The interstate is good at one thing. It carries us past places we were never planning to notice.
Heading south on I-390, the Finger Lakes can become a blur of exits and mile markers. Yet just beyond the shoulder of that speed lies another landscape entirely. Slower. Rooted in its own time.
I came upon one of those places by accident near Avoca.
Tucked into the hamlet of Wallace, Healing Spirits Farm sits on thirty acres of woods, fields, and running water. A cold trout stream moves through the property all year. Herons work the banks. Hawks cut across the sky above the treeline. Deer appear without announcement. Coyotes and fishers move through the margins. Even bears pass through from time to time, leaving only signs that they were ever there.
Bees drift through the herb fields in steady loops from bloom to bloom. The work becomes honey, wax, and whatever the plants make possible that year.
The land has been cared for by the same family since 1982. They raised five children here. Now grandchildren move along the same paths. The farm is not managed so much as lived with. The guiding idea is simple. Stay close to the land. Take only what can be taken responsibly. Return what can be returned.
That ethic is visible in the work.
The herbs grown here are certified organic and biodynamically cultivated. They are harvested by hand, dried with solar heat, and processed on site. From them come teas, tinctures, salves, infused oils, creams, and flower essences.
Everything here seems to move with time instead of against it.
Not long after arriving, I mentioned that I had been carrying some muscle pain that day. I was offered Solomon’s seal salve.
Solomon’s seal, a plant long used in traditional herbal practice, has been associated with relief for sore muscles, stiff joints, and irritated connective tissue. The root is slowly infused into oil, sometimes over gentle heat for hours, sometimes over weeks in a sealed jar. What emerges is a preparation that carries the character of the plant itself, translated into something usable.
Before modern medicine took its current shape, there were apothecaries. The word comes from the Greek apotheke, meaning storehouse. These were the people who knew how to work with plants, minerals, and preparation. They learned how to turn what came from the ground into something that could help ease illness and injury.
That older role has mostly disappeared from daily life. Yet something of it remains in places like this farm, where knowledge is still passed through practice, and where healing is still understood as something that begins in relationship.
Here, plants are not treated as raw material. They are part of a larger living system. What they offer is measured not only in harvest, but in the care required to grow them.
What lingers after leaving Wallace is not a product or a purchase, but the sense that life there holds together.
Across the Finger Lakes, rural life often carries a narrative of change. Farms consolidate or disappear. Small-scale knowledge fades. New systems replace older ones. Against that backdrop, Healing Spirits Farm carries a sense of continuity. A family has remained rooted here for decades, learning the land in detail over time.
The Finger Lakes are often described in terms of beauty. Lakes. Vineyards. Rolling hills. Those descriptions are accurate, but incomplete.
There is another way to understand the region. It can be seen where human life stays close to the land, where weather and soil shape daily work, and where care is measured in years rather than seasons.
Healing Spirits Farm belongs to that second definition. It is not only a place within the Finger Lakes. It is one of the ways the Finger Lakes continues to mean something at all.
George Cassidy Payne is a Rochester-based nonprofit leader, educator, and advocate for sustainable economic development. With a philosophy and social work background, George has spent over two decades addressing issues of equity, public policy, and crisis intervention. His community development and environmental sustainability expertise informs his commitment to strengthening Rochester’s regional economy.