Abbie

A Prescription for End-of-Summer Blues

Note: This prescription is preventive, and must be initiated several months prior to the end of summer.

Rx: Tomato plants, any highly productive variety.

Quantity: 72 plants (or any larger number of plants).

Refill: Once annually, as needed.

At the end of May, apply 72 (or more) plants at once to fertile soil every three feet. Replace any plants singed by a late frost. Stake and tie plants for maximum tomato yield. Grow plants with a commitment to eating all tomatoes produced, immediately and year round.

2015-08-29 05.24.15 Harvest tomatoes constantly. Preserve tomatoes with a complete set of canning
equipment, quart jars, and, ideally, a food dehydrator. Stare repeatedly at the full mason jars, hoping they have been properly sealed.

If fulfilled and administered as directed, this prescription will heighten relief at summer’s end, delay autumn melancholy, and curb feelings of dread that winter is pending.

Possible prescription interactions increasing these effects may include:

Having a day job (Or a night and weekend job. Any other job, really).
Raising livestock.
Parenting (See previous).
Growing ridiculous quantities of other vegetables.
Fulfilling weekly shares for a Community Supported Agriculture enterprise.
Parenting.

A willingness to allow tomatoes to rot, however, will weaken the effects of this prescription.

Side effects may include:

Sweating profusely in the garden.
Dark tomato plant staining of fingers, resembling heavy tobacco use.
Heartburn from overdose on fresh tomatoes.
Sweating profusely in the kitchen.
Abnormal gait while sliding in tomato juice all over the kitchen floor.
Insomnia due to finishing the last canner load at midnight.
Hypersalivation from olfactory stimulation.
Deep sense of satisfaction.

Caution: While using this prescription, Do Not perform the simple arithmetic of dividing the grocery store price of canned tomatoes by the number of hours spent planting, weeding, picking, and preserving your tomatoes. Such calculations might impair your perceptions of value and could result in injury to your gratification.

Consult your physician, therapist, spouse, neighbors, employer, and local garden guru before beginning any rigorous garden program. If you have a past history of excessive gardening or aversion to eating ripe tomatoes right off the vine, or if you lack a support network to receive boxfuls of ripe tomatoes in early September, this prescription may not be right for you.

May This Night Rise

When the time comes for remembering this season—the end of our first summer on the farm—may this night rise to my mind’s surface. May these twelve hours of sky—lit by peach-colored sunset, carpeted by stars, then skirted by morning fog below us—play again for me, as if I still sat on our hill.

May the campfire deliver me a crisp-edged hot dog topped with my sweet-hot pickle relish, accompanied by an unapologetically hoppy beer, as my butt falls asleep on the cedar-log bench that teetered atop the wheelbarrow full of camping gear as Andrew pushed it up the hill. May I also deserve that hot dog after my own several, laden trips upslope.

May our dessert be apples—some mouth-pleasing, some mouth-curdling—fallen in the gone-feral orchard, where the game camera, which sometimes captures deer, crows, and coyotes, photographs us in silly poses. May we hike there through the woods in late dusk, when my eyesight turns two-dimensional, and I worry about stumbling with Stella piggyback.

May we emerge from woods to barnyard, for locking up ducks and chickens, then stop by the house once more, having forgotten our flashlights. After the puppy inhales her food, may I lift Stella for the day’s last climb, which Sam powers on his own two enthusiastic feet, through the hay field to our orange dome tent, where the kids will giggle and shadow-puppet their hands while Andrew and I savor the campfire.

May I crawl back out of the tent, alone, after reading my family to sleep—even the puppy—and stamp the tall grass on my way back to the fire. May the Milky Way smudge the night as my eyes shift between flames close to my feet and the pinpoint lights reaching me from years ago. May I feel exhausted and stunned by the quiet and filled with poignant thoughts about the past and future.

Later, while the stars are still bright beyond the tent’s screened dome, may the puppy, delighted to find us all here together, wake me by wriggling on my head, then threaten to wake everyone similarly, thus inspiring me to scratch her ears and tug her stuffed toy for long minutes until she returns to her blissful sleep. May I wake, full-bladdered in daylight, to realize that we’ve all slept as late as seven.

