Up!

2010-03-27T18:27:00.004-04:00

So Blogger is discontinuing its FTP service, and I'm trying to figure out what to do about that, but I think it will mean a move to Moveable Type. In the meantime, things might be a little wonky around here. Hopefully all the bugs we be worked out soon.

2010-03-14T11:48:00.003-04:00

Here comes mud season. The early week was perfect sugaring weather - warm sunny days and cold, cold nights. But the last few nights have been warm as well, staying at least several degrees above freezing. Today the rain started, and the last of the snow is melting away.

As the ground slowly thaws, it turns to mud. All that water has nowhere to go until the soil is fully unfrozen and the trees leaf out. We throw extra straw around the chicken yard to keep them from getting entirely filthy.

Of course, there's no guarantee and no reason to believe that winter is behind us. The official last frost date is still two and a half months off, and that leaves a lot of time for last-minute blizzards.

2010-03-06T16:12:00.004-05:00

Strong sun. No wind.

Green sprouts in damp soil.

The reemergence of scent into the world.

The best apple I've ever eaten.

Dirt under my fingernails.

Quiche in the oven.

Happy happy happy.

2010-02-24T18:57:00.002-05:00

(aye, and the snow
shall inherit the wind,
and the wind
leave her with nothing.

and sorrow
shall inherit the sky,

and i the shovel.)

2010-02-22T19:05:00.002-05:00

He holds the knife behind his back,
holds the chicken gingerly by her beak.
He looks up at me
deep breath
looks down at the chicken.
Okay missy.

She's upside-down in an orange construction cone.
She was easy to catch, slow, sick.

He looks up at me,
looks down at the chicken.
Knife steady but still,
behind his back.

Wind chills my fingers
wrapped firm around her legs.
I can feel her heartbeat.
There is a scar on the bottom of one foot.

Okay missy.

Deep breath.

Okay.

He looks up at me, shakes his head.

The knife handle is warm from his hand.
The light is failing, cold night coming on fast.

Deep breath.
The blood runs hot into the bucket.
I can feel my heart beating.

2010-01-31T09:57:00.002-05:00

Because that's how things are, the thaw last week preceded the coldest temperatures of the year for this week. With both heat lamps on in the chicken house, it got down to six degrees in there; as long as they have enough to eat, they won't freeze, but they can get frostbit. Egg production has dropped a little with the cold temps, but now that we're past the molt we're getting a pretty steady dozen a day. We're in the position again of needing to find some more egg customers - we were selling three or four dozen a week last summer to a restaurant that since has gone out of business, and now our regular customers can't keep up! In the meantime, I guess I'd better get back in the habit of baking lots of cakes and making lots of pasta. One day I'll post my "how to use over a dozen eggs in one day without anyone realizing they've eaten that many eggs" menu.

(cross-posted to the farm blog)

2010-01-26T10:42:00.002-05:00

Thaw.

Hard rain scours away the snow, leaving the fields sodden and stripped. What doesn't melt entirely turns to ice overnight. The chickens scurry outside to stretch their legs and wings; they do not like snow, which covers up the compost pile and chills their feet. The deep bed of straw in their coop has reached nearly a foot deep. With a quarter-bale added every few days, it'll be deeper before the true thaw comes.

After going to California for Christmas, I went with J to Florida to visit family there. I'll be returning to California next week to mark and grieve my grandma's death. I feel as though I'm missing winter, though I'm sure there will be plenty of it left on the other side of February; still, I miss the feeling of hunkering down, burrowing in, of settling the body and mind for the long, dark cold. Bitter though it may be, I've come to love winter. And lovely as it may be to swim in the ocean in January - grateful as I am for the opportunity to do so, and to see all our far-flung relatives - I would almost rather stay home, wrapped in a wool blanket, sipping my tea.

2010-01-24T18:22:00.002-05:00

Ten thousand dead
in Haiti, all forgotten
when my mother's mother

the ground from which sprang
the ground from which I sprang

ceased, finally, to tremble.

2010-01-22T15:18:00.001-05:00

the tears rise as from a pool
splashed by the stone of death.

they rise, peak, arc
and fall. the stones fall
erratic, one and another, and
though there was only one death

there seem to be many stones.
there seems to be no end of water.

outside, the snow falls.
the night gathers its velvet and cold.
i wish that i believed in heaven.

death stoops to choose another
stone. heavy. smooth.

it skips.

2010-01-08T10:20:00.002-05:00

The snow falls and falls. We spend a full day in shoveling, clearing space around the greenhouse and the drive. We spend a day snowshoeing up a mountain, through crystallized trees and a flat white sky that encases us so completely I begin to think we are inside a snowglobe, and not in the world at all. Then on the hike down, the clouds lift just an inch above the horizon, just enough to let a stripe of liquid sunset light strike through and stain the whole mountainside orange.

