winter – Page 3 – the Dig and Flow

Sending Down Roots

Twilight this evening makes the world glow blue. The snow-covered ground reflects the dense sky. Finally, the winter we anticipated when we closed down the garden this fall has arrived. I slip into the barn to gather eggs—bluish-green and shades of brown—and watch the dog kick up some powder as she tears around on the hill.

Then we go inside to make French onion soup for supper. The smell of onions and garlic roasting with olive oil and thyme will fill the kitchen and spill into the mudroom when Andrew comes home.

I collect an armload of onions from our root cellar, a reliable source of satisfaction. Our root cellar used to be the cistern for water storage in the basement. Two thick stone walls complete a rectangle enclosing a corner under the kitchen.

The previous owner short-sightedly bashed a hole into the foundation to allow him to toss wood from the driveway into the cistern. He hammered another opening in the cistern wall to carry wood to the wood-burning furnace, which he later un-installed.

Andrew and my dad spent many summer days in that cistern, fixing the damages. Stones jigsawed into the foundation hole. A wooden frame closed the space between the stone wall and the kitchen floor joists. Insulation filled all the gaps. They poured a concrete doorway, then built a door, now held by hinges and a latch blacksmithed by my dad.

To get to that door, I walk past shelves they built, now laden with canned tomatoes, spaghetti sauce, dill pickles, bread and butter pickles, dilly beans, pickled beets, plum jam, hot pepper jam, hot peppers, hot cucumber relish, and a bin of butternut squash. I lift the heavy latchpin and swing open the door.

Wooden crates—thanks again to dad—stack five kinds of potatoes against one wall. Many, many potatoes. Carrots and daikon radishes hide in tubs of damp sawdust. Onions fill another crate. I grab five large onions and head upstairs to cry as I slice them thinly.

We have sent down roots in this place, and I think about home. I juggle deep gratitude for our marriage, kids, farm, and jobs with the ache of living away from family and decades-old friendships. We each have strong roots in other places—Pennsylvania and Indiana—where family, extended family, and close friends coincide. We find ourselves living in neither of those places, but digging into life here. I find myself full and missing.

At my kids’ ages, I lived on the farm where my dad grew up. I had the sense of belonging that comes through generations of living there. After high school, I left home quickly, eager for new places, unconscious of what I was leaving behind.

Home always has layers and complications. How do I feel rooted in a place where all of our roots are only one year deep? What will our kids understand of themselves in this place? How can we connect them to our village, when it spans multiple states?

Now, home is where our potatoes parallel this stone foundation. Home is the dog among the chickens, the dog and the chickens in our kids’ arms. Our village is the kindness of strangers becoming friends, coworkers adopting us like family. We are lucky. On this blue evening, our home is warm. Our roots are roasting in the oven.

2015-10-11 22.31.51 — Digging potatoes in October

RootCellar.2.2016 — Potatoes and onions in February

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.

Will We Insist?

On a curve of Lake Road lies a dead cat. I see her while driving to the elementary school in the morning. She is a bold calico, with clear patches of black and orange on white. The vehicle that killed her left her body mostly intact, but very, very still.

I say nothing on that first pass, allowing the kids’ music to fill the car. Adjusting our course to avoid hitting her, I press my lips together.

December astonishes us by imitating early November. Bare trees, bare ground tinged with leftover green-golds instead of white, and warmish air on our skin. Driving up the next rise, I tell the kids to look at the sky, where a rent in the pewter clouds seems to pour orange light onto a hill across the valley. No, Sam tells me. It looks like a fire, reaching up from the hill and burning a hole in the clouds. I agree. It goes both ways.

Returning from the school, I drive past the cat again. She is unmoved. I see animals die all the time. My throat constricts. I cannot face this single death; there is so much dying. So much being killed.

I chew on my thoughts, as I do too much these days. Lately, I drive past my usual turns, forget where I’m supposed to be going, put the milk in the cupboard, leave the grocery list at home and fumble through the store. I leave off household tasks, distracted by Stella wanting a story, Sam needing Lego help, Skip flopping on my feet, anybody needing to poop. I want to embrace each moment, then my mind flits around.

We arrive home to my coffee, canine exuberance, and sun on our own hill. I head out to our barn, where our birds greet me raucously. They spend nights in their spacious new coop. Now I open the coop door and step aside for the chickens and ducks to stampede comically for the barnyard, taking fast steps and gossiping amongst themselves. They lay their eggs where we can’t find them these days, crafty birds, but they dodge the big red-tailed hawk, too, so I appreciate their instincts—to hide, to keep safe.

