October 2012 - Barleywine Offerings

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We know winter has arrived when we start to see, smell, and hear our neighbor’s house. Past the old stone wall that marked the outlying pasture of the Bedell’s 1800s homestead runs a line of pine, oak and maple. When the maples explode like fireworks and scatter their glowing ashes, our closest neighbor’s house emerges from the woods, along with the first smoke from their pellet stove and the crack of a deer rifle. We’ll be able to look in each others’ windows for the next six months, so it’s time to get neighborly. We dress Jonah in a bright orange hat and send him over the grassy path between our two homes with a pre-emptive peace offering of homemade barleywine, one bottle labeled “his” and the other “hers” (because last time “he” drank it all by himself and “she” wasn’t too pleased).

By our third fall, we’ve settled into a firm pattern of rituals. October is when Alisande must be sailed to the haul-out station in Castine so she can be put away in a barn for the winter. It’s also when we lay up our stores of Northern Spy apples (which keep through the entire winter unrefrigerated in the basement), an enormous box of frozen wild blueberries, and the 100lbs of beef from the cow we split with Zach’s parents and sisters. These add to the bounty of our summer gardens; pounds of cherry tomatoes preserved every which way (dehydrated, frozen, roasted and stored in olive oil), frozen pucks of pre-made pesto, u-pick strawberries, and shelves of squash (delicata, pumpkin, butternut). Zach works to cut, split and stack a pile of 20 logs, while I am focused on shearing, winter hay, and de-icers for water troughs. Kitchen herbs retreat into pots in the sunroom. The kids anticipate their fall birthdays and try to remember how to wear sweaters and coats. 

This fall Jonah has been in soccer and Zora in dance. The kids are both loving their extra-curriculars and we are trying to stick with just one activity per child at a time so that none of us become too neurotic. Speaking of which, I recently wrapped up a fierce battle with insomnia that lasted one and a half months. It was as if I bumped a switch and suddenly forgot how to fall asleep, stay asleep, or go back to sleep when awakened. Night after night for weeks I watched the dawn rise, and after a certain point, I no longer felt tired. Even sleep medications were only minimally useful. Then I spent an afternoon cleaning my friend’s house. I was supposed to have accompanied her on fiddle at a show in Dover, but the show was canceled due to wind. After four hours of cleaning and organizing her space (and a nice Thai dinner afterwards) the spell suddenly lifted, as oddly as it had descended. Every time I woke that night, and the nights that followed, I drifted naturally back to sleep. I may have repaid some kind of karmic debt I didn’t know I had – or perhaps, dealing with another household’s “stuff” freed me from the weight of my own.

It would be nice in some ways if our “farm work” was our true work, but in fact it is how we spend much of our leisure time. Zach and I are both working full time now, in addition to raising kids and running a farm, so it’s not hard to understand how stress and sleeplessness might result. Today I am trying to figure out what to do about the fact that Coco, my leadersheep, decided to challenge a skunk that was trying to get into the henhouse and got sprayed right before the shearer is supposed to come. Tomorrow I will fly to Miami for a two-day meeting where I am presenting. I return late on Thursday. The next morning, a truck is dropping off 30 bales of hay that I need to pack into the loft. Only in my most lucid moments do I ask what the hell I am doing. Like last winter, when I found myself on the slippery roof of our barn at night in a snowstorm trying to net a guinea hen that hadn’t found its way into the henhouse before dusk. I had a report due the next day and it finally occurred to me that this is nuts. My mother’s generation stretched to take on both work and family responsibilities, and now my generation wants to one-up them by piling on homesteading as well – a lifestyle my ancestors probably sought to free themselves from.  If my great-great-great grandmother were here, or even the matriarch of the Bedell family that used to own our land, she would probably give me a good schooling.

So here’s a barleywine toast to mid-October in Maine. The tourists have fled and it’s too cold to do much more work outside.  Time now to slow down, sleep, eat, breed (if you're a sheep), molt (if you're a chicken), and make music.

