Spring – Page 3 – the Dig and Flow

Coaxing Life

On Sunday morning, the first tracks on our road scroll out behind my tires. It is my snowiest drive to work all winter—April 3. My feet make new tracks on the sidewalk at the emergency clinic. I am walking in to a kitten with an infected eye, a dog with dog bite wounds, an old cat with an intestinal blockage who tries to die under anesthesia.

I wish I had stayed home and sat all day, cross-legged, in the brooder. Light is constant and warm there. Peeping balls of fluff skitter across clean shavings and droop into naps. Chicks are simple babies, able to eat and drink and run on their own. Curiosity is their survival trait. They see everything, peck everything. They reassure me with their fragile, feisty lives.

They arrived early one morning, and we rang the bell at the post office back door, where we could hear the peeps inside. Sam carried the noisy box carefully to the car and held it on his lap. At home, we lifted each chick, weighing nothing, and dipped their beaks in water. It’s a ritual of welcome and a promise—we will care for you.

A farm, even a barely operational farm like ours, holds one hundred opportunities for tending—animals, plants, buildings, equipment, soil, each other. It is rhythmic work interspersed with frenzy, both meditative and stressful. The work is coaxing life, guiding life, and respectfully ending life to feed other lives. In spring, there is tiny new life to nudge forward.

At one week old, the chicks already seem like strapping young birds compared with a week ago. The twenty-five chicks that will grow into meat seem burlier—meatier—than the twenty future laying hens. They are all growing accustomed to us, and I indulge myself in reaching into the sleepy crowd of them and strumming my fingers among their soft bodies.

The chicks are getting their first feathers that extend fuzzy winglets into more useful-looking patterns. Oblivious to the April snow, these babies have everything they need. Our dog watches over them with all of her border collie concern, whining if her peeps sound distressed. I feel the same way about them, and about my veterinary patients.

At the emergency clinic, I think of the chicks as I stroke my fingertip up the nose and downy forehead of the old cat. The adrenaline settles in my bloodstream from navigating his rough anesthesia. This old cat survives, sits up, and we blink at each other, bewildered by the afternoon’s events. Relieved and subdued, I listen to his chest and tuck his blankets around him. It’s a ritual and a promise—we will care for you.

Spring and The Pope

These moments arrest me: Dust highlighting the edges of sunlight in our old tin-lined grain room. The complicated evening sky behind my loved ones on our hilltop. A curled cultivator from the Landis family farm given new paint and new work in our garden. An old white man kneeling before refugees with his hands cradling their brown feet.

A photograph of Pope Francis washing the feet of Muslim, Hindu, and Christian refugees—pressing his lips to their skin—more than captivates me. I am undone. I can feel my own feet in someone else’s hands on a Thursday before Easter, over twenty years ago. Teenaged, I barely fit in my own skin, unsure of my changing body and my place in the world. There, on the thin carpet, an adult woman knelt, cupping water over my feet and drying them gently.

This ceremony is intimate and powerful, even when photographed for the world. More embodied than communion, one person’s fingertips and palms hold another person’s foot. The act could feel awkward or staged, but doesn’t. Our bodies influence our minds too much for cynicism in this moment. To choose to kneel before another person, bathing their feet, feels—I realized as a teenager—strong and connective. Afterwards, we stand together.

This year, 2016, is an extraordinary Year of Jubilee, added onto the regularly scheduled Jubilee years. It is a year of debts forgiven and wrongs absolved, a year of starting clean. It is—Pope Francis has declared—a Year of Mercy, which is kindness without boundaries, love as a verb.

Although I am not Catholic and do not subscribe to traditional ideas of sin and salvation, something inside me embraces Jubilee and Mercy, especially in spring. This season always reassures me that life can return. Browned by winter’s freeze, plants become green again, even exceeding minimum survival by producing red buds, yellow blooms, purple petals, bright new growth.

Also this year, world events and national politics relentlessly conjure words like destruction, hatred, and division—a bludgeoning that sends me walking outside to watch the chickens running and scratching for a while. I need to wander, to see that the scars and ruts where junk and abuse gouged our farmstead are indeed healing.

On the farm and as a veterinarian, I count on healing, but I don’t perform it. I simply try to create opportunities for healing, then cheer when it happens. Perhaps this is a year of creating opportunities, and—at my most hopeful—I can see that healing can happen. This spring, we will prepare the soil and the barns and fences, and we will open our minds and bodies. We will kneel and invite connection, reminding ourselves that this is an extraordinary year of forgiveness and mercy.

This Squirming Pile of Fortune

On the road, it is wet and warm and dark, except for some distant lightning. And my flashlight. This kind of night invites amphibians, so I have come. I walk slowly, looking down, to avoid stepping on anyone.

The night is not peaceful. Spring peepers—sweet sweet!—and wood frogs—chuckle chuck—yell into the steady wind, which carries a promise of lower temperatures. It is raining. All around me, there is sex and death, and soft, shiny lives are running out into the open.

Stellaandsalamander — Jefferson salamander

I am a hundred paces from our front door. I am the last one out here tonight. Sam and Andrew went first, to check the cylindrical metal traps we have been placing in the wetland’s edge for several days. Every day, we check the traps, squealing together at lively Jefferson salamanders, grape-sized tadpoles, and one newt with a bright yellow belly. We admire the predaceous diving beetles, who carry an air bubble for breathing underwater and pinch your hand faster than you can drop them.

