A LITTLE LOVE STORY
Thirteen years ago, I bought a one-way ticket to Madrid, Spain, my favorite city. There’s something about Madrid that is absolutely captivating and charming. The city is very walkable, the sky is always the most-gorgeous shade of sky blue, and it is so clean. The general aura of life feels calm, slower, and connected…imagine a group of friends, colleagues, families sharing a beverage and a tapa outdoors routinely…a beautiful way to engage in outdoor space.
I bought a one-way ticket to Madrid because I knew what I was getting into. As a sophomore in college, I studied abroad for an entire year there with my best friend. Going there again to complete my masters was a no brainer. I fell in love with the ease of life there—shopping at small specialty stores for my pan, carne, and pescado. Forming a friendship with the frutero who took my orders daily about which vegetables and fruits I wanted. Growing up, I always felt a strong sense of connection to the European lifestyle. This had a lot to do with my parents, particularly my father who is Polish and emigrated to the United States in 1980. As a child we spent a lot of time traveling and exploring—seeing different places, trying new foods, engaging with traditions and cultures from around the world.
So I bought a one-way ticket to Madrid—and about 6 months before my scheduled departure, I met Jeremiah.
“I think you guys would be great together,” a mutual friend told me before a casual group hangout. Today, I’m so glad she set the two of us up—but at the time, I really didn’t want to be bothered.
I had experienced a long-distance relationship before and I wasn’t looking to do that again. I didn’t want to be held back while abroad. I wanted to learn, grow, and maybe find a Spanish man to marry…
But as you’d expect now reading this, Jeremiah and I really hit it off. We enjoyed each other’s company. We had a lot of fun. But in my mind, it was just a fling. Emotionally, I was guarded.
He, however...was not.
“I love you,” he said to me two weeks after we met. I smiled at Jeremiah. “No, you don’t,” I replied.
And so the story goes
We continued our individual paths—me in Madrid living the European lifestyle I dreamed of, studying and speaking Spanish while Jeremiah farmed and worked in New Hampshire—but we wrote to each other constantly. Email threads back and forth until it was just too much to bear. We realized after about 3 months that being separated wasn’t an option so we figured out how to be together. Not even the ocean could keep us apart. And then together, we started dreaming about the life we currently live.
It sounds sort of poetic, but it’s not meant to. Lots of people have dreams and aspirations, but when we dreamed—we shared our dreams. We wrote our dreams in notebooks and talked ad nauseam about what our future was going to be like. We told our closest friends and family about what we wanted—a farm, a farm store, land to share with the community.
Sometimes when you share your dreams, the people listening clearly doubt you. They don’t say it out loud, but you can tell by their body language, their questions. For us, this was just another reason to get it done.
“We want to find farmland in the same district as Nicole works,” we would say. “Farmland on the Seacoast? Farmland in SAU16? Good luck,” we’d hear.
But we kept talking openly about our ideas, and we would try to manifest what we dreamed. We talked about it like it was going to happen and slowly, it started happening. We saw our hard work start to pay off.
But before VFF had its name, before it became what it is today, Jeremiah and I were both separately admiring this land.
Jeremiah would admire the land from the road, on his commute to Riverslea Farm. He drove down Piscassic Road almost every day and would often stop to see it closer, beginning to imagine our future there.
I admired the land while running through it. I was coaching the women’s XC team at the time and I would run with them in the woods, down the trail that abutted the fields. Then I would go home and describe it to Jeremiah.
We realized we had both been daydreaming and falling in love with the same place, the same fields—the exact same slice of heaven—our future family farm.
Fast forward 13 years
We have a thriving pastured livestock farm where we raise pastured, non-GMO chicken, lamb, and cows. We host family-friendly events on the land, and our farm store is a one-stop-shop that carries meat, poultry, seafood, eggs, dairy, fruits, vegetables, and dry goods from over 30 local vendors and makers, open daily, year-round.
This farm has incorporated and continues to incorporate pieces of Madrid that I never thought I’d have here in NH. I step outside in the morning and the sky is the most beautiful shade of sky blue. Even with the hustle of farming life, the farm feels calm, slower, connected. Every Friday, I see groups of friends, colleagues, families sharing a beverage and a meal outdoors in the space we worked so hard to create.
