I have spent this past month off of social media, aside from the occasional peek into Instagram on desktop and a frankly shameful reliance on Facebook’s mobile site (not the app). The latter I have tried to curate as solely Buy Nothing, plant ID, century-old rowhome repair, and fat fashion groups, but the Chrome extension I use to filter out the ads, suggested posts, and other garbage doesn’t work on the mobile site. With my food and fiber arts and farming interests, I am served a sea of tradwife-adjacent content like this as I try to give away an old dresser or find a roofer to fix my skylight:
OK, I do most of these, but I’m pretty sure we have different reasons for not trusting the government
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I began taking a social media break each June as a birthday gift to myself, and this year, it’s hard to see myself going back. So far in June, I have read 7 books—approximately 7 times more than usual—and have enjoyed feeling enriched rather than hollowed out by the words I’m putting into my brain for hours each day.
When I don’t look at social media, I’m not goaded into feeling bad about myself by seeing other people having a nice time on Instagram. I’m not in a perpetual clench due to the deluge of bad news and takes on BlueSky, a platform I never really used but subbed as scroll fodder when Twitter became unusable. Over the weekend, I spent my time gardening, making ceramics, and hanging out with my friends at book club. I remaining blissfully ignorant that the US had, while I was living my life, bombed Iran until I pulled up the homepage of my city’s newspaper on Monday morning.
I don’t feel great about how easy it can be to insulate yourself from bad news or other truths you don’t want to hear, though keeping some distance feels healthier than monitoring social media 24/7, which ratchets my hypervigilance into overdrive. I do feel a bit like I’m missing out on what my IRL friends and internet friends are doing when I don’t use Instagram, and I sort of feel like I don’t exist when I don’t share I’m doing with the .1% of my followers who actually see my posts. I reached something like a life goal the other day when I harvested blueberries I grew on my front stoop into a ceramic bowl I made myself—but did it even matter if no one was around to like it? (Yes.)
Then again, aside from the dozens of cat pictures I take each day, I haven’t been “documenting” life with my phone as much. Part of the trick to quitting, or seriously curbing your use of, social media is grayscaling your display to make whatever’s on the screen look boring. A side effect of this is that you’re generally less interested in taking pictures as well as looking at them, and when you do snap a pic, it’s hard to tell how well it came out.
Delicious yet out-of-focus blueberries
The berries might not be in focus, but it does capture what was a lovely vibe.
As my brain has been able to breathe a little during this time, I have felt moved to write, but very little capacity to actually do so—despite no dearth of relevant topics both positive (attending the Meeting of the Milkmaids last month, filing copy for a couple of upcoming Culture articles) and infuriating (climate.gov being basically shut down, literally everything else). 2025 has been rough for me in many different domains, as my therapist would call them, and it honestly feels like an achievement to work and feed myself and maintain some semblance of hygiene and stay on top of basic adult tasks. It doesn’t help that I write for a living, and often, the last thing I want to do at the end of a long day is more tap-tap in front of a screen.
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But I have been doing lots of reading. Today, I’m going to share what’s been on my summer reading list this month with you. Next time, I’ll put together a list of my favorite newsletters—mostly food-centric ones, but a few others I always open, too. And hopefully by then, I’ll have the link to my latest Culture article to share.
I have shelves full of nonfiction—food systems, food histories, food memoirs—that I buy but then take forever to get to because reading them can feel like work. Barons: Money, Power, and America’s Food Industry sounds fascinating, but as bedtime reading, it’s literal nightmare fodder. So for my social media cleanse, I leaned into fiction, mostly.
I don’t follow contemporary literature as closely as I should, so choosing what to read can feel like trying to pick a perfectly sweet, juicy watermelon from a giant bin of identical duds. I pulled these together thanks to a combination of Libby’s “Available Now” search filter, some weeks-old ebook holds that fortuitously came through, and recs from friends and acquaintances.
