Abbie

This Squirming Pile of Fortune

On the road, it is wet and warm and dark, except for some distant lightning. And my flashlight. This kind of night invites amphibians, so I have come. I walk slowly, looking down, to avoid stepping on anyone.

The night is not peaceful. Spring peepers—sweet sweet!—and wood frogs—chuckle chuck—yell into the steady wind, which carries a promise of lower temperatures. It is raining. All around me, there is sex and death, and soft, shiny lives are running out into the open.

Stellaandsalamander — Jefferson salamander

I am a hundred paces from our front door. I am the last one out here tonight. Sam and Andrew went first, to check the cylindrical metal traps we have been placing in the wetland’s edge for several days. Every day, we check the traps, squealing together at lively Jefferson salamanders, grape-sized tadpoles, and one newt with a bright yellow belly. We admire the predaceous diving beetles, who carry an air bubble for breathing underwater and pinch your hand faster than you can drop them.

Tonight, knowing it’s a restless night for amphibians, the guys squelch out in tall boots, while I read books to tired Stella in bed. Then, footsteps pound up the wooden stairs, and Sam’s laugh bounces into the hallway. They burst into the bedroom with a new species, a spotted salamander, vibrant with her big yellow spots and tall black eyes. Sam caught her near the wetland. We cheer and admire, then they take her gently back.

Later, with both kids asleep, I walk out alone. Rainy spring nights coax salamanders from the woods across the road to our wetland to mate and lay eggs. Male frogs emerge too, beckoning females. Squashed frog bodies litter the road, and I dart around—as Sam did an hour earlier—scooping up the living and slipping them into the grass.

Seeing no dead salamanders, I wonder. In European mythology, salamanders could walk through fire, even lived in it—an untrue, but stirring image. On our road, are salamanders smarter or faster than frogs? Luckier? Are they fewer in number, and less likely to be hit? Or do they just stick to tires, leaving no evidence? It is always complicated to assign reasons for one group’s apparent fortune in the face of another’s losses.

When we wake the next morning, the grass is green. Wood ducks have splashed down into the wetland. Standing among cattails, the din of frogs surrounds us. Sam yells when he lifts one trap from the water, “It’s a whole family of spotted salamanders!” We grin at each other, thrilled by this squirming pile of fortune.

Muscle Memory with a Pitchfork and Banjo

We are the music makers,

and we are the dreamers of dreams…

Arthur O’Shaughnessy

I keep my nails lopsided—long on the right hand, short on the left—just in case I find the time and gumption to play my banjo again. This house has never heard the bum-ditty of that spunky instrument.

The banjo has waited in its case through our construction dust last winter, hidden in the closet through a busy summer, and has been tugging at me this fall and winter. Finally, one late February day, I unzip the case.

I lift its perfect, round face into the light, imagining the words encircling the head of Pete Seeger’s banjo: This Machine Surrounds Hate and Forces It To Surrender. The time seems right for music. I wonder if I can still play it.

FullSizeRender — Photographed from Pete Seeger’s *How to play the 5-String Banjo*

My return to banjo stumbles along, but my fingers surprise me by how much they remember. I play clawhammer style. A left fingernail strikes a string, lifts, then strums, A high pluck of the thumb on the fifth string punctuates each strum. It’s an old-timey, sing-along sound that brings me pure delight as I create it.

Callouses form again on my left fingertips where they press the wire strings. Sometimes my hands even act independently of my brain, as if by instinct. But this is different from the instinct. Instinct drives my chickens to scratch forward, then step back and dart their beaks to the ground. My banjo-playing movements are learned with meticulous repetition. Once taught to my confused, unwilling muscles, this music-making seems to have entered my cells.

Our bodies store memories. The smell of your elementary school. Stubble on an unshaved cheek against your lips. A dog’s ears in your hands. Mint tea from the garden—sweet on your tongue, cold down your throat.

As spring approaches, callouses form again on my palms. I lever a pitchfork into two-feet of hay and petrified sheep turds that linger in a small corner room of our barn. The shove, pry, lift pattern plays old scenes in my mind of other places I’ve used a pitchfork or a shovel. Sweating in stalls as a teenager so horse-crazy I felt honored to handle their feces. Turning compost in our red dirt garden in Alabama. On this farm, I push wheelbarrow loads to the garden, where the well-cured manure will fuel our vegetables.

