Heather Angell

So the summer after my freshman year in college, I got a job as a farmhand.

And it was 2001, and I was 19 years old.

And the couple that were my new bosses, they were in their mid-60s by the time I walked up their driveway in New Hampshire, and they'd been farming for 14 hours a day for 40 years.

And the husband would soon and forever become affectionately known to me simply as the old man.

And he would wear a different canvas hat every day, perched kind of like a bird on his bald head.

And he had like a muddled brow, a furrowed brow, and like two watery blue eyes.

And he, his parents were French Canadian, and so he had learned a little bit of French.

And he also spoke with a pretty good Boston accent, but it was so slow that it almost had like a down east vibe.

And that was the year that Christina Aguilera's single Lady Marmalade came out on the Moulin Rouge soundtrack.

And he would walk around the farm singing.

He was mouthy, he was charming, and he was nobody's fool.

And I soon learned that farming was really hard.

The first week I worked there, he made me unload a trailer load of 50-pound bags of soil twice.

We would be so dirty sometimes at the end of the day that I'd have to take off my clothes and hose off in the driveway before my mom would let me come into the house.

I thought I was going to die in his barn.

The hay was so thick in the air.

that it would get into your lungs and it would like cut any exposed skin and be in your hair and you'd find it like the whole rest of the day.

And nobody understood why I loved it so much.

And the farm became really like a part of my life as I went on.

And it was so different from the life that I was leading otherwise.