I read Gone Girl (starts somewhat promising and then goes wildly off the misogynistic rails), Sally Rooney’s latest, Intermezzo (stream-of-consciousness sad Irish people in relationships), Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner (fun, funny novel about intergenerational trauma), a three-book collection of Raylan Givens stories and novels by Elmore Leonard (Justified hive, rise up), I’ll Look So Hot in a Coffin: And Other Thoughts I Used to Have About my Body by Carla Sosenko (deformity/disability memoir in essays), and Trust & Safety: A Novel by Laura Blackett and Eve Gleichmann (bougie, tech-obsessed Brooklyn hetero couple buy a fixer-upper in the Hudson Valley and rent an outbuilding to a local queer couple, chaos ensues). The latter would make an excellent beach/lake read.
My understanding of food storage, the cold chain, and produce itself has been deepened and transformed after listening to this book, much of it on the trip back from the Berkshires to Philly after Milkmaids. Twilley takes you from underground cold storage caves in Missouri to one of the few reefer trucks in Rwanda to precisely calibrated dry-aging rooms in NYC to Svalbard’s seed vault. Anyone who eats should read it—but it’s especially salient for food professionals of just about any stripe.
Hello. I am finally presenting my cheese and climate research in an easily accessible online format next Monday, and you are all invited.
Here are the deets:
WHAT: Cheese & Climate Change: Mitigating Impacts, Exploring Solutions, and Building Resilience Virtual Webinar & Discussion WHEN: Monday, April 21 at 8pm Eastern COST: $10 (your donation to the Daphne Zepos Teaching Endowment will support future cheese education grantees) TICKETS:Get them here!
Here’s some quick backstory: In 2023, I applied for the Daphne Zepos Research Award, a then-$2500 (now $3000) grant that supports a cheese professional in researching a topic of their choice to present to the wider industry in some kind of educational medium. I chose cheese and climate change, a massive, wide-ranging, and somewhat controversial topic, and won the award. You can read my application vision here—pretty sure I won’t get all that done by June 2026, or ever, but go big or go home, right?
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Winning this award was a huge blessing—as a freelance cheese creative who doesn’t fit neatly into a professional mold, I don’t get a lot of institutional approval or financial support, and this award was incredibly affirming that my perspective had something to offer the wider industry. It was also a curse, because I had chosen this broad yet thorny topic, and I spent the next several months driving myself nuts with research, much of which didn’t make it into the presentation I gave at the American Cheese Society conference last summer. (Spoiler alert: Some of these findings will be published here and in audio format in the near future.)
I also ran up against the limitations of the American artisan cheese industry’s conception of sustainability—saying the word “degrowth” in front of even the crunchiest small-scale cheesemakers and dairy farmers is going to provoke a knee-jerk reaction—and my limitations as a presenter to make some of these big ideas more digestible for that audience. I got a lot of positive feedback and also some pushback, which I was prepared for, and I knew I’d want to refine my messaging before presenting my research as a webinar.
But nothing about climate change is static. In the seven months since I presented my research, a lot has happened, unfortunately, that I’ve been able to add to my presentation or for us to talk about in the discussion portion of the virtual event. Flooding in Vermont, hurricanes in Western North Carolina, wildfires in Altadena.
With those events highlighting the urgency of adaptation and resilience measures in addition to climate mitigation, I had already planned on updating my webinar to focus more on those aspects of my research. But in the last three months, the federal government has gone all-in on climate change denial, slashing funding for climate research and reneging on legally binding funding contracts for climate projects with farmers and advocacy groups alike. Here in Pennsylvania, nonprofit organization Pasa had $55 million in USDA Climate Smart Commodities funding cut after they’d hired dozens of staff, many of them farmers, to help hundreds of producers throughout the Northeast with climate resilience projects.
I don’t have the answers for how to combat this in my research—if only. But these developments underscore that we are, more than ever, on our own when it comes to climate change. I don’t mean that in the toxic individualism prepper way, although it’s a good idea to plan ahead and do what you can to prepare for climate disasters most likely to affect your area. I mean that at the community level—neighborhoods, towns, cities. Within your industry or your supply chain. Thinking and talking and making plans, to the extent that you’re able, to protect ourselves and each other, to mitigate harm and suffering.
Amid all this, and everything else, we have to continue pushing back against climate denial and fascism and demanding accountability from our governments and from the fossil fuel industry. But we must also imagine new ways of existing, both to adapt to what’s coming our way as best we can and to one day leave behind the growth-at-all-costs systems that brought humanity to this existential crisis in the first place.
