“It’s pretty wild because when you're within a community for so long you have your resources, you have your connections, you have people that you see regularly. When you go to another one it doesn't exactly happen as organically as you would hope,” said Miranda Betts, owner, founder, and chef of Farm to Face, a farm-to-table vegan café that served up innovative falafel wraps and other colorful creations featuring locally sourced ingredients. For 15 years, Miranda sold at Baltimore City farmers markets, Maryland festivals, and at her storefront on Harford Rd. In March 2023, she publicly announced she would be closing up shop. She celebrated her last weekend doing double-duty at the 32nd Street Farmers Market on Saturday, April 29th and the Baltimore Farmers’ Market under the Jones Falls Expressway on the 30th.
Miranda’s decision to close Farm to Face was multi-layered, including the opportunity to move north to Maine to be close to her dad. Her cousin had 80 acres of land with five of them accessible for gardening. Miranda was interested in being on the other end of the food spectrum by growing the food instead of preparing it. This wasn’t an entirely new venture. In Baltimore, she was involved with the Baltimore Agricultural Task Force and taught kids how to garden through after-school programming. In Maine, she dreamt of having a learning garden, teaching people how to grow food and cook with what they grow. It’s this magic of backyard harvesting that first started Farm to Face.
After attending Towson University, Miranda and her college friends stayed connected. “We would grow food together. We would go and have potlucks together. We lived in houses near each other. Wednesday night potluck would be at so-and-so's house. We would feed each other. We called it the Golden Age because it really was just golden how our community supported each other,” she said.
I first met Miranda in February 2021 at the 32nd Street Farmers Market. I had moved to Baltimore two months prior to pursue my MFA in Theatre Arts at Towson University. I was looking for part-time work to support me through graduate school, and I had already developed a weekly routine of shopping at the Farmers Market. Throughout high school and undergrad I worked at various cafés and food trucks during the summer, including both a farm-to-table café and a falafel food truck. This, combined with the collard greens Miranda served the falafels on that reminded me of my first love affair with collard greens at the farmers market in my college town, made the match of working together seem serendipitous. Miranda would call it spiritual.
“Community building is totally a spiritual thing that happens. It really is the connection between people. It isn’t just a coincidence,” she told me at a lunch date in December 2023. We were meeting up for the first time since she had moved to Maine. With Farm to Face, her community wasn’t just with her friends and co-workers. “Our larger communities started building outside of that too, through our customers. And also through the relationships with the farmers. It's actually really beautiful how that blossomed, you know?”
“Were you aware of it blossoming at the time?” I asked her.
“No. I don't think it was intentional at all. It was just like a lot of beautiful humans having a wonderful, beautiful time.”
Miranda’s reflections on how her community naturally grew out of her passion project resonated with my own experience of building community in Baltimore. Having moved to Baltimore for graduate school, I had the privilege of two years to focus on my studies. My MFA program was an accelerated, experimental, laboratory-based program, and after the first semester we were already developing our thesis projects which required a public presentation. I knew I wanted my project to be community-based. I had first learned about community-based theater as an undergraduate student and was passionate about creating theater that was both in collaboration with and reflective of the local community.
I was eager to start building community in Baltimore. After attending a workshop facilitated by the performance ensemble and dance company Urban Bush Women titled, “EBX: Entering, Building, Exiting Community,” I was inspired to focus on this “Entering” phase. Having identified my own patterns of where I spent my time, I began to see the 32nd Street Farmers Market as a place where I could research this process of an artist encountering and becoming part of a new community. Throughout my conversation with Miranda, we touched on all three phases of EBX.
One of Miranda’s first memories of entering her new community was at the Maine Common Ground Country Fair, the signature event of Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners (MOFGA). “This fair is such a beautiful community of organic farmers and growers. I went there and I kind of had the intention of wanting to just be solitary and absorb it all...just be an observer, you know? I think I was still in this healing phase of wanting to be internal and wanting to figure out myself and reflect on all the things that I did here [in Baltimore] and figure out what I want to do next. I feel like I never had the opportunity to do that.”
