The First Thing Green

I planted Brussels sprouts this past year.  The greenhouse nearby, you know the one I mean, with its hay bales outside and rows of potted mums, had a perennial sale in the spring.  Must have been sometime in June if I recollect correctly and if you bought one tray of plants, you had to take the second along for free.  I couldn’t get out of there.  Every time I reached for something, I was forced to take an additional pot with the other free hand.

Anyway, I ended up with a tray of Brussels sprouts.  Not cause I wanted them, but because I was strong-armed into the deal.  At that time there was no room in the regular vegetable garden, so I cleared some space in a particularly anemic row of blueberries and put them in.  Well, they grew, but don’t ask me how.  The soil had been amended with enough acid to fill a battery.  The blueberries were already responding, but I had no idea the sprouts would do well in such an environment.

They filled out.  I don’t know if you’ve ever tried them, but those sickly little cabbage plants grow past their awkward looking stage pretty quickly and before you know it, you have these stalwart plants with guts and glory and the like.  The first forming cabbages look like marbles along the sides but it takes well into September and October before they beef into the sprouts you and I see in the store.

There were bugs.  Chewing kinds and some other kind that left a frass on the lips of each lime colored head.  Then came the first frost and though the pumpkins collapsed, the sprouts held their ground.  There were mornings that the entire landscape looked like it had been carved out of ice and though the leaves of the sprouts laid low, each day as the sun warmed, their regular turgor returned.

Christmas has come and gone.  Red ribbons and fancy paper peak out of the tops of black trash bags and wag in the wind.  At this point, we’ve had enough freezes and blizzards to fill a Dairy Queen.  I can go into the field and pull some of those frozen cabbage heads off of the plant…maybe snap off a couple of crisply frozen leaves of kale along with them, come inside and watch them return to their normal texture within minutes.  Both can be chopped and thrown in a pan with pasta and cheese, or the kale can be stirred into a chicken broth with beans and sausage for a delicious soup.  It’s as though the freezing has sweetened them, yet each keeps it’s crispness and original texture.   Put it alongside a piece of peach pie made back when August held reign and you have yourself a plate of bounty.

In the melting snow and thawing land, the mustard and nettle rise again.  The first taste of the fresh earth born, the first thing green that nourishes and wakes.  Spring comes soon in the collapse of cold, in the warm gaze of my grateful eyes.  A buttery taste, a shake of salt, and a long wrapping time of warmth.

The Diner's Open!

When I first moved up here, I had this idea that I would open up a diner.  I saw the alarm clock read 5am; I smelled coffee brewing in an urn; I saw hand written orders hanging from a stainless steel roundabout; I saw me talking through a window into the kitchen over the sound of sizzling eggs to familiar faces at the counter.  I’d say, “Hey!  Any of you farmer Mary’s want to have a piece of fresh pie?”  And I’d hear the rough crowd roar, “Sure! Count me in!  I’ll take one to go!”

My secret boyfriend’s name is Arthur and he’s a game warden up here.  Nice build on him; wears a tan, tight fitting policeman’s suit; has a gold badge and carries a gun to shoot poachers.  Every day, he pretends to nonchalantly drop in for a something, coffee, pie, cup of white bean soup, then he’ll look for a reason to talk to me.  “Didn’t you tell me you were from New York way?  I heard on the radio you people are supposed to get one hell of a storm down there.”  Or  “ You said you heard coyotes out at your place?  You know you have to be careful if you have cats.  Those coyotes will eat cats.”

I say to him.  “You know, the next time you’re out by my place, you should drop by.  There is something shitting on the rocks in my stream, right next to a hole a in the side of the hill, and I would love for you to look at that crap and tell me what kind of animal laid it.”

He says, “Oh that’s probably a muskrat.”

And I say, because I want to wow him with my outdoorsiness, I say, “You don’t think it could be a mink or an otter?”  

And he says, as though that didn’t faze him a bit, he says, “Nah, probably just a muskrat.”

I get this idea now, while I watch him blow over the top of his coffee and measure off another portion of peach pie with his fork.  I have this idea that I’m going to talk this cocky son-of-a-bitch into my bed and fuck him with his legs up in the air.  I work him over one more time with my eyes and take a moment to wipe up the counter space next to him.  When he looks up at me, right into my eyes and says, “You ever seen a muskrat?”   then smiles a big, illegal grin, I know that it will all come true.

Once I had sex with a trucker.  I stopped off at some rest stop somewhere, don’t ask me where the hell I was, and I went into use the john and there was some thirty-something guy in one of the cans, sitting on the crapper and jerking off.  So while we peered at each other through the crack in the metal door, we somehow made this agreement through finger gestures and head bobs that we were going to see each other outside.

The next thing you know, I find myself climbing into the cab of a big semi.  It was the first and last time I’ve ever been in one and I was shocked to discover that behind the front row seat, they have a whole bed in the back!

 So we start fooling around and the next thing you know, he wants me to fuck him.  Well you know me, I’ll try anything once, but when he pulled off his overhauls, what did I find but him in a pair of pink girl’s panties! And he starts moanin, “Oh fuck me, officer, fuck me for speeding.”  I don’t know where he came up with that one.  The only thing about me that looked like a policeman that day was some leftover powdered donut on my shirt from the Krispy Creme in Clark’s Summit.  But anyway, he’s going on,  “I don’t have the money for a ticket, so you’ll just have to fuck me for speeding.”  Then he proceeds to pull off those panties and I can see why he made up the speeding part, because tracked down the center of them was a thick, brown racing stripe.  I mean, this Mary might have been speeding, but god knows he put on the brakes and left some pretty wide skid marks before he got to me.

Even then, I was ready to forge ahead. I had been driving for about 4 hours and had another 2 to go and I needed something to relieve the monotony, but just as I was about to go down, I was hit in the face with a smell that was packing almost as much cargo as that truck.  I haven’t smelled that much shit since I saw the last Mamet play on Broadway.  Then he wiggles around, and honestly this was the part that made me run screaming from that cab, he wiggles around and put that pink, pimpled ass of his up in the air and all I could see was hole hair and shit smears.  I tell you, that was it. Good Night Irene.  You could have forced me to drive another 2 hundred miles.  I would have done every inch of them within the speed limit just so’s I wouldn’t have to take another look or have another whiff of that sewer.