This hasn’t been the breezy, enticing invitation I wanted to send (or write) today. But by writing and talking about these things, maybe we can all feel a little less alone—and move through our climate anxiety to some form of acceptance that frees us from despair and paralysis and creates the space for necessary action.
Here’s that ticket link for next Monday’s webinar one more time. I’m excited to share my work and talk about these topics with you.
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March began here in the Delectable Mountains with the change from seemingly endless snow to sudden thaw to glassy, lumpy ice. I finally put micro spikes on my muck boots and have only taken them off once or twice since then. Even the goats had trouble staying upright. We put them out into the loafing yard to fork and shovel out the barn on Saturday, and even with the barrowfuls of old hay we’d laid down for traction, it was a bit of an ice rink.
I had intended at least one missive in February, but winter is always like this: January is dark, slow, takes years to pass. February speeds by—not just because it’s a short month, but because work picks back up again, people have emerged from their post-holiday haze, and the capacity for joy is simply diminished in the frigid center of winter (even more so when you’re being terrorized psychologically by the federal government).
I was expecting March in Vermont to be much like February, as I know it won’t properly feel like spring—blossoms on the trees, bare arms—up here until sometime in May. Instead, mud season kicked in, freeze and thaw cycles began, and the sap started running. I’m picking up a maple bourbon pecan pie at a nearby sugar house on Thursday, and they will be serving creemees, and this fact is single-handedly dragging me through an otherwise extra-stressful time of deadlines, meetings, goat work, and mysterious car trouble.
That plus the fact that my time here at Villa Villekulla Farm will soon come to an end. I head back south in two and a half weeks, and I’m trying to prepare mentally and emotionally for my return to real life—cats instead of goats, city instead of country, more free time but less direction in how I spend my days.
I’m also trying to figure out what habits I’ve developed here that I want to retain. Not 5 a.m. wakeups, but maybe earlier rising and bedtimes will stick. Dragging myself outdoors for physical activity in the mornings, rather than remaining inside and sedentary for as long as possible. Maybe I’ll start weightlifting? I have to haul five-gallon buckets of water to and fro three times each day, and I want to capitalize on these gains by regularly lifting heavier things than two-pound weights during virtual barre class. What else? Pulling a card each morning, meditating before I start (computer) work, doing crafts regularly (after messing up the heel turn on the second of two socks, I am in sight of finishing them before it’s too warm for wool).
Things I won’t miss? Being quite so isolated, being away from the people and places and sandwiches I love. Missing my cats, who I’m desperate to snuggle. Feeling like I’ve taken a little life detour—exploring, but not sure how much progress I’ll have made when I get back on the main road. (Honestly, I recommend taking a break from your everyday life in some way or form long enough for it to become routine if you can swing it, but I’m feeling ready for home.)
If you’ve made it this far, you deserve your reward: goat pics. After all, it’s why you opened this email. We’ll get back to topics like farm policy and cheese politics in the near future (I’m sure to learn a lot at the Science & Craft of Raw Milk Cheese Conference, happening this weekend). But that can wait.
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Here are just a few of the 40-odd goats I’ve been hanging out with up here:
The Kids
These little critters are my first stop at 6 a.m. each morning. I’m in their shed three times a day, stuffing feeders with hay and scrubbing poopy water buckets and getting filthy hoof prints all over my barn clothes, because they try to climb literally every object. They’re fun and frisky but not technically kids any more—they were born last spring—and the one striking a pose in the middle, Rodney, is pretty hefty at this point. They love hay and minerals and pets and chewing things and running around in a frenzy in response to basically any stimuli.
Puku
Each herd of goats has a strict hierarchy, with the queen at the top and the rest of the goats sorting themselves out below. Puku is the queen of this herd not only because of her personality, which has described by people who love her as both “psychotic” and “demonic,” but also because she’s the only goat with a horn, and it grew in at the perfect angle to fuck everyone else up. (She also sometimes uses it to scratch her own butthole.) When she charges forward to get the first bite of hay or lick of mineral mix, other goats race to get out of the way, swirling through the barn before her in a mini-stampede.
