Mus Urbanus -> Mus Rusticus

Yesterday morning we packed up the car and I made the 7 hour drive from Brooklyn to Ohio. Shelly and Rheinhart took a flight in the afternoon and we all arrived at my parents' place just outside of Kent around 4:30 in the afternoon. Hence, the title of this entry: Mus Urbanus ("City Mouse") -> Mus Rusticus ("Country Mouse").

The title of the entire blog is simply Mus Rusticus because for the next 2+ months I'll be here in the Ohio countryside (far away from the magna urbs - New York), and once a week I'll be working at the Lucky Penny Farm in rural Portage County and, from time-to-time, at the farm's creamery in town. Shelly will be interning at the farm and creamery too--but for five days a week (while I look after Hart!).

Our objective? To learn how to make cheese. But along the way, we'd both like to find out what the hard work of farming is really like...

The strangest thing about this experience for me (as it begins, at least) is that in the 18 or so years that I grew up here, I never paid any mind to what goes on in the surrounding farmland. To be honest, I wanted nothing to do with the parts of Portage County outside of Kent. But after college I moved to the city and I began to think more about the food I eat. Where does it come from? What's in it? Is it safe and healthy enough to share with my son? And one of the many corollaries of these thoughts was that I should see for myself what "farm-to-table" really means.

Hopefully, I'll figure out what it means in this blog, where I'm going to share anecdotes about my trials and bloopers on the farm. But I can't forget that my job as a Latin teacher back in the city is what gives me the freedom and means to move to the country for a little while. So I'm also going to work in a bit of Latin: each week I'll be reading a little from the Georgics, Vergil's poem about farming. If I'm lucky, I'll make some meaningful connections between the verses in the four books of his "most polished masterpiece" and the real everyday experience of laboring on a farm. We'll see if my

hoe is ever ready to assail the weeds,
[my] voice to terrify the birds,
[my] knife to check the shade over the darkened land,
and [my] prayers to invoke the rain...

(Translation of I.155-157 by H. Rushton Fairclough).