Leeky buckets

          
          "Three dollars a glass!  And they're not even local lemons!"
          I raise my hand to my forehead, creating a visor against the setting sun. I look towards Lori, who's nestled at the end of the green bean row. I've been listening to her talk for some time now but with my head down, eyes buried in the beans, making sure I'm throwing fat, juicy ones into the bucket I'm sitting on, not stringy ones (even though they're called "string beans"). I'm reveling in being on -- more like in -- this farm, where my life always feels complete and in need of nothing else.
          But with this exclamation I look up. I stand up, to hear more.
          Lori has been talking about time. How to get more of it. Every day this summer (save for when she went to Queens to visit her mother) she has been straddling a bucket next to some row of vegetables growing on her small New Hampshire farm. Or she's been standing on the hard concrete floor of her garage late into the night wrapping rubber bands around bunches of kale or weighing tomatoes for her customers. Every day there's been something to do... something... and though her husband Jim tackles many of the needs of the day, Lori tackles just as many: weeding, watering, harvesting, packaging, selling... weeding, harvesting, packaging, watering... 
          It's hard for me to tell her I'm going on a kayak trip later in August. I know she     cannot -- has not -- done anything off the farm for months.
          "One thing Jim's done to save me more time is build a permanent table for us at the farmers' market, so I don't have to set one up and take it down every Saturday," she says, stepping over the green bean row to pick on the other side.
          That's good, I think as I snap fat beans off their wiry stems. But I know a mere table will not ease the burdens on my 47-year-old friend. 
          "We're also thinking of growing fewer varieties of crops and focusing instead on value-added products that can earn us more money with less work."
          "What's a value-added product?"  I ask. 
          "Like sauerkraut or pickles. We can grow a lot of a few things and make them into products that people will pay more for. We can only get $3 a pound for our tomatoes -- that''ll never change -- but people will pay much more for homemade tomato sauce."
          Then she says: "Lemonade is a value-added product, too. I'll bet those people who sell lemonade at the farmers' market make a killing. People line up to pay $3 a glass for lemonade -- even though they'd never pay $3 for a bunch for carrots. But what have the people who are selling the lemonade done to grow the lemons?  Nothing!  Three dollars a glass!  And they're not even local lemons!"
          Lori's nearly laughing. Not because there's no such thing as local New Hampshire lemons, but because it's ridiculous that a couple of lemons and some sugar water earn their sedentary servers a whopping $3, while the carrots Lori's tended through two plantings this summer and that Jim has monitored daily for pests and that taste sweeter and more divine than any sugary drink could never earn that much these days.
          I've stood up now. Lori's gotten my attention because I know I've stood in the grocery store many times and looked at the local peaches or the local lettuce and seen their price and passed them by. I've then pushed my cart into the next aisle and -- breezily,   mindlessly -- bought the equivalent of that $3 lemonade. Through these "lemonade purchases" I've enriched stockholders, CEOs, people who get to go on vacation, people I don't know. But not the Lori's of the world -- farmers who could use some of my cash to hire an assistant so they can leave their land for a couple days and get some rest.
          Summer, after all, is about rest. But not for the people who feed us.
          "Carrie, I can't tell you often we've wondered how much we make an hour. We haven't figured it out yet 'cause we know it would kill us."
          A few weeks later at an agriculture conference, I would learn that a University of Wisconsin study found that most small farmers make under $10 an hour. But for now, Lori and I lapse into silence and return to our bean picking. Behind me is a row of kale, and behind that are the carrots. Behind the carrots is the spinach, and then the corn. These fields might look less diverse next year if Lori and Jim choose to focus on just a few crops for value-added products.
          Or perhaps by then -- because miracles do happen -- people at the local farmers' market will be willing to pay $4 for a bunch of carrots. Perhaps I will. Or we'll all go over to Lori and Jim's for a few hours a week and help the people who are feeding us. Many hands make light farming. 
          Haley-dog, the farm's resident spirit-angel, prances around me and gets tangled in my feet as Lori and I make our way back to the house with our buckets of beans. We're laughing about something or other, and the hot sun has slipped behind the treeline at the western edge of the farm. Jim's back at the house with a bucket, too, full of freshly-picked leeks soaking in water. 
          "Hope your bucket doesn't leak," I joke. 
          Not if I can help it.