Autumn – Page 2 – the Dig and Flow

A Barn on the Brain

I have been quiet here for months. And now the purple asters punctuate goldenrods along the roadside, and the tomatoes sink into weeds. The twelve-foot tall sunflowers, keeling over, seem to have drained their warm colors into the pumpkins. Summer’s upward projects slow, pause, relax—the barn is secured for the winter, spaghetti sauce in jars, book writing complete. Fall brings its spectacular grand finale of sky and color, and a permission to settle ourselves into routine. My brain is grateful.

The barn, in particular, challenged us this summer. Even 18 months ago, our 200-year-old barn gave us headaches, looking dilapidated, but still housing the previous owners old cars and piles of junk. Last fall, finally empty of junk, the barn was dizzying with its crooked beams and floor. Over the winter, we felt vaguely ill watching the barn’s north wall bending in the wind. This summer, the barn pained us both, for different reasons.

Andrew led the restoration efforts, starting by clearing out almost a century of hay and tearing down a filthy dropped ceiling and old electrical wires. With his dad, he carefully jacked up all posts in the leaning north end, some requiring 18 inches of lift. I fretted, declaring that I’d rather bulldoze the barn than see anyone get hurt, but they were careful, and raised the barn safely onto stacked wood towers.

We hired an Amish construction crew to excavate the ruins of the foundation and pour a new one. Friends and neighbors helped to further straighten the barn with giant come-alongs and chains. Meanwhile, I was painting the stack of barn siding, with more help from friends and family, until the afternoon I became the only person injured in this whole summer of barn work.

barn-whereiconcussed — The fateful doorway

I was heading out behind the barn to paint siding, but detoured through it to admire the progress, enjoying a quiet moment alone. After a few minutes, I decided to get to work. Striding from the main barn through the even-worse side barn, I ducked out the low back door. But—distracted and wearing a ball cap—I miscalculated. The doorjamb’s blow to my head whiplashed my neck and sent me backwards onto the ground.

While I spent the rest of the summer wrestling with worsening, then finally improving concussion symptoms, the barn crew performed miracles. They set the barn down on its new foundation, replaced huge rotten beams, cranked the barn into straightness, and painted the rest of the siding.

I still have some residual headaches and neck pain, but I am much better. We still have some barn doors to build and another year or two of work on the remaining half of the barn, which will include tearing down the concussion-causing side barn, but the main barn is much better. As the fall sky fills with wild geese and the green disappears, our minds have a respite, knowing that the main barn and I will both remain standing this winter.

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.

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.