Belonging
January 26th, 2012 § 4 Comments
I have been thinking lately about how inexorably I have become connected to our land and home and how clearly it has shaped me in ways I could never have imagined. This on the heels of a short essay I wrote for an about-to-be-launched quarterly, ad-free journal that celebrates place-based living. It’s called Taproot. I’ve seen pre-production mock-ups and it looks fantastic.
Anyway. We bought this land nearly 15 years ago, and have lived here for 14 of those years; the first summer was spent in a frenzy of hammer and saw, erecting the humble cabin that has since been expanded in our pursuit of the too-large house. It sat on concrete piers, some of which, owing to the slope of the cabin site, rose a full 4-feet out of the ground. This was far beyond the design parameters of such a foundation, and on windy nights, those piers swayed back-and-forth, back-and-forth. It was like being in a cradle.
Both boys were born at home, on the same shiplap pine floor Penny and I nailed down in one frenzied October day. I can point out, within an inch or two, the precise spot where each of the boys took their first breaths. Back then, the boards were still shiny and smooth; the wood has since become dinged and tarnished with use, and to be honest, I like it better now. The pine was originally intended to serve as a subfloor; we planned to eventually install a finish floor over it. Eventually is a fairly open-ended concept, so perhaps it will still happen. But I pretty much doubt it.
Everywhere I look, I see our imprint on this land: House, barn, pond, greenhouses, blueberries, the pasture we cleared a couple years back. Not long ago, a pilot friend emailed some photos he’d taken of our land from the air and I have to say, it was a bit shocking. I’m still not sure if the pictures imbue me with a sense of accomplishment, or mild horror at the profound impact we’ve had on this piece of land. It’s a little of each, I guess.
What’s harder to see is the imprint this place has made on me, and I sometimes wonder what aspects of my life have been defined by this – and no other – piece of land. I’m not much of a second-guesser, but if I was, I suppose another way to put that would be: How might my life have ended up differently if I’d wound up somewhere else?
There’s no satisfactory answer to such a question, and I’m not really interested in an answer, anyway. I only know what I feel: That I am tied to this place, that I understand its nooks and crannies better than any other place on this earth, and that the better I understand them, the more I appreciate them. That the more I’m here, the more I want to be here. That if I am blessed enough to have my physical life come to a natural conclusion, I wish it to conclude here. That someday, I hope to be lowered into the soil upon which I’ve trod so many times, to give back just a little of what it’s given me.
My End of the Bargain
January 17th, 2012 § 1 Comment
We do chores twice each day, seven days each week, 365 days each year. Where we live, there’s nothing unusual about this; many of our neighbors adhere to similar schedules, and have for a half-century or more. I sometimes wonder what it’s like to have spent nearly a lifetime doing chores twice daily, to have the patterns of this work as engrained in body and mind as sleep or wakefulness. I suppose someday I’ll know.
I think of chores the way I suspect some people think of a practice – meditation, or yoga, or prayer. Maybe aikido or a musical instrument. Chores are physical, and frankly don’t require great skill, but they’re also emotional, intuitive and, I think, somehow artistic. I find this to be particularly true of chores that involve animals, which most of ours do.
I get up most days around 5:00 or 5:30. I do not set an alarm. In the summer, when it’s light or near enough so, I head straight outside. This time of year, I start fires, make a cup of coffee, sit for awhile and let myself adjust to the day while the rest of the family goes about their slow rousing.
If I’m to be honest, there are mornings I don’t much feel like doing chores. Of course, I do them anyway and I can truthfully say that I have never been sorry it had to be so. In part, this is due to the sheer physicality of the work, the way it gets the blood moving on a slow day. There’s something honest about greeting the day with sweat, as if offering something for the simple good fortune of being alive.
There’s another part to it, and I think it’s that chores are an assumption of responsibility in a world that can sometimes feel devoid of such a thing. In a sense, chores are an homage to the animals and crops under our care, the fulfillment of a silent promise not only to them, but – perhaps selfishly – to ourselves.
