Reviewed by Susan J Tweit
Posted on: February 19, 2023
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“What does it mean to love a place? To know you are in the right place?”
These two interlinked questions are at the heart of A Little Bit of Land, poet, scientist and small-farmer Jessica Gigot’s memoir of place and becoming. This lyrical narrative of Gigot’s search for a place to belong chronicles her wanderings from Wisconsin, where she was born and where her family was rooted, to the suburbs east of Seattle, Washington, where she grew up after stops in other places. Gigot’s journey then took her to Vermont for college, studying first poetry and then biology, and back to Washington and Oregon for farm internships and then several graduate-school programs. In Western Washington, she finally found her place in the fertile farmland of the Skagit River Delta.
The narrative traces Gigot’s internal wanderings as well in a coming of age journey. Along the way, Gigot goes to graduate school in agricultural science, and finds a partner who she dreams of farming with and then loses to infidelity, a betrayal that brings up the pain of her father leaving her mother for another woman. Gigot wanders through graduate programs and research projects, and finally finishes another degree. By then, the pull of land and farming is so strong that she searches for a small chunk of farmland of her own. There, Gigot truly begins to flourish.
“My educational trail from poetry to biology to poetry again has taught me one thing—the Earth needs more companions, especially those who are creative and willing to stay…. In my adult life, I am becoming land literate and learning about what is possible, internally and externally, when a person stays put.”
Throughout A Little Bit of Land Gigot ruminates, chewing over what life and farming and land mean, the way her beloved sheep chew their cuds. The narrative alternates essays on aspects of farm life—Soil, Animal, Water—with essays from places along her journey, braiding her personal experience with the larger questions of what her search for home and farm mean in the context of how we grow food in this country, who we exploit as we do it, how we treat cropland, and how to reconcile the history of land wrested from those who tended it for millennia.
“What does it really mean to own land? Yes, there are titles, but beyond the legalities of my tenure on this piece of ground, there is the moral responsibility to tend and conserve it, to make the place better than when I arrived…. Coast Salish people have been here for thousands of years. In comparison, commercial farming is a fairly recent and possibly short-lived endeavor.”
In A Little Bit of Land, Gigot ranges deftly and thoughtfully from the particulars of gusting wind and trumpeter swans waddling as they glean potato fields to the universal questions of who we are and how we live. In the doing, she chronicles a bumpy but ultimately redemptive journey of becoming, a tale that reaches to the heart of home and belonging.