But you know, now that I have the diner and Arthur, I have no need for rest stops and truck cabs.  I’m fine with him, flawed though he is.  Happy to watch his four wheeled drive, all-terrain Wrangler pull up the road and watch him fuss over any dog hair, Peter, our Labrador leaves on the seat.  I built a bench on the hill overlooking the stream and Arthur and I sit there at dusk looking down into the ravine to see if we can catch sight of the Kingfisher that’s built a nest down there or watch a hawk dive from the pines to catch a small, sharp meal.  We sit there sometimes almost an hour, before he says he’s got to go to bed or wants to watch something on the TV.  His favorite shows are cop show.  He likes to sit on the sofa, neat as a pin, and glue his eyes to the NYPD or Los Angeles Police Force and watch the drama unfold.  When I catch him like that, from my vantage at the kitchen counter…leafing through a seed catalogue or fingering the handle of a coffee mug... I think to myself, ‘boy oh boy, can I pick ‘em’.

Before He Goes Down

This Monday, I found out that Uncle Bob died.  I spoke to his children on the phone, my cousins, who seemed grateful in that way you do when an illness goes on too long and your nerves are tied up in balls; when after tripping over anxious moment after moment, the news finally arrives, the body sighs, and the silence settles in.

I didn’t go to the funeral because the scheduling and driving would have been bad.  Too much coffee, too much bustling, too much forgetting, too much strategizing…all so I could tell cousins I haven’t seen for years that I cared.  I called them instead.  They seemed grateful of the fact that there was one less person they had to thank for condolences that they really…that no one really ever wants.

So instead of going there, I pretended that Uncle Bob was with me all day on Tuesday…a funny thought because trotting around with a gay New Yorker is the last thing that U. Bob would have done.  Still, death must have loosened him up because I felt a distinct presence.  We drove together to my account in Long Island and with his help I turned an incredibly bad situation around.  After that, I came back to the city and enjoyed two successful business calls, a quick stop at the gym, and some productive, smart work on the computer over a martini and a small meal.  Then, like cards played out in a perfectly stacked deck and the evening was magic

I’ll tell you a short story, but I’m not sure why.  About three years ago, I met this cute jew-boy.  Couldn’t have been more than 20.  He’d been flirting with his homosexuality for years and I was his first plunge.  After a day of laughing and fake spars and too many touches that were supposed to be casual, he was back in my apartment and we were kissing very softly.  After a few minutes, he took my hand in his and held it up next to my face.  Then as though being lowered into a pit, he slowly sank to his knees.  He never stopped looking at me and that look I’ve never forgotten nor really ever understood.  A challenge?  A plea?  I don’t know.

Back at the farm, I’m watching my dog trot merrily through icy fields.  In her mouth she carries the bloody entrails of a recently gutted deer.  The paradox is disturbing.  The golden, morning light reflected not only off each white, frosty blade and her own truly satisfied self, but off the rust-red and dried blood of these ripped guts. For all I know, that deer once trotted those same fields, maybe as recently as one week ago, and now this upside down, inverted turn of events; this implosion of life or what we think is life:  same trot, same field, same guts, entirely different happening.

I have read that once decapitated, the head remains alive for a bit, staring, blinking, wondering at it’s own bodiless self.  I think about Uncle Bob come to live for a day in New York City and me in bed lost with a man who feels like a woman.  In the end, how will the others and I be?  The same march of petulant thought, the same clamor of squalls, but this time through the back of our eyes and through ways inside we never thought possible.

Summer Plants in Winter

Before I moved here, too excited to think, I bought a number of tropical vines I thought would look good draped over the outside balcony.  Unfortunately the construction dragged on and by the time the vines were ready to do their spreading, they were forced to stay indoors in their dry pots and enjoy the outside world through the sterile distance of window glass. 

Not to state the obvious, but there’s something unnatural about green plants in the winter.  Firstly, they never look like they’re comfortable with the situation.  They always look a little dry and dusty, a little burned and browned around the edges.  They sit in salt stained pots, in dirty dishes that catch water.  For all the reasons we seem to want our greenery to last the winter through with us, they give us none of them. 

Maybe in our efforts to keep those plants alive, we are in a way wishing someone would take care of us.   Not necessarily allowing us to thrive, but survive the coming cold and live again to see warmer, embracing air.

In addition to my desiccated vines, I’m forcing some bulbs that are on track to be blooming by the 1^st of the year. There’s another inexact science.  I have 10 or so in a ceramic window box and another ten in an antique chamber pot.   There’s gravel in the bottom, a good deal actually, and a healthy dose of compost.  I even gathered some fresh moss to put around the top so I could make each pot ‘floral grade’.  Still, they have erupted unevenly and I wonder…is it something I’ve done?

The other day a woman drove up selling fall bulbs for her daughter’s gymnastics class.  She had the girl in tow, a malnourished, bespectacled child with tape on her glasses.  The conversation was hard as I could see that the woman was trying her best to snoop.  I bought a bag of 10 crocuses and called it a day.  I planned on putting them in between the stones of the patio, but the weather took a cold turn and there was no way to get all the bulbs in on time, so I decided to force them.

Fall bulbs like crocuses have chilling requirements, so you just can’t pot them up and expect them to sprout, they have to be exposed to a certain amount of cold first.  The pot I had was ceramic, so there was no chance I could just leave them outside.  The first freeze would expand the moist soil and crack the pot, but I didn’t want to live with a pot in my refrigerator for the next 6 weeks either, so this is what I did.

I potted them up, then put them in a box insulated with Styrofoam (it was an old vaccine shipment box I had lying around).  I then stuffed straw around the pot, closed the lid and buried it in the fresh manure pile I have next to the barn.  The manure is ‘working’ so once I dug down deep enough, I could feel the heat of the living microbes.  I placed the box in the warm hole and covered it.  This morning when I checked, the outside of the pile was frozen, but I know that inside, that pile is still working and the bulbs are probably snug in a 40 to 50 degree environment.  I’ll unearth them in early February and bring them indoors.  They’ll be perfect on a windowsill of hot, spring, white light. 

Those flowers won’t be unnatural against a white back drop of flying snow, but the first marching steps towards warmth and the summer they insist will come. 

Winter Vacation

Do you know what I was thinking about last night?  I was thinking about those times when you’re a kid when your parents take you to Florida or the Outer Banks or a trip to Canada to go fishing.  They wake you up in the middle of the night to get ready.  Did that ever happen to you? 

I would have a difficult time falling asleep initially because of all the anticipation, but the next thing you know its five in the morning and mom is harshly whispering in the darkness of my room,  “Get up, it’s time to get going.”  She would even flip the light on.  She had no mercy.  I had one of those hard, domineering mothers you hear about when discussing the parents of gays.

