Cornwall: Center of the Universe
We moved to Cornwall because of a window. The window was inside of the house, and on the other side was a secret room that you have to climb around a huge chimney to get into. The kids thought it was hilarious.
This was the beginning of 2020, and we came up right at the pandemic lockdowns were started. We came up for a long weekend and basically have been here ever since. By April we were looking into the school, and in the fall the 2 oldest kids entered Cornwall Consolidated. Pandemic social distancing in the woods of New England is simply life in New England.
At the end of 2021 Tyler and I had started working on a project in Colombia to source products from the amazing ecological systems down there and find a way to create a market for them, a way to ensure that small farmers could make a good living do it. He had spent the pandemic living down there and had found some amazing things.
Not just chocolate, but coffee, vanilla, panela and a never ending series of fruits that I've never tasted before. And if we could do some really creative things to keep more of the value down there, we can actually get higher quality ingredients up here by bypassing the industrial supply chain. So the Fine and Fair Agroforesty products was born.
What we discovered is a wonderful community that existed around that window in that house. I got a lumber mill and spent countless hours in the forest. The kids climbed on the stone walls and explored the forest and swam in the lake and skied at Mohawk. The last few years we've been through a lot; a death, a fire, a marriage, an uncountable number of trips to urgent care for scrapes and stitches (4 young boys), and soon a new baby.
What a great place to do it.
In the fall of 2022 I was selling my company in Brooklyn just as the Cornwall Market was put on the, well, market. As I was thinking about what I wanted to do next, everything lined up. Let's make this market and plant outselves into this ground for the next chapter.
So much as changed in 2020. Now there's 4 kids in school and, as I write this, another one shortly on the way.
None of this was the plan when we first got enchanted by that window in the kitchen. Pandemics, death, fires all mixed things up. Life is what you make of it, and we're excited to be making some delicious food!