To be a human working among goats, you have to convince them that you’re not just another goat—that you’re an empress, above even the queen (I learned this from a free behavioral basics webinar created by Lee Hennessy of Moxie Ridge Farm). That means walking through, not around, the animals whenever possible, and basically not taking shit from them. For the first month or so I was here, though, Puku treated me like any other goat, which meant that I was getting stabbed on the regular.
After several uncomfortable bruises, and responding to her attempts on my life with a hip check (which is more like how another goat would respond), I was advised to hold my ground, yell, and give Puku a firm bop on the snout when she came for me—which to be clear, was in response to such affronts as “providing clean water” and “entering the barn.”
At first, I felt bad that I was training an animal to flinch from me through physical contact. By now, though, she has begrudgingly decided I’m not worth the trouble and humiliation of being stepped to by such an inferior creature. Sometimes, she even moves out of my way when I’m coming through with full, heavy buckets, and has refrained from inflicting any more contusions (though she has tried). I had to learn to speak her language (despotic rage) for us to coexist.
Frida
The only goat who dares to hold her own against Puku is an underdog in so many ways. Frida has a congenital hoof issue, and by the time she and Lauren, the farmer here, crossed paths, it was too late to be corrected. Plus, when she was born, she wasn’t attended to in time. In the wintry weather in which many farms plan kidding season, that can mean frostbitten ears, and hers had to be removed. But she endured, and now she thrives as the Weird Barbie of the main barn. She has also developed a particular way of communicating with humans, as we give her pain medication in a little cup of grain each morning (she is not part of the milking herd). She makes this alluring face when she sees you coming with her treat.
Mouse
Whenever I’m doing stuff in the barn, the ironically named Mouse, who just might be the biggest goat in the main barn, comes over for nuzzles and pets if I stand still for more than a few seconds. When I am feeding Frida her meds—a process that typically takes a few minutes and requires vigilance to keep other goats from snarfing up her pills—Mouse will come over and snuggle her face on my butt the entire time. Positive reinforcement against Puku’s bad vibes.
Cuddles the Dumpling Goat
With slightly stumpy legs and exceptionally rotund middle, Cuddles is up there for most adorable goat in the main barn. And although the handful of goats due to kid in May have started ballooning a bit, she is not pregnant—in fact, Cuds doesn’t get bred because her udder had to be removed due to a big ol’ tumor. As a fellow zaftig queen who recently had gigantic reproductive tumors removed, I feel a certain kinship with her.
Dudley
The preceding goats are in the main area of the barn with the more mature ladies, but Mr. Duds is in the two-year-old cohort. Due to some health issues when he was tiny, Lauren kept him indoors for a while, and he’s so human-oriented that he’s basically a giant friendly dog with hooves. He always wants pets and nuzzles when you approach.
Dudley is a wether, or castrated male. On a typical dairy farm, he would have been sold for meat or otherwise culled. Here, he gets to be a sweet goofy boy and cuddle with his sisters Pearl and Penelope.
Little Frankie
Frankie is almost three, but she’s the smallest (and fluffiest) of her cohort. Because of her gentle demeanor and wee size, she often missed out on her cohort’s twice-daily grain treat. With limited space at the feeders, she was shut out of this important snack by the larger goats.
For a while, we tried giving Frankie her own little cup of grain, which she’d nose into but never actually eat. She wanted to be at the big kids' table with everyone else! The problem was solved with the addition of a third feeder, and now she confidently stakes out a spot and holds her own against the bigger, more aggressive grain hogs. Yay for Frankie!
The Grannies
Shirley and Sylvia are two of the grannies (the third is Placer, to their left), and they are clearly communing over some gossip or shit-talking the youngsters in this sweet moment. They’re in their mid-teens and were some of Lauren’s original goats. These revered elders get a daily treat of grain and forage pellets, seeds, and a cereal-like mix called Sweet Goat to meet their unique nutritional needs, and little jackets when it’s extra chilly.
The Bucks
I have little interaction with the bucks, Elmore and Vaughan, because Lauren usually handles their care. Rutting season is over now, but for the first few months of the year, they were doing their various horny signals whenever you passed by. Vaughan is a Nubian, so he gets a jacket for warmth in the winter.
