The personal qualities of Julie Rawson and Jack Kittredge, so complementary for their family, benefit the NOFA/Mass family in much the same way. Julie does the dance of talk and touch - farming, phoning, nurturing their four near-grown children, empathizing with a NOFA staffer - while Jack (figuratively) moves the chairs out of the way for her, buttresses or extends the dance floor, supplies a new instrument here and there and often writes and plays the music. In more literal terms, he planned and designed many of the systems on their farmstead, the CSA they run, and in NOFA/Mass and beyond. He does the financial planning and accounting, buys equipment and works out techniques for fertilizing, cultivating, and preserving on their CSA.
"Julie remembers names, picks up situations," Jack says, then adds in jest, "If it's living, Julie deals with it. If it's dead, I do!"
Julie's energy (high) and focus (sharp) are legendary within the NOFA circle and her local community. Jack's measured way of appraising issues and imagining sensible ways to resolve them, his downplayed emotions and his curiosity and intellect are less visceral, but they lend an enterprise the legitimacy and sense of security that a well-grown man offers his family. Together Julie, 46, and Jack, 55, "can organize anything," exclaims Julie, and it isn't an empty boast. They've put NOFA solidly on its feet - growing, with a bank balance to help steer it into the 21st Century - and they've turned the NOFA Summer Conference from a nearly-junked idea to an educationally and financially profitable venture for NOFA/Mass. Jack resuscitated The Natural Farmer, the publication that goes to all seven chapters of the Northeast Organic Farming Association.
Their home, where I interviewed them and have done mailings and sat for meals and meetings, expresses a lot about them. At the center of everything hunkers a black Stanley cookstove which also heats their home and their hot water. The comfortably worn country kitchen it dominates and the bright living room tend to be taken over by NOFA-related materials. Outside, a deck and a large yard mowed by chickens is bordered by faded board sheds, woods, and Julie's gardens, which sprawl confidently and abundantly in the late-summer sun.
There is a feng shui to the compound: the woodshed is handy, the workshop and machinery and storage sheds (where CSA sorting and pickup happens) stand in convenient relation to the gardens. It all forms an embracing arc along the border between plain and hill, allowing energies to move in and out of the working farm in a nice sweep.
The two met in Dorchester through Julie's HUD-activism and a roommate. Both were working for non-profits. Jack, a Maryland native, created and published board games on the side, a business he continues. Julie was from Illinois. "We both came out of family situations of strong morals, or Christian or something," Jack observed. Their children started arriving in 1977. Almost immediately, they began looking to buy a piece of land with savings from Jack's business. The 55 acres in Barre became theirs soon after the oil shortage of 1979, and they moved onto it in 1982.
Besides oil, their children Dan, Paul, Ellen, and Charlie influenced their plans. "We felt we needed to raise food, have meaningful work, chores," Julie said. "When you're raising children, it's important to involve them in living systems."
It came to pass. "In a time and place where people don't live on farms, we made our kids come home to work on the farm," Julie reminisced. "They were allowed to do a fall sport in grade school, and music stuff. And in junior high, they could do spring sports too. Other parents said 'You're turning your kids into slaves!' But they could take one hour off work time in the field to play music." She pauses. "We got a lot of live music!"
The children's clothes were often homemade. How did they feel about that? Accused by a classmate of being poor, Ellen turned the tables: "I'm so lucky to have a mother that makes my clothes!" A stream of helpers, customers, and visitors - both American and foreign - brought a salad of cultural and individual influences to Many Hands Organic Farm. The children ate it all up and grew up to be a manifestly confident and well-adjusted lot. They still work on the farm - "and we didn't encourage them to be here," said Jack. "I encouraged them," Julie corrected instantly.
Dan walked through the kitchen. Asked how his upbringing prepared him for the real world, he thought a second. "I don't feel at all insecure. I feel I could go anywhere, and do OK."
Some of that, he implied, is from his exposure to all that productive work. Perhaps he also gained a sense of his usefulness in the economic scheme, in the family self-sufficiency and security that resulted. And one senses in the Kittredge kids a social ease, possibly from being on home turf around all those visitors.
When they first built their house and settled on their new farm in Barre - while their children were toddlers - it was lean. "We sold wood, rocks out of the field. I distributed organic fertilizer," said Jack.
Julie picks up the thread. "I was involved in NOFA, and I saw it failing. I thought: it fits our abilities, writing interests, need for work. We can do without much money. It might offer us decent part-time jobs. It provides our main living now, the work at our various NOFA jobs."
Jack: "We're both youngest kids in our families. We don't care about status and security issues. We get a little off the farm, the game business, Julie directs musicals."
She does so for the local high school. They have no mortgage. Though Jack travels to gather material for The Natural Farmer, the world comes to their door more than vice versa, which saves clothing, travel and impulse-shopping expenses. And food bills are low - they root cellar potatoes, carrots and beets, do some canning, "mostly freeze," and make "a lot of wine."
It all adds up to a wealth of satisfaction and security. Theirs is an island of "order" - what Wendell Berry uses to define intelligence - in a relatively disorderly civilization.
I'm enough of a mystic to believe the methods that grew strong kids...and a strong NOFA...tend to grow very nourishing vegetables for the fortunate members of Many Hands CSA.
This page was last modified on January 14, 2008 at 12:25:36 PM.