"This book is the story of the two love affairs that
interrupted the trajectory of my life: one with farming—that
dirty, concupiscent art—and the other with a complicated and
exasperating farmer."
Single, thirtysomething, working as a writer in New York
City, Kristin Kimball was living life as an adventure. But
she was beginning to feel a sense of longing for a family
and for home. When she interviewed a dynamic young farmer,
her world changed. Kristin knew nothing about growing
vegetables, let alone raising pigs and cattle and driving
horses. But on an impulse, smitten, if not yet in love, she
shed her city self and moved to five hundred acres near Lake
Champlain to start a new farm with him. The Dirty Life is
the captivating chronicle of their first year on Essex Farm,
from the cold North Country winter through the following
harvest season—complete with their wedding in the loft of
the barn.
Kimball and her husband had a plan: to grow everything
needed to feed a community. It was an ambitious idea, a bit
romantic, and it worked. Every Friday evening, all year
round, a hundred people travel to Essex Farm to pick up
their weekly share of the "whole diet"—beef, pork, chicken,
milk, eggs, maple syrup, grains, flours, dried beans, herbs,
fruits, and forty different vegetables—produced by the farm.
The work is done by draft horses instead of tractors, and
the fertility comes from compost. Kimball’s vivid
descriptions of landscape, food, cooking—and marriage—are
irresistible.
"As much as you transform the land by farming," she writes,
"farming transforms you." In her old life, Kimball would
stay out until four a.m., wear heels, and carry a handbag.
Now she wakes up at four, wears Carhartts, and carries a
pocket knife. At Essex Farm, she discovers the wrenching
pleasures of physical work, learns that good food is at the
center of a good life, falls deeply in love, and finally
finds the engagement and commitment she craved in the form
of a man, a small town, and a beautiful piece of land
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