FARM GIRL

A tender memoir of a tumultuous life that also celebrates agricultural cultivation.

Baxter begins her remembrance (in which some names have been changed) in a cabin in the Catskills, where she and Jayden, her poet fiance—both in their 20s—went to try and rekindle their love after a summer apart; it’s their “last chance,” as she puts it. Jayden spent the previous summer in Paris, seeking inspiration, and Baxter went to Cedar Circle Farm in New England to work because she needed money—something that Jayden “struggled to understand.” At the cabin, she discovered a condom in Jayden’s pocket, which was apparently evidence of an affair, as she’d been taking birth control pills for years. The couple fought at the cabin and again at an airport a few days later. Consequently, Jayden returned to their apartment in Portland, Oregon, ahead of Baxter and moved into a separate room, where he stayed following her return. As the memoir continues, it becomes increasingly clear that Baxter and Jayden were in very different places, with very different ideas of what will make them happy. Baxter weaves accounts of her summers as a farm worker with recollections of Jayden’s alcohol abuse and his trips to hospitals for new painkiller prescriptions. The author is shown to believe that staying with Jayden would keep him alive, even as the status quo remained unchanged. The collapse of this relationship and its emotional toll on Baxter are effectively emphasized with ruminations on the careful tending of crops, such as corn stalks and fresh strawberry plants, through the seasons, with such symbolic observations as “If I am rough with the spinach it will turn soft and break as it warms.” There’s some intensity in the accounts of Jayden’s pain-fueled pursuit of drugs, but overall, the memoir is more serene than it is dramatic. Overall, the author focuses her attention, at last, on where she’s most herself; it’s not so much a love story as it is a rumination of one’s proper place in the world.

An often moving ode to nature—human and otherwise.