She was probably hung over.  My mom was an evening drinker. After a day of concentrated housework in which things were cleaned with discipline and regiment, she would settle into a five o’clock cocktail while monitoring something simmering on the stove.

By dinnertime, she was primed to be more lighthearted, but she could turn quickly if something set her off.  Usually it was something on the news:

“How about that!  Raped that little girl?  What do you boys think they should do with a guy like that?  I’ll tell you what I would do.  I would take that guy out into the middle of the woods and I would make him take that thing of his out and I would cut it off and put it in his mouth.  That’s what I would do.”

It was something to think about while chewing your pot roast.

My father died when my brother and I were young, a car accident, and my mother took over his business, a roadside bar and grill.  It was called the Duncanvilla and under my mother’s hard watch, it became very successful.  Men from all around used to come in for her famous meatball sandwiches and enjoyed the bullying, no-nonsense lip she gave them.  She could be coy when needed and at other times, cold and tough.  There were very few she couldn’t handle and when one came along that she couldn’t she coaxed the other regulars to pressure him to leave.  Her business partner was in the mob; she looked down the barrel of a revolver during one robbery; and one of her barmaids, as she called her staff of all-women bartenders, was rumored to have murdered her first husband.

My twin brother and I each had a different relationship with her.  My brother was a hot shot when we were in school, a lady’s man, cocky and smart.  He was Born To Be Wild as they say and that kind of behavior in my mother’s eyes was like a gauntlet thrown down.  She came at him with both barrels blazing and Jesus did they fight.  Mine was a more smoldering relationship.  Conflicted about my sexuality, I was moody and distant which could also set my mother off, especially on days when she was a little rough around the edges after a night of drinking.

Years and years later, long after I had come out to her and my family, long after my brother married (to an alcoholic btw), my mother got sick with cancer and I left my job in NYC to return to Pa and take care of her.  It was an incredibly fulfilling experience.   We rarely fought.  Actually, we became oddball friends.  Good friends.  We talked, ate together, drove around in the car.  We didn’t spend that much time together, but the time we had was truly enjoyable.  It wasn’t till the last two months of her life, 60 long cruel days, that the experience became almost unbearable.  She was so sick she couldn’t eat, couldn’t talk.  She just lied in her bed and wasted away but she would not die.  She seemed to face death with the same angry stare, the same icy poker face that she must have given that man with the revolver.  My mother didn’t greet oncoming death with contrition; she looked it in the face and without blinking seemed to say, “Yeah?  What about it?”

The night before she died, I gave her more morphine than I should have.  It wasn’t my idea; it was the hospice nurse’s.  Before the last injection, I told my mother that I thought she was beautiful and called her my beautiful angel.  She sighed…a kind of huff that was riddled with fatigue and perhaps contempt.  I left the room with her staring angrily at the space above her.  Silent and armed to the end.

I went to bed unsure if she would make it.  About 3am I was awakened by a telephone call.  I answered and a seductive, male voice asked me if Angel was there.  Confused a bit, I stuttered so the voice repeated, “Is Angel there?”  We live in a very white, blue-collar town; there are no women or men called Angel where I live.  Toughening up, I queried, “Who is this?”  And in the same seductive tones, the voice repeated, “Is Angel there?”  Then the caller hung up.

The next morning, I woke to find my mother dead.  I recalled our conversation during which time I called her my Angel and I remembered the eerie late night phone call.  I *69ed the number and it came up blocked.  The man never called again and I never found out who it was.

It was the height of February cold and snow when she died, but I had been preparing for it for weeks by buying forced, spring-bulbs to decorate her room and bringing in vases of forsythia and ornamental quince to bloom.  It had all timed out perfectly and that day, when I waked her in her room, mourners sat with her in a space filled with spring scent and blossoms.   By 10pm the funeral director came.  It was heart wrenching to let go of this woman after guarding her for so long.  In her room, I made brief preparations.  I tore out all of the hateful tubing, catheters and bandages, changed her clothes and brushed her hair.  In the inside pocket of her nightgown I placed a picture of my brother, her, the dog and me. It was a shot of us crouching before a rhododendron bush, years earlier when that bush was much shorter and so little experience had passed.  Those were the days when the trip to Florida was just around the corner.  A night of anticipation and then a harsh whisper in the middle of the night.  “You boys get up.  It’s time to go.”

  

Arabian Nights

Hey, I think a blog or two back, I talked about wanting to crawl on my knees to find this one guy I wanted to fuck, right? Well, I had my chance last night.

As usual, my regular squeeze was MIA, so I went looking online and the next thing I know, I’m chatting up this Egyptian guy…the one I told you about earlier.  Now I don’t know if I told you this, but I have a real THING for Middle Eastern men.  I love their politeness, their grooming, their accents, their asses, their textiles, their tea, you name it.  And when this rose-lipped, bubble-assed beauty said that I could come over and fuck him, I practically tripped over myself scrambling out the door.

I started to worry when 5 minutes, then 10 minutes and again at 12 minutes into the journey, he called to find out where I was.  Where I was??? Jesus Christ, if I had been moving any faster, I would have had to get NASA to plot an orbital velocity. 

So I get there, and this guy is so fucked up on Meth, he can barely function.  I ‘m hardly in the door before he starts:  “Take it out, take it out, take it out. Let me see it. Let me see it. Take it out.  Take it out.  Take it out.  Awww that’s great.   That’s beautiful.  Touch my tits, touch my tits, touch my tits.  Let me hold it, let me hold it, let me hold it.”    This man shouldn’t have been a drug addict; he should have been a driving instructor. 

And it only got worse when we were in the bedroom. “ Push it in, push it in, push it in.  That’s enough!  That’s enough!  Stop.  No.  More!  Leave it there! Touch my tits.  Touch my tits.  That’s it baby. Now push it in, ½ a centimeter more, just ½ a centimeter. 

Jesus Christ!  Now I needed to know metric conversion.  He had me pushing and touching, twisting and fiddling.  It’s a small wonder that with all that dialing, I didn’t tune in a television program.

“Come on baby, get it hard for me, get it hard for me, get it hard for me.”  How the fuck can I get it hard?  I’m too busy taking all this direction!

Finally I told him I had it and packed up and left.  But before I went, he reminded me that we had hooked up years ago when he lived in another apartment further south in Chelsea.  It all came back.  I had gone over to his apartment on a late Sunday afternoon.  He was high then too, but he was much healthier and in far better shape then.  I remember thrilling that I had bagged such a beauty.  His ass was twice the size then that it was now in his current wasted frame.  I remember sunlight coming into the room.  I remember fucking him and a feeling that he was remote…distancing himself from the man that was attached to the cock that was up his ass.   I remember cumming in him at his insistence and then an awkward, quiet goodbye.   

