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. 

January 2014 - Hibernation

I went out to the barn to collect the single egg that one of my twenty chickens had improbably laid in the below-zero weather.  The egg had frozen solid and cracked. In the heat of my pocket, a little of the white leaked onto my fingers. I drew out my hand with the egg in my palm, and during the walk back to the house the tiny amount of fluid froze the egg to my palm. “Just one today,” I waved to my family with an egg dangling unassisted from my open hand. 

Ayup. It’s wicked cold. The kind that reassures you global warming hasn’t messed up everything yet. As my boogers freeze on a single breath, I try to remember that this is what makes it possible for us to afford a farm. If it didn’t get this cold some portion of the year, everyone would want to live here.

We are keeping the cold at bay with a turkey in the oven, a 1200 degree fire in the soapstone woodstove, gin in our orange juice, and digital devices for the kids. My children are zombies. After reading Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle, Jonah got the idea we should try her “too much TV cure,” which involves watching TV for two days nonstop until you never want to see a screen again. We don’t have a TV but our apple devices are equivalent. No better time than now, I figure, when the holidays are over and we wait for school to resume.  It’s time to find out what nonstop screen time does to a body. The kids had been enjoying the sled hill, which we logged this summer, but not today: they are not allowed to do anything except eat, sleep, go to the bathroom, or sit in front of a digital device.  We even let them off their farm chores, which is why I was the one bringing in today’s dangling egg.

Yesterday I painted a “wheel of the year” for the kids, to help teach them about the cyclical nature of time and have fun anticipating the joys of each season.  But then it came time to paint something for January and February, my least favorite time of year. It was hard to think of something to paint. I finally settled on a giant snowflake, a skiing snowman, and a pair of mittens with a hat. This is the time of year we eat, drink, sleep, vegetate, dream and plan. I love that our life in Maine has built in down-time.  But this winter it’s pretty far down. Like in a hole, deep in the ground. Groundhog day will be here soon. We don’t have a groundhog but we do have a guinea pig. When he’s not willing to come out of his box, we shouldn’t have to either. 

September 2013 - Tropical September

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One last chance at summer: a steamy morning, sung in by an insect crescendo. One last chance to swim, run barefoot through grass, and enjoy the shelter of green leaves. We had threats of frost a few nights ago and the frost will soon return to stay. But for one more day, like the last rally of lucidity in a death-bound creature, this summer is ours to love and hold.

Our little “wheel of the year” calendar, a kids craft project from Summer 2012, has spun around nearly one full rotation since I last updated this blog. The little arrow in the middle slid past Thanksgiving, sheep breeding, Chanukah and Christmas, maple syrup time, lambing, chick hatching, strawberry time and then blueberry time, landing squarely back on apples. Nowhere in those months did I find time to sit and write, the longest stretch I’ve ever gone.  I try to reckon what has changed since I last blinked. Like the view from a car, those things farthest from us (the world’s many quagmires) seem to be moving slowly, while the things close at hand (bills, birthday parties) are whipping by.

An account of what has changed in one year:

The kids are both a foot taller, while we are greyer. Zora has started coming home on the school bus. Jonah can play guitar and is making new friends more easily.  I began performing fiddle in a band, which corresponds roughly with when I stopped having time to write. Zach is self-employed. The barn and the love shack (re-named “Carmen,” after its most frequent occupant) both have a new roof. We have 25 poultry, 10 sheep, and our biggest garden yet. The bedrooms finally have proper window treatments. There is a “blob” pool in the yard. Our northeast corner has been logged free of gnarly pines, leaving room for the oaks.  And the two new bee hives in our yard brought us apples for the first time, making this a particularly sweet Rosh Hashanah.

For much of the year I have been considering how to spend less time “doing” and more time just “hanging out.” In the summer we had wonderful visits from friends and family. But in the colder months, few visitors come to Maine and I can’t help but ponder our relative isolation. So does my sociable daughter. Over the winter holiday, riding in the car with my sister and her boyfriend, Zora chirped from the back seat:

“When I am grown-up and I want to get married, I will just go sit on my lawn - on the edge of the lawn - and wait until I find someone to marry.”

The major flaw in Zora’s plan is that our lawn can’t even be seen from the road. To actually meet someone, Zora would have to go all the way down to the edge of our property.  Near one corner is a little white church; she could possibly hang out in the parking lot. Our other edges, which border a horse pasture and a swamp, don’t offer any hope of social engagement except perhaps with a passing Turkey hunter. We bought our house from a short person who relished its privacy; our neighbor says he never saw the house’s elusive occupant, and that when he looked out to see who was driving the snow blower, it appeared to be driving itself around in a haze of snow. Even earlier, the place was a B&B frequented by wealthy escapists who landed and departed by helicopter.  So I told Zora that that is probably her best shot: wait until her true love lands in the sheep pasture. Hopefully that will hold things off for awhile. I can’t even take her to the grocery store without her charming the checker.

After a year of considering our isolation, dreaming of Ikaria (a Greek island written up in the New Yorker where people live long, sociable lives), and envying Ithaca’s Porchfest (http://www.porchfest.org/), I couldn’t have been happier when some friends announced that they are planning a monthly “winterjam.” The event will take place in their barn, which is situated in the middle of our town’s small downtown area. Kids can come, people can dance, and anyone can play. I now feel absolutely sure we moved to the right place. Between that, finding a spiritual home, joining a band, and having recently connected with the wonderful lady who runs a local food pantry (finally we have a good place to volunteer as a family), Click! Click! The remaining tetris pieces in our East Coast life are falling into place.  One major piece we now have to reposition is Zach’s work. Can a solar guy make it on his own in the North country? Tune in to the next episode of “Zach and the Nobel Farm Pirates” to find out.

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.