Category: Spring

The Ombre Between Us

In yet another reminder of how much I do not know, I recently learned about ombre. At first, I pronounced it wrong—om-burr. Now, since it is French, I am still pronouncing it slightly wrong, despite the Internet’s best assistance. Its real sound is somewhere between om-bray and oom-bruh.

Ombre is French for shading—a marvelous word implying the fade from one color to another, darker to lighter, a gradual shift. Ombre is also a three-person card game that Europe loved in the 17th and 18th centuries, but I have failed to connect those definitions. I have also failed to stop thinking about the gradual shift in shades of color since my exposure to ombre.

Ombre seems to capture the passage of time in one frame. On a single wall, you can paint the sky changing from dark to dawn to daylight. The ombre hairstyle, dark near the scalp and light at the ends, is like a time-lapse of growing your blonde dye job back into your natural brunette, but where you choose to have both colors coexist. Across the spring days, the trees shift from grey to green, but for an hour on a single morning, the fog paints ombre on the woods. I am now watching everywhere for shading, changing.

A woman turning forty might contain her own ombre—the darker weight of her thirties easing into a lightness of loving herself even when she disappoints people. A nation holds many gradients in a single moment, all of the literal and metaphorical light and dark—seeming sharply divided, but perhaps more mingled, with more intermediate, connecting shades than we tend to realize.

Ombre seems also to describe the space between the living and the dead. Voices blend at this Saturday’s memorial service. Their music translates ombre into sound, filling our heads and chests with the harmonies of How Lovely is Thy Dwelling Place, folding and fading. People speak, painting my uncle’s life in words, some heavier or deeper with color, others brighter, glowing.

A handful of cousins meet afterwards in a restaurant, barely knowing each other, but we laugh together and taste each other’s drinks. We are comfortable in the gradient of our beliefs and experiences, connected in the space between our unique lives and our shared grandparents.

This morning, I paint our kitchen cabinets and listen to virtuoso musician Edgar Meyer, unaccompanied on the double bass. I ride the music from growling low to trembling high, soft to intense, slow to buzzingly fast. I am rolling pale grey and darker grey across the wooden doors. Between one tone and another, I find the richness in ombre.

In Which the Sheep Get Naked

This photo of me is evidence against a picture being worth a thousand words. In this photo, I appear relaxed and competent. In control. I am none of those. Within ninety seconds of this photo, the photographer has to drop the camera and rescue me, as I realize that my arms are too short to reach the hind end of the wiggling sheep. So this photo simply creates a debt requiring nearly a thousand words to correct it.

It is almost true that the shearing begins with me looking skillful and the ewe looking docile. I am prepared. I have watched a man shear a sheep at Plumpton College, East Sussex, UK, gentle in both his British accent and his handling techniques. He shears the sheep in less than five minutes. By my seventh viewing, I am standing beside my computer, pantomiming his movements, learning the choreography I need to perform by this evening. When the cat wanders over, I set her on her rump, tuck her right foreleg behind mine, and shear her brisket with imaginary clippers.

I arrange things in the barn. Plug in the clippers. Oil them. Flip the switch. They are much louder and heavier than they looked on the video. To get the feel, I lift my pant leg and run them up my shin. They buzz on my skin. Fiddling with the angle, I trim my winter-long leg hairs.

When Andrew gets home, I am ready. We wrangle a reluctant Rhubarb from the pen. I inform Andrew that I will hold her and shear her, as this approach will give me the best access for efficiency.

“Then what will I do?”

“Take pictures,” I say.

All I need is to get Rhubarb alongside my legs, facing my right. Then, while I turn her nose towards her side with my right hand, I lean over her, reach my left hand under her belly for her right hind leg, and…I cannot reach her leg. The year’s worth of wool makes her too rotund to get my arms around her in any direction. I grunt around on the mess of woolly sheep for a minute, then Andrew helps. When Rhubarb leans quietly against my legs, Andrew hands me the clippers. He stands back and takes the photo.

My arms feel too short and weak. My back seizes within minutes. I nick her skin, once when she wiggles and once when she doesn’t. Trying to protect her skin, I shear off the pad of my left ring fingertip, run down to the house, drip blood across the kitchen floor, get woozy in the bathroom while Stella cries because she wants to see it before I bandage it, reassure her with my head between my knees, bandage it, and run back to keep shearing before I lose my nerve because there is our sheep with a third of her fleece dangling from her, waiting on her rump in Andrew’s arms.

None of my memorized choreography works for me. I realize that a smallish woman with large sheep cannot expect to work the same moves as a large man with a smallish sheep and untold hours of experience. Kneeling beside Rhubarb, I talk us through it. “You’ll feel so much better afterwards. Just a little more, then this wool will be gone. You will be just you.” Ha, I think. Ewe.

