Letter From The Future: Georgia, March 2032
Speculative fiction as stubborn hope.
(Expected reading time: 5-7 minutes.)
Dear Brilliant Reader,
In April of 2021, as we started to get vaccinated against COVID, I launched a project called Letters From The Future. I imagined myself driving around the country, visiting people and places that embodied the work of The Third Reconstruction. This was a project of speculative fiction, but above all, a project of stubborn hope.
Each month, I also partnered with a different independent artist to create an image tied to that month’s story. I physically mailed these letters to friends and family, and had the images printed as postcards to send along too.
It feels super important right now to keep dreaming of the world that awaits our work. In that spirit, I’m going to use the first Thursday of each month here in Build Notes to revisit Letters From The Future. I will begin by sharing lightly edited versions of the original letters. Then, we will press onward together, telling new stories and bringing new artistic visions into the mix.
I welcome your suggestions on stories to tell, and artists with whom I can collaborate. Now, without further ado, here is my first letter to you.
We are about to do a new thing in this nation. Now it springs forth; can we see it?
At the end of a long and cold winter, I shared some big hugs with family and friends, climbed into my trusty camper van, and headed south. I was aiming for a little town in north Georgia called Ellijay. I had heard that some crazy people there had planted an orange grove, of all things. Sure enough, they’re growing and selling oranges a fair ways above the Florida-Georgia line.
The North Georgia Citrus Cooperative started in 2028. The story begins with two guys from Atlanta, Jud and Tim Robinson, who bought a piece of land here. They wanted to build a little cabin to get away from the city, and spend time in the country with their son, Gideon. Tim told me with a laugh that when all of this started, he was “a below-average accountant, and Jud was a pretty bad marketing director.”
Jud loved the apple trees on the property. He started baking pies and canning applesauce each year at harvest time. “We literally couldn’t eat all the pies he was baking,” Tim said. “I told Jud, you’d better open a proper pie shop, just to get rid of this stuff. I don’t like even like apples all that much, to be honest, and I do all the gardening. So I got conned into this whole thing.”
They opened the Route 76 Pie Stop in a storefront in Ellijay, not long after they moved into the cabin full time. Jud was baking pies every day, and serving fresh cider from the local apples. Tim kept the books – badly, he assured me – and drove Gideon to soccer practice. In their second year at the shop, they won Pie of the Year at the Ellijay Apple Festival.
A week after the festival, one of their neighbors turned up on their doorstep. “I’m fixin’ to retire,” he rumbled in a thick backwoods accent. “My kids don’t wanna farm. I think you fellas need some more land.” He was about to list his 50-acre orchard for sale, but he’d offer it to them first. Did they want to buy?
“Now we had a problem,” Jud told me. “We were only tending about an acre of orchard. We didn’t really know anything about farming. But when would we get this kind of chance again?” Their scrappy little patch of existing trees was enough to qualify them for a USDA Feeding Our Families loan to buy the land. “The only thing we knew for sure was that we needed help. Lots of help.”
“We threw a party here at the Pie Stop,” Tim continued. “We invited all of our weirdest friends from the city. Told them to bring tents and camp on our land, because we were gonna spend the weekend enjoying Jud’s best pies of the season. We hoped we’d sign up some new farmers.”
Three friends turned up on the closing date to co-sign with Tim and Jud on the loan – Abhi, Blake, and Roz. None of them had farmed before. The USDA loan officer, taking pity on them, mentioned that Ellijay had of course been known for its apples for many years, and cotton before that. But with the winters in North Georgia getting warmer, some farmers had been experimenting with growing orange trees in their orchards. That was all Abhi needed to hear.
“My grandfather had a grove in Darjeeling,” Abhi said. “It was my favorite place growing up. I thought oranges only grew in Florida or California. When I heard that, I knew we had to try.”
Blake got to work cleaning up the former owner’s machine shop, and started cobbling together the equipment they needed. Roz put serious miles on Blake’s pickup truck, collecting up saplings from central Florida to plant in their new grove. Abhi built a new greenhouse next to the machine shop and appointed herself Chief Scientist of this mad venture.
Meanwhile, Gideon started having a hard time making it through soccer practice. He was running a low-grade fever all the time. Weeks of driving back and forth to Children’s Healthcare in Atlanta confirmed their fears: Gideon had leukemia. This was 3 months after they bought the new land.
“It’s never a good time for anything, right?” Tim said, wiping his eyes.
Roz and Blake visited every local farmer in Ellijay to ask for help. They make a striking combo – Blake, tall and burly, mostly silent, a lumberjack in waiting; Roz, small and intense, non-binary, with crew-cut grey hair and enough piercings to set off a metal detector. Roz is a pastor’s kid. They made the hard sell: “I said to those farmers, this is your chance to love your neighbor. This group of us here, we’re family now. We’re asking you to be part of our family too.”
Gideon pulled through. The farmers of Ellijay showed up, week after week, through Gideon’s chemo and his bone marrow transplant, to get the grove and orchard in good shape. Blake donated the marrow. “Didn’t hurt as much as he was hurting,” was the only thing Blake said while I was there.
Their first orange harvest happened this past December. Most of the fruit went to buyers up north. Jud said, “I grew up in Philly. One time I shoveled snow for an older lady down the street from us. She gave me oranges as payment. Said they were better than money. People still love to give oranges to each other at Christmas time.”
Jud sized up his farming family, sitting at a big round table in a corner of the pie shop. “Tim’s ancestors picked cotton on this land,” he said. “Their families were torn apart. Now –” Jud’s voice broke. Roz reached over to squeeze his hand.
“We chose each other,” Roz finished for him. “Now, this is our family.”
I’m thinking to head towards Alabama next. Hope this letter finds you in good health and in peace.
Kind regards, Michael