I hadn’t seen him in all these years.   What had happened?  That beautiful body?  There were pictures on his wall of his family…taken some time ago, they showed a healthier frame on him.  Now they were in shadows in his darkened, messy apartment.  The health of his past, the zest of his life…now a grainy backdrop to this mad, jacked-up....  I wished I had known him better before…before he had come to this.  For a few seconds I enjoyed a fantasy where we were out together, talking and enjoying each other’s company.  I took another look at the dark wall with all the pictures.  Which of those older folks were his parents?  Who were the children he held his arms?   Those images, that man, that youth and now this quaking, bug-eyed collapse he had become.

You know, I pull back and think to myself…what has a farmer to do with all these urban tales?  Where is the talk of baling hay and how to balm an utter? 

Well I’ll tell you this.  At my farm, there is a steep hill, the face of which is covered with tall, dark, solemn hemlock.  There they stand each morning and night to look down upon me in stoic silence.  Firm, immutable, cold.  Beneath their height and shadow I am nothing other than the choices I make, stupid or clever or funny or kind.  No response from them, encouragement or clues.  I am left before them, my tiny actions, however good or bad, my pathetic attempts at reckoning what should and should not be, with the only knowledge that mistakes are swiftly and irrevocably punished.  

Frosty start to the morning and my big dick.

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Guilty Pleasures

I’m going to lay it all out for you.  About 2 years ago, I was about as miserable as I’ve ever been.  I was working in a great position for a great company, but my day-to-day life was a tedious hell.  The office always had some plot festering, some bruised ego exacting revenge, some shortsighted passion going on and I was left to figure out how to control it, deflect it, or eat it. 

That January I decided enough was enough and I booked a quick flight out of Newark to Puerto Rico.  Literally the moment I got out of the plane, my phone started to ring.  It was the office again.  Again.  I don’t specifically remember the ‘crisis’ I needed to be brought in on, but by the time I hung up the phone, I felt physically ill.

So I left the airport and in minutes I was in downtown San Juan.  I had that tourist-white skin on.  I walked beneath a ceiling of cloud puffed blue and signs atop buildings that read For Rent or For Sale.  At that moment, I thought, why not?  Why not move to PR for part of the year and live the other half in the NE at my farm?  Others managed to do it.  I only had my needs to meet, no others.  Why not?

That evening, there was a festival in the Colonial portion of the town.  Within the tight streets, the balustrades above, revelers danced while loud music pulsed.  I followed the group from a distance for a while before plunging in.  The music and singing were so loud that it drummed through me. I felt exorcised.  I remember a wave of happiness and release mounting over top of me.  I felt inundated with air.

That night, I walked slower and more contentedly.  I found a bar, noted for it’s male hooker trade, off the beaten path of the more popular Condado.  As soon as I sat at the bar, I noticed a beautiful, exotic man sitting to my left who within seconds dropped some pocket change that we both tried to retrieve.  It was a great opening to a conversation.  His voice was beautiful.  He had a Middle Eastern accent and he was putting together mannered sentences that were free of the typical snarking we Westerners trade back and forth.  Soon we were very close, our mouths bent around the other’s ear so we could talk and be heard against the music.  He had thick black hair that I remember feeling beneath my hand as I pulled his head closer to my mouth.  He had the face of a ball player.  Looked like he could have handled a chew in that full mouth of his. Looked like line drives and home runs.  Like SMACK, right in the old catcher’s mitt.

We went back to his apartment and he presented a cocoa colored, perfectly round, hairless ass.  I remember he tilted his pelvis up a bit so that it lifted off the mattress slightly.  He was drunk and I mounted him like I’d hired a whore.

I didn’t stay the night yet somehow, and I can’t remember how it happened, we found a way to reconnect the following day.  We went out on a proper date, but before we did, we made love again.  He was over-the-top insistent that I wear a condom when fucking him.  At the time, I did not know my HIV status, but had been dabbling in unprotected sex as a top here and there.  I had gotten through so many instances without catching anything, that I assumed the risk as a top was low…so here’s what I did.

I tore a hole in the condom before putting it on.  He liked to get fucked from behind, so I would grab the condom that he insisted I wear, open the pack with my teeth, but before putting it on, take another bite out of it and put a hole in the top.  Then when I slipped it on, the head of my dick popped through and I could experience the feeling of fucking him bare back.  Because he faced away, he never knew.

Hate me now?  Well, that’s what I did.  What’s life without honesty, right?  And I didn’t just do it that way once, I did it several times.  We were hot for each other and it wasn’t uncommon for us to fuck 4 times in one day.  I didn’t think I was giving him HIV (or the Hi Five as my friend in LA calls it), because I was convinced I was negative.  And I didn’t think I was doing any harm to myself, because I assumed that such a prig couldn’t possibly be positive.

Well I was wrong.  We had an overblown romance.  The kind you can only have while on vacation.  No obligations, only recreation and cocktails and scenery and new love.  I left after a few days, but as soon as I got back to NY, I called him and we spoke every night for the next few weeks.

His name was Ibrahim.  Did I mention that?  He was an Egyptian who worked for the American University in Cairo and for reasons he never quite made clear, he was working for a month in Puerto Rico.  Something to do with finance, but he kept his business life a little on the murky side.  Later when I told this story to my friends, they told me it was because he had a wife and kids back at home and wanted to make sure that there was a certain distance kept.  I talked to him about my concern that he was ‘keeping something from me’, but he insisted that I was the reason why he kept himself secret.  When he felt he could trust me, that my affection for him was real, he would reveal all.

I decided I would return to PR and see him again.  This was about 3 or 4 weeks later.  I booked another flight and almost from the moment I landed, I started to get a headache.  It was sick headache, like the kind you get when you’re coming down with something.  It wasn’t unmanageable, but it was present and at times insistent, like a hand grabbing me from the back of my head and holding onto me. 

We had a great few days together.  A rented car, a day at a beautiful nearly-deserted spa, a trip through the interior of the island, early dinners and whole evenings where we were wrapped up together in bed.  By the time I left him on the fourth day, we both had felt as though we had gone too far, too fast.  Still we must have called each other a dozen or so more times…in the taxi on the way to the airport, while checking my luggage, while waiting at the airport.  Over and over again.  The same professions, the same promises.  I arrived back in NY to a frigid landscape that had recently been buried (once again) in blizzard-proportions of snow.  The headaches continued and there were times when I felt light headed and dizzy.

