Light as a feather, her hooves barely touched the ground as she stepped out of the trailer to my home in Mattapoisett, Massachusetts. Amity the filly had arrived from Green Meads Farm in the Berkshire hills. I had longed for a registered Morgan that I could ride, show and breed to have foals (baby horses)…
It is said you have to love farming to keep doing it and we did. It was not a job but a way of life, a ritual repeated day in day out with exciting and unexpected events both good and bad. We loved the animals and loved the land. Here is the memory of our…
So I wrote out the request. “Please cash in my teacher’s retirement account”. I had worked as a traveling art teacher for about five years and took a leave of absence to work on my art. But I never went back. I loved creating my art and was managing to sell much of it in…
It is said you have to love farming to keep doing it and we did. It was not a job but a way of life, a ritual repeated day in day out with exciting and unexpected events both good and bad. We loved the animals and loved the land. Dick had grown up near Boston…
Dick and I had searched for a farm for almost a year before finding this one in Washington County NY. We had traveled through the great snowstorm of 1978, driving out of Massachusetts before Boston was shut down in the heavy snow and wind. We drove into Maine as quickly as we could just in…
“I think I have found a horse for you, Carol,” the old horse trader and trainer, Leo, said to me. My heart jumped for joy. I had been riding and helping with chores at riding stables all through my teens and just lived for the day that I could have my own horse. Finally, my…
The cow is such a generous and peaceful animal. I got to know them on our farm, Amity Farm, that we had in Hartford, New York, for 28 years and these were Jersey cows. We grazed them over the fields for the warm months of the year and sheltered them in our barn and exercise…
It was many years ago that I was at the barn with my two horses grooming my mare Amity to go riding, when fifteen Jersey cows showed up. My friend Joanna was nearby and helped me to get them back to a farm nearby. She had told me there was a new young farmer in…
Spring has evolved to what now seems like summer and the month of May is at the end. Memorial Day will always be an anniversary of when we moved to Amity Farm in Hartford, New York at the foothills of the Adirondacks. My Morgan mare, Amity (means friendship), gave her name to our jersey cow…
Every spring I can’t help but be reminded of the strong relationship between farmers and the seasons. Spring of course is the beginning of the cycle. The season of optimism. Farmers forget their troubles of winter. There is the frozen water, the cold machines that take so much coaxing to get going, the broken…