Maine Farm Playlist

The sun is setting. I’m cradled in an Adirondack chair, soaking in the last crackling warmth of a bonfire with my fellow WWOOFers. I breathe in the crisp Maine breeze, take in the weathered grass and spicy pine air, the twilight light falling over this patch of earth, and out of the corner of my eye, I see Franklin, a 40-year old former school teacher from North Dakota, break out his guitar. The soft first few chords of Gillian Welch’s Everything is Free ring out, and soon we’re all singing along.

Everything is free now, that’s what they say,

Everything I ever done, gonna give it away,

Someone hit the big score, they figured it out,

That we’re gonna do it anyway, even if it doesn’t pay…

Franklin continues plucking right on into the next song, Emmylou Harris’ Where Will I Be.

Oh where, oh where will I be?

Oh where, oh when that trumpet sounds…

I am warmed by the fire, and the feeling of breathing in and out, singing these songs among friends. These are songs about being lost, about subsisting, about appreciating the most basic things in life, and about how maybe, those most basic things are secretly also the most important things. 

I think about my day spent cleaning the sheep’s quarters, about my time spent being taught to weave wool into yarn, about the sweater my friend Oscar is knitting with our freshly-dyed wool. I’ll be going back to college in a few weeks, but for now, it’s nice to know that even without all of the machinery of the world-- the pandemic-related tuition credits, and applications to summer lab programs, and housing lotteries-- I can subsist. 

This is my fantasy of next spring semester, a semester deferred and spent WWOOFing on a Maine wool farm owned by an old couple. It’s a fantasy that I already know definitely won’t happen. But if there’s anything that I find comforting to think about during a worldwide pandemic that’s struck right in the middle of a period of my life when I’m supposed to be starting to create a life for myself, it's the idea that, if all else fails, I could leave everything behind and go WWOOF. As Gillian Welch says, I never minded workin’ hard, it’s who I’m workin’ for. 

So I made this playlist as an ode to that sentiment. These are songs that I imagine being sung around a campfire, songs that ring with time-tested sentiments, and worldly truths, songs that transport you to a place where all of your basic needs are met, and everything gets figured out eventually. Let them wash over you, and I hope you can let them bring you to your very own Maine farm.

– Sarah Wagner