May 2012 - May Day

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This May Monday, bouncing along Witchtrot road with a belly of coffee and a halo of sun glinting off the new leaves, the week could not have felt more full of promise. I was sure I would find time to write, but there was too much to do at the urgent pace of a Maine spring day. Now it is Tuesday, beset with rain; the sense of promise is gone, but fulfillment is closer, as the earth slows to take a drink.

People are calling this the winter that never came, but when the first birds and insects broke the silence, it was clear we were waking from something; not the long, deep slumber of a typical Maine winter, but at least a nap. Those first twitters were followed by the roar of peepers and all of a sudden it was summer in spring, long hot days and drying grass.

Into this strange, warm new world were born four Icelandic lambs, a breed that has been virtually unchanged since the Vikings brought them West. I helped deliver the first two, guiding the two small black hooves and one black nose out like delicate folded tripods. I had warning of that birth, seeing the ewe separate from the herd and look at me with a beseeching expression hours before she was due. There was time to put her in the stall alone, and when I woke at midnight to check on her, the water bag was just emerging. I stayed up all night, drying the lambs and making sure they were nursing. The second ewe went into labor four days early and without warning, on a morning when my daughter was sick with the stomach flu. I went out to check on the sheep and found the ewe nursing one lamb; she had rejected the other, which had toddled off to another ewe in search of milk. Sheep are such devoted mothers, licking their newborns, nickering to them and watching over them constantly, that it is heartbreaking to see them butt away one of their own. After several long days and nights trying to reunite mother and ewe – feeding, petting, and sometimes restraining the ewe so the lamb could nurse and hopefully re-acquire her own mother’s smell -  we consigned ourselves to bottle-raising the baby. This meant waking once or twice in the middle of the night, warming her milk and going out to the barn to feed her; first every two hours, then every three, then every four. After two week of this she was strong enough to make it through the night, and we slowly started to piece our lives back together.  

Now our field is full of jumping lambs, our nest boxes are full of eggs, the apple trees and blueberry bushes are planted, and after much plowing and tilling and rock removal we have prepared patches of ground for our other crops. A frost last weekend (low of 26) made us glad we waited to put in our seedlings.  When the kids had their spring break and my parents came to visit, we invited our favorite neighbors to join us for a BBQ. One of the families rolled up in their giant blue tractor; the others walked across the field from their house to ours carrying homemade pies. We barbecued a shoulder from a goat we had butchered last fall, and served home brew. After dinner my father played his guitar and I fiddled; we played Ragtime Annie as well a new tune (Amelia’s waltz) that is something of a local favorite here. Then the kids got tired so we all tucked in early, Maine-style.  We did the same last weekend, at a “May Day” party where we brought our bottle lamb for the kids to pet and I fiddled for the may pole dance.

Zora has become quite a little storyteller. Her imaginary world is full of animals and babies, and whenever something happens in our lives, it is sure to show up in her parallel world. I am now frequently asked to babysit her Emu during the day while she is at school. Jonah had a spate of being a juvenile deliquent a few weeks ago, telling two girls in the space of one week that he loved them and then, at his school’s Spring Concert, stowing rocks in his pocket to throw at parents who might try to take his picture. I discovered the plan in time, but felt wholly depressed that my child would consider such a thing. His phobia about cameras seems to override all reason and spur him to acts of violence he would not normally consider.  We have been making an effort to spend more time exercising him after school, now that the weather is nicer; he loves playing soccer. The kids are both avid swimmers and we have been enjoying our membership at the YMCA, visiting the pool once a week. Last weekend, Zora’s best school friend Amari joined us. Zora’s fearlessness in the water was so infectious that Amari went from being afraid to enter the pool to swimming its length with her “floaties” on. Amari’s mother Andrea is a Spanish teacher at the local high school, a single mom, and a singer who plays all over the area. I was told a few weeks ago by a store clerk in Dover (20 minutes away and population 30,000) that I reminded her of someone – it turned out to be Andrea, of all people, that I reminded the clerk of. Andrea and I like to play music together on our daughters’ play dates, and she has invited me to fiddle along on a song at her gig this Friday. So I put down the writing now to try and work out a suitable accompaniment, wringing what I can from the minutes of this rainy day.