myself, to know that I painstakingly stood over a sink scrubbing them one by one until my back ached, that I spent hours placing them in cartons and writing random goat names on the“hand-picked by:” section of the “Farm Fresh Eggs” stickers. I can't help but feel a little proud when customers report these eggs have the brightest yolks they've seen, though I don't have much to do with that.

When things aren’t so busy, or if we sell out before 3, I get a chance to walk around the market and see what other farmers have traveled here to sell. I’ve been to farmer’s markets in Berkeley and Ann Arbor, but I’ve never quite seen anything like this: maybe it’s my distance from the urban world but I feel like I’m at a festival as I take in handcrafted jewelry and pottery alongside fresh pasta, smoked salmon and grain free bread, bouquets of tulips beside raw oysters. The people-watching is even more awe-inspiring: it's like I've walked into a fashion show for old white ladies toting tiny dogs in strollers and beanie-clad families dressing their toddlers in Carhartt. The crowd is so attractive I feel more like I've walked into a music festival than a farmer's market.

I feel grateful to be on the other side of the table, and I get to know the other market vendors nearby. For the first time, I learn the word “barter” outside the context of an elementary school classroom, trading fresh ravioli for a half gallon of milk, three cartons of chicken eggs for a flat of foraged mushrooms. By the end of the day, my nose is cold but my stomach is full of warm cider, Washington apples, and fresh pastries, none of which I’ve paid for with my credit card.

When the clock finally strikes 3, I’m ready to collapse, but I’m happy. I decide not to tell my partner about my driving anxiety and successfully navigate the van, about three times the size of my Honda Civic, onto the freeway, making use of the double mirrors to get us home safely and silently patting myself on the back. The work isn’t done until we unload the van, leaving the signage in for the next day’s marketgoers, and showcase our haul of fresh vegetables, bread, and meat, to be shared by everyone for the next week, to those who stayed behind. I won't get off the couch for the rest of the day, except to eat the fresh ravioli that rewards my day's work.

Market days offer an interruption from the bubble of farm life. For the first time, I understand my role as a producer as well as a consumer of food. With every positive interaction I have with a customer, I can't help but to think back to my political economy classes, where I learned about Karl Marx's theory of labor. Marx criticizes capitalist modes of production, writing that when man takes part in only one part of a production line, he is alienated from the product of his labor and cannot take satisfaction in his work. But on the farm, I am a part of every step of production, from plucking the eggs out of the muck to washing them and writing the name on the box I hand to customers. I feel the dignity of my work, worthy of the exchanges I make with fellow vendors. I feel apart of a community of food producers, and realize how rare and crucial small-scale agricultural work is.

As I consume the bounty of food we take home from market, I begin to re-evaluate how I eat. I start to think more carefully about where I source my food. Back in Ann Arbor, I had become increasingly aware of the ethical imperative to eat more plant-based, and had made efforts to cut out meat and dairy products. But my intentions weren't entirely noble: my plant-based attempts often manifested in strict food rules that amounted to another attempt to control and purify my consumption. But now, as I considered the difference between the eggs I so lovingly ate at breakfast and the pale, weak-shelled Costco eggs I relied on in Ann Arbor, I realized I wanted my food values to come from a place of love.

Alice Waters is a Berkeley chef and author credited with spearheading the farm-to-table movement. In her "slow food manifesto," You Are What You Eat, she writes that American culture is inundated with "fast food values," resulting in expectations that food should be speedily available regardless of the season and always identical. As I worked at the farmer's market, I became in tune with the availability of different produce available at different times of year. As embarrassing as it is to admit, I had simply never considered it before; after all, at the grocery store, it's easy to find most fruits and vegetables regardless of the time of year. But I realized that in order to fully embrace food from a place of love, I had to consider how my actions were affecting the larger food community. Instead of feeling lost around food, I could use such "slow food values" like locality and seasonality to guide me.

In All About Love, bell hooks compares behaving unethically to eating tons of junk food: "while it may taste good, in the end the body is never really adequately nourished and remains in a constant state of longing. Our souls feel this lack when we act unethically, behaving in ways that diminish spirit and dehumanize others." Eating with slow food values to me is just one part of living ethically. bell hooks asks us to think bigger, acting from a place of love in all we do. She encourages us to "live consciously" and think critically about how we interact with the world. Thinking critically about the way my values guide how I eat is just the first step.