Yesterday, I went to Greenwich, a nearby town, to see my friend John Rieger, who owns Power Country Products, and to pay my hay bill for the coming year—$488— and I met Isabelle Edmond.
He wanted me to meet one of his summer hires.
One thing I love about the country and the farm kids is that they are not very much into TikTok or live all night on Instagram. They know how to talk and have no unease around older people.
They have real lives and real decisions to make.
They work hard all summer as they make plans for the future. Almost all of them go off to college.
They know how to talk to people and seem to enjoy it. I like to talk to people and enjoy it, too. And they listen to people who might give them some guidance.
Isabelle is unlike many of the young people I meet; their lives were not shaped online or behind screens.
I asked Isabelle if she was going to college this fall – often true of John’s summer employees – and she said she is going to Paul Smith College in the Adirondacks, a college famous for teaching nature and how to live and be outdoors.
Are you going to have a life in nature? I asked.
She said she is considering being a Park Ranger or perhaps a tractor-trailer driver.
I was intrigued by her answer. I said I’d read that tractor companies are turning to driverless trucks.
She said she hadn’t heard that, but it didn’t bother her, my guess is that when it comes down to it, she’ll go for the Park Ranger option.
I asked her if she didn’t find the two options different, and she said yes, she’d figure it out. I got the feeling she liked the idea of driving around the country, the freedom of being outdoors and seeing other parts of the country.
The farm kids often think about that. They all seem to go to college.
She had a quiet ease about her; the farm kids up here who love nature are often as calm and thoughtful as she seems. I’d like to stay in touch with her and see what she does.
I asked if I could take her photograph, and she said sure, of course. She said she wanted to see my blog, and she’d heard about it.
She didn’t worry about how her hair looked or tell me how much she hated having her picture taken, and I asked her to pick up the plant I just bought and hold it for the photograph.
I’ll see her often this summer when I visit John. I go to John’s to get plants and flowers for my raised garden bed.
(John Rieger)
I love to sit down with John and talk about our different worlds. We are very different from each other, but we connect as friends who understand one another. I talked John into going to lunch with me last year—it was the first lunch he’d ever taken in decades of hard work.
He is always in the store with his wife, Millie; they greet every single person who comes in and make sure to talk with them.
Yesterday, we sat outside on a bench in the sun and caught up. It’s always a pleasure to talk to him.
For our one and only lunch—John is a workaholic, and going to lunch is for city people—he wanted to go to McDonald’s, which we did. He said he was on a strict diet as I ate his french fries and cheeseburger.
John is a good and sweet man; he’s a farmer through and through, and his business is a much-loved place to shop for farm people, especially in comparison with the bloodless and corporate Tractor Supply just down the road. The real farmers love John. I never go to Tractor Supply.
John had some surgery last year and headed to Florida for some rest. He looks great.
We love to kid each other about growing old and talk about the difference between farm and city life. I think he could have talked more to city kids like me.
We rarely see each other, but I cherish our visits. I think he does, too.
Every year, he introduces me to one of the young people he hires each summer before they head off to college. He is proud of them, and I usually take pictures of them. They are impressive, like Isabelle.
I wouldn’t buy hay from anyone else.
