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.
