"Are you a farmer?"

It happened during one of our Maple Weekend open house days, when hordes of people were in and out of the sugarhouse. My job during those weekends is to greet people at the door and check folks out if they want to buy maple syrup or other goodies. Somewhere during the fray of steam rising from the evaporator, people cramming into our small sugarhouse to view the action of sap being boiled, and directing my nephews on what syrup needs to be restocked on the shelf, a young boy who was very enthusiastic about being in the sugarhouse asked me in a very earnest way, "are you a farmer?"

For a few seconds I didn't know what to say. I stammered out some answer about what kinds of farming enterprises we were part of, including making maple syrup, but included the caveat that my husband worked full-time elsewhere, and then said in a not-so-confident way that yes indeed I was a farmer. But to be honest, I wasn't sure.

You see, in my mind, a farmer is someone whose main income comes from some kind of farming activity. My dad was a dairy farmer, and having grown up in a farming family, rubbing shoulders with other full-time farmers along the way, I developed an inherent respect and reverence for the art of pulling an income from some agricultural pursuit in this day and age. Even from a young age I knew it took a lot of hard work and sweat, as well as a lot of brains and ingenuity. I had a hard time placing myself in the same category as these folks who toiled day in and day out running a profitable business with live animals that died, plants that didn't grow, or customers who dropped off the radar. Folks who knew how to deal with things that went really well, almost too well, and on the flip side deal with things that went really bad and then get back up and push forward.

Life went on after that maple season. Spring came and then summer. We were milking one cow at the time, selling our raw milk out of our sugarhouse. We decided to try and expand our herd by buying another cow. One cow didn't work out and we sold her. After buying a second cow who seemed to fit in much better to our operation, she one day took sick and the vet came and gave us a diagnosis that made our hearts sink into our stomach - she had a rare form of a twisted stomach and wasn't going to make it. Another vet came out and operated on her, which was a total shot in the dark. He didn't even take any money for the operation - we think he did it just for experiment's sake. Long story short, after a week of careful nursing and lots of prayers we knew she indeed wasn't going to make it, and my husband ended up putting her down.

More time went by. We made more maple syrup. Raised our own jersey heifers and continued to milk our one cow while juggling the growing demand for our raw milk. Eventually we were milking two. We started selling our own ice cream out of the sugarhouse. We had a baby of our own and as a result went to once-a-day milking. We met lots of bumps along the way - more sick cows, chasing escaped cows with a baby in the front pack, navigating real life while needing to be home for chores and milking time. But lots of sweet times too, like walking our cows down from pasture to the barn as a family on summer sunset evenings, and good times in the sugarhouse with friends and family while the evaporator bubbled away. And as we faithfully plugged along we saw leaps in growth in our various enterprises - the maple business, raw milk business, and soap business.

Fast forward to the present. These days we are milking three dairy cows and make about 15 gallons of milk a day. Our modest maple operation of about 2,000 taps (large to some folks, small potatoes to others) produces a nice amount of maple syrup that we sell from our sugarhouse as well as wholesale. Sales out of our sugarhouse have grown and our ice cream has gained a nice little following (if you know, you know). Our raw milk business has grown too; there has been so much interest that we have had to turn people away, much to my husband's chagrin. My husband still works his full-time job. And in the midst of it all, yes, I continue to make cows milk soap and ship it all around the country and to local shops all around New Hampshire.

Just recently we took our products to sell at a weekend event a half-hour away. My husband got up at 5:00 that morning to move the pasture fence for the cows before we left for the day. We knew we would get home late that evening and have to get the cows milked before winding down for the day.

At some point during the event a young boy walked up to look at the products on our table. My daughter was riding along with me in the carrier, my husband was talking to another customer. The young boy asked a few questions about our products and then asked me, very earnestly, "are you a farmer?" To which I unhesitatingly replied, "Yes. Yes I am."