For the next 2 to 3 months, I flirted with mononucleosis-like symptoms.  I was in fact experiencing my worse dream come true.  I was sero-converting.  The thought of it turned me off to Ibrahim and I stopped calling him.  This was the secret that he had held off telling me and because of my selfish behavior, of choosing to lie to him and screw him unprotected without his permission, I infected MYSELF with HIV.  One year later, I was sick enough to go to a doctor and finally get the bad news.  After an adjustment period, I contacted Ibrahim on Yahoo and told him everything.  He corroborated my story, but unsurprisingly wanted nothing to do with someone as selfish as me.  I live with regret for it.  Not because of my HIV status, which thanks to the inroads of the countless dead before all of us is manageable.  No, I regret what my experience proved me to be: an animal, a coward.

There has been a reprieve of a kind.  I am no longer saddled with fear and I experience sex with all the abandon that got us into this mess to begin with.  I am part of a bigger psychological orgy that I am made more and more aware of every day.  Other HIV positive men and younger negative men who crave no-holds barred sex, sex to the point of self-abuse, invite me to their lairs.  I am privy to a world that seems at times to take its cue from Vampires, a world in which the innocent are drawn to a relationship that puts their lives at risk.  Since admitting to the world that I am HIV positive, I have had many people ask me to put my ‘pos’ load up their ass, invite me to make them ‘pos’.  I have also experienced the more desperate love of the marginalized.  Both given it and received it.  My status has brought me to a very basic part of my and all of our existences: raw need.  I am now part of a group that is stripped down to the bone, that gives itself over to love or romance or sex as though lying before an altar.  Whatever we are giving ourselves over to; we are giving it as though our life depended on it.

Best Thanksgiving Day Turkey Ever!

I just wanted to share a great way to cook a turkey.  I bought a Murray's Turkey from Ira over on 20th street; brought that bitch home and deboned it.  Deboned it?  That's right.  I got me one motherfucking sharp ass knife...any sharper and I could have turned it on at the handle and cut off Luke Skywalker's arm with it.  I cut down the center of the breast and pulled the meat away from the keel like opening up a dinner jacket.  When I got to the leg, I made a cut running from where the thigh socket inserts into the pelvis, all the way to the little bird's foot.  Again, I peeled the meat away, this time as though it's pants had been sliced down the front and then opened up the meat like curtains to a show.

I skipped doing the wings similarly to the legs because it was too much work for two little return.  I just ripped them out of the socket and saved them for stock.  Finally, I cut the meat away from the spine and Voila! (as Julia Child might say), I had deboned the turkey.

Because of the turkey's size, I chose to cut the 'dinner jacket' in two  from top to bottom so that each side was comprised of a breast and and a leg all attached together with the skin.  Then I beat the living daylights out of the breast with a meat tenderizing hammer to flatten it out, sprinkled the inside of the 'jacket' with salt and pepper, then lathered the whole inside of the turkey with a stuffing mixture.  I froze the other portion for later use.

Next I rolled that bitch up and tied her together with string, buttered the skin, salt and peppered the whole thing and threw her in the oven till the thermometer registered 170.

Fantastic.  Once the bird comes out, you just slice it down.  It looks like a perfect rollatine.  Roasted potatoes on the side with a nice pumpkin/squash puree and some gravy...delish!

Happy Thanksgiving everybody!

Daffodils, blue moons and balls.

I put in another 260 daffodil bulbs this fall.  A hundred last week and another 160 today.  Two varieties, Juanita and King Alfred, the bulbs of which are as big as a Cuban’s balls. I have a hillside sloping down from the house and I figure if I put in about 200 or so every fall, one day, I’ll have a whole mountain of spring flowers leading up to the house.

Here’s a story for you:

I grew up in a small town in Pa…real blue collar…coal town, railroads…like that.  I didn’t know WHAT I was going to do with myself.  I knew, as best I could have known at the time, that I was queer, but what to do?

There was a program at the time that got kids out of high school early so they could go to college.  This was during the Reagan years, and those of us that could get out of high school  and enroll in college by the start of the next year, could maintain their social security benefits (my father was a veteran and killed so me and my brother received a check).  Any way, I applied, and then next thing I knew, I got to spend my senior year of high school as a freshman at Penn State University.

What fun!  I was young, hot, full of cum and off I went.  Still I didn’t really know anything about the gay world and I was intensely ashamed of being a homo.  Aside from a couple of hot dalliances, I floundered. 

Not in school though.  Free of the tight scrutiny of high school, my GPA soared.  I was on the dean’s list every semester.  During exams, in all the huge 101 courses, me and my friend Leah were surrounded by 6 or so students desperate to cheat off our papers.

Leah and I made a pact.  We were going to take this new found momentum and apply to Ivy League schools, get out of the Pa sticks, and find ourselves the Brave New World everyone talks about…   Actually, I wanted to find a place far enough from home that I could get laid and not feel like I was going to get caught.  I didn’t give a fuck about attending a University (since I already thought I knew it all), I just wanted to be free.

I never made it into an Ivy League (and Leah got pregnant so that put the cabash on her college goals) but I DID make it into William and Mary.  The day I opened that envelope was one of the happiest days of my life.  I had that hot summer to think about moving to Virginia and everything I was going to do.  By August, I packed up my car and drove south to Williamsburg.  I remember a big fight with my family a day or so before I left.  Nothing extraordinary, more of the usual bullshit and now of course when I look back on it I think to myself, could I have been any more of an asshole?  Anyway, the departure was one of those ripping-up-the-gravel-driveway departures.  Me and my four cylinder Ford EXP…a real tough guy all right (!)

Once at William and Mary, I made a lot of friends.  I was cocky and loved to party.  I could hit the bars with the best of them (the legal age to drink was 18) and since my floor thumped with one weekend frat party after the next, there was no shortage of mischief I could get into.  That’s where I met Joe.

Joe was like an alien from another world.  On my floor, I roomed with an Ambassador’s son, a nephew to the President of Chrysler Corporation and any number of Washington big wigs, but there were none that stood out like Joe.  He had been raised in Budapest, extensively traveled Europe, smoked Gitane cigarettes and had a mind like a cracking whip.  The boy completely swept me off my feet. 