Shaggy Elmore is an Alpine, so he handles the cold just fine. Major Black Philip vibes from that one.
Want to help support these goats, many of which are retired from working life and require specialized care? You can donate here.
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Please consider donating to Mutual Aid LA, which is redistributing funds to people affected by the Eaton and Palisades fires, and to Mask Bloc LA to get respirators to those who need them.
2525 Highland Avenue seen from the sidewalk, ca. 1990s
There are two places I feel like I come from. Not the countries my family emigrated from—France and Wales on one side, Poland and Lithuania and Scotland on the other—but the places my family has called home in living memory.
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One is a sliver of Quebec between Montreal and the US border, where most of my mother’s large family still lives. The other is across the continent in southern California: Altadena, a small, unincorporated town nestled between Pasadena and the San Gabriel Valley to the south and the mountains of the Angeles National Forest to the north and east.
Dotted with orange trees and towering palms, Armenian bakeries and soul food restaurants, Altadena is where my father grew up and a place I’ve visited all my life. My grandmother Sara moved there from New York with her family in 1933 when she was five years old. With a few exceptions—college in Oakland, a few years in Florida with my paternal grandfather, a marine biologist, after which she returned alone, with two small children—she lived in the same WWI-era home for almost 90 years.
Seen from the driveway, 1941
The house on Highland Avenue was a sand-colored, single-story Craftsman in a sea of green. A steep staircase to an upstairs room had been added on at some point, and a dark, dusty garage crammed with old tools sat at one end of the long, narrow driveway. There was a shady porch, large, heavy doors, and original features like built-in shelving and star-patterned linoleum in many of the rooms. But it was the gardens, where fruit and flowers seemed to flourish without effort, that always fascinated me.
A massive camellia, an orange tree, and a feijoa tree in the front edged a sprawling lawn of stiff, scrubs-green grass. The spindly palm at the curb was the tallest on the block. The backyard bore tangerines, walnuts, kumquats, Bearss limes, lemons, more oranges, and white grapefruits, which collected on the shady ground below in heaps, molding fuzzy blue and green.
View of wisteria vine from the back porch, 2021
There were two towering avocado trees, plus rose bushes, patches of calendula and violets, and an ancient, gnarled wisteria vine shading the back porch. For years after my parents settled on the East Coast in the ’90s, Grandma would pull out her picking pole and laundry basket to harvest the scaly avocados, wrap each in newspaper, and ship them across the country for us to mash on toast with salt, pepper, and lemon juice.
I was nine when my parents and I left California to follow my dad’s job to North Carolina. We visited Grandma’s house at Christmas or summertime most years when I was a kid and a teen. When my partner and I began visiting my grandmother on our own around 2015, I hadn’t been to California in several years; I was a broke college student, then a broke twentysomething.
Because my visits were mediated through my grandmother’s or my father’s experiences and landmarks and routines, stopping by the same old haunts and old friends’ houses every visit, and because the house on Highland stayed the same from year to year, Altadena could seem unchanged when seen for a week or two at a time over decades.
The living room, 2021
The drugstore where my father worked as a delivery boy, Webster’s, was still there. Businesses that had stood since the ’60s still displayed their original signage. The cute little bungalows and Spanish-style ranchitas and sprawling mansions built in the first half of the 20th century gave the place a distinct character. Despite the forces of gentrification and skyrocketing housing costs, Altadena was still home to many working class and middle-class families—notably, it was one of the few places in the LA area where Black families could purchase homes in the days of racist redlining.
But gradually, the economic forces that had long shaped the entire region became more apparent, more visible. Home values had soared. New neighbors moved in: Disney executives, UCLA professors, and mid- to low-level celebrities you may have actually heard of—Mandy Moore, Maria Bamford.
Coffee shops and smoothie places popped up among the longstanding Mexican restaurants and thrift shops. A wood-fired pizza and natural wine spot opened up at the corner of Lake and Altadena, and bougie young families flocked to the oyster shuckers and arepa trucks at the weekly farmers’ market in a nearby park. As these markers of gentrification multiplied and the socioeconomic status of each wave of new residents became wealthier, my grandmother scoffed, bemused at the idea that people would be willing to pay so much to live in the place she thought she’d never leave.
