Shannon Hayes

It was just getting dark the night of November 1st, 1999 as I locked my bike outside my Ithaca apartment, walked inside and learned from my roommate that Bob had been trying to reach me. He was waiting at my parent’s farm for my call. The new house we’d just purchased up the road from my parents, 2 ˝ hours away from where I was attending grad school, didn’t yet have a telephone. I went into my room, sat down at my desk and dialed. Bob answered on the first ring.
“Hi sweetie!” His voice was eerily chirpy.
“What’s up?”
“Are you sitting down?”
“Yes.”
“I need you to make a promise to me.”
“What’s that?”
“Promise me that you’re going to stay in school.”
“Huh?”
“Say it. Promise me that you’re going to stay in school.” I was 2 years away from completing my Ph.D.
“Okay. I promise to stay in school,” I said lightly.
“Good. ‘Cuz I got fired today.” (more…)

Seven weeks of vacation was fun, but our farmers’ market starts in two weeks, and there is a backlog of work that needs tackling in order to be ready for opening day. We’ve been making soap, lip balm and candles; cleaning, repairing and updating our display spaces; weaving baskets to have in inventory;reclaiming the blueberries, grapes and asparagus from the spring weeds; organizing to get the sausage made; catching up on Saoirse’s homeschool lessons and Ula’s eye therapy; and tackling the glut of spring planting. This week, Bob also had to take our fleeces up to the mill in Prince Edward Island, where they will be made into blankets and yarn to sell. Two days before he was scheduled to leave, our sink backed up. He stayed up all hours of the night attempting every plumbing trick he knew of in an effort to clear it out.

Thankfully, the girls were both visiting friends and family for the weekend, leaving us alone to deal with the mess. In a last ditch effort prior to his departure, he went out and bought a gallon of some sort of liquid fire, dumped it down the drain, and hoped for the best.

Things only got worse. (more…)

By Shannon Hayes

Pardon the pun, but the one cut of meat I am most likely to see a new customer “bawk” at is a whole chicken. Our price for whole birds last year was $4.95/lb, 35% less than a pound of grassfed ground beef. Poultry is the cheapest meat at our farmers’ market booth. Interestingly, it is also the most expensive for us farmers to bring to market, owing to the cost of grain and the amount of labor required to produce and process a healthy pasture-raised chicken. Paying $25-30 for a whole chicken may feel like a stretch for someone who is accustomed to cheap* factory chicken from a grocery store, but truthfully, it is the best bargain at the market. A single 4 ˝-5 pound chicken can usually generate 3 different meals for a family of four, making a total of 12 servings. Thus, a 4.75 pound chicken winds up costing $1.96 per serving, a modest sum when you figure that a side serving of fresh local swiss chard costs $1.13 per serving, or that a side portion of decent quality potato chips costs $1.25 per serving. (more…)

It didn’t bother me in the late nineties, when I was in my wonderyears, hopping in and out of airplanes, when British airline security chose to scrutinize me more closely. Back then, there weren’t female officers to pat down female travelers, but the man who took apart my carry-on and patted me down had a good sense of humor. “I feel as though I should give you a hug for going through this,” he joked, “or at least buy you lunch.” Another officer held my passport and asked me a series rapid-fire questions about my life, and where I went to school. I passed the test.

“There must be something about my name,” I often quipped to Bob prior to our most recent trip, because these things only seem to happen going in and out of the United Kingdom. (more…)

For the past several weeks, our family has been living in Europe. Our itinerary has included a week in England, a month in a rural French village, a week in the South of France, and a week in Paris. After writing a book about home-centered, frugal living, a few readers have raised their eyebrows at how this could happen (thanks for your emails, by the way). Radical Homemakers with family farms don’t belong vacationing in the South of France….or do they? (more…)

At its best, travel is a patchwork of glorious moments, too perfect and rich for all the senses to be captured simply in photographs. Ula reminded me of that the other day. (more…)

Saoirse started crying during dinner a few nights ago. We’d just returned from an evening stroll around our temporary home, St. Pierre de Maille, where spring has taken a definitive hold. Along the walk we’d passed by fields plowed and freshly seeded, cattle finally out on pasture, neighbors out doing the seasonal work that comes with permanent residence: cleaning brush, tilling gardens, planting vegetables. It felt odd watching other people carry on the work we would ordinarily be doing around our own home. By the time we’d made it to our supper table overlooking the river that runs through the village, her young soul was pining for the rhythms of our own home life, sorely missing those activities that define spring time back in West Fulton. (more…)

I would be lying if I told you I was a linguist. But from the time I was a child, the ability to speak languages ranked high on my life priorities. It distressed me as a kid to think that the only way I might connect with strangers in foreign lands was if they happened to speak English. Thus, throughout high school and college I studied French and Spanish. Then I got a job in Japan and studied Japanese, too.

Somewhere along the line I came to the conclusion that I could spend years in a classroom mastering the mechanics of verb conjugations, adjective agreements and literary nuance. Or, I could get myself to a foreign land, smile broadly, and fumble through with the skills that I had. I would love to claim that I mastered all the languages I studied, but I came to a point when I decided “good enough,” and went out to have fun. I wanted the language skills to connect with humans, and once those goals were met, I was willing to make room in my brain for other things.

The skills have been a great passport to the world, and I am thankful I learned them while I was young. I’ve encouraged Saoirse and Ula to do the same. But I never encouraged Bob. (more…)

This is the second trip that our family has made to the rural village of St. Pierre de Maille, a small community never mentioned in the guidebooks that lies about an hour south of the Loire Valley. The first time we came, the house we rented was made available to us as a writing retreat while I worked on a project. Saoirse was only 18 months old, the winter we were here was particularly harsh (our neighbor, Mme Pelletier, still recalls it as the year the ice froze on the river), and we met very few local people. Truth be told, Bob and I remember it as one of the loneliest winters of our lives. (more…)

Bob and I didn’t have a clear homeschooling plan when we decided to take Saoirse and Ula to Europe. Truth be told, I suppose it is more accurate to say that we didn’t actually make this decision to come. I wanted to go to the Grand Canyon. It was thegirls who lobbied for France. Saoirse has been taking French lessons with a neighbor for three years now, and Ula began studying last September. They wanted to see the place with their own eyes and cement some language skills. (more…)