Now I don’t know if you know this about William and Mary, but it is a HUGE dyke school.  Christ, step outside and all you smell is boxwood and progesterone.  Oh and clear off the sidewalk too, lest you’re overrun by a pack of brawny girls on their way to field hockey or softball or a game of cutthroat tennis.  But as far as faggots go, the only way you’re going to find a boy to sleep with is if you attend the closing night party for the theatre majors or get some poor fratboy drunk enough for him to pretend it all never happened.  So when I met Joe, it was like someone had slipped me the long lost brother I never had.  He took my hillbilly style and  rocketed me up to speed on fashion, discourse, behavior oh and the best part, he introduced me to the gay night life in Norfolk, Va.

Ever hear of it?  It’s a big US port.  Sailors and shipyards.  And if you dig deep enough into the dirtiest part of the wrong side of the tracks, you’ll find a couple of queer bars.  You know, I don’t think I can even remember their names, but that’s where Joe would take me and Jesus God did we have fun.

There were actual sailors in the joint.  Dressed up, yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum, sailors.  I think the first time he took me in the place, I must have practically passed out from the anticipation of just being in the same room as them.  Now don’t get me wrong, at some of the bar tables it would have taken four men to make a full set of teeth.  I mean, most of these guys were not going to win a beauty contest anytime soon,  but peppered throughout the crowd, you’d find a handful of eyes-out-of-your-head, slobber-down-your-chin studs and it was fantastic.

Dancing at that place, seeing Joe across the floor working some trick, me working one that I found… God that was fun.  I met this one black guy there.  Six something, built like a superhero with two big ass cheeks.  Looked like the back of his acid washed jeans were stuffed with two loafs of pizza dough.  Anyway, we started dancing together, then making out.  The next thing I know, I was driving down regularly to fuck him.  Those were my very first truly gay encounters.  Everything up to that point had been boyscout stuff.  But this was full on, cock up his sweet ass, gay sex.  We would cum four or five times a night.  No joke.  And I was so high on the experience, I felt as though my feet were no longer touching the ground.  In class, driving, at work, where ever, my head was not where it should have been, but  back with that boy in his crappy apartment, lying on that mattress he kept on the floor, fucking and making out.

Then I got so sick.  I could barely walk.  Took me two weeks to get over the illness and ontop of that, I discovered I had a raging case of crabs. Turns out that black guy wasn’t just giving me booty, he threw in the cooty as well. Well  with enough chicken soup and RID, I recovered, but it wasn’t long after that Joe pulled me aside on the Duke of Gloucester Street, the main drag in the town,  to ask me if I had read about the new ‘gay cancer’. 

I had.  I remember the article buried deep in the Washington Post and I remember a growing anxiety in me that I had already become infected, an anxiety that would last me over 25 years. 

One year later, nearly to the day that Joe had told me about the ‘gay cancer’, he was dead.  It was the same hot, stifling day; the same still air; the same sound of cicadas sawing in the trees.  My dearest friend, a man to this day, I still see as a laser light of energy and ideas, dead of AIDS at 20.  His mother flew in from Budapest, an imperial woman, cold and emotionless.  I mentioned to her that Joe and I were very good friends.  She sized me up and dismissed me…maybe as a hick, maybe as a fag, I don’t know.  I don’t even know what became of Joe's remains, if he was buried or cremated.  I don’t know.

Anyway, I don’t want to end on a downer.  I just remembered Joe for whatever reason and how much fun he was and all the Joes that all of us meet in our formulative gay years.  Those that extend that hand to us and pull us in and crack us up and make us feel as though we are finally a part of something.

And don’t ask me to tell you WHAT on earth this has to do with a hillside of daffodils.  I’d try to tie it all together for you, but you’d just vomit because it would sound so forced...but how about this:

Last night we had a full moon the size of Hooker’s Hole.  It was the ‘blue moon’ you’ve heard tell about.  The odd ball moon that turns a cycle of three full moons per season on it’s end and slips one more in for good measure.  So maybe that’s why I’m thinking of Joe.  He was the one that the world needed to make room for.  The one that barged into the order of things, shoved them aside and made his way forth.  My friend Joe, a Blue Moon, and only that once.

If you don't like Chemistry, skip this one and jump to the sexy part

I don't know if you know this, but wood ash is supposed to be a great fertilizer for plants.  I got to thinking about this and couldn't figure out what the ingredients to wood ash would be.  I figured that wood is mostly cellulose (which is really a complicated sugar) containing Carbon, Oxygen and Hydrogen and that when combined with Oxygen in the burning process would most likely form Carbon Dioxide and Water (both given off as gas)...I mean what else could the combustion reaction create, right?

Well I did a little online research and turns out that all those other elements important to healthy cellular life, Potassium, Phosphorous, Sodium and Chloride (though search me what the hell Chloride does in plants) form carbonates in the burning process.  This is what wood ash is made and if you look at a bag of fertilizer, you'll see that it's comprised of three things, a Nitrogen, a Phosphorous and a Potassium portion.  Though we don't get any Nitrogen left over in the burning process (it's gotta be combined with Oxygen in the burning process and given off as NO2) wood ash is all that Potassium and Phosphorous in the plant combined with Carbon and Oxygen.  So, when we dump our wood ashes on our plants, we're really giving them a big boost of two out of three essential 'vitamins' important to plant health (Potassium and Phosphorous).  

A word of warning.  The chemical formula for Potash (the carbonate formed from the reaction of Potassium and Carbon Dioxide in the burning process) is
K2CO3.  When this shit dissolves in water, you get Potassium Hydroxide KOH, a strong base.  That's why you want to make sure you don't add wood ashes to acid loving plants (like blueberries) unless you add a sulfur component with it (the sulfur combines with oxygen and water to form sulfuric acid).

Jesus, it woulda been much better if I talked about sucking dick or something like that, right?

Raunchy at the Farm

Hey Men,

I get lots of interest in my naked barnshots.  I think it's a real fantasy for a lot of people.  Truth is, it turns me on too...that's why I do it.

                                             

There's something about being outside all day, working, feeling your muscles tighten and fatten...then all the solitude and distance around you.  Maybe I catch a whiff of my own body oder, maybe I just get hard for no reason, whatever the impetus, I find myself pulling my fat cock out in the middle of the forest or taking pictures of myself in the barn jerking off.

I have fantasies that one of you out there will read this and come over...sneak up on me while I'm up in the hemlock jerking off and pull out your cock as well or I turn around in the field and find that you've been spying on me playing with my cock.

I'd love to find you sitting next to the stream.  I walk up to you, pull out my fat dick and push it into your mouth, your face flattened against the hair on my balls and stomach.