It Takes a Village
January 7th, 2012 § 11 Comments
On Saturday, we kill the pigs. It goes well; one shot each followed by a quick probe of the knife to loose the blood and as always, the shock of the sheer quantity of it, spreading across the frozen ground like unfurling sheets. Ryan and Jocelyn show up, and we spend the next two hours skinning and gutting and sawing and hoisting the halves to hang overnight so they’ll stiffen for cutting the next day. We have lunch. We skin and gut and saw and hoist some more. We are tired and the job is done.
On Sunday, Michael and Kelly arrive at 9:00 and Michael and I carry the halves in one-by-one, dropping them across the big maple butcher block our friend Brian made for us back when we were building the house, ten years ago or more. They are nice pigs; the largest halves are pushing 150-pounds, and carry a good 3-inches of backfat, which we’ll render on the wood stove and use to fry doughnuts (or “dog nuts” as the boys have inevitably taken to calling them), chicken, eggs, and more. The six of us cut for three hours, reducing the halves to manageable bits – chops and roasts, sausage trim and slabs of bacon. We have lunch. We cut for two hours more. We are tired and the job is done.
On Monday, Penny and Fin and Rye and I travel to our friend Pete’s. Pete is the sole founder and owner of a small-batch sausage business and has invited us to utilize his facility on his day off. This is beyond gracious, and of incalculable value to us, for we have about 130-pounds of sausage trim to grind, mix, and stuff into casing. What would take us literally days in our kitchen, with our rudimentary tools, will take only hours at Pete’s. He leads us into the gleaming space, shows us how to work the equipment, and leaves us to it. The boys work the vacuum sealer while Penny and I grind and mix and stuff for four hours. We pause for snacks. We grind and mix and stuff and seal for two hours more, clean, and leave. We are tired and the job is done.
I am as guilty as anyone of perpetuating the almost-trite belief that food can be about more than simple caloric nourishment; that it can be about relationships and community and nourishment beyond the not-insignificant value of a full stomach. But I perpetuate it because it is true, and to the extent I ever doubt this, the processing of our pigs reminds me of just how true it is. It’s not just the processing, for we raise them largely on waste milk gleaned from two neighboring organic dairy farms. Every other day or so, week-in, week-out, I’m in Melvin’s barn, or Jimmy’s and Sarah’s, picking up the buckets of milk they’ve filled for us. It is rare that I do not stay to chat for a few minutes; it is rare that I do not know how they’ve spent their day. More often than not, one of us has a story for the other, some small hardship that further fades in the retelling and the reciprocated acknowledgement that our challenges are rarely much different from each others’. Or some small happiness that grows in the sharing.
Not counting the farmer from whom we purchased the piglets, and not counting ourselves, there were eight people intimately involved in the raising and processing of our pigs. No money changed hands, nor will it. To the extent that debts were accrued and favors granted, they will be repaid and returned in a like manner, informally and in rough equivalence only.
What is the right name for this? Barter? Exchange? Neighborliness? Or simple community? I do not know for certain; perhaps it is some of each. But whatever it is, I have come to recognize it as one of the most powerful forces in my small life, on this small farm, in this small town. And for that, I am exceptionally grateful.
Start Me Up
December 30th, 2011 § 2 Comments
It was just a tick or two above zero this morning, so I duffed around for an hour or two, hoping it’d warm up a bit before I headed outside to replace the starter on the tractor. I would’ve waited for a warmer day, but the tractor had already been down for better than a week, and the projects are piling up and tomorrow we’re killing pigs and by gum it’s handy to have the loader to hang them from. So today it would be.
At a little after 9:00, fortified by a second cup of coffee and with the thermometer nudging a full ten degrees, I swaddled myself in multitudinous layers and waddled down to the tractor. I’d remembered the old trick of bringing two pairs of gloves; I’d tuck one pair under my overalls to stay warm, and swap them every five minutes or so. It’s amazing what a luxury such a simple thing can be under the right circumstances: I’ll take a half-warm pair of gloves fished out from my overalls while lying on my back under a tractor on a late December morning over practically any other extravagance I can imagine.
