Abbie

Between Contentment and Complaint

At the back of our property, the bottom corner, I hear the trees talking. It’s a sound somewhere between contentment and complaint, a creaking of two lives rubbing against each other. The wind whips the dog’s happy breath upwards in small clouds. She and I are exploring beyond our boundaries, walking and just walking some more.

Despite long underwear and heavy coat, I will feel chilled for an hour after this walk. It’s a rare day this winter that is truly cold. Winter’s brown-grey palatte seems more vibrant in the woods than in town, or even at the farmstead. In the woods, winter seems like exactly what should be happening, instead of a bleak time of waiting for spring.

Our neighbor’s two-track carries me around the original 100+ acres that once belonged to our house and barns, but is now divided between them and us. They are good neighbors. Walking this loop, I am accepting their invitation, given a year ago. For several strides, I envy them these woods, where they touch the edge of a large wetland.

At this boundary, I stop and the dog freezes—heads high, ears alert, scanning the swamp. The otherness here holds both of us. Wetlands always make me feel this way, as if I’m touching velvet on an antler—wild texture and mystery. The not-woods, not-lake, not-field opens my imagination. My envy dissolves when I remember our neighbors’ invitation. The gift of this place has been offered to me, too.

This is early January, and it will be my last hike for a month. While I hike, my parents are watching the kids. While my boots crunch ice, Andrew sweats in a different forest—Amazon rainforest—with teeming greens and inexorable dampness. He helps to lead fourteen undergraduate students well beyond their previous experiences. When he returns, we will spend three weeks flattened by flu and respiratory infections. February will find us hatching slowly back into regular activities.

For now, following the edge of this wetland connects me to Andrew, who taught me to see this type of landscape. I can outline our relationship by connecting the dots from Onion Bottom in Indiana through bogs in the Northwoods all the way to swamps in southern Georgia. We’ve found carnivorous sundews and pitcher plants, and read stories in water-loving trees like willow or cypress, or trees that drown when the water rises. We try to understand the places that are neither terra firma nor open water.

The dog, as always, covers triple my distance as we turn away from the low, wet acres and head uphill. We emerge from the woods, skirt a pasture, then crest the hill through our large, stubbled field, which stood tall and green-gold with rye this summer. I’ll return from my hike’s solitude to the house full of our kids and my parents. Our lives will keep rubbing against each other, creaking like trees, offering texture and mystery.

Will We Insist?

On a curve of Lake Road lies a dead cat. I see her while driving to the elementary school in the morning. She is a bold calico, with clear patches of black and orange on white. The vehicle that killed her left her body mostly intact, but very, very still.

I say nothing on that first pass, allowing the kids’ music to fill the car. Adjusting our course to avoid hitting her, I press my lips together.

December astonishes us by imitating early November. Bare trees, bare ground tinged with leftover green-golds instead of white, and warmish air on our skin. Driving up the next rise, I tell the kids to look at the sky, where a rent in the pewter clouds seems to pour orange light onto a hill across the valley. No, Sam tells me. It looks like a fire, reaching up from the hill and burning a hole in the clouds. I agree. It goes both ways.

Returning from the school, I drive past the cat again. She is unmoved. I see animals die all the time. My throat constricts. I cannot face this single death; there is so much dying. So much being killed.

I chew on my thoughts, as I do too much these days. Lately, I drive past my usual turns, forget where I’m supposed to be going, put the milk in the cupboard, leave the grocery list at home and fumble through the store. I leave off household tasks, distracted by Stella wanting a story, Sam needing Lego help, Skip flopping on my feet, anybody needing to poop. I want to embrace each moment, then my mind flits around.

We arrive home to my coffee, canine exuberance, and sun on our own hill. I head out to our barn, where our birds greet me raucously. They spend nights in their spacious new coop. Now I open the coop door and step aside for the chickens and ducks to stampede comically for the barnyard, taking fast steps and gossiping amongst themselves. They lay their eggs where we can’t find them these days, crafty birds, but they dodge the big red-tailed hawk, too, so I appreciate their instincts—to hide, to keep safe.

When it’s time for preschool, Stella and I drive up Lake Road again. Few cars have passed the cat on the quiet road this morning. She remains.

This time I stop. This time, I have noticed a piece of her story. Beside her lies a mouse, equally dead, that she must have been carrying across the road. In the line of duty, comes to my mind. Going about her work. Blindsided. Coming down this road, I sometimes drive too fast, wielding the car around the curves.