                                                                             

I'm not like this all the time.  In my non horny moments, I'm your regular gay farmer.  I lay patio stone on the terrace of my new house, I mulch the blueberry row, chop wood, drive the truck to the butcher to buy a chicken to roast at night.  At the gym I talk shop with a cattle farmer named Dave.  Every Friday, I talk to Jess and get tips on how to better care for my orchards.

                             

Today was the first real hard frost of the season, but a bright sun quickly burned it off leaving dew drops where minutes before there were sharp crystals of ice.  I'm looking across the patio now to a few of those drops hanging from the black cherry tree.  Because the sun is refracting through them, they're like lasers that change in color from red to green, blue, then back to red in an instant depending on how the light breeze moves them.

I'm going to be working alone in the house today in my shorts and socks.  I wish you could come over.

Chopping wood for winter

I used to have a neighbor, George.  Lived about 3 football fields from the house...the trailer is still there.  Not lived, I guess, visited.  He came from somewhere in the Philly area.  He would pack up his car, his wife and sometimes a few of his teenage kids, drive up here and shoot guns.  I got to know him cause almost from the day I bought the place he would visit on his ATV and monologue me to death.  The man could talk.

Not more than 3 months after being here, he warned me that others were hunting on my property and in an effort to 'protect me', he posted my ground.  Big white ugly signs, all over the place that indicated this property was mine.  The reality was George was posting my land so that he could trespass on it all by himself.  I didn't really care. I was rarely here and if he wanted the land to hunt on all by his lonesome, so be it.

Then about 2 years ago I had a phone call from my other neighbor, Jason.  George's body was found on my land at the bottom of a steep cliff, with his ATV rolled over ontop of him.  It seems that George had decided to take a tour of my property in the winter when a slick ice patch had glazed over one of the steep logging trails.  Once George drove over it, his tires slipped on the ice and over the edge he went.  The death was instant.

The ice patch is part of a swift, seasonal stream that tumbles down this intense slope and when I saw that George's body was found at the bottom of it, I decided to call the stream George Falls.  Morbid, but memorable.

So yesterday, I'm sawing wood up in the same hills, got to by the same trails as those often walked by George.  I was thinking about the dangers of steep hillside and about George's death when I took a turn further up from George Falls and heard something break loose.

The 300 pound wagon that I was pulling with the ATV to collect the wood gave way and the carriage commenced to race down the summit.  The pin holding it had snapped and now the wagon was charging down the mountain on its own.  I was actually shocked to see it travel the distance it did on its own before, as though cued by George himself, it took a sharp left at George Falls and threw itself headlong into the abyss.  The remaining journey I could only chart with my ears.  Three loud, terrible bangs and then an agonizing silence.  When I peered over the edge of the cliff to look, I saw the wagon, badly dented, flipped on its back and wedged in a deep ravine.  After a few attempts to get it out, I left it for today when I could attack the situation with renewed vigor.  Three scotches and a good night's sleep later, I used the winch on the ATV and three long chains to pull that poor, bruised bastard of a wagon up.  And damn if the thing still wasn't in good working order.

On another note, I finished a THIRD garden row and see that there is room for a fourth.  I don't get to play outside today though, I have to spend the entire time inside working on my 'real work'.  As you can see, I'm gearing up for it now.

The old garden...and I'll post pictures so you can see, is four 100 foot rows.  One with asparagus, another for strawberries, the third for red, gold and black raspberries and the last for whatever I feet like growing (potatoes, arugula, spinach, etc).  I've decided to give a break to this last, over-used row and in preparation covered it with about 4 inches of raw manure.  Next spring, I'll turn the manure under (I read somewhere that it's best to turn the soil in the spring since the fungal hyphae systems you upturn release valuable nutrients.), then plant the row with early spring crops of spinach, peas, scallions and radishes before turning it under again in July.   After the strawberry row produces (also around July), I'll move the suckered strawberry plants to the newly turned row and dig up the old strawberry row to be the new misc vegetable row for 2012.

Oh brother, there goes the alarm.  Time to go work.  See you in the fields, friends!

  

The official end of the 2010 Growing Season

Well, it was bound to happen.  You could see your breath by 7pm and the sky had a space-ice kind of clarity.  When I woke up this morning, not only Jack, but Jill, June and Jennifer Frost, his wife, daughter and cousin on his father's side respectively, had all made an appearance.  They made short order of the fields, ran up and down the tomato patch, sat (?) on the blueberries, and took an ice cream dump on the red raspberries.  So long folks, we'll see you next year!

Spent all day yesterday working on a spreadsheet for one of my accounts.  Came out great, but it wasn't till 12 midnight, when my friend James called me, that I was able to figure out a little hiccough in it that was preventing the numbers working correctly.  God bless him for doing that.

Today, I'm committed to getting some outdoor chores done.  There is so much to do that it can be a little overwhelming, but I'm just going to dive in and get started, probably the most important thing I can do.

The good thing about the frost...now that I know those asparagus ferns are dead, I'm going to cut them back and cover the whole row with that beautiful manure.

Here comes the Fall

(Portentious title, no?)Some of you know that I started my own business.  There's good news and bad news.

Good News:  I'm able to work from home.
Bad News:  I'm too busy to do any of the fun work I wanted to do while I was home.

Good News:  Business is a hit
Bad News:  I'm constantly traveling, so I'm never at home to work from home.

I'm trying to build a patio.  Well, I'm not trying, I'm actually DOING.  I had Yoda come over and he said (Yoda voice),  "Try?!  Try not.  DO or do not.  There is no try."

So I'm building a patio.  I started out the way my Aunt Gertie would have started out. Grabbed some rocks and started putting em on the ground.

Oh I have all kinds of detractors (including some voices inside my own head), but I'm plowing forward.  The soil where I want to put the stone has been compacted hard from the construction around the house, so I'm only adding a layer of gravel and a big fucking flat rock on top and filling in the seams with some dirt and more rock.   It's slower going than you would expect because I'm using rocks from th farm that are all varying levels of thickness and some of them, I don't mind telling you, are heavier than Aunt Salome's ass, so you have to do a lot of struggling and maneuvering to make them fit.   Then I have a dog up my backside, bugging me to throw a ball every 15 seconds...throw in an urge to jerk off every 2 hours and you have one long drawn out process.

But this is about gay farming, so let's get out those pitchforks and get to work.

