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The brothers hadn’t planned to be farmers. They returned to their childhood home in 1981 to help out their ailing father and never left. Paul explains that once farming gets ahold of you, it hooks you. “I think if you go more than a couple or three years, then that’s it; you’re going to do it forever. You can’t get away from it.”

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The original land grant from the King of England to Simon Willard was 500 acres. The Willards now own 17 acres. The land has been sold for various reasons, including to pay for college.

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Paul will stop farming when he can no longer do the work, but he plans to farm something right up until the end. “I think I’m just going to wind down, keep doing what I’m doing, but less of it and slower. And someday, slow will be indeterminable from still. And then we’ll be done.”

Matt McGrath, Paul's primary helper on the farm, was married to Elizabeth Cooper's sister. He was a dear friend and hard worker until January, when he died suddenly.

Willards have been digging in the same soil as their ancestors since 1676, one hundred years before the United States of America became a country.

Even though he helps with farm chores, Wendell doesn’t consider himself a farmer. “Farming is what people did here, it’s what Paul wanted to do, and I fell into it part-time because that’s what you do if you have the land. You use it.” Wendell is here, living in the house he grew up in because he’s rooted in this place and has no desire to go anywhere else.

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If somebody showed up and said they wanted to learn how to farm, Paul says that would be good. But they would be from away, coming here to farm. “That’s going to be a problem as long as the three of us, or even if one of us is living here. The ideal thing is that whoever is living here is farming here. That’s why it worked for generations.”

Elizabeth Cooper, Wendell’s wife, says the hardest part of living at the farm is its uncertain future. “Even if the climate were not so obviously changing, it’s getting harder and harder to grow the same crops every year.”

The title of this project, Living Like Grass, is from a poem written by Elizabeth Cooper. Excerpt: What if we are common? The common is not necessarily without use. It may be our grace simply to live as we are living like grass, living at all.

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Paul says the cost of producing anything today is way out of line. “A dollar gets spent almost before you earn it because of the cost of pesticides, diesel fuel, labor, insurance – everything has gone up. You can only get so much for a tomato.”

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According to Wendell, ”Farming was never a way to make a living.” The Willards are hopeful that whenever the farm stand ceases to be, they can still be living there.