I tell you right now, I am no mechanic. Replacing a starter is a fairly simple task, even if whomever designed your machine saw fit to wedge it so tightly against the power steering pump that said pump must be removed, along with hydraulic lines feeding it, along with the fuel filter and a couple of fuel lines and… you get the picture. The bolts for the starter itself came off in about five minutes, but to actually extract the beast necessitated another hour’s worth of knuckle bashing. Then, install the new one and commence reassembly, cursing the fact that so many of the bolts must be threaded into ungenerous nooks and crannies that accommodate no more than a couple of ungloved fingers.
I’m a little ashamed to feel so dependent on our machines, grateful as I am for the toil they save us and gratifying as it can be to harness their power. But there’s a dead-endedness to them that nags at me, and it’s one of the reasons I end up crawling under them on a 10-degree morning: I just can’t bring myself to invest serious money in something that feels like such a backwards and callous way of interacting with the world around me. I recently read about someone who gave up cars for 17 years, and I swear just reading about it made my breath feel lighter. Over the holidays, we didn’t leave our land for three days straight, and it felt as much like freedom as any trip I’ve taken.
Still and all, it felt damn good to get hear that old diesel engine purr again, both for the personal satisfaction in having overcome both the elements and my mechanical ineptitude, and for the very real comfort in knowing that I again had so much sheer capacity at my command. Someday, perhaps, we will have figured out how to do without it. But for now, and at least until the next breakdown, I’m damn grateful for it.
Satisfaction
December 23rd, 2011 § 5 Comments
On Monday I spotted a road-killed deer along Interstate 91. I knew I should pass it by; it was 8:00 AM, and I was headed to Massachusetts to do some interviews for a magazine story I’m working on. I knew the deer would be in the car for at least a dozen hours, and I knew that Penny’s parents were arriving early the next afternoon for a three day visit, and I knew that the house was a disaster of epic proportions and I knew that I would arrive home that night road-weary and grumpy. I knew it would be stupid to pick up that deer.
Naturally, I hit the brakes.
It was a nice deer, a doe carrying a winter’s worth of back fat on her slender legs, all four of which had been shattered by the impact. I pried and wedged her into the back of the Subaru; a few miles down the road, I stopped for a couple bags of ice and then continued on my way. Every so often, I’d glance in the rear view mirror and see her feet protruding over the backseat headrests. For some reason, this sight confirmed to me that I’d made the right decision.
The next morning, we let the boys go at the deer. They’d been wanting to butcher a large animal, having paid their dues on squirrels and chickens aplenty, and this seemed like a perfect opportunity. I hung the deer from the bucket of the tractor, sharpened the butchering knives, and left them to the task. They built a small fire over which to warm themselves and roast bits of meat and stayed at it for nearly three hours straight. By the time they drove off with Penny to retrieve their grandparents at the bus station, the deer had been reduced to primal cuts, and I was left with only the final processing and cleanup.
In the big picture, I suspect it doesn’t matter a bit whether or not I made use of that deer. It could just as easily have been left to rot at the side of the road, another victim of our culture’s self-serving choice in transportation. It would have fed a few birds, rather than us, and one could argue that this would have been a more appropriate use of its gifts. After all, we don’t particularly need the meat, though we’ll find ways to share it with those that do. To the deer, struck dead by two tons of metal and rubber, there is no preference. Everything that mattered – abundant browse, surviving winter, a fawn by its side come spring – ceased upon impact.
So I’m left with the inescapable conclusion that my satisfaction in having pulled that deer from the frozen shoulder of the interstate, in watching my boys apply themselves so completely, enthusiastically, and skillfully to the task of dressing it, in slipping the packages of venison in the freezer, in the smell of the simmering bone broth that wafted through the house for the next two days, is both self-serving and naively righteous.
But then again: When is it ever different?
The Other 99%
December 13th, 2011 § 4 Comments
A couple of nights ago we ate an early dinner, strapped on our skis, and headed out across the hayfield above our house. It was the night after the full moon, and there was barely enough snow for skiing – three inches, maybe less – but our neighbor had let his milkers graze the field after second cut, so the surface was shorn low and smooth. The only obstacles were of the bovine fecal nature, and because these deposits were frozen, we could glide over them without breaking stride. Did I just say that we skied on cow shit? Why, yes, I did.
