Featured Image: Sharon Brandwein
And, oh my word, it’s me…
We’ve all seen the movies, you know, the one…“Falling Inn Love,” Safe Haven,” and more recently, “The Lost Husband.” All of the aforementioned have one thing in common — the city-girl-goes-farm trope. In many cases, it’s a woman running away from a bad marriage, a dead spouse, or some other heinous life event, and apparently, the end of the earth is some farm in No Place, USA.
And the story is always the same: the main character trades her Louboutins for duck boots, her Prada handbag for an egg basket, and swaps her daily oat milk latte for fresh eggs. And with the guidance of some handsome farmhand, she becomes one with the land. Existing somewhere between a Hallmark movie and an IG story, these women rightly earned our collective “pffttts” and eye rolls.
I was part of that eye-rolling crowd, but one day, while chasing Lady Eggcellence back into the coop (and in circles, mind you), it hit me. I’m the city-girl-goes-farm trope IRL. (Insert unamused face here.)
For a little backstory, I grew up in NY — concrete as far as the eye can see. In my late teens and early 20s, I attended the Fashion Institute of Technology with dreams of a Devil Wears Prada-esque lifestyle. I worked in NYC for years, hailing cabs, wearing black, and never, ever giving in to flats…
Fast forward 20-ish years, and my life (and wardrobe) looks very different.
I am that trope. But not in the way you’re picturing, I have yet to stand in my garden tossing wildflower seeds from my skirt, although I’m fairly certain my husband would pay good money to see that, and my entrance into farm life has been anything but graceful.
More often than not, I find myself negotiating with a flock of chickens who are only interested when I come bearing worms, and herding them into the coop feels less like pastoral bliss and more like Lord of the Dance gone wrong. They scatter. I panic. There’s flapping. There’s cussing (me, not the chickens). And none of it is dignified.
And don’t even get me started on the sheep. One day, when we were swapping pastures for the donkeys and sheep, my job was to keep the sheep and lambs away from the donkeys. It started well enough — I stood at the ready, hands wide (picture Chris Pratt in Jurassic Park with the raptors). Everything was fine until one of the ewes decided she had had enough. She took off running out of the pasture, and apparently, all the other sheep understood the assignment. My house of cards collapsed quickly. And if memory serves me correctly, I could only scream “oh no!” and run after them (lord knows there was no way I was getting ahead of them) while trying not to pee on myself.
My husband (you know, the good-looking love interest), meanwhile, always seems to step in like some kind of livestock whisperer. Calm. Efficient. Maybe even a little smug at times. He moves his arms twice, and the chickens fall into formation like they’ve signed some sort of contract. He’s fast enough to catch up with the sheep (or at least get close), and he handles this farm with complete confidence and aptitude to match.
Watching him, you’d think he was raised in a barn. Watching me, you’d probably just shake your head.
Ten months in, I’m still learning because it seems this farm has a lot to teach.
This week, I’ll be replanting seeds that didn’t germinate the first time because apparently, farming has no interest in my expectations. I’ll be hauling buckets of chicken poop to the compost pile, which is exactly as glamorous as it sounds (no slow-motion montages for that), and I’m sure I’ll be nursing some kind of pain or muscle ache. Don’t even get me started on the condition of my hands and nails — it’s a situation…
The truth is, this life isn’t “soft-focus and whimsical.” It’s gritty. It’s repetitive. It’s a whole lot of doing things over — sometimes immediately after you just did them. It’s shoveling poop for the millionth time, it’s rigging up a makeshift shelter for new lambs on the one snow day we had (because why wouldn’t they make their first appearance in bad weather?). And it’s burying a dead chicken in the compost pile because that’s what happens on a farm.
There are no OODs here. I tried to be cute once, but I only managed to fall off a moving side-by-side and ruin one of my favorite yoga pants (and bruise a rib). The farm doesn’t care about aesthetics, guys.
For all the ways this lifestyle is romanticized and oversimplified online and in movies, what it actually requires is something much less photogenic: generous helpings of grit and gumption — the kind that shows up when things don’t work the first time. Or the second. The kind that keeps you moving when the job is messy, inconvenient, or just plain exhausting.
And that’s the real story of the city girl on the farm. Love story aside (I got the handsome guy, and we’ve been married for 20 years), this wasn’t a transformation into some effortless, earth-toned version of myself. Instead, it’s the slow (and sometimes awkward) process of learning how to keep up.
Weather, animals, timing—none of it bends to your will. It’s failing, adjusting, and trying again, trading perfection for persistence on the daily.
I’ve gotten better at herding my chickens (shake some scratch at them, and they come running), but I may never be able to keep up with runaway sheep, and that’s ok. But I show up every day—boots muddy, hands full, expectations checked at the gate. And I’ll continue to do so because it’s so very rewarding. Opening the nest boxes to find a dozen eggs waiting for me, Sophie finally letting me pet her (after six months of trying), and seeing green sprouts peek out from the dirt…there’s nothing like it.
If starting a farm isn’t a lesson in humility, I don’t know what is — but there’s no place else I’d rather be.
Click here for more stories of life in the South.
