It was a scalding summer afternoon. I remember running around in my neighbor’s backyard along with our brothers, carrying out our daily activities of dodge ball and fort building. When we decided we needed some mode of cooling off, we took to spraying each other down with the hose in their backyard. At some point during our cool down we decided we liked the mud we were creating with the hose, and we wanted more of it. I can’t say for sure what sparked the idea in our seven-year-old minds, but next thing I remember (to the future dismay of my neighbor’s mother) we were digging ourselves a two and a half foot mud pit in the back corner of the yard. When all was said and done we were bating in mud up to our waists, blissfully covered from head to toe, for no conceivable reason. I’ll never forget the look on my Mom’s face when my brother and I knocked on the back door looking like the survivors of some horrendous mudslide.

In The Bulldozer in the Countryside, Adam Rome quotes a passage from Margo Tupper’s No Place to Play where she talks about her daughter’s distress upon finding out that, in order to build new houses, developers would be coming to clear her favorite place to play: the local woods. Reading this passage made me think back to my childhood, where activities such as the mud pit excavation were regular occurrences for me. I vividly remember building tree houses with my cousins, riding bikes through the woods with my friends, and taking every opportunity to be outside as a kid. Looking back on my early years, it’s hard to imagine what life would’ve been like without the experiences, lessons, and distractions that nature provided me.

When I arrived at Fair Weather Farm this week Nancy put me on hay duty, which entailed loading bales of hay from the fields onto a trailer and then stacking as many of those bales as possible in the barn. Some of the hay bales were a lot heavier than they looked, making lifting and stacking the hay pretty taxing on my hands and arms. With the humidity and the heat it seemed that the hay particles and dust were permanently stuck hanging in the air, leading to uncontrollable sneezing and an extremely unpleasant itch over my entire body. Additionally, the barn acted as a sort of green house that trapped the heat and dust, exacerbating my newfound allergy to hay. Throw in profuse sweating and a dozen treacherous pitfalls between the stacks of hay we were climbing on, and I’d say it started out as a pretty unpleasant job. Yet after a few minutes of working I somehow found myself enjoying the work I was doing.

While stacking and gathering the hay, I thought back to a childhood version of myself. One who wasn’t quite so bothered by heat and humidity, who spent far more hours outside getting dirty than he did sitting in front of a laptop in the air conditioning. I picture a younger me being told he can take all the bales of hay he wants from some field to stack in a huge 150-year-old barn to climb on. Seven-year-old me digs mud pits for fun; a looming, moldable mountain of hay would provide hours of entertainment for my friends and me. In that moment I can’t say for sure whether I truly started to see the hay through the eyes of a younger me, as an entertaining and beautiful structure at my disposal, or simply felt some nostalgic joy knowing that a younger me had that sort of spirit and imagination. Either way it made the work exponentially more enjoyable.

When I got back to my apartment I realized I was dirtier than I’ve been in a while. A level of dirty that a twenty year old me took pride in as the sign of a job well done and an excuse to skip the gym that day, but a younger me would’ve seen as just another day outside playing with friends in the dirt and grass under the sky. The work I did on the farm this week definitely helped me reconnect with my inner child, and showed me values of getting dirty that I haven’t seen in a while. It made me note the differences between what was fun as a kid and what is “fun” today. I gained a new perspective from looking at things through my childish eyes this week, and I plan on continuing to do so as I spend more time on the farm.