Caprice and Mollusks: What I Almost Named the Farm that I Almost Started
Every six months or so, I decide I want a new career. This has been going on since I graduated college and it's included jobs like teacher, interpreter, river guide, and food truck chef. I gravitate toward jobs that I effectively have zero qualifications for. Inevitably, for a few weeks after the new job enters my head, I'll Google it like mad and find the new job prospect requires about 17 more years of schooling than I'm up for. So I'll lose steam, go quiet, and wait for the cycle to rear its head in another six months. The cycle is almost comforting in its predictability. Last year though, the idea of becoming a flower farmer stuck around for a while. I didn't have to go to school again, I could practice growing stuff on my dad's acre of land south of Boston as well as my local community garden, and the idea of being outside for my occupation really lit me up.
I spent an inordinate amount of time thinking up names for the farm. If I'm going to be honest, that was really where the bulk of my effort for "preparing to become a flower farmer" went to. For months on end, I scrawled potential names on every napkin, tissue, and receipt. My husband liked this exercise too. It required little effort on our part, we could keep our day jobs, and we just got to shout out random words and write them down. "Pen! Who's got a pen?! I've got another one!" Along the way somewhere, I decided we'd also have little goats and make goat cheese on the farm. I think that was after I read edible Boston's article with a picture shot by talented Adam DeTour of a girl hugging a goat. Who doesn't want goats after seeing that? And really, the sky was the limit, because the farm was in my imagination. We'll stick the goats right here, I thought, circling a little spot on my diagram. They'd be situated in between the barn and the house, two buildings that didn't exist, but on every napkin and scrap paper in our house they did.
After endless rumination, I was struck by the arrowhead: I had the name. My toes tingled. I walked on air. This was it. I had just finished reading Elisabeth Tova Bailey's beautiful, quiet book, The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, and I was hopped up on the snail as my spirit animal. "They're intrepid," I said to Dan. "They just climb over obstacles, ones so much taller than they are, and keep going," I said. "They carry their home on their backs." I just couldn't get enough of the snail.
It was against this backdrop that the name came to me. "Dan," I said to my husband.
"I've got the name." I was in a fever.
"Ya?" he asked.
I nodded. "I'm so sure," I said.
"Let's hear it."
"Caracol Farm and Cheese," I said.
He wrinkled his nose. "Huh? Cara-what?"
"Caracol is Spanish for snail," I said.
Then in two words he took the wind out of my sail: "Snail cheese!" He nearly fell off the chair laughing. You want to name the farm Snail Cheese?" I put my hands on my hips. I was very indignant.
"It's not snail cheese," I said. "It's Caracol Farm and Cheese."
"What's caracol mean again?" he asked. This was entrapment.
I moved my lips slowly and spoke very quietly. "Snail."
"What was that? I couldn't hear you," he said.
"It means snail," I said.
"Snail cheese!" he piped. He kept shouting it, hopping to and fro. This wasn't the reception I was hoping for. It gave me pause. I thought perhaps I had more thinking to do.
Since then, I have not started Snail Cheese Farm. Not yet. I am still working on the name. Plus, there was an unexpected wrinkle. When it came time to cut my sunflowers last year in my community garden, I couldn't do it. Whenever I visited the plot, fat bees were perched on the big flowers like Romans at a feast. I loved watching them sift through their bounty, the pollen clumping on their black legs. I loved that they came to expect that my little plot of land was somewhere they could rely on for pollen. I put my shears away and left the sunflowers to be.
I've heard that to be a successful flower farmer one needs to sell the flowers. So, the aforementioned emotional blockage against actually cutting the flowers creates a clear challenge in my business model. So that's an issue I have to reconcile. In the meantime, I keep writing my lists of names, doodling snails, and thinking about stroking the coarse hair of my baby goats. I think we'll have five of them.