On Sisters and Sistering
Considerations from Sarah, Spring Equinox 2022
A few months ago when the first grass was starting to grow in that weird warm winter, Anna looked out over the fields just starting to turn green and shook her head. “Spring is wild, man,” she said. “I look at all this and I see that the grass is green and I’m excited. I’m like, hyped. But then I remind myself, it’s NOT AS GREEN as it will be in spring!” She shook her hands around. I said, “Okay.”
And now it’s spring. The grass is as green as it will ever be.
Most of you know Anna. She’s the one with the cute farming clothes, the trendy glasses, usually holding a clipboard. Anna is my little sister, the joke always being that she’s also my older sister, the one who speaks a little more clearly, organizes a little more thoroughly. If given the chance, my dad will tell you the story of how four-year-old Anna would take eight-year-old me to the bathroom in restaurants when I was scared to go alone. That has sort of set the tone for our relationship. Our childhood felt like a joint effort, an act of co-creation, in which we constructed whole worlds and lived within them, established rules—we drew a line down the middle of our bedroom; Anna had the closet, so she could get dressed, but I had the door, so I could leave—and edged our way into the world together.
A moment here to appreciate our brother Isaac, who is seven years older than me and who made me laugh before anyone else could, took each of us on whole-day excursions for our birthdays, and whose face Anna once maliciously gouged while he was taking a nap. He also shaped my childhood, but from his own world, with his own ways of becoming.
Then we went our separate ways and didn’t live in the same town and rarely the same state after I left for college. There were long stretches of time when we didn’t talk much at all and were pursuing very different lives, though I retained the sense that being and having a sister in this world meant there was a person out there who was her own person, sure, not me, but not entirely not me. I don’t think either of us expected to end up here in this same moment in our lives, on this land together, starting a business, trying to co-create a farm. But somehow we both became farmers, and learned we could not farm alone, and, as each of us happened to have a sister who was also a farmer, we couldn’t help but try.
I have to remind myself almost every day that people have been working with their siblings for thousands of years. Especially farmers. It often feels like such a wild thing to be doing, that we are supposed to be more differentiated from each other, living far apart and seeing each other at holidays, which we did for many years. Sometimes I mourn that friendship, the special occasion-ness of it, the endless talking and laughter, and worry that I will never look forward to hanging out with Anna again. In its place, we have a new sisterhood, one in which we necessarily spend an enormous amount of time together and make countless tiny decisions everyday. We are witness to every excruciating turn of one another’s emotions and decision-making processes (mine) and work habits (hers. I don’t really have work habits so much as I stumble around and sometimes happen to find myself working).
I thought it would be easy to transition to working together, since the line between my brain and Anna’s brain has always felt thin to me. With so much shared experience and patterning, I imagine myself having more access to her brain than to other brains, or rather, I allow her more access to mine and expect her to understand it. Of course, it has been much harder than either of us expected. I’ve learned that Anna is more deeply logical than I ever knew, though I’ve also watched how her emotions work, the way she won’t really empathize with my little personal dramas but will be brought to tears just thinking about the grand scale of human suffering. The sense I had of my sister as the more rational, competent version of me—the me if I worked harder and if my feelings were a little more contained—has been altered. I’ve learned that this is not how Anna sees sisterhood, and that indeed this is not what sisterhood is. We are not different versions of each other, but whole and different people. We care about similar things, but have very different methods of getting to them. Anna’s not the more logical presentation of the same emotional processes I go through; she’s having entirely different processes. This sounds utterly obvious, I know, but to me it is embarrassingly new and profound.
But it is still true that part of how it feels to have a sister is to never be entirely alone. Even, perhaps, when Anna wants to feel exactly entirely alone. Already as an eight-year-old, she was always wandering away to look at grass and sheep by herself, carving out aloneness wherever she could. She didn’t mind having the side of the room with the closet and no door; she loved to hang out for hours in the closet to escape from the rest of us. Still today, the degree of confidence she has to take on projects mostly alone—namely, a flock of sheep that requires constant vigilance and attention and physical wrangling—utterly astounds me. But I also wonder—hope?---if she’s able to have that confidence because she knows ultimately that she is never entirely alone.
Do you know Anna? Do you know how hard she works? Do you know how much she knows about grass? How obsessed she is with the sun? “I’m just not sure people really get how great the sun is,” she has said, more than once, and I wonder if maybe I don’t really get how great the sun is.
