Good Husbandry
A Memoir
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- $279.00
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- $279.00
Descripción editorial
From the author of the beloved bestseller The Dirty Life, this “superb memoir chronicles the evolution of a farm, marriage, family, and her own personal identity with humor, insight, and candor” (Publishers Weekly, starred review) detailing life on Essex Farm—a 500-acre farm that produces food for a community of 250 people.
The Dirty Life chronicled Kimball’s move from New York City to 500 acres near Lake Champlain where she started a new farm with her partner, Mark. In Good Husbandry, she reveals what happened over the next five years at Essex Farm.
Farming has many ups and downs, and the middle years were hard for the Kimballs. Mark got injured, the weather turned against them, and the farm faced financial pressures. Meanwhile, they had two small children to care for. How does one traverse the terrain of a maturing marriage and the transition from being a couple to being a family? How will the farm survive? What does a family need in order to be happy?
Kristin chose Mark and farm life after having a good look around the world, with a fair understanding of what her choices meant. She knew she had traded the possibility of a steady paycheck, of wide open weekends and spontaneous vacations, for a life and work that was challenging but beautiful and fulfilling. So with grit and grace and a good sense of humor, she chose to dig in deeper.
Featuring some of the same local characters and cherished animals first introduced in The Dirty Life, (Jet the farm dog, Delia the dairy cow, and those hardworking draft horses), plus a colorful cast of aspiring first-generation farmers who work at Essex Farm to acquire the skills they need to start sustainable farms of their own, Good Husbandry “considers what it means to build a good, happy life, and how we are tested in that endeavor” (Mary Beth Keane, New York Times bestselling author of Ask Again, Yes).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Kimball's superb memoir (following up The Dirty Life) chronicles the evolution of a farm, marriage, family, and her own personal identity with humor, insight, and candor. Having left her home in New York City to start Essex Farm "from scratch" with the man she would marry, she left a world of easy conveniences for farming rigor in partnership with a man whose "inner radio has been tuned to WFRM, all farming, all the time." She commits to using horses instead of machines and expresses her desire to "make a farm that did more good than harm" to the environment and community, leading to both extraordinary labor ("working for grueling hours in all weather") and deprivation (the house lacked stairs between floors). But by the end, readers will come to understand and appreciate her message that "the work is all there is, and it's a beautiful thing." Eventually, children are welcomed, and "I was on one side with the children and their needs, and he was on the other, with the farm and all its work." Readers curious about small-farm life, or simply how one woman weathers great change both professionally and personally, will love Kimball's gutsy, generous second memoir.