In California over Christmas, I sat outside in a T-shirt in the sun, looking out over the greening hills, and I longed for Vermont and snow. For the tiny tracks of mice and rabbits and the stories they tell. For layers of wool and mugs of cocoa. For the snug feeling of being inside while the world whirls and freezes outside, and for the steam off my skin at the top of the mountain while the world whirls and freezes around me. And for the tightly-held dream of springtime, the thrum of the seasons that insists: You are alive.

2009-12-19T18:03:00.002-05:00

three bowls of soup.
hot. fast.
the woodstove

isn't coming.
put on a hat.
pull up a ladle.

are you ready
for the longest night?

& the long, long cold.
i am.

2009-12-19T08:26:00.002-05:00

Last night, in the haze of almost-sleep, I thought to myself that I should take an internet vacation this weekend. Yes, I said to myself, that's a good idea. Step back from the screen and into the world. Do some writing, and do some hiking, maybe even sledding.

At dawn this morning I was outside chasing a chicken. I don't know how she got out of the fence (well, I suppose she flew; what I don't know is why) and I don't know when, except that it was yesterday. I saw her tracks, yesterday, in the garlic field, which is near the chicken yard, but all I thought was, "Hey, neat bird tracks!" Usually when a chicken gets out of the fence, all she does is pace around trying to get back in, which is what Sylvia was doing this morning; I don't know where she was yesterday when I was admiring her tracks in the snow. What else I don't know is how she survived the night without freezing or even - as far as I can tell - frostbite, since it was at least -2 and probably colder with the windchill. Even with the rigged-up oil-pan heater we use, their water was frozen this morning.

Sylvia is a silver-spangled hamburg, a small black-and-white spotted chicken with big dark eyes, blue legs, and a rose comb. She's the only one we have of that breed, which I think may have been a mistake. It's a smaller breed than all the others, who we chose for their meatiness in addition to their laying ability. She came along because she's the only white-egg layer and because she's so pretty. But as the smallest hen, she seems to be at the bottom of the totem pole by default, and often gets picked on and chased away from the best treats. I think maybe if we had two, they could at least band together. Maybe not, though; the subtleties of chicken politics are beyond my meager comprehension.

At any rate, by the time Sylvia was securely returned to the proper side of fence and coop, I was cold and hungry. I'm accustomed to drinking my coffee while checking email and reaping the night's collection of blog posts, and habit had me several pages in before I remembered my determination of the night before, and by then I wanted to write this post. And since writing was part of what I was supposed to do with my non-internet day, that seemed alright. Justification works!

This post about workspace at Via Negativa inspired me this morning, at least in part. If I were to take a picture of my workspace, it would be a picture either of the kitchen table or the living room couch, which is where I'm parked now. We have a very nice desk, also in the living room, which originally furnished J's grandfather's podiatry practice. I have written on that desk perhaps four times, even though I always set it up with the idea that it'll be a good writing space. Now, of course, it's cluttered and unusable - the printer lives there and the new landline phone, and the charger for our cordless hammer drill, and the farm clipboard and some other papers and sundries. The kitchen table often gives way to a likewise mess. My lap, however, is - unless occupied by a kitten - almost guaranteed to be clear. And the laptop fits so tautologically well thereon.

So I write wherever I happen to sit myself down of a morning. But - and this, really, is the point - many mornings, and many days, I do not write at all. Even now, when I am again unemployed, when the farming season has (chicken chasing nonwithstanding) drawn to a close. With some full days of nothing else to do, I do nothing.

In my murky musings last night, I thought to myself that I should be writing my book. Which book is that? Any book, really, but there are two most on my mind: one, a country-living guide for the city-born homesteader; two, something about food and Zen and wild and farm and love, perhaps in the Pilgrim at Tinker Creek tradition. The first I've been working on a little, slowly; the second has only been simmering, but for a long time.

Without structure, I become ineffective very quickly, and I so far have proven a poor hand at creating structure out of none. I end up circling my goals, pacing the strange and fearful boundaries that keep me from them, and often, I think, fleeing blindly and squawking from the very things which might best actually get me inside that damn fence: a routine, a commitment, and, maybe, a real space in which to work.

2009-12-16T19:07:00.002-05:00

The kitten was gone at the vet's all day, getting spayed. Her absence made itself felt, all day, a quietness and also a lack of suspense. Nobody to pounce on your feet as you step out of the bathroom. Nobody to pull the pom-pom off your hat as you sit reading on the couch. Nobody to race madly and full-speed around and around the living room, and nobody to dive between your legs just as you take a step. Nobody to investigate the faucet while you brush your teeth. Nobody to stalk you in slow-motion all the way across the room. And nobody to hop on your lap when you sit down. Nobody to nuzzle your chin. Nobody to lay on your chest and fill you with purr-reverb.

