Well . . . just take resources from those who have plenty and give them to those who don’t have enough. Problem solved. I can make that so in a novel or story. In life? Not so much. Neesha is suffering from a resource dumpster fire. The farm is too much for her.
Ophie doesn’t have kids. She’d rather clean pig stalls than date a man. No, not LGBTQIA+. The Letter Cult is annoying. Men are useful and sometimes fun. Ophie’s batting record with picking guys is not good. She picked Charlie. Just saying. She’s thirty-something and telling herself there is still time.
The farm was a stroke of luck. She broke up with Charlie a year or so before one of her real estate friends told her it was headed for foreclosure. The farm was familiar to her. But when she was there her guard was down. Bumping uglies in a prepper bunker was ok until it wasn’t. Thank the gods for birth control.
Land Safety
Ophie has real estate. She has a house on Old Gunn Road in Bon Air. It’s a wooded lot. You can’t grow much on the steep, shaded hillside of her yard. What she saw on Charlie’s Goochland farm was safety. If she had his farm she could grow most of what she ate. She’d trade labor for money.
It all seemed so perfect. She got the farm in a foreclosure sale. Then a quick renovation turned into two years of frustration. The renovation bloomed into an over budget mess. Charlie’s attempts at repair made things worse. His bug-out shelter under one of the barns required an expensive cleanout by a crime scene cleaning company. Charlie used the half-acre where the house and one of the barns was. But a survey by the county revealed property lines defining ten acres of former farmland still belonging to the deed.
Coulda, woulda, shoulda. The farm, properly run, could make money. The Hanover Vegetable Farm is an example. But . . . Charlie. It just made sense that Neesha was a good fit for Farm Manager. She was a Mom living in substandard housing. She had a job at Popeyes until her store closed.
City Skills Don’t Apply
The life skills you need to make a success of living on TANF in Public Housing don’t carry over to Farm Manager exactly. Mom/house frau comes easy. I’m a WASP raised by an electrical engineer father and social worker mother. I have zero idea how to run a farm. Neesha and I are out of our element on a farm.
Neesha didn’t see it. She didn’t see what Ophie saw. Neesha saw emptiness. No car so how was she supposed to get to work? Or childcare. Or make groceries? In Gilpin Court she had friends and Instacart. Here? nothing. No car, no income, no friends she could call on. Yeah, the tubes and her iPhone. But who is going to drive nearly an hour from Richmond?
And then, and then . . . Goochland Social Services isn’t Richmond. Actually, they both suck. There are no local case workers. Everything resides on VA Common Help. Actual human help is through a call center: 855-635-4370.
How About Yes
“So . . . fuck that. And . . . fuck Ophie, stupid bitch. Yeah, the farm? Awesome. But how the hell is a cashier at Popeyes supposed to know how to run a goddamn farm!? You can’t do “My Fair Lady” on a country girl from Blackwood, VA. Country don’t mean stupid.
What Neesha does know is Charlie. Charlie is nasty. He’s also typical of a lot of guys. Sorry, Moms you are going to get awkward questions about this next. God made women with holes. Two of them are for waste elimination. One is for eating and talking. The fourth is how women bring life into the world. Men are nasty. Charlie is the nastiest. His favorite hole on a woman is her mouth. No, not for talking. Worse.
Charlie will do almost anything if given some affection. Just suck it. And promise fast money. Shiba Inu was blowing up. Neesha had the farm’s credit card. She could make huge bank with Charlie’s help. He’s an ex but this opportunity was too good to let old feels get in the way.
Fast Money Times
Charlie is out. The ADA took a plea with unsupervised probation. Then the bar fight but that wasn’t much. Some hours in the drunk tank and a citation for drunk in public. Neesha needed to feel normal. Yanking her out of Gilpin Court wrecked her. She knows the grind. She can, or so she thought, hustle Charlie and free herself of bougie bitches and Social Services. A taste of normal.
So . . . Neesha’s name is on a credit card belonging to the farm. She has it so she can get what the farm needs. Ophie believes the catechism that says equality is achieved by transferring wealth. Her twist is that she transfers her wealth to the downtrodden. It’s not been going the way she wished.
Full Drip
Neesha speaks. The furniture and interior decorations Ophie put in the farm house are racist. The feel is hip-hop and urban. There are full drip touches all through the house. This is a historic 19th century farm. Decorating in drip style is like putting lipstick on a goat. Then blowing up social media with how cute the goat looks. Fucking racist, seriously.
Now you know why Neesha lasted a day in the farm house before the incident. One other thing. Ophie, in trying to do the right thing, set up a business checking account and debit card for the farm. So Neesha could pay bills and buy what the farm needed.
Third, in the business plan Ophie estimated that the farm was capable of earning $250K. So there was a half-million in the farm’s checking account. Neesha has never seen $10k in one place, much less $500k. Holy shit, racists got bank. Drip is racist but damn!