No farming project can be carried out entirely alone. There are people who farm mostly alone and do so beautifully, but there is going to be that day when you need another pair of hands to move a table, and so many days when a decision is too complicated for one brain to make. A year ago I was sure that I never wanted to make a farming decision alone, and this season has shown me how exhausted I become if I can’t work autonomously at least part of the time. But there will always be some decisions that must be communal, because this land is entirely too precious for even one acre of its care to be entrusted to a single human brain.
And yet, there are so few good models for how to farm, work, live in partnership or in community well. The popular model is to farm within a marriage, which is burdened with a power structure that isn’t easy to escape. I have tried and failed to farm with a romantic partner, and couldn’t manage to escape my own gendered assumptions about what that kind of farming should look like. Those power structures are perhaps beginning to loosen, both within me and at large, but its slow work. In the meantime, I live in deep gratitude that my sister is also a farmer and willing to enter into this project with me, that I have another structure with less rigidity around it, more of an ability for both of us to show up with our full selves to work, more room to construct anew what a day, a week, a season looks like.
I recently listened to adrienne marie brown describe siblinghood in the podcast she hosts with her sister Autumn, How to Survive the End of the World. She said:
In my life, I was gifted with two blood sisters, and then I have chosen additional sisters...I have gathered and gathered, because it's, to me, one of the most sacred forms of relationship, where you're saying, we are in a peer relationship, really, we're within a few years of each other, we share these experiences. If there was trauma in our family, we probably share it. If there was privilege in our family, we probably share it. And so balancing between healing and relinquishing, you know, unjust power and all of that, it’s shared, we have to figure it out together.
These reflections came after a series of interviews adrienne and Autumn had done with siblings of all ages and from across different kinds of Black liberation work who had worked together or adjacent in movement for decades. I don’t want to compare growing vegetables in an extremely white and well-resourced context to deep social justice work, but her words on sisterhood landed squarely in my heart. Sisterhood’s history is long and rich and laid mostly by Black women, who have always known that this world demands new and better relationships than are offered. But all of us need so much more than the thin veil of community that we are currently making do with. Single people know this, parents know this. Community is no joke and is the hardest work there is, encompassing all kinds of relationships: mentors, parents, children, lovers, spouses. Many of those relationships are entrenched in power dynamics that are nearly impossible to extricate ourselves from. So it is the peerness of sisterhood that gives me the most hope.
In sisterhood I can show up a mess and still be taken seriously. (“Sometimes I marvel at the human body and how incredibly it all functions together and runs so well,” Anna said recently, “and then sometimes I choke on my own spit.”) In sisterhood I can be indecisive, contradictory, confused, and while all of this will certainly annoy Anna to no end, her respect for me doesn’t wane or her trust in my work waver. She’s just annoyed, and that’s ok. I’m annoying. I move slowly after lunch and delay going back to work so I can make a cup of tea. Anna, bustling off to set up farmstand, is always trying to find new ways to make me move faster. “Digesting is great,” she said, “but not being rushed to set up is better.” When I do move quickly, it’s usually because I’ve suddenly decided that something needs to get done that’s entirely outside of the week’s plan, and Anna’s poor laboriously planned brain explodes.
We do not get along all day every day; we rarely get along for more than a half hour at a time. But no one’s expecting us to. We are working to make the decision-making less laborious and inefficient, to have separate spheres and be more autonomous within them, to be quicker with our meetings, to give each other the space to work the way we work. All of this will help, but the fundamental truth of sisterhood is that there is no power script. Anna will often feel like I have more power because I’m older and I’ll often feel like Anna has more power because of her sheer competence, but in the end, there is no structure we’ve inherited for how it should look to be in business and on land together. The tremendous relief I feel because of this can’t be overstated.
The deepest truth of sistering and the one that gives me the most hope and comfort, is that it is not exclusive. The great fortune of sisterhood is that it is so much greater than blood. Sisterhood to me is any deep platonic and specifically peer relationship with the sole purpose of helping one another through, hopefully with joy along the way. As Alexis Pauline Gumbs writes, “Sistering begets more sisters and mothers, and fathers and brothers. The chosen and given families of sisters in practice become family across and through the sistering.” Small farms have a tendency to cultivate these relationships, which I think is why many folks are drawn to them, and I feel the sisterhood around this farm growing.
