Weekends in Carolina by Jennifer Lohmann Page A

where they were grown, so she lacked a gauge to measure her progress. But there was also exhilaration in trying something new: reading the literature, testing the soil, shoving something in the ground and then looking to Mother Nature for the rest. Knowing that only some of your success or failure was under your control and that the forces of nature held tight to their power. She scanned the field, trying to read her future in the soil, then shrugged at her own silliness. If the peanuts didn’t work out, there was always next year. And regardless of whether she got a cash crop out of them, they would add nitrogen to her soil.
    “Crop rotation, like during the Middle Ages?”
    “Well, yes.” When she nodded, the rain dripped off her hood, obscuring her view of the field. “I have a tractor instead of oxen, a pickup instead of a wagon and I can buy ladybugs over the internet, but the basic principles are the same. Rotating your plants keeps insects from gaining a foothold and your soil from being depleted. Cover crops and tilling in add nutrients. That plus elbow grease, sun and rain and you will grow good food.”
    She didn’t know why she was so intent on having him understand, having him be impressed with her land management. Probably because of his dismissive attitude toward the land that was his by birth, but she didn’t want to accept that. She’d never let one person’s opinion, especially one man’s opinion, of her business affect how she felt about her life choices before.
    Mud squished and squawked under their feet as they walked up the small rise to the next field. Ashes let out a woof when he finally noticed they were gone, and vaulted some rocks up to them. The gray, wet weather obscured the breath of her fields, but land was alive. Max could walk it, plant it and make it grow.
    She wished Trey could see the land’s value, as useful as wishing she could plant infertile seeds plucked from hybrid plants. Max continued her tour, which had turned into a treatise on crop rotation. She talked about how she would schedule carrots in fields that had previously had potatoes because the potatoes cut down on weeds and how she planted clover between all her crop rows. If Trey was bored, he hid it well.
    By the third field, Trey was talking about his life on the farm as a boy. He pointed out places where he’d hidden from his father and where he had surprised Kelly with an angry and aggressive water snake, telling him it was a water moccasin. He also pointed out where he’d been bitten by a cottonmouth, which he’d deserved for poking it with a stick, and where his brother had broken his arm jumping out of a tree into the pond during a drought.
    As they rounded the dirt road from the fields back to the greenhouse, Max asked the question that had been burning inside her since Trey had actually expressed feelings other than disgust for the land. “You talk about your memories fondly, even though they involved physical pain. Why don’t you enjoy coming back here?”
    “Do you want me to decide to become a gentleman farmer and kick you out?”
    The hard tone in his voice pushed her into a defensive position. “Well, no, but...”
    “Why don’t you return to Illinois and farm there?”
    “I didn’t come to North Carolina to escape my father. I came to North Carolina because the growing season is good, the local produce market is strong without being saturated and my mom lives in Asheville. I was attracted to North Carolina, not repulsed by Illinois or my family.”
    Though everything she’d told Trey was true, it wasn’t the whole truth. She’d grown up thinking she would farm her father’s land with her brother, but one summer spent interning at an organic vegetable farm outside of Chicago had changed her mind. Her brother and father grew the food that fed the world, no mistaking that, but she wanted to feel the sun directly on her back, not through the glass of a harvester window. Despite her father’s