The idea had been to ski under the nearly-full moon, but we were too early, and for a while I had everyone convinced that the idea of a waning moon is a myth, that the lunar cycle goes from full start to full stop in just one day. At first, I thought I was joking, but after another moonless half-hour, I started to wonder if perhaps I was onto something. Such is my hubris.
Then we saw it begin to rise, emerging from behind the northeastern horizon first as a preceding glow, and then by inches as itself. We stopped and watched, and even the boys – especially the boys – were transfixed. It happened so fast, we could actually see it rising, as if it had been catapulted from somewhere deep in the earth’s core. Within minutes, the entire landscape was brushed in a warm, almost intoxicating glow. After a while, we skied on.
At Thanksgiving, friend of ours told me that humans can perceive only 1% of what’s out there. In other words, there is another 99% of sights and sounds, smells, tastes, textures and feelings that we know nothing about. I’m not sure how she knows this or if I should even believe it. Still, for whatever reason, I decided to. At first, I found it mildly unsettling, if only because I am at times already overwhelmed by how much I do not know.
But the more I’ve thought about it, the closer I’ve come to feeling comforted that so much could exist beyond the realm of common human understanding. The older I get, the more important it feels to me to believe that we are only consequential within the context of our humanness, that all the havoc our species has wrought upon the natural world only matters in the very narrow and specific perspective of that single percent. To think that there might be another 99% that could be as ignorant of us, as we are of it, is immensely appealing, if for no other reason than it grants me a complicated (and arguably naive) form of absolution.
There’s another reason it appeals to me, and it’s the same reason I stood still for a dozen minutes in a hayfield on a freezing night in early December watching the moon climb into the sky: A sheer, unadulterated sense of wonder at forces so profoundly beyond my control and with it, the simple gift of the knowledge that I’m not nearly as important as I think I am.
Waiting for Winter
December 7th, 2011 § 3 Comments
Given the disturbingly mild weather of late, I felt compelled to revisit this piece, originally written for Vermont Commons.
The season’s first big snow finds me on the shed roof by 7:00, trying to nail down the last few sheets of tin before the storm begins in earnest. Already, the air is thick with driven flakes. When I look up, I see the cows, bent to their feed, broad backs coated with white. I see the boys, sleds in hand, trudging through the accumulating snow. They are yelling. Maybe they are arguing, maybe they are just yelling to notice how the snow hushes their voices. I yell, too, but they don’t hear or, if they do, don’t acknowledge hearing. They are getting older, learning that I can be ignored.
It is 16-degrees. The bare fingers of my nail-holding hand burn with the cold, and I have to stop every three or four nails to tuck the fingers into my armpit. Beneath my feet, the tin is extraordinarily slippery, and twice I almost slide over the roof’s edge. It is not a long drop, so I allow myself to enjoy the sensation of sliding, knowing that even if the worst should come to pass, it won’t be that bad. But it doesn’t.
I have always loved winter. For years, it was for the skiing, the cut-loose feeling of falling down a mountain, of being at once in control and out of it. I still covet this sensation, but have noticed a shift in my appreciation of the season. Maybe it is age. Maybe it is fatherhood. Or maybe it just is. Whatever the reason, I find it in the sight of those cows, uncomplaining as the snow piles atop their hides. They stand so still, as if giving the storm permission to fall upon them. There is something honorable in it.
And I find it in the way a block of hard maple sounds when it submits to the maul. Goodness, but I love that sound, love the lubricated feeling of my muscles working in the cold, love gathering up the wood and carrying it indoors and watching the flames take it.
Even the absurdity of laying roof on a 16-degree morning, in a snowstorm, no sure footing to be found. I should be cold – hell, I am cold – should be miserable, should probably wait for the storm to pass. It’s not my work ethic that keeps me up here, nor some misguided notion of what defines valor. Believe me, I have no surfeit of these particular traits, although it is true that a small part of myself will measure its worth against the portion of the job that remains unfinished at day’s end. It is true that I can feel myself taking strength from the sight of those cows, from the sound of his boys whooping in the cold.
