Plough Quarterly • Winter 2018 59 Susannah Black is a contributing editor to Plough and has written for publications including First Things, Front Porch Republic, Mere Orthodoxy, and The American Conservative. She lives in New York City. next to the house that he uses as a studio. He’s working on a block of linoleum, carving an image: he’s a printmaker as well. Some of these he sells from the Etsy shop that he and his wife use to market their goods: his prints and turned wooden bowls, her goat’s-milk soap. Until a couple of years ago, just before their fourth child was born, Amy, Jack’s wife, was working as a Presbyterian minister in Wichita. Jack was running the farm and his growing woodworking business and homeschooling the kids (the oldest is ten). But she left her job so that, as he describes it, “she could be a mom, finally.” It wasn’t easy. “As we were making the transition to losing the bulk of our financial security,” he says, “there was a lot of question- ing from family and acquaintances. ‘How are you guys going to survive?’” “My apprentice Wyatt Rickles feeds our ewes. He came to learn woodworking skills, but wished to help out with the farm chores while he was with us. I call the ewes my priests of the land.” —Jack Baumgartner The answer to that question is the story of their days: they’re living on a patchworked domestic economy that takes a great deal of human energy, a great deal of commitment, and a great deal of creativity. The woodworking brings in the most money – later on that day, he’ll finish a custom poker table he’s making for a lodge in Montana – but the farming supplies much of the food. Before he can get to work on the poker table, his chores include checking the health of an ailing ewe-lamb; Amy milks the goats; the children collect eggs. He feeds the pigs, stepping carefully over the electric fence, racing to reach the feeding pans before the pigs reach him. “I have to win,” he says, “or I can’t get the food past their greedy heads and bodies smashing into my legs and crowded around the plastic tubs. The kids Photography courtesy of Jack Baumgartner