Every day I ask myself what it means to live gently, but firmly. We can choose what we aim at. We choose who will receive our ammunition—money, bullets, words, food, shelter. Each of us is so powerful. Will we insist on destroying each other? Will we insist on love?

I bend over the cat. I tug her, stiff, into the roadside leaves. This small gesture means nothing, but strangely reassures me. I pause, then lift the mouse and nestle it under her shattered chin.

Autumn Layers

2015-10-02 20.36.52 — Layers in early October

2015-10-29 01.08.23 — Layers at the end of October

I find myself wielding a machete behind the barn in my pajamas. Maybe this is not the perfect tool for this job, but it feels right. I am a ninja, swinging my heavy blade. I am an Amazon woman. I am a Jedi knight. Regret this tomorrow, I will.

It is a grey-sky, damp-air day, warm for November. A breeze touches the tall grass and dead goldenrod as I whack them. Without leaves on the trees, the underneath layers of the farm seem more complex, more beautiful. The wetland stands out, green-bronze below, topped with silver branches. The ground I am clearing undulates, perhaps deeply rutted from past heavy equipment, so it has escaped the bush hog. It is surrounded by half-naked trees and rusty-tufted sumac and leaning, disconnected fenceposts. I am hacking a path for the electronet fence.

Our laying hens’ dissatisfaction with their current accommodations has inspired my madness. A week ago, I exerted Hurculean effort to push their A-frame tractor uphill to fresh pasture, thinking they had exhausted the fun and nutrition from their enclosure on our defunct tomato patch. I thought they’d be grateful. I underestimated them.

First, they were loathe to leave the garden area, where we’ve rotated their house all summer. After prolonged, humiliating coaxing, most of the chickens crossed the road. Seven refused, deciding the gravel of our driveway was the devil. Six of these allowed me to scoop them under my arms and carry them across the Driveway Styx. Beardo did not.

Beardo, an Americauna with the dark whiskers of a lumberjack, required a slide tackle. In the process, Stella nicknamed her Roadrunner. I would’ve thrown up my hands and wished her luck finding the flock on her own, but a red-tailed hawk cruised nearby, and we needed leave to pick up Sam from school. With both of us muddy when she was finally under my arm, Beardo and I had words.

Since the big move, the hens have been flapping out of their electronet fencing several times daily. They prefer the garden, with long-dead sunflower stalks and bare dirt, to the pasture, with more exposure and no vertical structures. In the new location, Stella observes, the wind blows their butts wide open.

2015-11-11 22.04.09 — Rewards for my troubles

These birds now have no qualms about breaching the driveway to run all over the place. I don’t begrudge them their freedom, but it separates them from their food, water, and nest boxes, making them more vulnerable to predators.

This morning, I look out the kitchen window and see half the chickens down in the garden, with several hens scratching towards the road. Fine, ladies. Fine. I stuff my feet into muck boots and head outside to lure them back to safety—except Beardo, who I refuse to chase this time—and to move their house and yard under the trees.

Careful to keep my attentive dog behind me, I grip the machete, swinging from my shoulder. Knees bent, feet apart, I lean into the moment. I feel a little stiff. There are other things I should be doing. My coffee is definitely getting cold on the kitchen table, but I’m having too much fun to go back inside.

2015-11-11 17.19.48 — Today: the rogue Beardo. Skip wonders what the heck is wrong with this unherdable bird.

She Sees Inside The Dog

In the morning, Stella refuses my offer of crayons, snacks, books, stuffed animals, and amusing herself in another room. She insists on watching me spay our puppy. “If I get scared, I’ll hide behind the wall,” she tells me. She has always known herself this well.

So we follow Skip, tugging on her leash, into the clinic. I press my stethoscope to Skip’s chest, with Stella at my elbow. She watches carefully as I draw some pain medication and a sedative into a syringe and inject it into Skip’s muscle. She stands close as I shave a small patch of hair on Skip’s forearm and place a catheter into the vein.

I juggle my two hats—mom and veterinarian—describing each step to Stella, in a light voice, before it happens. She is poised, ready for each next moment. She closes a drawer I absentmindedly leave open.

Stella never flinches as Skip relaxes, then slides into sleep during my next injection. I curve a tube past Skip’s adult incisors and puppy canine teeth, into her trachea. The technicians shave her belly and vacuum it. Stella follows us into surgery.