Kate Beilharz, our first and only employee, joined us this season at the point when Anna and I had utterly exhausted the amount of interaction we could sustain. Kate and Anna know how to work together; they’ve worked together for years. Kate is also a sister, not just ours through farming but to her own three siblings, who grew up together in a single yurt. She knows what it means to be one of a bunch, to be partly a self and partly a mirror to other selves, what it looks like to help each other through. Her careful work and attention this year, as well as her humor and patience, have made this season every bit as possible as Anna’s work and mine. She can bounce garden ideas around with Anna in a way that I cannot; she has the patience to do things right when I want to skirt around them. She remembers, crucially, to bring a water bottle into the field.
Kate is not the only one who has helped to sister this farm into being, of course. Our housemates Kris and Katie work every week, have done endless weeding, harvesting, and fencing, and Kris is ensuring that our new greenhouse actually gets built right. Our other housemate Scot has worked occasionally with us as well, and our household rotates through cooking for each other every night, a gift that I do not underestimate. “This is what I know,” writes Gumbs, “Sistering requires food. It requires specific intentional foods that support our spirits.”
Other farmers have been so deeply generous it astounds me: our neighbor Scotty from the former Laguna Farm let us tap into his irrigation line and lease cooler space, and David and Kayta at West County Community Farm have offered us endless support and guidance. Our friend Brittany came over to help wrestle plastic over a hoop house on a windy afternoon. Our sweet mom Ellen takes care of half our flock of sheep, diligently feeding and closing them into their barn every night. There are more and others. There is every single one of our CSA members who took a chance signing up for our first season. What I mean is: there are a lot of hands in this, and the relationships that are built are not just friendships, but relationships grounded in tangible action, in labor, in mutual support, and helping each other through. The section of the Alexis Pauline Gumbs essay I’ve quoted is titled “Sister is a Verb,” which is from a quote by the writer and activist Toni Cade Bambara. It’s stunning in its simplicity. Sisterhood is built by action, not by biology. Gumbs writes:
What is sistering? When is it happening? What is the freedom and accountability that accrues when “sister” is not just a static identity that you have but is something you do or don’t do, with consequences. What happens when I apply that to all of my relationships? What happens if we replace the roles patriarchy has scripted us into with actions guided by what we want to create instead?
Kate and Anna planting spring brassicas
For me this grounding of relationship in action creates a kind of love that is for the entire community and the earth itself as much as for individual people. I think this is the way Anna loves. She loves the sun and her sheep and potentially the entire population of the planet every bit as she loves me or you. It feels deep and stable, unswayed by mood or personality. The world feels so often in crisis now, and so much must change. We need to live and farm and consume and organize differently than we ever have. All of that will have to be rooted in new ways of understanding how we care for each other. “If we want to have a revolution,” Alexis Pauline Gumbs writes, “we have to craft revolutionary relationships, in action, not simply in rhetoric.” How can we offer each other new and different models for what community care looks like? How can we include more and more in how we define community at all?
Anna and I agonized over the name of this farm. “Winter Belly Farm” was on the table, as was “Dozing Dog Farm” (I thought it would be a fun way to use our last name. I was wrong). We scavenged through winter-related names and toyed with sister-related names, but it wasn’t until I was parading through options on the phone with a friend (shout out to my writing sister Jules Ohman, whose beautiful novel Body Grammar comes out in June and I encourage everyone to pre-order it right now, right here), when she said, “I mean, what about just something simple, like Winter Sister Farm?” Somehow those two words hadn’t quite landed right next to each other yet. They sounded good.
It felt immediately important that “Sister” be singular. “Winter Sisters Farm,” which plenty of folks mistakenly refer to us by, directly links the farm to the sisters doing the farming. Aside from the sheer jarring sound of it, it feels wrong to me because not only do I not want Anna and I to be the only ones farming here, I don’t even necessarily see the “sister” in our farm name as being only about the farmers. Our farm is sister to and sistered by other farms, other hands, winter itself. We are the sister of winter, as winter is sister to summer. If animals are husbanded through their lives, then this farm and this land is sistered in a deep peer relationship of love and respect and humility. Gumbs writes, “the possibilities of our living shift directly in relationship to the rigor of our loving. Love the people. Love ourselves. Love each other. Love the possible into being.”
Today is the first day of spring, when it feels most possible to love anything into being. Happy equinox, everyone. I love you.
- Sarah
Works Cited:
brown, adrienne marie and Autumn. “Sibling Miniseries Finale.” How to Survive the End of the World, produced and edited by Zak Rosen. February 9, 2022.
Gumbs, Alexis Pauline. “The Sweetness of Salt.” Pleasure Activism edited by adrienne marie brown. AK Press, 2019.