But it is truer that the settled, elemental nature of winter soothes and fortifies me in a way I can’t quite define. I do not see it as a battle with the elements; it is more like an acquiescing to them, a simple, humble acknowledgement that there is so much beyond my control. The cows know it; perhaps I have learned some of it from them. I’m pretty sure the boys know it, too, though it probably won’t be long before they forget. They are only human, after all. That is their only failing.
I come down. The task is unfinished but I am, at last, too cold to carry on. My fingers no longer burn, but I know it would be better if they did. I stick them under my armpit, look up through the hole in the roof, feel the snow on my face. In a moment, I’ll go inside, hang my coat, put my gloves by the fire to dry. In a moment, I’ll be warm. But for now, I stand there, doing nothing.
Reading
November 30th, 2011 § 1 Comment
At 6:30 this coming Friday, December 2, I will be reading at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Hardwick. This event is being held as a benefit for the Hardwick Food Pantry and/or the Center for an Agricultural Economy’s Food Access Fund. Please bring a non-perishable food item for the former and/or a bit of fiat currency (or gold… you could bring gold, too) for the latter.
Better yet, I will be only one of five local writers reading original works. Julia Shipley, Pete Johnson, Annie Myers, and Bethany Dunbar will also be reading. We did this event last year, and it was a fantastic success. Come early to secure a good seat. And stay late, as a post-reading visit to Claire’s is inevitable.
Thanks, and hope to see you there.
The Other 1%
November 29th, 2011 § 7 Comments
Thanksgiving came and went the way I hope all of my family’s Thanksgivings forevermore will come and go. There were nearly 30 of us gathered around a long row of cobbled-together tables, friends and family ranging in age from 2 to 70. There was snow on the ground, and sledding, good conversation and laughter and, needless to say, food aplenty. We disbanded early; of the families present, four had milking animals to attend to, and of course milking animals don’t really care that you’ve eaten a few too many pieces of pie and might prefer to spend chore time splayed across the couch.
Like most of us, I take far too much of my life for granted. This is the almost-inevitable result of living amidst constant abundance and largely in accordance with my own peculiar desires. There isn’t much sacrifice in my life, or if there is, it looks and feels too much like blessing to be taken as such. Oh sure, I have my moments, little petulant temper tantrums that tend to crop up when I am pulled in too many directions and it feels as if the needs of others are usurping my own. But like most of the stories we tell ourselves, this one is primarily of my own internalized design, and after Penny talks me down, I am always struck by how much of how we relate and react to the world is of our choosing.
From which I can only extrapolate: It is my choice to take so much for granted. Therefore, it can also be my choice to be more consciously grateful. Grateful for what? My family, naturally. Our animals. The friends that gathered in our home on Thanksgiving Day and those that didn’t. That fact that in about five minutes, I’m going to shut this computer down, get up from my desk, and head outside to labor alongside my wife, doing work that feels so damn good and important I don’t care a whit that nobody’s paying me to do it. The fact that I have the freedom to do this. And on and on and on.
I’ve been thinking about all of this in relation to the Occupy Wall Street protests. The protests resonate with me, but only to an extent. Because while I understand intellectually the damage done by the lockjawed grip of corporate America on the politics and policy of our nation, there’s a part of me that feels sorry for the poor demented bastards at the helm of these institutions. Ok, so maybe they’ve taken more than their share of our nation’s assets. Maybe they’re the driving force behind the unequal distribution of wealth in this country. And for this, they should be held accountable.
But of course true wealth is not confined to the narrow metric of money and stuff. And to the extent that wealth can be described as living life on one’s own terms, amidst a community that understands, supports and honors this definition, I am almost embarrassed by my affluence. Because the more I think about it, the more it feels as if I am part of the 1%. It’s the 1% that has learned (or is learning) that money is at best a partial accounting of prosperity. It’s the 1% that has learned (or is learning) that money and time are not readily conflated. It’s the 1% that spent Black Friday making or doing or simply being, rather than buying. It’s the 1% that is probably much bigger than 1%, but having no particular need for acknowledgement, is content to go quietly about its business.
It’s the 1% that can say, in all honestly, let them have it. Because what I’ve got is better.