Tonight, knowing it’s a restless night for amphibians, the guys squelch out in tall boots, while I read books to tired Stella in bed. Then, footsteps pound up the wooden stairs, and Sam’s laugh bounces into the hallway. They burst into the bedroom with a new species, a spotted salamander, vibrant with her big yellow spots and tall black eyes. Sam caught her near the wetland. We cheer and admire, then they take her gently back.

Later, with both kids asleep, I walk out alone. Rainy spring nights coax salamanders from the woods across the road to our wetland to mate and lay eggs. Male frogs emerge too, beckoning females. Squashed frog bodies litter the road, and I dart around—as Sam did an hour earlier—scooping up the living and slipping them into the grass.

Seeing no dead salamanders, I wonder. In European mythology, salamanders could walk through fire, even lived in it—an untrue, but stirring image. On our road, are salamanders smarter or faster than frogs? Luckier? Are they fewer in number, and less likely to be hit? Or do they just stick to tires, leaving no evidence? It is always complicated to assign reasons for one group’s apparent fortune in the face of another’s losses.

When we wake the next morning, the grass is green. Wood ducks have splashed down into the wetland. Standing among cattails, the din of frogs surrounds us. Sam yells when he lifts one trap from the water, “It’s a whole family of spotted salamanders!” We grin at each other, thrilled by this squirming pile of fortune.

Life, Winning

There are tears. There is trying too hard. There is caring too much about small, broken lives. There is the perfume gushing in the open car window, from black locust trees dripping with blossoms along the highway on my way home. There is an evening glow across tree-covered hills and partly-mowed fields.

A few hours ago, a young woman gasped and slid down the exam room wall to the floor, curled her knees to her chest and sobbed under the bench. Her dog was critical, I explained. Bleeding internally. He might survive if we gather ourselves and act.

I pull into the driveway. Beside our red barn, ostrich ferns curl fiddleheads, thick and unbidden, inside a disheveled stone-bordered bed. Next year we will eat them; they will always taste like spring. Unfurled, they invite our kids into imaginary worlds. They are the color of hope.

Caught in a car engine fan belt, the cat’s front paw dangled by a thread, bone jagged. Her wide lovely eyes, slim six-month-old shoulders, and softest long black hair contrast her grotesque injury. I bargain for her life, knowing prompt surgery costs the owners too much and costs the emergency hospital staff time that we don’t seem to have on this busy holiday weekend.

Two days before Memorial Day, frost singed our seventy tomato plants, which we’d planted with an eye on weather and too much optimism. I walked between their bruised-looking leaves, wishing them green. Regret tempted me to lie there among them in the dirt, feeling defeated. Within a week, though, fresh growth pushed from their shriveled tops—life, winning.

Two hours past my shift’s end, I have just made the last phone call. The overnight doctor, with her jaw set against her overwhelming task, has taken notes on all my hospitalized patients. As I’m leaving, a patient codes. I turn my back on the capable CPR team and walk out.

For our anniversary, we intended to buy a fruit tree, or maybe two to pollinate each other. I find myself digging seven holes—three cherries, two plums, two apricots—into hard, rocky soil behind the house. Together, we line the holes with black, composted manure from beside the barn. As the sun drops, we hold each young tree straight, tucking it into our lives. Relaxed in this work, we talk about how good it is to watch things grow, and how, someday, there will be fruit.

Something New Every Day

Last week, my dad taught me how to drive a tractor. The grass and burdock and parsnip had begun growing at an ominous rate. We beat back weeds around the house with our ancient push mower, until it sacrificed itself on a hidden stump. Looking across the fields, we knew we’d soon be in over our heads if we didn’t take action.

Our used tractor search, made possible by my dad, who started driving old tractors as soon as he could just reach the pedals, culminated in Dad driving Eloise home. We bought this early 1960’s era Ford 4000 just up the road. A good deal, with the brush hog mower, our little blue and white tractor came with the name “Eloise” scripted across the front.

I’d never driven a tractor before. The last time I straddled onto this type of machine, I was a kid, and it was my grandma’s riding mower. My legs just reached the pedals. I was a determined, do-it-myself kind of girl, not content to simply pick up sticks while Dad cut the grass. After some instruction, I fired up the engine and started making wide sweeps under the oak trees in my grandma’s front yard. On my second or third round, I found myself heading straight for her lamppost. I panicked.

I don’t remember climbing off the mower, perched on the steeply angled lamppost. I do remember staring at the metal curls around the cursive L in Grandma Ruth’s screen door, working up my courage to creak it open. I remember approaching her, seated at the front kitchen window, and looking at the floor as I told her what I’d done. I remember lifting my face to see the crinkles beside her eyes, her barely-concealed grin as she glanced out the window, where my dad was backing the mower off the lamppost. “Last time I was on that mower,” she chuckled, “I drove it straight up a tree, and it wouldn’t go backwards or forwards from there.”

Last week, I sat on our new old tractor with dad standing beside me, carefully making sure I understood how to stop it. I experimented with my foot on the left brake and the right brake and both at once. I worked the clutch and changed gears and slid the hand throttle up and down.

Finally, I eased Eloise forward, creeping along in first gear, then sliding the hand throttle down to encourage the engine. As I touched the left brake and completed a turn, I lifted one hand from the thin, hard steering wheel. I pumped my fist in the air and yelled, “I’m Driving!”