Spring – Page 2 – the Dig and Flow

We Would Give Them The Stars

“Your children are not your children.

They are the sons and the daughters of Life’s longing for itself.”

Kahlil Gibran

For the first time in their lives, our kids want to fall asleep by themselves. They scheme up this plan, in cahoots, and pitch it to me. So Andrew and I doze on the living room sofa, while the kids giggle in their shared room. When we rouse ourselves enough to go upstairs to bed at ten, the kids seem not-quite-asleep, but settled.

Near midnight, the dog barks downstairs. I roll out of bed, entirely disoriented, to check on things. On my way, I peek into the kids’ room. Something seems off. I look closer. Their beds are empty.

Luckily, my brain is so slow and bleary that I do not panic. Someone probably had to pee. I bumble downstairs, but the living room is dark and quiet. So is the kitchen. And the bathroom. There are no kids in this house.

I turn on the kitchen light and lift Sam’s blankie from the radiator and hold it limply, feeling something fall away inside me. “Were they stolen?” I ask the dog, who stands calmly looking at the front door, head up, tail waving softly.

Then the mudroom door opens, and they appear. I resist flinging myself at them. They are in full winterwear—hats, boots, coats, snowpants—suitable for the cold, snowy night. As I help them unzip, I see they are shirtless underneath, but each wearing pajama pants. We are mutually baffled. They have come inside, I will learn later, because they saw me walking past the kitchen window and wondered what I was doing.

They went outside because they wanted to see the stars.

These two kids, five and seven years old, have gone out in the darkness, looking for beauty. They can seek the midnight stars here because the air is clear. Plentiful clean water wells up from the ground here. The soil and water grow good food. We are so lucky.

It is not only luck, though, that produces star-worthy nights, healthy air, and potable water. We make choices—individually, as a community, and nationally—that will directly keep the air and water clean or foul it up. We will all have to live with these choices, our own and others’.

In the White House, the hand that undoes protections for these basics of life is clutching at delusions. He is a puppet, manipulated by greed. With the jerk of a pen, he dismisses breathing and drinking, as if there is any other way for our children to survive.

And couldn’t we at least all agree that we want our children to survive? If we could, we would even give them the stars.

When I finally have our kids tucked in and asleep, I climb back into bed myself. “The kids were outside,” I say aloud, startling sleeping Andrew.

“What?”

“The kids were outside.”

“By themselves?!”

“Yep. They wanted to go look at the stars.”

“Bless their hearts.”

Our Bleeding Hearts

Old devil hate, I knew you long ago
Then I found out the poison in your breath
Now when we hear your lies, my lovers gather ’round
And help me rise to fight you one more time

No storm nor fire can ever beat us down
No wind that blows but carries us further on
And you who fear, oh lovers gather ’round
And we can rise and sing it one more time

~Pete Seeger

A hard wind thrashes my bleeding hearts. They are a gift from my mom, as are most of my perennials and many of my personality traits. Eloquent, pink flowers dangle at the end of their down-curling stems, reminding me of bowed heads and tears.

The wind was already blowing when my parents arrived last week with a carload of my mom’s green thumb—various hostas, black-eyed Susans, Echinacea, lavender, pink coral, daisies, Solomon’s seal, spiderwort. My mom and I each pulled on one of my sweatshirts against the sudden coolness of June. We planted them together in two large beds, alongside plants from a friend, re-rooting the legacy of womens’ attention to beauty and life.

Then we traveled to my sister’s home for a party. On June 12, our family celebrates two women—my sister and my mom—and their initiators into motherhood—my niece and me. This year, we are all together on this birthday. I awaken inexplicably weepy, emotion trickling over my internal spillway, feeling the world, without even seeing the news. I walk into the kitchen, straight into a hug from my mom, who has not yet seen the news either.

One of my mom’s best gifts is throwing her arms wide open. When I was a kid, my mom’s good friend, Joe, died of AIDS. I sat beside her and dipped a needle into dark cloth, helping to stitch Joe’s panel for the AIDS Memorial Quilt. We wept at his funeral, held at our Mennonite church; any objections to this location for a gay man’s funeral were smoothed over by our wise and loving pastor. As Joe had requested, a recording of Carly Simon swelled against the rafters that day, singing, “Let the river run / Let all the dreamers / Wake the nation.”