After an undisclosable amount of time in the menacing clipper drone, we all three stand, panting. Rhubarb—naked—rejoins Parsnip, who now looks enormous. My adrenaline dissolves, and I could fall asleep in our late supper of leftover spaghetti. Parsnip will wait until tomorrow.

The next day, I find another tutorial—How to Shear a Sheep in 20 Steps—similarly impossible looking, but better matching my ergonomic realities. We handle Parsnip more smoothly, despite her more feisty behavior. The shears balance better in my hand. I swear only once, at a single nick on her leg, and sustain no injuries myself. In half the previous time, Parsnip is nibbling hay while Rhubarb sniffs her in disbelief.

Watching them, I feel that disbelief too. We did it. The photo is not a complete deception; it is worth something. It is a reminder for me. The story is always more messy than a single frame can describe. Our thousand words are more complicated and compelling, more engaging and relatable, than one glance at someone’s life. It is always worth listening.

Note: This is the wool of one sheep. One.

 

Snow and the Painted Ladies

Thirty-nine inches of snow fell one day in March, towering into drifts along our house and over the fence. Inside, I had gone dormant, curled into smallness and slowing myself protectively. The blizzard, though, dragged me outside. Wind blew the snow into our eyebrows. Crusts froze on our hats and shoulders, but shoveling warmed us. It felt good to have something to fling ourselves against, together.

We started by the road and worked our way towards the well-buried cars. One foot after breakfast. One foot after lunch. Another foot late afternoon. Always revisiting the pile left by plows along the road. Each time we lifted the snow higher at the edges. In that blizzard, and the next few snows, adventure leavened the work.

March ended, though, with snow on the ground, less like a lamb and more like a dead fish. April’s snows have been a series of small betrayals, echoing my experiences in the past several months. Quiet months. I have been quietly resting and working.

At work yesterday, I euthanized eight animals. I took one dog’s shiny black face in my hands before I pushed the syringe. She released her head to me. My thumbs stroked her ears. Good dog. Sweet baby.

When someone is dead, they are dead. The excruciating effort of finding life after death is for the living, not the dead. Easter brings one of my favorite seasons because the old stories seem fresh; there is awakening and unfolding. Even the large snow patches do not stop water from rushing down the ditches. Buds fatten on grey branches. The hens and ducks race around outside again, pecking and dabbling. My legs exalt in striding between the barns unhindered.

Once last spring, I followed a hen to her hidden nest in the barn. As she crooned and postured, I spent twenty minutes with my camera focused on her butt fluff, waiting to capture the shiny wet egg escaping her body. I am that kind of optimist. But she decided to wait for more privacy to reveal her daily miracle.

This morning I am tending the improbable butterflies. A gift. Over thirty painted ladies, emerged from their chrysalides. Many of them sit folded. They seem too still. I refresh the cotton balls in honey water and move them to a warmer spot. I watch the painted ladies open and close and stagger over each other to find sweetness, uncoil a proboscis. I wonder if they will die the moment we release them, or fly off in subtle, fragile glory—allowing us our illusions.

More likely, they will do neither. They will remain—motionless in the cold spring—poised at the edge of death and life. And we will continue to wonder.

 

 

Mother: Part Science, Part Magic

As my hand buzzes the circular saw through scrap two-by-fours, no one is making supper. Andrew steadies the boards while I power the screws in place, and the skeleton of a moveable sheep shelter arises from the concrete barn floor. Our kids are tucked into their screen-time—although I think this is their school’s screen-free week—and will forgive a very late supper of noodles and sauce, minus veggies. I’m counting on the idea that parenting, as my mom says, is more about the overall average than a particular meal or moment. There are many ways to be a mother.

As a noun, mother expands far beyond her first definition as a female parent. Mother is a woman in authority, leader of a religious group. Mother is the source, origin—calling up images of soil and water. When speaking of an extreme or ultimate example, especially in size, we might say, “That is the mother of all roller coasters,” or ice cream sundaes or construction projects. We might say, as writer Cheryl Strayed did to encourage a woman to be strong and honest in her writing, “Write like a motherf***er.” We might open a mussel and admire the luminous lining, the mother of pearl.

As a verb, to mother is to give rise to, and to care for and protect. Being a mother, by definition, is powerful, large, and fierce, as well as tender. I note with relief that the prerequisites do not require excellence in organizing school papers, mopping the kitchen floor, or folding laundry. Mother embraces and exceeds the ordinary and spectacular and complicated acts of bearing and raising children.

