![]() ![]() ![]() Other years brought alfalfa, sweet potatoes, hundreds of sheep whose eerie bleating I’d hear winter mornings crying through the fog. Some seasons we’d watch fifty acres of his corn fatten on their stalks. ![]() ![]() Our house, which sat on a modest plot, faced a wide expanse of land whose wealthy owner rotated crops. Saddled between Bakersfield and Fresno, I grew up on a scantly populated, two-lane road several miles from town in a county where agriculture remains the economic lifeblood: milk and cream, pistachios, raisins, cattle and calves, strawberries, citrus, lettuce, and-when I was younger-cotton, and walnuts. Seductive as it is-with promises of “beds of Roses / a thousand fragrant posies, / A gown made of the finest wool / Which from our pretty Lamb we pull”-part of me resists, has always resisted, Christopher Marlowe’s sixteenth-century charge to “come live with me and be my love.” This aversion, however, is less about the hypnotic ventriloquizing of Marlowe’s passionate shepherd or his spirited assurances of those pleasures yielded by “valleys, groves, hills, and fields” than poetic convention itself that is, the pastoral’s idealization of rural life and labor, which has always seemed a far cry from the wrought sounds of soil preparation, piping, aeration, planting, irrigation, clipping, spraying, weeding, and picking that pervaded my childhood and adolescence in Central California. ![]()
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