May I hear the upward buzz of the tent zipper as Andrew steps into the morning. May he call to me, knowing I will want to stand in the dew-soaked grass to see the clouds filling all the crevices, our farmstead below us, drenched in fog. May the rising sun burn into our minds these moments, which could fade behind the stress of school mornings, endless lecture planning, fear that the 200-year-old barn will collapse before we can fix it, tough veterinary cases, infinite kitchen mess from preserving the garden, and unfinished projects in the cellar.

May we remember how we stayed on the hill one night at the end of this summer, all together, and watched the Earth turn under the sky.

Why I’ll Always Keep Chickens

Sam takes his job seriously. He is our flockster, in charge of chickens. The chickens provide affection, drama, intrigue, and comic relief. Sam has conditioned them to enjoy petting and holding and, in the case of the Silkies, to tolerate being stuffed up his shirt to peek out at under his chin.

2015-08-31 19.41.52 — Two small chicken eggs. Two large, white duck eggs.

Feeding and watering them is a team effort, but Sam spearheads the latest task: egg collection. Our hens have been earning their keep this summer by providing hours of entertainment for our kids. Now, they’ve added to their job description. Blue-green and light brown eggs have begun to appear in our freshly hay-bedded nesting boxes. Mostly no longer than my pinky, these are eggs from teenagers, just practicing for adulthood.

The chickens roam within an electro-net fence during the day, scratching and rolling upside-down for dust baths. They siesta in the shade of two trees in their enclosure. At dusk, they meander into their moveable chicken tractor, roosting safely for the night.

2015-09-07 00.42.13 — Silver-laced Wyandottes

Ever since we ate the last roosters for supper, life has been peaceful among our young hens. It was my fault that any roosters remained beyond chicken butchering day. I let romantic notions override my general rule: No intact, non-human male animals on the property. The roosters were beginning to crow, which added to the farm ambiance. They were becoming handsome, especially the largest one.

We could just keep one of the five roosters, I thought. One rooster would surely settle into his role and act sensibly. He might even help to protect the hens. Out loud, I accidentally said, “We could name that big guy Fezzik.”

There. When butchering day came, we had to carefully avoid Fezzik, named for the endearing giant in The Princess Bride, and therefore special. Within a few weeks, though, Fezzik was plucking our hens’ back feathers and dragging them around by the neck. This behavior took the shine right off him. I cannot abide a bully.

Neither can Sam. He spent hours stalking around after Fezzik, chasing him away from the hens, sometimes shaking his fist. One day, after hearing a hen yell, but not seeing which one had been attacked, Sam rushed me over to examine each hen, searching for the victim. He brought them to me, one by one, until I found a broken, bleeding neck feather. More fist shaking and angry reprimands ensued.

Then we switched tactics. We thanked Fezzik for growing so large, then excused him from the flock. We invited the neighbors that day and grilled the freshest, best-tasting chicken we’d ever had. The next day, we relished new, contented sounds from the chicken yard—croons and clucks, without the terrified squawking.

Few delights compare with a flock of cared-for animals making happy noises while running towards you. For a sensitive, five-year-old boy—squatting to receive his flock in open arms—this moment signals acceptance. It affirms his much-practiced gentle touch and soft voice. These skittish creatures have learned to trust him. He feels the strength that comes in tenderness, the power to draw an animal towards you because you are kind.

2015-08-19 02.43.42 — Ameraucana, a blue-green egg layer

Beyond the Junk

2015-08-22 02.38.44 — Sam and Stella help dismantle the loading ramp. With gusto.

One day last week, a simmering pot in the back of my mind disappeared. Multiple times over the past nine months, it had bubbled over a bit, spilling anxiety and anger. Now, after all that energy spent stewing and containing the boil, I find a new calmness here. The farm has lightened, freed—entirely!—from junk. The place is ours.

A big black truck had been driving on and off our property willy-nilly since May. Sometimes I’d be taking the dog out in my pajamas or picking sugar snap peas in my favorite, so-soft-it’s-transparent T-shirt when the unmistakable engine pulled, unannounced, into the driveway, sometimes with several Amish guys along to help.

