Uncategorized – Page 10 – 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.

Muscle Memory with a Pitchfork and Banjo

We are the music makers,

and we are the dreamers of dreams…

Arthur O’Shaughnessy

I keep my nails lopsided—long on the right hand, short on the left—just in case I find the time and gumption to play my banjo again. This house has never heard the bum-ditty of that spunky instrument.

The banjo has waited in its case through our construction dust last winter, hidden in the closet through a busy summer, and has been tugging at me this fall and winter. Finally, one late February day, I unzip the case.

I lift its perfect, round face into the light, imagining the words encircling the head of Pete Seeger’s banjo: This Machine Surrounds Hate and Forces It To Surrender. The time seems right for music. I wonder if I can still play it.

FullSizeRender — Photographed from Pete Seeger’s *How to play the 5-String Banjo*

My return to banjo stumbles along, but my fingers surprise me by how much they remember. I play clawhammer style. A left fingernail strikes a string, lifts, then strums, A high pluck of the thumb on the fifth string punctuates each strum. It’s an old-timey, sing-along sound that brings me pure delight as I create it.

Callouses form again on my left fingertips where they press the wire strings. Sometimes my hands even act independently of my brain, as if by instinct. But this is different from the instinct. Instinct drives my chickens to scratch forward, then step back and dart their beaks to the ground. My banjo-playing movements are learned with meticulous repetition. Once taught to my confused, unwilling muscles, this music-making seems to have entered my cells.

Our bodies store memories. The smell of your elementary school. Stubble on an unshaved cheek against your lips. A dog’s ears in your hands. Mint tea from the garden—sweet on your tongue, cold down your throat.

As spring approaches, callouses form again on my palms. I lever a pitchfork into two-feet of hay and petrified sheep turds that linger in a small corner room of our barn. The shove, pry, lift pattern plays old scenes in my mind of other places I’ve used a pitchfork or a shovel. Sweating in stalls as a teenager so horse-crazy I felt honored to handle their feces. Turning compost in our red dirt garden in Alabama. On this farm, I push wheelbarrow loads to the garden, where the well-cured manure will fuel our vegetables.

We are always teaching our bodies something, whether or not it’s what we want to learn. I have learned to ride a bicycle, to drive a car, to tie surgical knots. I have learned to carry my shoulders high and tense and to bite my fingernails (must resist…need them for the banjo).

Movements repeated, like my fingers across this keyboard, become unconscious. We cannot unlearn them, although they can fade with disuse. I wonder what other actions I repeat without realizing that I’m coding them into my body.

Maybe one day I will play the banjo as fluently as I ride a bicycle. It will keep me company and make me laugh. It will invite other voices and their own harmonies. The banjo has no agenda. It offers me no guilt or frustration, only song. It takes my moods and stress and fears and creates something more hopeful. My banjo needs its own slogan—one that rings true for me. Maybe: This Machine Digs Into Shit and Turns It To Fertilizer.

Between Contentment and Complaint

At the back of our property, the bottom corner, I hear the trees talking. It’s a sound somewhere between contentment and complaint, a creaking of two lives rubbing against each other. The wind whips the dog’s happy breath upwards in small clouds. She and I are exploring beyond our boundaries, walking and just walking some more.

Despite long underwear and heavy coat, I will feel chilled for an hour after this walk. It’s a rare day this winter that is truly cold. Winter’s brown-grey palatte seems more vibrant in the woods than in town, or even at the farmstead. In the woods, winter seems like exactly what should be happening, instead of a bleak time of waiting for spring.

Our neighbor’s two-track carries me around the original 100+ acres that once belonged to our house and barns, but is now divided between them and us. They are good neighbors. Walking this loop, I am accepting their invitation, given a year ago. For several strides, I envy them these woods, where they touch the edge of a large wetland.

At this boundary, I stop and the dog freezes—heads high, ears alert, scanning the swamp. The otherness here holds both of us. Wetlands always make me feel this way, as if I’m touching velvet on an antler—wild texture and mystery. The not-woods, not-lake, not-field opens my imagination. My envy dissolves when I remember our neighbors’ invitation. The gift of this place has been offered to me, too.

This is early January, and it will be my last hike for a month. While I hike, my parents are watching the kids. While my boots crunch ice, Andrew sweats in a different forest—Amazon rainforest—with teeming greens and inexorable dampness. He helps to lead fourteen undergraduate students well beyond their previous experiences. When he returns, we will spend three weeks flattened by flu and respiratory infections. February will find us hatching slowly back into regular activities.

For now, following the edge of this wetland connects me to Andrew, who taught me to see this type of landscape. I can outline our relationship by connecting the dots from Onion Bottom in Indiana through bogs in the Northwoods all the way to swamps in southern Georgia. We’ve found carnivorous sundews and pitcher plants, and read stories in water-loving trees like willow or cypress, or trees that drown when the water rises. We try to understand the places that are neither terra firma nor open water.

The dog, as always, covers triple my distance as we turn away from the low, wet acres and head uphill. We emerge from the woods, skirt a pasture, then crest the hill through our large, stubbled field, which stood tall and green-gold with rye this summer. I’ll return from my hike’s solitude to the house full of our kids and my parents. Our lives will keep rubbing against each other, creaking like trees, offering texture and mystery.