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.

September 2014 - Summer Finale

September always arrives in a burst of green and gold. Goldenrod and sunflowers gild the ground just as the leaves in some trees are beginning to turn yellow and rattle in the breeze. Everywhere else is still a deep Atlantic summer green.  Huge dragonflies and crickets roar out a crescendo of sound at the season’s grand finale.  And so do we. Our last several weekends have been full of music: Opening for the Mallet Brothers (and joining them onstage for a song) at the Dover amphitheater; playing Eagles’ tunes all night with my neighbor’s friends at an “up-camp” bean-hole-bean supper; performing with my father and my band at our own house party; and tearing the hair off my bow at some friends’ annual backyard rock and roll fest.  These days, I don’t expect anyone to follow my fiddle tunes, I just grin and say, “play something you know, I’ll follow you.” Zach has been a supportive fan and last night he gave me one of the nicest compliments I’ve received yet: “The fiddle gives the music more dimension, like taking something made with white sugar and adding in a bunch of wild honey.”   This is all the more poignant since we just harvested 60 lbs of honey from our first hive and are now putting it on everything, it is so wonderful. 

Jonah is taking off with music now too. With his head for math, he’s already better at music theory than I ever was. I couldn’t have been more pleased than when he told me the other day, “Playing guitar is as much fun now as playing video games.” We are trying hard not to overschedule our children, but Jonah wants to keep taking guitar lessons through the school year. We’ll see if he still feels that way when the homework burden really hits – it may become too difficult to keep practicing every day. Plus, now he has signed up for chorus and band. Trombone?!

The kids restarted school this week. This year I was ready for it.  We bought all the school supplies in advance and Jonah set up his binder for 4^th grade following the very specific instructions given by his teacher. I bought the kids a few new (or “new-to-us”) clothes, new gym shoes, washed their backpacks and cut their hair. I feel, in retrospect, like a supermom.  But of course, the reality was that Zora melted down in the Stride Rite and she didn’t actually get her new shoes until a second trip to a different shoe store. And the kids fought in the school supply aisle, threatening to harm one another with protractors. And the backpacks were still slightly wet went they went off to school, having only been washed the night before. Oh well.

In September, with the kids back at school, I can refocus on work. I am preparing for 3 major presentations this fall, including at an oral presentation at the American Public Health Association conference. It has been a year of stretching myself to be able to accommodate higher levels of public performance than I have ever been comfortable with before, both professionally and musically. Strangely, the two dimensions seem to complement one another, with success at one building my confidence to take on the other. Lastly, I agreed to serve as an assistant coach for Zora’s soccer team so that she could play (she’s one grade too young, but really wanted to join a team). I have a huge learning curve, but this year it’s just another stretch among many. It seems that as you get older, there are less and less people above you to take on those responsible roles, so someone has to do it, and if you’re able enough and willing enough people will just toss it in your lap, grin at you and say “go!” Next thing you know you’re playing along, doing the best you can to keep up with the music.

July 2014 - The Cute & the Stinky

This morning I woke up with food poisoning. Zach left something on the counter that I thought was a packed lunch he forgot to take to the car. Turns out it was something that had brought in from his car after it sat steaming in the summer heat for 3 days. So between bouts of illness, I attended to the copious amount of puppy poo I face first thing every morning.  They have been cute and I will miss them and I know each one so well I can identify them by the way they move, but as the first two left this afternoon I sighed with relief. Two more head to their new homes tomorrow and then I will only have 2 baby wolves jumping on and biting my hands while I try to pick up their feces.

After spending my first hour of the day throwing up and scrubbing dog poo, I cleaned up and put on a brave face about playing a 4-hour concert at the farmers’ market.  The vendors kept offering chocolaty baked goods as tips, when all I really wanted was a box of saltines. Andrea kindly played all the songs I don’t like during my mysterious absences from the stage.  After I returned home, I tidied up once more for the new puppy owners, presenting them with a bucolic and perfectly sanitary setting – nothing to hint at what they are likely to encounter when they introduce their new puppy into their home: scratched floors, pee-infused carpets, favorite household items chewed into a thousand pieces across the floor…[If you are reading this, mom and dad, I hope you are happy I am keeping your puppy for you an extra four weeks. I am only doing it because I know how many times you had to clean up after me when I was too young to appreciate it. ]

After the new puppy owners came and left I was blissfully alone. Zach and the kids were down east sailing with their grandparents for the weekend. I picked the last of the sugar snap peas from our garden-turned-jungle and watched the daisies and black-eyed-susans waving in the wind of an oncoming storm. The milkweed flowers were as oversweet as high school poetry and crawling with honey bees. Shiny Japanese beetles were mating on weeds, chewing them into lace while they ignored the nearby kale and lettuce. Now is the top of summer, the time of fireflies, festivals, fireworks and thunderstorms. It’s when the march of flowers slows to a trickle of new blossoms and all the berries start to ripen. Farmers hold their breath for weather windows to dry their hay (and if you have animals that eat hay, you are holding your breath too, happy to see every truck passing with bales on the highway).   The biting flies emerge and everything living wants blood, nectar or water. 