We are always teaching our bodies something, whether or not it’s what we want to learn. I have learned to ride a bicycle, to drive a car, to tie surgical knots. I have learned to carry my shoulders high and tense and to bite my fingernails (must resist…need them for the banjo).

Movements repeated, like my fingers across this keyboard, become unconscious. We cannot unlearn them, although they can fade with disuse. I wonder what other actions I repeat without realizing that I’m coding them into my body.

Maybe one day I will play the banjo as fluently as I ride a bicycle. It will keep me company and make me laugh. It will invite other voices and their own harmonies. The banjo has no agenda. It offers me no guilt or frustration, only song. It takes my moods and stress and fears and creates something more hopeful. My banjo needs its own slogan—one that rings true for me. Maybe: This Machine Digs Into Shit and Turns It To Fertilizer.

The Barn Politic

In a stiff wind, the north wall flaps. I worry, mid-January, that it will take flight, leaving the rest of the barn to fend for itself. Feeling fatalistic, I shrug and leave it up to nature and gravity to decide if we’ll still have a barn by spring. Andrew opts for strategy and action. He angles some beams from floor to wall, tethering the pieces, for now.

This barn is older than our 1890-built house. Dutch settlers built barns like this one all over upstate New York, many now crumbling. The Dutch Barn style features decorative ventilation holes near the peaks and, often, horizontally lapped siding. These barns typically have an H-shaped support structure, and an open threshing floor on the upper level. Thick, hand-hewn beams pegged together make these barns surprisingly difficult to dismantle, even in extreme disrepair. That’s what we’re hoping, anyway.

We bought this barn sight unseen, since the innards were filled—wall-to-wall, and on the lower level, floor-to-ceiling—with the previous owner’s junk. The main barn was strong enough, anyway, to hold six vehicles surrounded impassably by stuff. With the junk gone, we have taken stock.

Here is a barn with potential for great usefulness and charm, carrying almost two centuries of history. Here is a barn that could house cows and horses and enough hay to feed them all winter. Here is a barn with some major deterioration. A sad and tilty barn. A nearly naked, aged barn, still holding onto its dignity.

We scrutinize our priorities. What is our responsibility to the past and the present? What kind of structure do we need, going into the future? How important are beauty and history? How much can we commit—time, money, other projects pushed aside—to this central, even guiding, element of this enterprise? What makes sense, and what do our guts tell us?

Sometimes you have to tear apart the old structures and build a new, working system. Raze the existing edifices, corrupted by time and rot and small problems ignored into larger ones. Or, perhaps what stands can remain, with rigorous—and costly—renovations. The foundation might need to be reset, and the crooked framework hauled into line.

All of this work demands honest courage and discerning vision. Deny this work, and the whole, rat-eaten construction can crash, despite its strong potential. Approach this work brazenly, with a lack of heart, bringing only a destructive energy, and the results will be ugly. I am pondering big decisions that define a place. I am thinking about presidency and candidates.

We decide to save the barn and to tear it down. Almost half of the building consists of three added-on pieces, which are not worth saving. The main part of the barn will suit our needs, for holding livestock and hay and the soul of this farm. This summer, and probably next summer, too, we will do our best to transform it backwards and forwards into a noble, effective structure. We hope it will offer good lives to those who depend on us and make this farm a welcoming, secure place. May it also be so for our nation.

Warmth in February

Few of us are as joyful as a dog on her farm. We head out into negative ten degrees so I can get fresh air, which is to say, watch my dog be joyful. With my grandfather’s scarf and her furry toes, we hurry into the sharp wind towards the woods. She merges with white ground and dark trees.

Stepping out of the woods at the hilltop, I keep my back to the wind. The sky shines blue-white. I can feel my skin making vitamin D as I face the sun. It is worth breaking hibernation to feel lifted.

The next morning, our thermometer will read negative thirty. Our kitchen sink pipes will freeze, despite the space heater aimed at them overnight. The car will think we’re joking when we turn the key. Our chickens and ducks, penned in the barn, will be absolutely fine.

Our chickens are mostly cold-hardy breeds, but negative thirty seems to be asking a lot of their feathers. I marvel at their toughness. Then I see a hawk, a crow, and some sparrows in the woods and field. Some birds can handle winter.

