Statistically speaking, there's nothing all that spectacular about Michigan teen Alexandra Reau. She's 14; she lives in a rural part of Michigan on land her family farmed for generations, so she, too, knows a thing or two about working the land. She's a 4-H member who lives in an area where seniors can ride their tractors and four-wheelers on the last day of school. She raises bunnies on the side.
As the New York Times put it in a story about Alexandra: "While her peers are hanging out at Molly’s Mystic Freeze and working out the moves to that Miley Cyrus video, she's flicking potato-beetle larvae off of leaves in her V-neck T-shirt and denim capris, a barrette keeping her hair out of her demurely made-up eyes. Who says the face of American farming is a 57-year-old man with a John Deere cap?"
This is the sort of thing that a teenage me would have scoffed at. Ag classes, 4-H, country roads, dilapidated barns, quilting lessons: Been there, done that. And there was nothing more boring to me than embracing my own roots and doing what was expected of me. My solipsistic teenage mind was sure there was nothing for me within 500 square miles of what I knew. Take that, bluegrass festival on the square!
I spent my earliest memories in the blink-and-you'll-miss-it Byrdstown, Tenn., where everyone has a garden in their backyard, and the idea of going to the store to buy produce is practically unheard of. But gardens need tending, and so my sisters and I were drafted to pick green beans, shuck corn and can vegetables every summer — child labor paid for with bushels of corn or cartons of blueberries to take home, something that, at the time, seemed like a royal rip-off. To me, it was indentured servitude, a country way of life best departed for the city.
Little did I know, the joke was on me.