When I was a kid in California, we were warned more about earthquakes than fires. Whenever there were fire warnings in the mountains above her home, Grandma would wave them off—the flames never came that far down the foothills, she’d say. In 2020, when the Bobcat Fire put my grandmother’s street one zone away from mandatory evacuation, I asked my dad what the plan was. There wasn’t one, aside from hoping the able-bodied neighbors who kept tabs on her would have space in the car and presence of mind to get her out.
My parents, in their retirement, had wanted to move out there with her, to return to the California where they met in the early ’80s, when they lived by the beach and sold encyclopedias door to door. We all envisioned keeping the house on Highland in the family. When my nephews were born in North Carolina, that plan changed. Grandma was still hanging in there, getting around okay with help from neighbors and rides to Trader Joe’s from friends, despite her poor hearing and low vision. After all, Great Grandma lived to be 101 and a half, as she often reminded us.
So her children waited. Grandma didn’t want to leave, and they didn’t want to go. And no one thought the flames would ever come that close.
Grandma on the patio, 1990s
The decision the family had refused to make was made for us. In 2021, my grandmother broke her hip. She tripped on the dangling electrical cord from the device she used to brighten and enlarge documents, an analog contraption that looked a bit like an old-timey overhead projector. It had been in that same spot for years.
My dad and his brother flew out to transition her from hospital to rehab to assisted living. By the following year, it was determined that the retirement savings her second husband had left her were running low, and the house that had been in our family for nearly a century would have to be sold.
Family members took items that held monetary or sentimental value. I received a TV my grandma never watched, a cedar chest full of wool blankets, a cracked ceramic mixing bowl, and a handmade wooden dresser given to my suffragette great-grandmother by Eleanor Roosevelt.
The rest was sold off in an estate sale. My dad sent me a video promoting the sale, showing an unrecognizable living room heaped with a century’s worth of possessions, grouped by item into piles of teacups, tchotchkes, cookware. I couldn’t watch for long. I didn’t want to see a life, generations of a family, a place that maybe could have kept my grandmother more lucid, content, even happy had she been able to continue aging in place, prepared to be picked over by resellers. To see a place that had been such a constant in my and my family’s life since before any of us were born become unfamiliar and strange.
Screenshot of the living room, 2023
There would be no more visits to Altadena. No hikes in Eaton Canyon or strolls up and down the steep 6% grade of Highland Avenue with my grandmother. No more avocados.
The house sold for a $1.85 million—an unimaginable sum to me and most people I know, but not for the LA housing market, especially if you work in entertainment. The person who bought it was the DJ and producer Madlib. You know who he is if you’ve even casually followed rap music over the last few decades; if not, trust that he’s an icon. Selling your grandma’s house to some form of celebrity is, I suppose, an everyday occurrence in Southern California.
This was, all things considered, a best case scenario. My grandmother could pay for her assisted living facility with the proceeds after closing costs and taxes and fees. Whatever’s left will go to my dad and uncle, and if anything remains when they’re gone, it’ll trickle its way down to me and my sister and my cousins. Isn’t that how the American dream of homeownership is supposed to work?
Still, there was grief in letting go of a place that held such value as a piece of family history, as a tie connecting the family to California, as a reminder of our respective childhoods, as a sunny and unchanging constant in our lives, not just a financial asset. Now a new family would make a home there. We’d have the peace of mind that Grandma was taken care of and maybe some inherited wealth and a fun fact to share about the whole thing. Wasn’t it crazy that Madlib would be making beats in the basement where my father and uncle had band practice with their high school buddies?
Now Altadena as any of us knew it is gone. My grandmother has outlived her hometown. I saw a satellite map of the fires, which someone had overlaid with street names. The fifth house down on Highland Avenue, west side of the street, where multiple generations of my family had called home, was just one in a line of small red embers. A neighbor shared a video with one of my dad’s childhood friends, showing the footprints where houses once stood, flattened to gray, smoldering rubble, but it didn’t show Grandma’s house. We knew there was no way it could have survived. There were stories of houses that did, and of people who died, garden hoses in hand, trying and failing to save the homes they’d lived in for decades.
