A Toast To New Beginnings

I put my lips together and whistled “buh bye” to winter the other day. Then I poured one of our favorite Long Island wines and we welcomed spring with a clink of our glasses. Bart shucked us a few oysters and life was good.

We have so much to be grateful for; our family and friends, good health, the bounty of abundance that Long Island farmers (sea and land) bring to our table.

We’re humbled that our self-serve farm stand is being well received. Keeping the retail cooler filled and supplying our wholesale accounts has been a learning experience this year, our first as a seller.

We appreciate the wealth of opportunities to educate ourselves. We dove deeply into the ins and outs of processing, health, safety, and record-keeping when we worked intensively this winter with the state Department of Environmental Conservation.

Mother Nature continues to teach us. We had to navigate bouts of rough winter weather that iced in our boat. Bart’s working on that challenge to keep us going year-round.

To new beginnings! Bart’s volunteer work with Cornell has turned into a part-time job, and I’ve also started working part time as a registrar at a Long Island health network. This means reliable income and health insurance benefits. It means we can keep growing the oyster farm!

So, we stood along the side of Montauk Highway, in front of the “vending machine” that Bart built for us, and celebrated our good fortune. We even got to give the childhood trucker’s toot to a local worker driving past us.

I brought the beautifully embroidered Happy Oyster Co. shucker’s towel that my friend Peg made for us. We sipped Pindar Vineyard’s excellent Winter White. It was a wonderful early spring day, my friends, and we’d like to share it with you.