Birds can fluff their feathers, trapping air for insulation. The skin on their naked legs can defy the cold. In dangerous low temperatures, birds can reroute blood from their extremities to their organs. Some birds can lower their metabolism, slowing their bodies into a hibernation-type state called torpor. They survive what seems unsurvivable.

I am thinking about resilience. Sometimes our lives seem as fragile as birds, but we rise anyway. How does a person survive a cold, dangerous time? One February night could freeze us solid, robbing us of our known world, or it could galvanize some warmth inside us. Do we respond by instinct, our hearts pulsing life to our most necessary parts? Do some of us survive through torpor, numb and still until the thaw?

Perhaps we, like our chickens, get out of the wind and huddle together, sharing the heat of our bodies to endure the night. This deep cold is a story we have shared. The next day, or the next year, or twenty-five years later, we can be amazed that we remain fluid and tender and animate.

Resilience must be a gift from our animal selves. I think of a three-dog night, when humans gauged coldness by how many dogs snuggling around us we needed to live until dawn. We seek connection for survival. We do not contain resilience in our rational minds; it comes from elsewhere.

Despite degrees in the negatives, this February day is radiant. My blood flows warm after the uphill hike, flushing my cheeks and sweating my armpits. I am grinning at the dog whirling across our high field, laughing as she snuffles under the snow and lifts her tufted ears in surprise. This dog is all warmth. I feel alive.

Sending Down Roots

Twilight this evening makes the world glow blue. The snow-covered ground reflects the dense sky. Finally, the winter we anticipated when we closed down the garden this fall has arrived. I slip into the barn to gather eggs—bluish-green and shades of brown—and watch the dog kick up some powder as she tears around on the hill.

Then we go inside to make French onion soup for supper. The smell of onions and garlic roasting with olive oil and thyme will fill the kitchen and spill into the mudroom when Andrew comes home.

I collect an armload of onions from our root cellar, a reliable source of satisfaction. Our root cellar used to be the cistern for water storage in the basement. Two thick stone walls complete a rectangle enclosing a corner under the kitchen.

The previous owner short-sightedly bashed a hole into the foundation to allow him to toss wood from the driveway into the cistern. He hammered another opening in the cistern wall to carry wood to the wood-burning furnace, which he later un-installed.

Andrew and my dad spent many summer days in that cistern, fixing the damages. Stones jigsawed into the foundation hole. A wooden frame closed the space between the stone wall and the kitchen floor joists. Insulation filled all the gaps. They poured a concrete doorway, then built a door, now held by hinges and a latch blacksmithed by my dad.

To get to that door, I walk past shelves they built, now laden with canned tomatoes, spaghetti sauce, dill pickles, bread and butter pickles, dilly beans, pickled beets, plum jam, hot pepper jam, hot peppers, hot cucumber relish, and a bin of butternut squash. I lift the heavy latchpin and swing open the door.

Wooden crates—thanks again to dad—stack five kinds of potatoes against one wall. Many, many potatoes. Carrots and daikon radishes hide in tubs of damp sawdust. Onions fill another crate. I grab five large onions and head upstairs to cry as I slice them thinly.

We have sent down roots in this place, and I think about home. I juggle deep gratitude for our marriage, kids, farm, and jobs with the ache of living away from family and decades-old friendships. We each have strong roots in other places—Pennsylvania and Indiana—where family, extended family, and close friends coincide. We find ourselves living in neither of those places, but digging into life here. I find myself full and missing.

At my kids’ ages, I lived on the farm where my dad grew up. I had the sense of belonging that comes through generations of living there. After high school, I left home quickly, eager for new places, unconscious of what I was leaving behind.

Home always has layers and complications. How do I feel rooted in a place where all of our roots are only one year deep? What will our kids understand of themselves in this place? How can we connect them to our village, when it spans multiple states?

Now, home is where our potatoes parallel this stone foundation. Home is the dog among the chickens, the dog and the chickens in our kids’ arms. Our village is the kindness of strangers becoming friends, coworkers adopting us like family. We are lucky. On this blue evening, our home is warm. Our roots are roasting in the oven.

2015-10-11 22.31.51 — Digging potatoes in October

RootCellar.2.2016 — Potatoes and onions in February