The Dirty Life: A Memoir of Farming, Food, and Love

 

Parental Advisory Warning: This is complete and pure FARM PORN.  If you get squeamish at the mention of consuming blood pudding or afterbirth, this is not the book for you.  If chasing runaway draft horses on a bicycle doesn't get your heart pumping, perhaps a wedding in a hayloft or a demolition derby might do the trick?  This is the ultimate romance novel for every country woman who dreams of a delicious, muscular, hard-working hunk to throw us over his shoulder and give us a romp in the hay.  But, this isn't a novel.  Ask any woman who's ever spent any time with a farmer, even a beautiful, romantic, idealistic one, and the truth is, as my friend Andrea says dryly about her dairy-farmer husband: "I never knew he'd always be so DIRTY."

Kristin Kimball was a jaded, New York hipster who fell in love with the wrong man.  Mark was NOT the person she was looking for.  NOT the man her middle-class Republican parents hoped she would marry.  But frankly, Mark is irresistible, even to her readers, even when he is acting sorta obsessive and crazy, which is often.  This is a man who cannot tell a lie, believes he possess a "magic circle" that draws everything he needs and wants into his life eventually, lives his romantic ideals (for better or worse), saves a giant roll of dental floss (for later use), prefers everything homemade, adores life and all its potentials, proposes on a mountain top and offers to take her name so their future children can feel the security of a linguistic family connection.  Can you blame Kimball for swooning? 

"Mark, I discovered, had never smoked or gotten drunk, he'd never tried drugs or slept around.  He'd eaten wholesome and mostly organic food, and he'd spent most days of his adult life doing some kind of arduous physical exercise.  He was the healthiest creature I'd ever laid eyes on.  Some people wish for world peace or an end to homelessness.  I wish every woman could have as a lover at some point in her life a man who never smoked or drank too much or became jaded from kissing too many girls or looking at porn, someone with the gracious muscles that come from honest work and not from the gym, someone unashamed of the animal side of human nature."

Amen.