I frowned at the rearranging and loading, and sometimes unloading, of mountains of “antiques.” Over the past month, under pressure of the (extended) deadline, the exodus of stuff crescendoed, and we welcomed the truck and the sound of it grinding the full trailer on the swell at the end of our driveway. Piles of metal that appeared immutable began to disappear. Stacks of tires and tire rims left the property. Shafts of light began to penetrate into the old barns.

Last to go was the piano, a baby grand from the 1800’s, he said. Like most of the things here, it was “perfectly good,” despite the silence when I first pressed the keys and the mold infiltrating the warped wood. We had declined to adopt it, so it moved from the house to the barn in pieces. Then its carcass, crumbling from the frame like well-cooked chicken from the bone, lay in weeds behind the barn for weeks. In the piano’s final week here, Stella harvested some keys and banged out its swan song on the bare, rusty strings, shout-singing along.

Then, one astonishing morning, the previous owner parked by our front door with his truck and trailer loaded. We signed an agreement that the lumber still stored in the barn and the loading ramp on the hill could stay, and that the extra three weeks we’d granted him were truly a period of grace, no charge. I gave him a hug, and we wished each other well, both amazed that this whole messy arrangement actually ended in a bon voyage—with just a hint of good riddance—rather than a legal disaster.

Now, the air seems cleared. I can simmer down and see our barns for the first time. The nearly 200 year-old, hand-hewn beams, wide as my body, need better support and protection—foundation and siding. As I walk across the open upper level, though, I feel the barns’ relief. Life pours in through all the cracks to fill the fresh, timeworn spaces.

2015-08-23 17.36.58 — August 2015: Loading ramp dismantled.

Vegetables, Like Meteors

Melancholy surges in my chest as I walk the row of sugar snap peas. They are senescing, finally, yellowed from the ground upward until only the tops remain crisply green. These peas, often confined to June, have astounded me all summer. Now, some straggling peas decorate these green borders, less sweet than they had been, but still trying. I munch them like the last taste of summer.

I shake my head at myself, feeling maudlin amidst the roaring vegetation. Behind me, the tomato plants weigh heavily with fruit, despite having lost their lower leaves to blight during our wet early summer. If they decide to ripen more than two at a time, we’ll can them. For now, Sam brings me one, and we take turns biting into its warm flavorful flesh, juice on our chins.

Our corn stands tasseled and proud, loaded with ears that bow my head at suppertime. Their tender sweetness echoes my Lancaster, Pennsylvania childhood, when my parents invited a yard full of friends and relatives to help freeze one hundred dozen ears. We’d perch on the blue pickup truck, piled high with corn—the husking and talking, all covered with cornsilk. Water steamed in canners to cook the corn; the hose ran all day to cool it. Women in Mennonite dresses or shorts, all sat on lawn chairs with knees slightly spread to hold pans as they sliced sharp knives upwards past the flesh of their thumbs. Corn fell from the cobs in long train-track pieces, snatched from the pans by those of us too young for knives, but attuned to the taste of everyone working together.

How can I feel anything but delight, here in this garden, with the sunflowers waving against this sky? Pollinators attend these wide yellow and orange-brown faces. Bees have thighs thunderous with pollen. They draw me away—I’ll blame them for my tendency to gape at the flowers—from picking cucumbers.

The cucumbers! Our newly built shelves in the basement hold pints and quarts of pickled cucumbers—dills, spicy dills, garlicky dills, spicy bread and butters, sweet gherkins, spicy pickle relish. The gherkins are actually semi-sweet, since I miscalculated and added half the required sugar, leaving them with a satisfying tang.

We’ve pickled in the evenings, mostly after 10 pm. We finished in the wee hours on August 13, at the peak of the Perseid meteor shower. Feeling saturated in salt and vinegar, we walked out into the cool darkness and watched the Northeast. A couple of green frogs played their rubber bands in the ditch across the road. Meteors wisped and seared across the sky above the snoozing sunflowers, tomato stakes, and cornstalks.

The vegetables, like meteors, seem to pass in one gasp of awe. This year, I know how short summer in the Northeast can feel. I welcome the sweating as I wade through the weeds, sinking my teeth and eyes and fingers into the garden. The yellowing peas put a lump in my throat as I savor this brief, extraordinary vibrance.