Gay and lesbian friends and relatives have always shared our lives and our home, with or without partners. So I am lucky. My parents strive to live generously, with intentional acts of acceptance—working to know how to love, why to struggle, and when to grieve. This way of living is both instinctual and learned. We do this together, on purpose.

I want to let my mom’s gifts flow through me, so I practice astonishment at flowers and the sky after a storm. I open up big laughs and cry easily. Children and dogs receive my most patient compassion, and adults receive my open arms. Echoing my mom, I give people food and flowers as they have come to me. I become an ally.

I spend my birthday this year moving in and out of hugs—my parents, my sister and her husband, Andrew, Sam and Stella, and even the guests for my niece’s first birthday party, strangers who quickly feel like friends. We have all seen the news from Orlando by now, and it scrabbles at our insides with sharp claws. I carry a full well of emotion, overflowing here and there. In this warm afternoon, though, we cheer for my niece as she raises her cake-smeared index finger triumphantly into the air—One!

There are so many fierce and joyous ways to galvanize our communities against hate. There are so many ways to love each other. There are never enough words to describe devastation and the aftershocks of tragedy.

Back at home, the gusting wind—even at its worst—does not destroy our bleeding hearts. Instead, they dance. Among the rocks in my garden, these tender, vivid flowers will return every spring to remind me, reassure me. The music will play again in my mind: “Oh lovers gather ‘round, and we can rise to sing it one more time.”

Good Neighbors Make Good Fences

It begins with walking. We walk back and forth between each others’ houses to share food or sledding invitations or canning efforts. We walk to the top of the hill to pick rocks in our fields. Living in a rural area, the only destinations within walking distance are our neighbors’.

Our neighbors, Sue and Neil, teach high school chemistry and physics. Their interests complement our medicine and ecology backgrounds so that we form a quartet of science lovers, energetically farming and raising kids alongside other jobs. As our kids discussed things the other day, I overheard their son, Thomas, tell Sam, “I’m not officially a guest. I’m your neighbor!” And that’s how we feel too.

A farm cannot exist in isolation from the people and landscape that surrounds it. Air and soil and water ignore boundaries of property ownership. Plants spread seed and grow across fences. Wildlife traverses. Kids toss baseballs and footballs and sticks for the dog. Our farm’s ecology—human and otherwise—seems most healthy when we commute and communicate across boundaries.

Walking the edges of our field—the five acres that lie between our house and their cow barn—Neil’s long strides measure a perimeter distance. Then he walks across to our door, sits with us at our little oak kitchen table, and we scheme over the constant peeping from the chick brooder.

Our neighbors raise beef on grass, and they’ll need more grass this summer for their growing herd. We, at this stage, raise grass, with no ruminants to graze it into meat. This situation is a match, we decide. All that’s missing is a fence to keep their cows in our pasture.

So we walk again, choosing a path for this fence. There is always walking, to place stakes and to stretch string and to measure, to talk with each other at each corner. Neil and his tall son, Andrew, dole out fence posts along the line. We are following relatively new boundaries, since our properties were once one larger farm, and our property has no fences. We are inventing the future.

We walk behind Eloise, which pulls a beast of a post-pounder, stopping to drive each post solidly in the ground. We are a slow procession, a parade with the music of the two engines and percussion so strong it vibrates your feet standing nearby. My dad drives the tractor; Neil’s dad lines up posts. Finding plumb takes a team, each eyeing the post from our own perspective and talking in sideways nods and hand signals to get it straight.

A few weeks later, with grass thickening the pasture, Neil and Andrew stretch the last piece of woven wire. Their hands are stiff and nicked from twisting wires. It’s demanding work—needing attentiveness and strength—to weave two separate pieces together into something stronger. It’s the right kind of work.

Marriage of Rocks and Trees

On our fifteenth wedding anniversary, we pick rocks from our freshly disked field. I keep Eloise the tractor at a slow purr while Andrew grabs any rock larger than a sandwich and chunks them into the trailer. Our rough fifteen-acre field adjoins our neighbor’s field, and, thanks to them, the whole area will be a hay field later this summer. We’ve had rocky times before, but this is different, I grin to myself.