 

I never have time to write about this time of year in Maine because it’s always in full tilt.  But tonight my family is gone sailing and I have shrugged off other possibilities for filling their space. I will sit petting the last of my puppies and try to understand something – as I approach my 39^th year – about the pace of life in this month and why it is so like this time in my life: racing, overworked and overflowing, through a tangle of adorable and disgusting moments that will end in some kind of harvest and then the chill of winding down. The garden will die, the lambs will go to the butcher and we will glimpse, as we sit wondering by the winter fire, how time consumes us too. The only difference between us and the bugs & lambs is that we have a chance to know it by seeing the cycle repeated so many times before ours ends. I imagine millions of ancestors before me contemplating their own fate. And as futile as it seems, wish I could shout a few generations forward to say: if all you manage to do is to pass on your love to your children, you will have succeeded.

May 2014 - The Legs

We have a bottle-baby (rejected lamb) this year. He prances around the house in a diaper and tries to eat my calendar. Last Friday night our family took a twilight “nature walk” around the property. Our lamb bounced along behind us, through the pasture, swamp and woods. He was eagerly following “the legs.” Those were the last pair of legs that had given him milk, and he wasn’t about to let them get away. He had sniffed those legs carefully after he nursed, imprinting himself on them. So when I decided to take a shower and “the legs” suddenly collapsed in a pile next to the laundry hamper, he stayed next to them. The pair that emerged from the shower didn’t smell quite right and weren’t worth following. I climbed into bed and placed a towel on the ground, thinking he would join me there for company. But he folded up his little body on top of the empty pants, still slightly warm, that had so recently fed him and led him safely home.  For a moment I glimpsed life from a sheep’s perspective, where survival depends wholly on staying as close as possible to the right-smelling pair of legs and the udder that hangs between them.

It’s probably the cutest month we’ve ever experienced. A box of velvet-soft puppies whimpering in the loft, a pasture springing with baby lambs, and kids giggling as they swing side-by-side over a dandelion-speckled lawn. To make it all happen is so much work and worry, especially around the new births. But we enjoy…

[Blog interrupted due to life. See July.]

Feburary 2014 - Dark Love

We escaped the cold for two weeks on a trip to California, visiting good friends up and down the coast. That was an expensive but otherwise really good idea. While we were waiting for the ferry to Tom Sawyer’s island at Disneyland, my cell phone rang with a call from the superintendent. “It’s a snow day, kids!” I proclaimed, and they grinned over their churros.

Earlier in the month, Zora announced that she wanted to write a letter to Darth Vader to see if he wanted a brother (hers). I thought she was just looking for an opportunity to get rid of her sibling, but on further questioning found out that she just felt Darth needed “some family on his team.” (The appearance of Luke in his life is, in fact, what did eventually inspire him to overthrow the Emperor). Having seen Episode 5 but not yet Episode 6, Zora also considered that Darth Vader was pretty much the most powerful person in the universe and that her brother would be safer off under his wing. I thought this was a passing obsession until she came home with a letter that a teacher had helped her write. It said, “Dear Darth Vader, do you want a brother?” A flurry of Facebook postings later, Carmen volunteered for the weighty responsibility of receiving and responding to this missive. I begged her to print her reply in “Star Wars” font because she is in our living will and might adopt the kids if we die young; I wouldn’t want them to recognize her handwriting and think they had been adopted by Darth.

At Disneyland’s “Jedi Training Academy” show, Darth Vader and his troopers rose up from a platform that appeared out of the ground and challenged each of the Padawans (kids selected from the audience) to a duel.  Zora was thrilled. After a day of rides, shows and ice cream, Zora reflected that the best part of her day was seeing Darth Vader. “I guess he’s on vacation at Disneyland, just like us. I want to meet him, mommy,” she confessed. “But I don’t want to fight him. I just want to give him a hug.” I tried to picture Zora dressed as a Padawan, dropping her sword on stage and hugging Darth’s leg. “Mommy,” she added more quietly, “I have dreams about Darth Vader. I want to climb on him.” Uh oh. It suddenly dawned on me why she had been so eager from the start to go on “Star Tours.” Here it was Valentine’s Day, and my sweet little five-year-old had a crush of empiric proportions on the dark lord.

Once we returned home, we found the letter that Zora had been waiting for. She carefully opened the elegant black envelope and I read it to her. As we composed her reply, it came up that Darth Vader dies in Episode 6. “I’m sorry, honey,” I explained, “people who do so much evil usually don’t have happy endings.” She grabbed Vader’s letter, ran to her room, and sobbed on the bed inconsolably. “Leave me alone!” she cried, as devastated as any heartbroken teenager. Finally, she was willing to let me comfort her and to explain that Vader is an “epic” character that lives on in the Star Wars movies and everyone’s hearts. Her mind spun as she tried to reconcile his movie death with the fact that she had just received his letter and seen him at Disneyland. “I guess I can’t go into the movie to be with him,” she concluded, and put her chin up.  Then she added, in confidence, “Mom, I don’t know why I like him so much. I just do.”

Two parent-teacher meetings later Zora seems to be doing just fine, though Mom may still need more counseling.