Les fondateurs

Ever felt like something just doesn’t belong? The world can occasionally make us feel out of place in our own lives, but sometimes being the odd one out brings more joy than you may think. When I told my mother I was leaving my pretty Brooklyn apartment to go live in a tent as a farming apprentice in Santa Cruz, I can’t say she was surprised. I was her black sheep daughter after all: the feisty, opinionated youngest of three girls, the adventurer, the wanderer, the one with good stories instead of a mortgage, books instead of babies. Her address book was full of my co stantly changing whereaboutsSan Francisco, Italy, New York scratched out in ink, scribbled in pencil, then finally jotted on Post-it notes stuck between the pages.

The East Coast suburbanites I grew up with would rather go to their beloved ballet naked than forgo a firm mattress and a decent thread count. So my willingness to do so for a six-month stretch must have provided much mirth to the whole extended clan. In their defense, this was seven years ago when “farm to table” hadn’t caught on yet, and only a handful of people outside of Bolivia knew how to correctly pronounce quinoa, much less eat it for breakfast.

Then again, this kind of disruption and amusement is what families depend on their resident black sheep to provide. And why not? This unpredictable life, while sometimes precarious, is never boring. Hurtling down the road that others passup, living out the vicarious fantasies of the stay-at-homes, we find joy in the sheer velocity, in the novelty of the unknown, sending back our stories scrawled on postcards, in letters with exotic stamps and emails tapped out over connections hat flicker in and out as monsoon rains pound down.