It seems right that we are practicing attentiveness to hard things emerging from deep places. Sometimes I hop off the tractor to help. Together, we pry out and lift a toddler-sized rock. A few times, the stones are just too heavy, even for both of us, and we mark them with flags—get help here.

The whole project—this farm, this marriage—has flags all over the place, but not the red flags that shout warning or danger. These are flags in my mind, marking places where special attention has been given or where our community has helped us move the heaviest stones.

There are also flags marking new trees, so tiny that stepping on them by accident is a real possibility. Down beyond the north end of the barn, eventually forming a windbreak, flags march across the damp area between marsh and drier pasture. Flags cascade across one-third acre of previous scrappy thicket in our woods. After shearing the thicket, Andrew has flagged the layout of our future forest. These flags mark our path forward. They create a connect-the-dot image of how our lives here in twenty or thirty years might look.

On this evening two weeks after our anniversary, our kids romp at the edge of this eventual forest. Stella hugs the dog and plays teacher under a pine tree. Sam balances on logs and turns a branch into a blaster. Andrew wiggles the dibble in the dark soil, leaning the narrow spade back and forth to create a space for bare roots.

Most of these trees are smaller than their roots, so we mark each one with hot pink flagging. As we plant them, I tally the kinds and numbers. We—mostly Andrew—will have planted white pine, Norway spruce, tamarack, paper birch, yellow birch, black walnut, red oak, white oak, sycamore, wild black cherry, silky dogwood, nanny berry, and several pears and apples.

“Whoa. That just added up to 518 trees,” I tell Andrew.

“And that’s just phase one!” he says.

We are laughing at the ridiculous scale of our visions and at our good fortune to be here. We are shoving the dibble back into the earth, tucking in the branching roots, closing the soil around some optimism, some big dreams, some tender seedling.

Sketching Shenanigans

Instead of washing the dishes, I run a half-dull pencil across one corner of someone’s school paper I just flipped over. Hours of talking with an unstable client at work this weekend have left me without words. My fingers want to trace clean lines, simple forms. I need something quiet and directly satisfying, completely under my own control. The papers pile up as I draw a kestrel, geese in formation, barns, a wood frog.

Juvenilemeatbirds — photo credit: Stella Gascho

Around home, we compile shenanigans. We chug to the hilltop with Eloise the Tractor and her trailer and our tent. Pitching our two-person tent that takes me back to our honeymoon fifteen years ago, but now, I pitch it with and for our kids to snack and read while Andrew and I scuff across the newly disked fifteen-acre field, picking rocks. We move our rainbow rangers—adolescent meat chickens—from the kitchen brooder to a chicken tractor, fortified with cardboard and heat lamp against the chill, and rearrange the brooder to make room for new chicks this week. We work on cleaning out the barn, tearing down ceilings that release a foot of dust, mice, hay, and more dust.

Skip, always helpful, finds a duck egg and totes it so carefully in her mouth that her teeth don’t even scratch it. Sam, always zooming around, plays soccer and baseball and football in cleats, pausing to hug passing chickens. Stella makes dirt soup, tricycles, calls Skip with a high-pitched “HooHoo” that Skip always comes to, and also hugs the chickens.

At work, I often have several patients at once—a lacerated paw, a hard-breathing dog, a vomiting cat. At home, there are competing noises—Sam yelling, Stella yelling, hungry birds, the cacophony of toys covering the living room floor. Right now I am drawing this frog.

Somehow, probably while I was a work, Andrew has replaced a board in the ramp leading into our barn’s top level. The gaping, leg-tempting hole across the ramp is gone, as if it healed. That one board changes my whole outlook. What seemed unsightly, un-useful, treacherous for the past year is now strong and whole. Inviting. One board, making all the difference.

I pause in sketching because a gawky Barred Rock chick has managed the jump to brooder-edge, where she poops over the side onto the kitchen floor. These laying henlets will need to move outside soon, too, following the meat birds. Silkies and Polish chicks and Mille Fleur d’Uccle chicks will arrive this week, completing our three-ring poultry circus. In the next two weeks, we will plant close to 300 trees, and we’re scheming with our neighbor to install a fence around our lower field.

Our April activity rivals the spring peepers in frenetic volume. The wood frogs, though, early and brief heralders of spring, have chuckled themselves into silence. They are still, like a pencil drawing of a wood frog on a quiet kitchen table near midnight.