Screenshot, 2025
We got confirmation in the form of a since-deleted Instagram post, taken from somewhere around the southwest corner of the house that was my grandmother’s bedroom. The orange and feijoa are charred and leafless. The palm, a headless twig in the background of the image, is still standing. No word on the avocado trees.
It’s not just my grandmother’s house that’s gone. It’s the entire community where she lived for almost a century, where my father grew up, where thousands of people lived and worked and went to school and church and the store and everything else. The Eaton Fire consumed much of the foothill town, destroying more than 9,000 homes in Altadena and Pasadena and killing 17 people there—deaths that could have been avoided if residents in the working-class neighborhoods on the other side of Lake Avenue had been told to evacuate in time.
Our family grieved when we had to sell the house. My dad and uncle lost their childhood home. My grandmother lost one of the last things that still made her who she was, the place she knew by heart. I lost the closest thing I had to a real place, not an abstract foreign past, where her old stories could feel real. The place I’d first marveled at trees laden with fruit, the idea that food could be so abundant as to be unremarkable, plucked from the branch or gathered from the ground on a whim. But at least we had the chance to say goodbye.
Our family was lucky, if luck can be said to exist in the time of climate change. Our intangible, emotional losses were balanced by a tangible financial benefit. We’d gotten out while we could. The house had been sold. Grandma wasn’t there—she almost certainly wouldn’t have survived. We hadn’t had the most valuable thing anyone in the family owned—shelter, safety, history, memories—turn to ash overnight.
The fire brought on a new wave of grief, one that feels crass to write about in light of what so many people have lost in the fires. Homes and jobs and everything they owned and loved ones and lives.
By now, I’m used to watching disasters unfold secondhand through my phone, through friends or relatives or strangers on social media more than through news outlets. Small farms in Vermont inundated by floodwaters during peak harvest season. Businesses in Florida cataloging the damage after hurricanes. People sharing photos of mountain towns just washed away, posting about which on-the-ground mutual aid groups or community-led recovery initiatives to Venmo.
The fire that burned Altadena combined that suppressed panic and empathy and powerlessness with echoes of a deeply personal loss and some dilute form of survivor’s guilt. It’s a new kind of climate grief for me, and I’m sure not the last permutation I’ll experience.
I don’t know what else to say about the Eaton Fire that hasn’t been said in news articles or Instagram stories about Octavia Butler or the quote (which I can’t find attribution for) that “climate change will manifest as a series of disasters viewed through phones with footage that gets closer and closer to where you live until you’re the one filming it.”
Except that while I bore witness to this integral piece of my family’s story going up in literal flames through social media, I also saw that how governments and institutions handle this fire recovery will be the biggest indication of how they’ll deal with disaster when it comes to your community. I saw that the people in these communities were the ones helping to protect themselves and their neighbors from fire, organizing clothing and supply drives, preparing and giving away food, and distributing masks to protect against the toxic air.
The actions and inaction of our governments and institutions and corporations got us into this mess. Now that we’re stuck in it, they refuse to adequately prepare or fund the efforts that can save property and landscapes and lives from this devastation, or reduce its impact, or help us recover when the smoke clears. We will be the ones sifting through the rubble and collecting donations and checking on neighbors and providing for each other. If we’re lucky.
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I planned to send out the following newsletter last week—before the LA fires destroyed the town and the home where my dad and grandmother grew up. I’m working on a piece about that to publish later this week, but in the meantime, you can donate to Mask Bloc LA to get respirators to Angelenos who need them, donate to support Altadena’s Black community here, or pick literally any of the dozens of individual GoFundMes and on-the-ground mutual aid projects you’re probably seeing on social media and give what you can.
I try to temper my expectations for the new year. I’ve learned over a couple of decades of adulthood that expecting sweeping self-improvements and 180-degree turnarounds in my habits is just setting myself up to fail. Aside from the occasional break from cannabis or social media, I try to ring in the new with as little fanfare and as much rest as I can get—a slow, soft landing into January.