My technician friends roll a tall chair into the room. Perched there, Stella holds her own council. Often chatty, she observes in silence, missing nothing.

Where does this fit into her four years of experience? Stella collects subtleties and figures things out. She understands more than what we tell her. She has seen dog sickness, injury, death, and, now, anesthesia in dogs. Today, she sees inside her dog.

While I close the body wall, Stella helps to arrange soft blankets in a cage, complete with a pillow. She squats beside me as Skip awakens with her fluffy head in my lap. As I carry Stella into preschool that afternoon, the powder from inside my size 6 ½ surgical gloves lingers on my wrists.

When Sam and I pick up Stella from preschool, she tells him that we spayed Skip today. He is awestruck and horrorstruck that she watched it.

“How did it look?” Sam wonders.

“Red.” Stella is matter-of-fact, but doesn’t want to give him many details. This experience is hers to keep.

“What was your favorite part about spaying Skip today,” I ask Stella.

“When you listened to her heart.”

Truly, that’s my favorite part, too—my daughter’s soft hand on my thigh as I kneel with my stethoscope. I can sense Stella’s neurons firing—curiosity and attentiveness. I can feel her big heart beating.

Our Place in the Family of Things

You do not have to be good. / You do not have to walk on your knees / for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

The dishes can rot. The laundry languishes, washed and dry. Each morning, I make the bed and updump the basket onto it. My optimism is freshly piled as high as those clean clothes—all wilting by nighttime, when I scrape the pile back into the basket, then fall into bed. Will my failures outlive any good work I have done?

You only have to let the soft animal of your body / love what it loves.

My son is tardy again this morning because I cannot uncurl his warm limbs from my arms, where he sought comfort from some fear that finds him in the night. When I open my eyes at last, the sky is aflame, so I run into the yard in my pajamas, camera in hand. Then the chickens need to be released from coop to run, and the light, splitting across the garden makes them glow so fiercely that each of their feathers demand my attention.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

October is cool on my skin, warm in my eyes, and feels like all of the places I’ve left behind. The shrinking daylight crescendos its intensity—the autumn sky making love one last time to the passionately dying leaves. There is a soft poignancy. How did it happen that I am this age in this place? Why am I still distant from so many that I love?

I peel my son from my bed, rousing him towards French toast—the only consolation I can offer him for forcing his instinctive self into such prescriptions of waking, walking, sitting, eating, and learning by the clock, a condition of growing up. Beside my bed is a wooden crate, stacked with prose and poetry that I turn to whenever I ask myself, “And who will take care of me?”

Meanwhile the world goes on. / Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain / are moving across the landscapes, / over the prairies and the deep trees, / the mountains and the rivers.

The beauty of this season stands me still, gasping. The hills burn red, orange, yellow, brown, green—bright on sunny days and strong, with depth, on clouded days when the wind carries my breath dancing across the hayfield with the leaves. Everything is restless. I see birds normally hidden, deer grown bold despite being hunted, small furry creatures gathering for the coming lean times.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, / are heading home again.

Their calls percuss the morning, making a racket over our farm. They lift from the lake at the end of our road each morning and throng over the treeline towards us. Evenings, they honk back across the sky and swirl down—hundreds of them? A thousand?—to our neighbor’s hay field and the lake he calls his wildlife preserve.

Such numbers in flight, choreographed to move as a whole, make me think swarm or school, but these are Canada geese, averaging eight pounds with five foot wingspans, not bees or small fish. These ordinary, unflinching birds carry weight alone and together. Soon they will move on.

We hurry to the lake one evening and park by the road. The kids tumble out, racing across the field. “Stop! Wait!” I yell. “Those geese will chase you.” They’ve dashed amidst a small group of geese who seem unperturbed, still resting and grazing. I catch up and see that I am fooled. Delighted, my daughter embraces the nearest decoy, hoisting it high and twirling through the grass. The real geese call from their safe floating beds on the lake.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, / the world offers itself to your imagination, / calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting— / over and over announcing your place / in the family of things.

Mary Oliver, “Wild Geese”

We spin apples on our new gizmo, which peels and cores and slices them. “Where have you been all my life?” I ask this gadget, as it fills the dehydrator in minutes, then creates a mountain of uniform, peeled slices that we toss with sugar and cinnamon, top with butter and oats and more sugar, and bake into a crisp. The kitchen is warm apples, wriggly puppy, kids making a racket louder than geese. I have cracked a window so that I can hear all of them this evening, inside and out, announcing our place.