Throughout my two years in graduate school, I spent a lot of time reflecting on where I came from. “I’m new to Baltimore” became an integral part of my introduction to anyone that I met, as much a part of my identity as my name. This introduction naturally prompted the follow-up question, “Where did you move from?” My straightforward response was that my family is from and still lives in Massachusetts, and that most recently I was living with them “because, well, Covid.” There were more layers to this question though. In addition to where I’m from (which, having divorced parents, has never felt like a straightforward answer), there’s also the who, what, when, and why I’m from, and through talking with customers and vendors at the 32nd Street Farmers Market, I had lots of opportunities to start crafting this story.
As I wrote in one of my thesis proposals:
I am a Scorpio/Saggitarus cusp (I’ll let someone more in tune to astrology interpret the significance of that). I am from “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” values, finishing what you started, and the type of resilience that sometimes breeds the, “Well I figured it out, so why can’t they?” sort of attitude––individual-oriented values which have masked larger systemic barriers. I am from the sacredness of salt water, an emphasis on the body’s wisdom, an “attitude for gratitude” mindset, and a “love over fear” philosophy. I am from Taylor Swift concerts in backyards and bedrooms. I am from armfuls of oysters and garden lettuce. I am from a yearning for my own sense of place.
To this, I will add: I am from heartbreaks that have opened my heart to receive more love than I knew was possible. These reflections on where I came from were integral to entering my community with an open heart.
I loved Baltimore,
And the city loved me back.
Parking lot magic.
I’m writing a book based on the people I’ve met at the 32nd Street Farmers Market. It’s my love letter to Baltimore. I shared these reflections with Anna from Tom Cat’s Kitchen, a vegan food business that sells at three farmers markets including the 32nd Street Farmers Market. Baltimore is special in that way, she said. She has lived in other places where she gave a lot to the city and didn’t get anything in return. “Baltimore is a reciprocal community.”
Building reciprocal relationships as an artist entering a new community was the focus of my thesis project. But I didn’t know that Baltimore had such a strong sense of community when I moved here. I moved to Baltimore because I was attending graduate school at Towson University. I attended Towson because it was the only school I had time to apply to and visit during my arduous theater apprenticeship in Philadelphia post-undergrad. I was accepted at the beginning of the pandemic, just as theaters nation-wide were shuttered, and I figured I might as well go back to school. Two weeks before I presented my thesis in April 2022, I met my husband Mike in a bike lane on the intersection of North Ave and Guilford Ave. We fell in love, moved in together, and got married within 10 months. I started a new job and Mike quit his bakery manager job to focus on his photography. In November 2023 we visited his Lola in Rochester, NY, because I was eager to meet someone from his family and his parents and sister live in the Philippines and Hong Kong. She asked us to move in with her. At 92-years-old, she needed help. She suggested that we could inherit the house. We started dreaming of a home to raise our family in. We saw the wave swelling and started to paddle. On Saturday, May 18th we rode that wave to Rochester with a U-Haul in tow.
Eleven days after we moved to Rochester, Miranda and I caught up on the phone. I had shared an earlier version of this story with her for feedback. “We should connect soon,” she texted. “I’d love to tell you how my connection to community has twisted and it’s pretty wonderful to tell the truth. It’s funny how things changed.”
Shortly before Miranda moved to Maine, her dad passed away. When we spoke in December, she mentioned that she had started volunteering at the Belfast & Moosehead Lake Railroad (BML), a non-profit dedicated to preserving the history of the railroad that once transported goods all throughout Maine. Fun Fact: It is the only operating railroad in America that kept its name since it started. Her dad Howard was the Road Master there, ensuring that the railroad was safe for the weekend excursions and other events. “[My dad] had a foothold in a huge community of train nerds,” said Miranda affectionately. He was involved with railroads in some form throughout her entire life, including the Walkersville Southern Railroad in Maryland. He donated money to all sorts of railroad organizations to keep them running.
As fate would have it, Mirand rode the BML to the Maine Common Ground Country Fair last September. The BML shuttles people into the fair, and it’s one of the BML’s largest events of the year. Miranda introduced herself as Howard’s daughter and offered to volunteer for a few hours. They eagerly accepted.