Arterial Benjamin Bleed
Why relaunch a farm with half a million in the bank? I mean, the land is there. Just put seed in it and . . . job done, right? No. Time on a farm is measured in years. The farm gets paid once a year once the harvest is sold. So ten months out of twelve there is no cash flow. Crypto is fast money on crank. Fortunes are won and lost on the same day. $500k to get a farm through the first year isn’t generous.
Neesha grew up around hustle and grind. A year is a lifetime for her. The ways she knows to get money involve crime, depravity and addiction. A half-million could turn into huge bank if it was on Kraken. So Neesha did. Charlie. Cha Ching!
Well . . for a while. Like, a couple hours. She was too afraid to risk the whole half-million. Ophie explained to her that there would be no more money for a year. But $150k in Shiba Inu . . . I mean, super Cha Ching!
A Very Unsure Thing
Neesha bought at the peak in 2022. Then Shiba Inu collapsed. That $150k became nearly nothing. She still had the other $350k so it would be good, right? $150k is huge.
Fast money life. It’s a thing in some circles. An organization with a six figure budget can just write checks for all of the income to its clients. No more poverty, starving children or oppression. Job done. It’s a child’s folly that makes things worse. It’s more like fast money death.
Well . . . shit. Neesha could just go back to Gilpin Court, get rehired at a different chicken place, and resume her life. Something else. Not everyone can go home to the way things were. A returning hero isn’t who they were when they left. She couldn’t go back.
Decorated Lawn
$150K went to Kraken and fast money dreams. She didn’t lose all of it. Neesha got out with enough money to get rid of the drip furniture. Neesha replaced it with pieces that felt at home if she were still in Blackwood. The beautiful titanium cookware junked for carbon steel, porcelain coated and cast iron pieces. Ophie bought an XBox and her kids liked the Switch. She got her brother to bring her Mom’s spare Corning Corelle dinnerware to the farm. Much better. Ophie is racist for not asking what she wanted.
It’s how she replaced all of Ophie’s drip style furniture and kitchen pieces that is what I made you wait a thousand words for. Neesha went full manic, drunken tantrum one Sunday afternoon. Everything Ophie bought in drip style landed in a dumpster parked on the front lawn. A few things spontaneously ignited in a debris fire. The Kazakh rugs stayed. The destroyed drip furniture hauled away in a rented dumpster.
Now that the house was stripped down to bare walls and floors she took the next step–paint. Warm earth tones replaced cold blues, teals and greys. She put up an LED electric fireplace veneered in sandstone. An appliance company helped her restore the appliances to updated versions of the original period kitchen. Neesha made the place her own.
Punished Good Deed
Ophie was crushed. How could this have gone so wrong? Everything was perfect. Millions spent on the renovation of a historic farm. Drip style was in all the magazines. Neesha clearly needed what the farm could provide. Ophie’s mashup of urban drip and contemporary agrarian turned into smoking embers. This is not how it was supposed to go.
The answer is supposed to be that wealth redistribution would make things equal. The oppressed were supposed to use their equality to better themselves. Why didn’t Neesha understand what’s understood? Did she make a mistake with Neesha? Maybe a tigress can’t change her stripes.
Neesha had already picked out replacement furniture from Ashley Furniture that matched up to the Kazakh rugs. It would only be a week of air mattresses before the new furniture showed up. She didn’t hate accepting the farm manager job.
Fail to Understand
She hated Ophie for assuming so much. Does she need the better education possible in Goochland? Or the security possible with investing herself in the farm? Yes. But Ophie never asked her what she’d want in the farmhouse. Neesha is a coal country girl. That aesthetic isn’t the same as drip.
Neesha ran from Wise County because her heart was filled with Maoist orthodoxy. The patriarchy must be destroyed. Racism must be defeated by putting the oppressors in their proper place. Great feels but leaving home to start from nothing isn’t the liberating move she imagined.
Wherever we go our troubles are with us. Neesha tried to escape her coal country roots. And found that Richmond didn’t welcome her. VCU thought she was a stupid Hill Billy that didn’t understand. You can take the girl out of the country, but . . . And VCU thought of themselves as sine qua non of Maoist orthodoxy. Neesha had nothing for them.
Call Taken
“What!?”
“You good?”
“I guess.”
“You don’t like drip.”
“I don’t. I’ll always be a coal country girl that likes Silk Road.”
“I saw the Ashley Furniture order. I understand. My guys will set things up for you.”
“You ain’t mad?”
“I am but some if it is my bad.”
“Oh ok.”
“One thing. You have to live on what’s in the bank until next harvest. I can’t cover what you spent.”
“Yeah. I got you.”
I don’t write Harlequin or Hallmark stories. You won’t get a hearts and violins moment in this space. What I can tell you is that Ophie and Neesha make it work. Also that country beat drip.
✤✤✤