I've just started reading Tom Lake, Ann Patchett's latest novel, published this year. Much of it is set on an orchard (cherries, apples, plums) owned by the protagonist, Lara, and her husband, Joe. They run it, along with their three daughters, who are prominent in the novel.
This passage from early in the book captured my attention as reflecting thoughtfully on rural places, especially in the farm context:
Together we take the dirt road past the wall of hemlocks and white pines to the barn. The cherry trees are so burdened that I don’t know how we’ll get the fruit picked before it rots. Most of the crew trailers are empty, three families down from the usual ten or twelve. Joe has divided the acres and given everyone their parcel to work. We wave to each other at a great distance. I leave a tray of sandwiches at the sorting table in the morning and pick up the empty platter at night. Emily’s ever-helpful boyfriend, Benny Holzapfel, is no help at all since he is working sixteen-hour days on his own family’s farm. Holzapfel—meaning crab apple, or the crabby people who hang out near sour little apples—is a selling name but does not suit our warm and generous friends. You could spend years in a New York apartment never knowing the people who live two feet away from you, but live on an orchard in Michigan and you will use the word neighbor to refer to every person for miles. You will rely on them and know their children and their harvest and their machinery and their dogs. The Whitings have an old German shepherd named Duchess, though she could have just as easily been Princess or Queenie. Despite her wolfish appearance, she is a sweet girl. Duchess has been known to walk all the way to our back door in the summer. I give her a bowl of water and some biscuits, and after a nap on the warm flagstones, she heads off again.
Past the pond there is a place where the two farms touch, ours and the Holzapfels. My husband used to joke that someday one of our girls would marry a Holzapfel, but when Benny started showing up in our kitchen his senior year of high school, Joe dropped the joke for fear of scaring the boy away. Since then my husband has whispered his dreams to me alone, in the winter, in our bed late at night: Emily and Benny would marry and join the farms. We would fix up the little house, put on a proper porch, a new kitchen, a real master bedroom, everything on one floor. Joe and I would move to the little house and give our house to Emily and Benny so they could have children here, children who may one day marry the children of the Otts or the Whitings nearby, weaving together an ever greater parcel, because even if a person can’t work the land they have, they will still want more.
(pp. 42-43 Kindle edition).
Here's another passage about farm ownership. Here, a much younger Joe Nelson is talking to Lara, long before she becomes his wife. She is visiting the orchard for the first time, with her friends and colleagues Duke, Pallace, and Sebastian. Joe is the nephew of Maisie and Ken Nelson, who at this time own and run the orchard in northern Michigan.
“One Nelson or another has been here for five generations. Either they hate it—my father hated it—or they were like Ken and couldn’t imagine doing anything else. All Ken ever wanted out of life was Maisie and the farm.”
“So who’s up next? Do they have kids?”
Joe walked over and pulled an errant weed near the base of a tree then dropped it in the road. “That’s the question. Their daughter Alice lives in Phoenix. Alice is out. She’s got a husband and kids. They’re settled there, they like the heat. I don’t think she even eats cherries. My cousin Kenny is a forester in the U.P. Everybody’s looking to Kenny to save the day but nobody knows for sure if he’s going to do it, including Kenny. There might not be anything to save anyway.”
Pallace was walking ahead of us in her little yellow shorts. She turned around to face us and started walking backwards. “Are they broke?”
“Pretty much,” Joe said. “This business runs on a very small margin. The crop is bad one year and you’re broke, or the crop is good, which means that everybody’s crop is good, and so the prices drop and you’re broke. Gerber tells you to put in twenty acres of plum trees so you sink all your capital into plum trees—”
“—and Gerber doesn’t want the plums,” Sebastian said.
“And you’re broke.”
“That’s so depressing.” I sounded like a petulant schoolgirl but the day was too beautiful to think that anything could change. Five generations of Nelsons had lived on this farm. Surely the sixth generation would live here as well.
“Farming is depressing,” Joe said. “But once it gets in you, you can’t put it down.”
“Farming is the new acting,” Duke said.
“Couldn’t they sell off part of the land to pay the debts?” I said this as if it were an original thought.
Joe laughed. “I’m glad you didn’t float that over lunch. Maisie would have handed you your napkins back.”
“So no one sells land.”
“Land gets sold when people die and the kids refuse to come home and take it over. Otherwise you keep the land.”
(pp. 166-168, Kindle Edition).
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