Another image arises in these definitions: a mother of vinegar. This mother hovers in liquid—not pretty, but transformative. It is a film or jelly, a slimy clot of cellulose and bacteria. The mother turns alcohol into vinegar in the presence of oxygen. I love this name for something so alive and potent. The mother seems part science, part magic—performed by a messy pile of life. It fits.

As mother’s day approaches this year, I am sawing old barn siding into pieces to fit our sheep shack. Each cedar board tapers, from thin to thinner, made to overlap the board below it and stronger when nestled above the one before them. I handle them gently, aware of my own overlapping—my mother below me, my children above. All of them alive and close to me in this season.

Mother, children, alive, close. There are no assumptions or guarantees in these words. So while I stack the fragrant, fragile boards, I think of children wanted or unwanted, lost before they arrived or lost suddenly or lost after painful struggles. I think of mothers able or unable to care for or protect. Mothers lost early or late. Children and mothers, sharing the extremes of pain and joy. I stack the boards, thinking of how things change.

Together, Andrew and I nail the siding to the structure, with Stella handing us nails. All of our previous mobile pasture shelters have ended up less mobile than planned, so we snap our pulling straps (dog leashes) into place with trepidation. But this time, our educated guesses have proven correct. To our surprise, it sails across the grass behind us: part science, part magic.

This sturdy shack is a mothership, a protective structure allowing for pliable, changing lives, and a home base to follow, to leave, and where to return. We celebrate the strength of this ship. We will treat her gently, support her work, and anchor her so she does not blow away.

 

Immersion in Asparagus

I have just learned how to plant asparagus from a nice man on YouTube. I found him shortly after I cut open one of our cardboard boxes from Stark Brothers Nursery. The asparagus crowns lurked in plastic bags—strange, white, squid-like plants, unlike anything I’ve ever planted. The asparagus video reveals a much more intensive process than I anticipated, but luckily I tend to be energetic and naïve at the front end of a big project. So I dig in.

I hack a long trench that will become our asparagus bed. Soil piles up along the trench’s sides, and the chickens arrive to poach juicy worms. Muscles awaken in my arms and back; they wake up a little grumpy. I am having fun, though, and trundle past the garden to the compost pile. After I fill the wheelbarrow with dark organic material, I can barely push it upslope, but the chickens help me churn it into the trench bottom. I add a wheelbarrow of crushed stone, mix, then hoe two mounds lengthwise in the trench. It is finally ready for asparagus crowns.

I have heard bringing book into the world compared with having a child, but this analogy is not my experience. For me, writing a book resembles planting asparagus, or trees—not flowers, but plants who demand serious digging and delay our gratification.

Yesterday, I knelt in the heavy drizzle, mud soaking my jeans while I planted pawpaw trees. At this early stage, the trees were glorified pencils, with a few tiny branches. Most of each tree was underground. I tenderly fanned out a sapling’s roots and palmed soft soil around them. Here it will anchor and grow into a life of its own. Six years ago, I held something equally spindly, mostly underground—the beginning of my book—and decided to let it take root.

Now I kneel again in light rain, in the asparagus trench. Not being one to hamper my creative momentum with excess planning, I find myself revising extensively. I space the asparagus crowns one foot apart, until I am halfway down the trench and realize they need to be farther apart.

After several rounds of scootching asparagus forward and hopping them to the end, I discover that at 18 inches apart, the 32 plants exactly fit my trench. With the book, I also found myself leapfrogging sections, cutting an entire chapter, splitting one chapter into two, and writing most of a new one. I could have measured things better from the start, but perhaps the process was necessary for me.

Tossing soil in the trench, I race against the chickens. They dart their beaks at the white worms of asparagus lying across the mounds. My reluctant muscles are angry, but I finish tucking all the soil back into the bed as the rain relieves me of watering responsibilities.

Now it is springtime for my book and our farm—full of newness and promise. I’ve brought home four small Romney lambs in the back of our Honda Fit. Two boxes of Red Ranger meat chicks—125 of them—have arrived from the post office. We are planting in the rain and after dark to keep up with deliveries of trees and berry plants. And two weeks ago, my book released into the world, as if finally bursting into bloom.

The fruit from my book is sweet, and I have already begun to taste its ability to connect me with longtime friends and new people. As my book finds readers, I am savoring the space created between us by these words, which bear more fruit in the mind and life of a reader. As with the asparagus and pawpaws, it seems that the book will grow into a life of its own.

But there is an important difference. At the end of the asparagus video, the nice man stands with shovel in hand. He says, “Then be happy that you’ll never have to this in your lifetime again, and you should have asparagus for 10, 20, 30 years.” While I do feel that relief about asparagus planting, I am already scheming about my next book.