Heather Angell

I was going to school in Chicago.

And so every summer, I would come home to the farm.

And every year, I'd go back to school where I'd stay up till 2 AM.

And then at the farm, I'd get up at 6 AM.

But I got to do really cool stuff, too.

I used to plant different varieties of pumpkins, and they had names like Cinderella and Jack B. Little and Racer, and they all sounded like bedtime stories.

And my life couldn't have been more different than when I went back to school.

I was a sophomore during the September 11th attacks, and I got really influenced by these Jesuit priests who talked a lot about nonviolence and peacemaking.

And I went to teach-ins for the Iraq war.

I rode all night to go to protests on buses.

And when I came back to the farm, I realized that the old man did not share my views.

Um, I was, we were both Catholic and I had been introduced to this really radical peacenik, um, kind of outside the bounds of the norms Catholicism.

And, uh, he was a New Hampshire Republican.

So, and he would say like really kind of intense revenge stuff.

And I would pause and look at him and I would say, I can never remember which gospel that's in.

Was it Matthew or Mark?

And we like to have fun with each other.

And the farm really became like medicine to me in his fields.

My life at home was not great at that time.

My dad had died a few years earlier unexpectedly.