we weren't friends in high school
Shana drew this one night in herb class. It’s lived in my wallet ever since.
It was 2014. I was harvesting beets on the veggie farm where I worked, when my friend Kat brought her over to help.
“Amanda, this is Shana. Shana, Amanda.” Kat introduced us, removing a chunk of rubber bands from her forearm and passing them to Shana before describing how to select the beets and bunch them with the special rubber-band-looping technique.
“Shana works at Triumph.* She’s interested in farming, so she’s going to work with us today.”
My first impression of Shana was that she was much like the other people I had met while farming – that is, she fell squarely into the category I called We Weren’t Friends in High School.
From the first summer I spent as an organic veggie farmer, the people I met – and befriended – were so different from the people I had known before. On the surface, we shared some key demographics: white, and from a rural or suburban town.
But while 16-year old Amanda trotted down high school hallways in a knee-length skirt and kitten heels, aggressively recruiting my fellow AP students into the book club I had started (“If you’ll join, I promise we’ll read a sci-fi book. But just one!”), my fellow farmer friends had spent their teenage years smoking weed and sneaking sips of vodka, attending anti-war protests and gaining an encyclopedic knowledge of Radiohead. I didn’t even know who Radiohead was.**
It didn’t take long into farming to realize that, looking around, I felt nothing like these people. Sure, maybe these days we were all sweating in dirty Carhartts and straw hats, double-dipping spoons in the 9-lb communal peanut butter bucket in the barn, and hashing out our twentysomething dreams-and-dramas while planting summer squash or squishing potato beetles. These days, we were kin.
But I was acutely aware that, just 6 years ago, I would not have been friends with these people. In fact, I would have been scared of them.
Amanda of the knee-length skirts and kitten heels was terrified of the kids who smoked weed, the kids who drank alcohol and hung out in the grocery store parking lot on weekend nights (there was nowhere else to go). Basically – I was scared of the kids who broke rules, the kids who lived outside of the narrow norms I fervently upheld.
When I went to college, I made friends with people who, on the surface, seemed different from me. My college friends were from different countries, from cities, of different races and religions. If you took a picture, you’d think “ah, look at Amanda and her diverse group of friends.” But beneath it all, we were the same bookish AP students, the same kids who put homework before hangout time and spent our entire childhoods dreaming of college – and following rules.
And then I started farming.
And I met people who had led very different lives from me. People who had spent a year hopping trains or hiking the AT, people who had overcome addictions, people who *gasp* smoked cigarettes. People who were brilliant without ever having taken an AP class. People who made it their business to eschew rules and norms.
By 2014, I was used to this. I mean, I had been scared of Kat before I met her (because she seemed so cool - which she is), but now here we were, sharing Stacey’s Cinnamon Sugar Pita Chips on breaks in the barn.
And then came Shana.
Shana appeared to be all of the scary things, but more.
Her arms and legs boasted extensive tattoos, and she wore clothing that amply displayed them. With pig-tailed black hair, a cap that managed to be recalcitrant, grungy, and stylish all at once, and perfectly plucked eyebrows, Shana was like a gorgeous version of Spinelli, come to bunch beets on the farm. The only thing I knew about her was that the guys at the restaurant where I worked in the winter (which was next to Triumph) all had a crush on her. And I got the sense that she was someone who eschewed rules.
I pretended not to be intimidated by her, of course.
Beet bunching was my forte, and she’d never been on a farm before. We had a nice few hours, Kat, Shana and I. We chatted and moved on to picking beans. We might’ve even shared some pita chips.
The next year, I left the veggie farm to start Locust Light and Shana started working at the farm part-time. I saw her every now and then, and we’d chat about botanical tattoos (A: I’d love to get nettle on my inner arm. S: I’d love to tattoo you. A: !!!!) or herbalism. I learned that Shana & her partner often explored abandoned industrial sites (definitely a rule-breaker) and that she loved the destructive farm tasks, like tearing down the tomato trellising.
Fast-forward through the years, and watch as LL and the veggie farm relocate to a shared property, Shana stacking veggies at CSA pickup, wearing a crop top and shorts that showed off her thigh tattoos, me meandering in for amicable chit chat, helping to stack veggies or tidy crates for a minute, stealing a cucumber to munch on, and wandering back to the garden. Then one day, in spring of 2018, Shana telling me goodbye, that she wouldn’t be working at the farm anymore.
As I got in my car to leave, I thought, “Wow. I never got to know her that well, and now I’ll probably never see her again.”
And the Fates laughed quietly to themselves.
... to be continued.
(See part 2 in the next post)
*the local brewery where we all hung out
** I asked John to proofread this story, and he told me that the "h" is not, in fact, capitalized