Susan McCorkindale

I like to read memoirs and on January 4, 2010 I checked out her book Confessions of a Counterfeit Farm Girl from my little local Fair Haven boro library. (I know because I just found the library slip as I was cleaning up the bookshelf.)

Try as I did, I had such a hard time adapting to suburban Jersey life and I was very attracted to Susan's story. She decides to leave her comfort zone of urban NJ and move with her husband and two sons to a cow farm in rural Virginia. McCorkindale was a self confessed total Jersey Girl, (woman) professional and Mom, who seemed the twin of every woman I ran into in my neighborhood, juggling careers and children and manicures and shoe shopping. (And I apologize for my judgementalness but when I arrived in suburbia my neighbors seemed too rich, too thin, too manicured, too self involved, and they drove their giant Escalades and Yukons and Hummers in such a distracted but defensive way it was if we really were at war in white America.) And I tried hard to get past my own shallowness at not being able to get past what I perceived as other's shallowness...)

So she was like me in reverse in a way. I am a country girl at heart and soul (well early on anyway, though I love NYC and my real home is the village of Bellingham) but I started life out on a little farm in VA and I go back to that land inside me every day.

Susan's life changes so dramatically when she and her husband decide to move with their two sons to a farm in rural VA and she tells her story with so much humor you can't help but love her.

So I utterly admired her honesty and her spunkiness and her willingness to be her unapologetic self but also try a life so outside her element, and she addresses that sort of culture shock I experienced moving between worlds that don't have many geographic miles between them but are as different as heads and tails.

I enjoyed her book so much that after I read it I found her blog online,
only to learn that after the book came out her husband got diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. And recall at that time I was very very ill myself with no one knowing what was wrong and I was partly reading just for escapism.

I think I cried for her and him and me when I read how ill he was. And I had to not stick with reading her blog. I was too entrenched in my own drama of pain and medicine and disease.

And I have had that strange phenomenon where I like something, and then it ends up connected to illness. For instance, two weeks ago I read Rhoda Janzen's Mennonite in a Little Black Dress and just loved it. Then looked the author up online only to find she has breast cancer and has been treated.

Well anyway, Susan McCorkindale has a new book coming out in August! 5oo Acres and Nowhere to Hide. I am excited. I watched a little three minute clip and then it happens, she tells how her husband got sick two years ago, and he died in April. I felt like crying for her and for him.

Rest In Peace Mister McCorkindale.

This is life, attached by the muscle to death.

I am still glad we have books.

I am going to write some.


PS. I did a terrible job with this post. Let's blame my head and crooked eyesight and fatigue of the mind and hands. But what I should really say is that actually Susan McCorkindale makes me brave. I admire her. The irony is that she makes me braver about farm life. Much of my life I had both mourned and celebrated the fact that I had escaped what I was sure was my destiny to be married to a farmer. That would have been a good fantasy but the reality seemed to me that he would have been alcoholic and I would have been miserable. Lets say I saw this a few times. So I was glad to escape and find a world in which women's and children's rights were at least acknowledged. When I was a child in VA it was still legal to beat your wife provided the stick was not too large. Animals, women, and children were abused.
So I have a fear of farms. Because they happen in the countryside, where there is isolation.
But now my mate and I both face the possibility that we could give in to a dream and have some land around us as we move to Texas where land and life are cheaper. The feral cats here who have adopted us seem to be saying, Dont move to the suburbs. Take us with you and we will be your farm cats. That is their gift to us. To help us, force us, brave our dreams.

Do you have dreams you need to brave?

(photo, my first trip to Chocolate Bayou, Alvin Texas, April 2011)