She's home now, groggy and wobbly but doing fine. The vet said she was "spicy" and "a handful," and looked apologetic when explaining that we're supposed to keep her quiet and inactive for ten whole days. Ten days! Wish us luck.

2009-11-29T09:09:00.002-05:00

It's funny and a little amazing how the kitten has transformed our home. Her bright energy lights the place now, even when she's asleep. She's full of mischief and the requisite curiosity. She likes to help - with laundry, with sweeping, and with making the bed especially.

She is so thoroughly herself, so full of her own desires and goals. I suppose that's obvious, but it's somehow easy to forget when you've lived without a pet for some time - that they are creatures complete unto themselves. Cats especially, who keep secret their unfathomable motives.

At night she burrows down between us and purrs herself to sleep, but once walking to the bathroom I saw her in the moon-lit square of the sliding glass door, staring out into the darkness, silent. She is a great devourer of crickets and spiders, but when she finds a ladybug she will sit primly with her tail wrapped around her paws and watch it, following carefully when it crawls out of her sight. She comes when called only if she has nothing better to do, but she comes running to the door to greet us almost always when we get home.

And somehow, it feels like we're a family now, rather than just a couple. Obviously she isn't a baby, and she's too autonomous and also too sharp to be a very good stand-in. But she is very small, and very sweet when she isn't being possessed by wild cat-spirits. And I do love her, from the bottom of my bottomless heart.

2009-11-28T09:57:00.000-05:00

Mostly I have the same dreams. It's always been that way - probably 60 or 70 percent of my dreams recur at least a few times. They don't bore me, because I have so many of them, hundreds still even if they go into reruns. Some of them are so common I know immediately that I'm dreaming; some of them are nightmares from which I've become quite skilled at waking myself. Some only repeat twice or three times, with months in between. Once I dreamt the same dream every night for two weeks.

And then sometimes, I have new dreams every night. It almost makes me uneasy, not knowing where I'll be when I fall asleep. Often times, even if the dream itself is different, it takes place in one of a handful of familiar landscapes - there is a dream version of my childhood home, of Tassajara, a dream mountain where I hike and where most flying dreams begin, other houses, rivers, kingdoms. Sometimes I resist waking because the dreams are so intricate, so brocaded with meaning and detail that I hate to leave them. Sometimes they seem brighter and more substantial than the day that follows. Sometimes I wonder if they aren't more real.

2009-11-26T12:58:00.003-05:00

For the hills outside the window and their ever-changing colors and the ever-changing clouds that hold them. For the chickens dustbathing in the late-November sun. For the chicken I will eat with my true love tonight. For my true love, and the eyes he has that see into my fears and hopes and lies and dreams, for which I am rarely thankful at the time. For my own eyes that see and hands and arms and legs that grasp and lift and hike the hills. For the kitten who tries to help me fold the laundry. For a warm place to sleep at night and a belly full of food. For a winter's worth of squash and potatoes, rutabagas and carrots, tucked away. For the family whose love I've never doubted. For knowing what I want my life to look like, and for a life that already looks very much that way. For a good book and a cup of tea. For good soil and soft rain. For blueberry pie and pumpkin spice cake and coffee stout and love. And love. And love.

2009-11-22T10:39:00.001-05:00

It is thoroughly November. The gaudy pagentry of October is well behind us now, and the serene, clear beauty of snowfall yet to come. Fields of sod cling to their green, but the trees have abandoned everything. The hills have retreated back into themselves.

Soon everything will be pen-and-ink, drawn starkly by the snow. But not yet. November is a muddled pallette, a great watercolor bleed of sepia, soil, and sky. The edges all smudged (the bright leaves turning back to dark soil) and feathered (the bare braches shading into bone sky).

Our new field is soaking wet. This valley all used to be the bottom of the sea, and the bottom of a great lake, and when the waters pulled back they left many and heavy deposits of clay. Rain two nights ago left water in the plow furrows which stands still today. Another spring like last spring - wet and cold and wet - and we may not be able to get into the field in time for first plantings.

Still, we craft our plans. The seed catalogues begin to arrive. Lots of people farm in clay soils. It will be alright.

And November rolls along on its creaky wheels. The kitten doubles in size, then doubles again, and is still so small that she can sleep in the tiny wedge of space between J and I when we curl up together. The teapot begins warming up for winter duty. We pull the heavy boots and down jackets out of their boxes, put away the summer dresses and sandals and broad-brimmed hats. In our new greenhouse, we prepare the soil for winter carrots and spinach and beets. We wish for a woodstove. We put the sleds out in the shed, easy to hand for the first good snow. November is nearly past, and winter, oh winter is coming.