When it’s time for preschool, Stella and I drive up Lake Road again. Few cars have passed the cat on the quiet road this morning. She remains.

This time I stop. This time, I have noticed a piece of her story. Beside her lies a mouse, equally dead, that she must have been carrying across the road. In the line of duty, comes to my mind. Going about her work. Blindsided. Coming down this road, I sometimes drive too fast, wielding the car around the curves.

Every day I ask myself what it means to live gently, but firmly. We can choose what we aim at. We choose who will receive our ammunition—money, bullets, words, food, shelter. Each of us is so powerful. Will we insist on destroying each other? Will we insist on love?

I bend over the cat. I tug her, stiff, into the roadside leaves. This small gesture means nothing, but strangely reassures me. I pause, then lift the mouse and nestle it under her shattered chin.

The First Animals of Our Barnyard

First, we noticed small feline tracks in the snow around our cars, leading towards the barn. We soon spotted the large black cat, too long-haired to see how bony he might be after this cold winter. Skittish, he bolted if he even saw us peeking out the kitchen window. He seemed to appear and disappear.

Next came the wild turkeys, fat bodies clinging to the spindly sumac trees behind the barn as they pecked the furry red sumac tufts. The toms proudly dangled their beards from their chests. One turkey carried a clump of burdock velcroed to its feathers. We followed turkey tracks right around the front of the barn, and over the largest drift near the old milkhouse.

One evening since snowmelt, we watched a possum saunter up our driveway, looking stoned. “Do they always walk like that?” I asked Andrew, laughing.

“Maybe he’s just waking up from hibernation,” he guessed.

The possum hunch-waddled straight into our barn. I wondered if he’d encounter the cat.

Last week, a bunny appeared. This was not a wild bunny wearing various shades of brown. We’ve seen those all winter, eating the red-berried thorn bush outside the guest bedroom window, ducking below the small deck at the side door, and trafficking under the loading dock that holds old trucks. But this bunny was white.

It just hopped out of our barn one morning, as if it had been there all along. Andrew walked out with an apple, sliced in half, spooking the bunny, and set the apple by the brick pile. The bunny emerged again; bunnies like apples.

We speculated—an escapee from the renting college student who kept rabbits in a camper until mid-December? A drive-by drop-off bunny, set free at our place by owners who were done with it? A stray bunny, busted free and gone feral?

Two days later, as the sun drew dusk down over the farm, Andrew and I stood at the bay window, facing away from the barns. A wild bunny hopped into view, visible crossing patches of snow, then hidden on the grass. Behind her came the white bunny, hard to see on the snow, but bright across the grass. He pursued her around the yard, casually, reminding me of Peter Rabbit going “lippity lippity” in Mr. McGregor’s garden.

That was the last we saw him, that symbol of frisky springtime fertility. I like to imagine that the white bunny continues to evade coyotes and chase wild lady bunnies. “I guess he moved on,” Andrew explained gently to Stella. “He was a traveling bunny.”

A Fresh Angle on the Project

In the glare of construction lights, I dance with a pole. On the end of the pole, a paint roller spreads white primer across a mostly white ceiling and walls. I spin and dip it towards the tray on the floor. The lights make me feel famous.

Last week, I swung a vacuum hose around, sweeping white powder from ceilings and walls. That dance partner weighed more, awkward and noisy, chasing the kids upstairs.

Stella returned when it was quiet, jutted out her hip, and pointed my phone around the rooms, clicking the shutter fast like she was photographing glamorous models—shop vac, buckets, chairs. She zoomed into the pith of the project, giving me a new angle.

Now there is music playing and an audience—the kids, the cat. I am calm in this work. Like shoveling, painting invites thinking. I smooth the walls and my jumbled brain, creating blank surfaces. These surfaces become a canvas for beauty and creativity and home.

I want color. I’m hungry for any green, deep orange, blue-greens, rich browns. In the drywall mud-white and primer-white rooms, paint cards stand in stacks and litter walls and windowsills. In the bedroom, I force myself to tone down from “wild life” blue to “rocky shelter” gray. For the kitchen I choose “natural soap,” a color with less vibrance but more longevity than “subtle glow,” which is not subtle.

The kitchen ceiling, since I have washed off its decades of soot, seems the right kind of gold-greenish-beige to be retro, instead of just outdated. It appears to be old milk paint, which doesn’t contain lead. But it’s peeling, and the ceiling boards required some patching, and, in the end, I will paint over it.

I can nearly see the final products: a living room with a real sofa for crashing at the day’s end, a room with a large bay window and light pouring in onto the rug, a downstairs guest room in restful colors with windows facing south to the mountain and east up the hill.