"Every time I’ve gone to volunteer at the Railroad since September, it has felt right,” Miranda told me in our follow-up conversation. Just last month, BML asked Miranda to manage the RailCyclers, recumbent bikes built to be ridden on railroad tracks. She agreed, under the condition that she be able to organize picnic lunches along with the tours, featuring locally sourced food as fundraising for the organization. It keeps her grounded in her passion and art for creating community through connecting and supporting local growers and producers. Miranda also plans on providing lettuce, sprouts, and tomatoes from her 1,000 square foot garden for the sandwiches.
“If I get back around to what my original dream was, that’s great,” Miranda said. But also, the dream has shifted in good ways. "I moved to Maine to continue having a relationship with my dad, and now I’m having a relationship with his community.”
Already, the dream that Mike and I had for Rochester has shifted. Since we first started paddling to catch this wave to Rochester, we learned about other family members who have been helping to take care of Lola from afar. For complicated reasons, we learned that we can’t inherit the house. We learned this months ago. So why did we keep paddling? Why didn’t we hop off the board? Mike and I were looking for change – a place that was new for both of us where we could reflect on who we were individually in Baltimore and explore who we want to be together. I couldn’t articulate that to myself a month ago. But it feels true at this moment.
I’ve had a lot of anxiety the past few months about leaving Baltimore and the connections that I made there. As Miranda shared, “moving to Maine basically eliminated all those resources that I was talking about...resources, connections...starting from scratch.” Mike told me that I had to focus on either entering Rochester or leaving Baltimore, and I was anxious about not doing either one well. He also told me that I can be an example for how to be in-between two communities. Being in an intercultural relationship with families spread out between three countries and two continents, we already exist in-between. We are always seeking out connections in-between the places that we call home, so that no matter where we are, we are tethered to the people and places who have shaped us.
*We asked our friends to meet us for our last Saturday at the 32nd Street Farmers Market.
Living in Baltimore City, I was surrounded by people across the spectrum of race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, gender, sexual orientation, education, age, and profession. The diversity of life stories that people shared with me empowered me to reflect on and develop my own life story in relation to theirs. Of the many gifts that Baltimore gave me, at this moment I am feeling especially grateful for how Baltimore taught me how to be in a genuine, reciprocal community with others. As Mike and I are orienting ourselves to Rochester, we’ve had many conversations with neighbors, small business owners, and patrons who express deep pride for being from Rochester and a desire to give back to the city. That spirit of reciprocity resonates because of my time living in Baltimore.
*Connecting with farmers at the Rochester Public Market, which has been operating since 1905.
I trust that I will stay in touch with some of the close ties that I made in Baltimore. It’s what sociologist Mark Granovetter calls weak ties – the people who exist on your periphery but with whom you share some connection point – that I am grieving the loss of: Farmer Joan who traded me fresh veggies for homemade muffins; Greg from Rosedale Auto who helped me feel like a more confident car-owner; the community members who I know only because we both shop at the 32nd Street Farmers Market. I’m going to miss that shared connection of being a resident of Baltimore.
Throughout our conversation in December Miranda kept emphasizing, “I know I’ll build this community.” Her deep knowing felt spiritual. It reminded me of the word ‘puhon,’ one of my favorite words in Mike’s dialect, Bisaya. Literally, ‘puhon’ translates to ‘someday’ in English. But as Icon of The Weekend Warrior writes:
Saying ‘puhon’ is more than just hoping for something to happen someday. For me, it is believing that something is really going to happen and with the confidence that God, or Allah, or Buddha, or The Universe or whatever you believe in, WILL make it happen. It is more than just wishful thinking. But rather, it is looking forward to the day that that something eventually happens. It is an affirmation that what you are wishing for already happened in the future, you just haven’t arrived there yet.
Miranda planted lots of seeds for growth and connection over the past year, including with farmers and gardeners at the Maine Common Ground Country Fair. But it’s the BMLRR connection seed that has blossomed. The community that Miranda spoke about with such faith in December "has come together since we last spoke,” she told me. Like how her Baltimore community grew out of her passion for gardening and cooking with locally sourced food, her community in Maine is growing out of her dad’s passion for railroads.
I look forward to how my and Mike’s community will come together here in Rochester, in new and unexpected ways. As Miranda reflected, though, these early weeks and months are a time for introspection – on what Mike and I built in Baltimore, what we want to carry forward to Rochester, and how we will exist in-between.
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