On today's docket (after I finish my MnFn' obligation to my 'business'), we're going...that's right WE are going...over to the fresh manure pile.  Oh. Yes. We. Are.  And you know what we're going to do over there?  We're going to load the ATV wagon full of that fresh shit and haul it down to the potato row.  And that's not all.  After that, we're going to hitch up the brush hog and mow through two big patches of weeds to clear the way for a sunflower garden, a corn patch and more general garden space.  If we're lucky, we'll take a second to get lost in the tall, dry goldenrod, make out and play with each other's cocks ;)

It's been two years since we've planted our current potato row and the soil there needs a break. I'm afraid we've accumulated disease in that area, friendly to the spud-men, and we're going to try leafy greens there next spring which is WHY we are going to create the new potato garden.  And it's going to be big. Cause daddy likes his taters.  Oh. Yes. He. Does.  You know what kind?  I like the red kind that have the red all the way through the potato.  Ever have those?  You can get them from Irish Eyes...the best potato catalogue company around.  You can also get those Kennebecs which are so delicious.  This year I planted the all blue kind which sort of tastes like you're eating some native American I-just-dug-this-crap-up-in-the-woods-cause-my-corn-failed tuber.  Not good.  I also planted a 'German Butterball' variety that I'll skip next year as well.  Not awful...just poor producer and no big deal on the dinner plate.

Anyway where was I...Oh yes, we're putting together a potato patch.  The soil in the area where we'll be working is fairly easy to dig, so the plan is, mow it, dig it and manure it.  By next spring, we should have ourselves some nice composed rows to put our potatoes in.

As for the corn-slash-sunflower-slash-whatever garden patch we're going to put in.  I'd like to try a variation on that 'Lasagna Garden' technique everybody always talks about.   I have a whole bunch of c ardboard in the barn that I plan to lay down in rows over the freshly mowed site and then cover them up with cow shit.  "Are you going to till the soil before you do that, Farmer Gay?" I hear someone asking in the back.  The answer is no, I'm not.  And the expanded answer is, I don't feel like it.  We're talking sunflowers and corn...they'll figure it out.  If I dig through the cardboard when planting the seeds ( or setting out the plants), the soil beneath should be suitable to new'ly forming roots of the starting plants.  That's the theory anyway and I'm sticking to it.

Now mind you, we still need to finish this patio (get rocks, get shale, set the stones, throw the ball for the dog), get wood for the upcoming winter (drive the ATV up the hill, cut  the logs, load the logs, split the logs, stack the logs) cut the grass again before winter, clean up around the orchard, mow the asparagus and cover it with fresh compost.  So you queens have a lot of work to do.  So pack up those pink waders and high tail it over here so you can help me out.

And so this is the Gay Farmer signing off for now.  Wishing you a sturdy Spade with a long, stiff handle.

The Day I bought the Farm

Hi all,

Thanks for joining me!  Ironically, though it is my first day writing my 'gay farmer's blog', I'm not in the country, but at my apartment in New York City.  The dog (Rye) is sacked out next to me and I got two dirty parrots picking through seed on the other side of the room.  

I should be at the farm, but the house that I'm building there...or rather that a construction crew is NOT building there, is taking forever to complete.  So I'm here, sweltering in the city, spending hours picking through the farmer's market when I could be up at my own beloved farm, enjoying a fresh picked peach or rifling through the bean bushes for the latest, freshest pod.  

About the farm:  well, I bought it five years ago.  I had been living in NYC for over ten years and I was desperate for some green.  I looked everywhere for a 'place in the country', upstate NY, LI, New Jersey.  It was either too far away, too expensive or both.  Then one day, I was searching the internet for farms for sale and stumbled on a horse farm listing in Towanda, Pa...wherever the hell that was.  So I loaded up the bf and we drove some 4 hours to Towanda.

Towanda is the capital of Bradford County in Northeast, Pa.  Some of the highlights along the way are the Outlet Mall in the Poconos, the lonely and lost-looking rte 380 which takes you past exits for towns like Moscow and Mountainhome, the Bluebird Diner located at the start of rte 6, and finally the endless mountains themselves, rolling hills and valleys through which the Susquehanna meanders panoramically.  

Route 6 is worth getting to, a winding road with enough speed traps to break your bank, but scenic and entertaining.  There's a seasonal BBQ on the left hand side as you head north and you pass through Meshoppen where a local guy sells his home-buzzed honey.  

Anyway, if you stay on route 6 long enough, you end up in Towanda and I don't care how much of a lead foot you are, that's too far to drive from New York City for a 'place in the country' as I found out that day. HOWEVER on the way home, we decided to take another rural route home, rte 187, and we ended up driving right by the for sale sign on the current farm that I own.  Weathered and forgotten, the sale sign had probably been there for years...indeed, inside the barn there were several versions of it, from this realtor and that.   Later, David (my ex) and I called up the broker and visited the farm and I'll never forget that walk.  A bright, June day with spinach and pea green colors all around, an intense sun, a baby turtle in the swamp, an orange salamander in the woods, the stream, the barn, the fields, the forest.  It had a little of everything.  The true litmus test was when I found a broken shovel and spooned a test load of the soil. It turned like cake flour in a bowl.  Sold.  

I'll post some pics of the early farm if you want to see them.  Mile tall with Teasel weeds and burdock, milkweeds and mustard.  The bf and I used to tunnel a path through it to a part of the stream that tumbled into a waterfall.  At the base of it, you can make a camp, build a fire and have a couple of drinks, which is exactly what we did; a make shift lost-world home filled with idle conversation and dreams of what the farm could be.

I remember that first year well.  I hacked an opening in the weeds and mud where I thought an orchard should be.  Bought a potted apple tree (that bears that most delicious apples to this day) and set it in on a hot, unforgiving July day.  I believe it was the next March that my friend Yvie came up and helped me plant an entire order from Miller's Nursery with snow flurries flying and way too many holes to dig.  One of the trees we planted that day (everything else is dead) is bigger than a pickup parked straight up and is right now ripening fruit.

It has been five (6?) years since I bought the farm.  I have replanted the orchard some 3 or 4 times due to freezing weather, deer and rodent damage and poor site location.  I have planted a garden, over 3000 spring bulbs, forsythia and Chaenomyles Speciosa from my first home in Altoona Pa and watched all of it prosper, struggle or drown in the wilderness that surrounds.  Finally, after years of dreaming of house on the land, I was offered a natural gas lease from Chesapeake Natural Gas for 100k.  The money gave me the confidence to build a house.  Now with the house nearly finished, I pursue my dream to be a gay farmer in Pennsylvania, learning the ways of the land and perhaps passing on a few tips to you, my friends and farming enthusiasts.