This year is different. The past two-ish weeks have been full of new habits and new activities. On January 2, I packed my Subaru and drove north from my home in Philly to Villa Villekulla, a one-woman goat farm nestled up a wooded hillside in central Vermont. For the next two and a half months, I’ll be living in a cozy little apartment above the creamery, helping out with goat care, milking cleanup, and other farm chores.
Nbd just stark natural beauty
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I’ve followed proprietress/crimson-haired goat witch Lauren Gitlin via Instagram and her excellent newsletter (she was a journalist in another life) for a couple of years. I even interviewed her for my DZRA project in 2023, intrigued by her uncommon approach to producing ethical dairy. When I saw Lauren post that she was looking for an apprentice for the first three months of 2025, I jumped at the chance.
Unlike many folks who work in ag-adjacent roles, I never got the chance to go WOOFing or work on a farm back when I was a rootless, carefree twentysomething with boundless energy and supple joints. I wanted that experience. After discussing it with my partner, who is generously holding down the fort and caring for our two cats back home, I sent her an email.
Villa Villekulla’s motto is “handmade skyr from hand-hugged goats,” and Lauren does everything in her power to live up to that promise. She runs a no-kill operation, meaning she refuses to process her animals for meat or sell them to buyers who will. If you know anything about dairying, you understand the economic and operational challenge that presents: milk requires pregnancies (though maybe not as many as it used to), and pregnancies result in babies. Sometimes those babies are boys who, not producing milk, represent a drain on the operation’s resources. It’s the kind of cold, hard biological and economic fact that’s at the core of dairy farming—something that’s less difficult to accept when practiced on a small, human scale but makes you queasy when it’s extrapolated to the nearly $900 million global dairy industry.
Obsessed w/ those salt & pepper ears
This is why we have veal and lamb and cabrito, and why humanely raised rose veal has made a comeback thanks to small-scale dairy operations. The economics of dairying—and the potential danger to animals and people in keeping intact male animals on the farm through adulthood—mean that farmers can’t feed mouths who don’t yield product. Bucking this convention makes an already difficult line of work even more challenging.
For the next several weeks, my days will begin at 5 so I can wake up enough to start barn chores at 6. I’ll feed and water the kids, empty and fill water buckets in the main, distribute the rust-colored blend of dried kelp and powdered molasses and minerals that supplement the animals’ salad course of dry hay. Then I’ll thaw out with a coffee in my little studio above the creamery and do my actual job, which I’ll still be performing remotely (self-employment has its perks).
Good morning from the mud room
Depending on the day, I’ll put in a little time in the steamy milk room to meticulously rinse, scrub, and rinse again milk cans and gaskets and tubes. Various barns must be mucked several times a week—by far the most physically taxing task, which involves forking or shoveling heaps of pee and poop-soaked wood shavings and hay. I might spend some time in the packing room getting jars of goat skyr ready for sale (you can find this thick, silky, thistle rennet-cultured product at better indie grocers, cheese shops, and co-ops around the Northeast).
I L♥️VERMONT
I’ve spent the past week and a half learning the ropes, getting settled in, and recalibrating my cooking, eating, sleep, and rest habits to adjust to this level of physical activity. Farm work is tough on the body, but as someone who thinks and taps on a keyboard for a living, it feels energizing to do physical work outside for a few hours each day (temporarily). It’s given me an even greater appreciation for the work farmers and farm workers do.
During my wintry adventure, I want to spend more time with y’all in this space, too. My goal is to develop some kind of regular cadence and try out different types of posts, so you’ll see me experimenting with those in the coming weeks. Don’t hesitate to hit reply, drop a comment, or leave a Substack Note. If what I write strikes a chord with you, please spread the word! I’m excited to cultivate more community here, especially as I’m away from my IRL community for the next few months.
If you’re a cheesemaker, dairy farmer, or other cheese pro in or around central Vermont, please hit me up—I’d love to pay your creamery a visit or meet up for a coffee. And since I’ll be in the area, I’m planning to attend the Science and Craft of Raw Milk Cheese conference in March. Maybe I’ll see you there?
And don’t worry, I’ll be posting plenty of goat pics—like these li’l goofballs:
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