September 2015 - Barn Dancing and Black Pirate Honey

Last Saturday night we walked to a barn dance. We left our cabin and headed West through our orchard under a nearly full moon. With rose briars clutching at my skirt, Zach lifted me over the wooden fence that frames our neighbor’s horse pasture and we approached the old homestead from behind. This house was once the home of the family that owned our property, the people who built our stone walls and left their old farm implements to rust in our fields. Now the doors of their huge barn were flung open, the inside laced with strings of lights and the sound of a fiddle and dulcimer pouring out.  It seemed all the ghosts of their family graveyard were there with us, strolling through the backyard under the heavily-laden apple trees. As if hosting a neighborhood barn dance is what this homestead was meant to do; it had been sleeping, and now had a reason to wake.  We ate with our neighbors and danced together across the uneven floorboards. The fiddler played Saint Anne’s Reel and her partner called out the steps. For one of the dances I surrendered Zach to a nice lady who had come alone; the musicians dove into the Tamlin and blended it with an American tune I hadn’t heard before.  Then I requested “La Bastringue” and we did it properly, raising our joined hands for a big whoop each time we met up in the middle. The musicians sent us out with a beautiful waltz. It was still playing in my head as we picked our way back home through the pasture and under the barbed wire to one of our forest paths.  Our log cabin glowed warmly as we approached, a humbler building than the chateau-like house and barn we had left behind, but small and sturdy on its ledge hill.  

The next night, last night, we harvested the tiny bit of honey we felt we could take from our bees after such a strange summer. The honey was dark, almost black, and tasted like caramel. Zach said it was knotweed honey. It it is entirely different from the floral, wine-y honey we harvested at midsummer last year.  The kids helped us spin the black, heavy heart out of the combs, then we put them to bed. After they were asleep I finished reading “Cinnamon and Gunpowder,” a novel about a chef who is captured by a redheaded lady pirate and forced to cook for her. It was a rich, sweet, dark story.  As we slowly filled our bell jars with the viscous liquid we had just harvested, the earth’s shadow slid dark red over the moon in a full lunar eclipse “supermoon” – the first since 1987. When a thin crescent of light reappeared, it shone through the sunroom window onto the new jars of black pirate honey.

I turned 40 this year. I, too, feel richer, darker, and sweeter. I am right where I want to be at this moment. Zach and I celebrate 13 happy years of marriage tonight, and my father turns 74. Many dreams are coming true for the people around us: my friend Andrea and two of my cousins have found true love, the Boghs have found their homestead on a hill in town, and my sister has seen the first client in her new business. I pray for our friends who are still waiting or searching, whether it is for love, or the gift of a child, or a place that feels like home: may this be the year.  And although the world is facing much darkness right now, may we pull together – as we do in a New England winter – to help each other through regardless of our differences. 

January 2015 - A Wooden Heart

In the flush of a Maine summer I often wonder, how did I endure January? Just as I wonder now, with two half-grown children, how I endured the diapers and sleepless nights of their babyhood. Or the raw and loveless years of my early 20s. I promise myself every summer that when midwinter comes, I will finally unlock the secret to surviving it – to surviving difficulty in general. And then bring that lesson into the rest of the year.

 Although the solstice passed nearly a month ago, this is my lowest point. The cheer of the holidays are a thin echo, the thermometer sits at 10 below, and I wade through the huge evaluation reports I must write at the close of each year. Like many other folks, I face a dead pine tree, several extra pounds on my belly, and a gift-swollen credit card bill. It’s time to cut back and pay up.

But even a wooden heart is a buoyant one. Unless we’re broken, we tend to float upward. The secret to surviving January is that the scale shifts, so that the sunny day we would have overlooked in May becomes a source of great joy when it sparkles on snow.  In January a friend’s hug feels warmer, and coffee feels better going down. Our emotions bounce up and down within their usual range, but the highs are triggered by smaller things. Hard times seem terrible in retrospect, using one’s current scale for reference, but in the moment they had their bright spots.

Do your worst, January. You’ve only got 2 weeks left.

October 2014 - Rodents in Motion

The wet cloak of Fall sits over our valley, stifling light and sound. We wake to a dawn that can’t break, muffled chirps of birds, and the air so full of cold water that invisible droplets tickle our faces. Trees that were blazing with colors look muted now, their leaves suspended in the heavy stillness.  

Another sure sign of Fall: the rodents are in motion. All summer they have been hiding in the grass, leaves and hollowed trees, content with food, but now frost nips at their backsides and tells them to find a new place. The scent of a skunk drifts through our windows at night. A porcupine shakes its spears in the middle of the road. Squirrels scamper back and forth. One morning, we find a pink and grey possum on the lawn, a victim of our shepherd’s vigilance.  The rodents search for their winter dens as we stack firewood and load a year’s cache of sweet second-cut hay. 

Only the grass in our East pasture doesn’t know. A long, glossy green velvet, it sends tender shoots into October. The sheep watch us and bleat as we set their fence around the perimeter of a new pie-slice of field. Let us at it, let us have one last taste of summer.  We secure their shelter against the hurricane winds of autumn and wonder how far we will be able to get across this field, how many weeks of rotation, before the frost yellows this grass too and the sheep will have to return to the barn.