2009-11-01T13:11:00.003-05:00

The first rule of combating SAD: if it's sunny, go outside.

Even if you don't want to. Especially if you don't want to.

Go for a walk, go for a run, fork over the compost, rake some leaves, shovel the walk. Stand outside for five minutes on your lunch break and text your best friend. Just keep your eyes open so the sunlight can hit the back of your retinas, because apparently that's where it's needed.

There'll be days this winter when the sky never really lightens, days of sleet and cold and dark. But there will also be clear, sunny days, when the snow makes for a brighter light than ever summer brings. When those days come, don't spend the whole damn time indoors. If it's sunny, go outside.

The other first rule? Start early. Start now.

2009-10-31T15:00:00.002-04:00

I don't like cities. I don't like being in them and I especially don't like driving in them. Too fast, too angry, too many turns.

Work brought me to Boston for three days, and I didn't like it. To the point that I ate at the restaurant in my hotel each night rather than have to go back out into the city -- and considering that the best ethnic food we have in Vermont is poutine, usually I'd go out of my way for some real Greek or Jamaican or even Italian food. But it was all too much for this country girl to handle, so I spent my evenings with my book as close to "home" as I could get. In fact, all the navigating and being honked at and getting lost and meeting new people completely exhausted me.

So when I had an hour to kill in Concord, it was worth my five dollars to make the small pilgrimage to Walden Pond. To walk along the edge of the water, on a clear day in what was still October, with the geese veeing overhead. To pace out the markers at the cabin site, hardly larger than our chicken house (though with a better view). To think about Thoreau and simplicity and autumn and root cellars and land.

I used to smirk at the knowledge that he walked over to Ralph's for dinner some nights, that he bought in flour and and took his laundry home for washing. But I have since lived in lonely places and small, and I have planted my own beans and hoed them, and I don't smirk now. Besides which, he never laid claim to hermitage.

But a life apart, just a little ways apart. It was worth my five dollars and my time to be walking in the woods beneath the still-changing trees, the pond so bright, the geese so loud overhead. To remember that I am not the only one ill-suited to cities, and that it's okay to want to be out in the woods, alone, for a while.

2009-10-27T20:15:00.003-04:00

FYI: I've got a poem up at qarrtsiluni for the "Words of Power" issue, which is shaping up to be quite as intriguing as I'd expected. So far I've particularly enjoyed this poem and these photographs. Check it out.

2009-10-25T08:26:00.002-04:00

My friend M, after some months of un- and under-employment, got a job yesterday that combines two of his greatest passions and skills. It's not an overwhelmingly well-paid position and it isn't a permanent one either, but someone is going to pay him to ski and take photographs and those are the two things he'd do most all winter no matter what.

After we finished the toasting and got down to the lasanga, I said, somewhat petulantly, that somebody ought to give me the job of my dreams. We're expanding the farming experiment quite substantially next year - we should have a 20-member CSA and a spot at a market or two - and farming is the dream and I'll be doing it. But I'm still going to need a paying job, and I'm going to need one pretty soon 'cause the ones I've got now are ending.

And somebody ought to give me the job of my dreams. Which statement, however, does beg the question: what exactly would the job of my dreams look like?

It's not waitressing, I'll tell you that. I'm a good waitress, and I'm sick of it. I'm sick, in fact, of the low-wage-retail-smile-all-day category all together.

I know this is a crappy time to be picky about getting a job. But it would be really nice to find one that I can stay with and stay happy with. We won't be full-time farmers anytime soon, especially if we buy some land next year, which is what we really, really, really want to do. So I don't want another crappy job that I'm planning to quit as soon as I can.

So the perfect job? It lets me work full-time in the winter and half-time in the summer (or, potentially, pays me enough in the winter to last all year). It pays enough. It lets me work either outside or with my brain or both. Learning things would be good. Not starting really early in the morning would be good. Food and nature and agriculture and animals are good. I like people, provided that I also do other things sometimes.

I loved working in the vet's office - it had the brain-work and the learning and the animals and the sometimes people. Obviously I like farmwork, but generally it fails in the "pays enough" category, and also in the part where I need to work in the winter.

Realistically, I'll probably take the first job I can get that fits "pays enough." But I think it'd be good to at least know what that perfect job looks like, so I'll recognize it if it happens to come along.

2009-10-24T11:13:00.002-04:00

The teapot boils
and boils but never whistles.
The rain comes cold and soaks the ground,
and all our lines sink out of true.

November looms,
and the rain obscures the mountains
where snow has already fallen twice.

At night I chant the tasks ahead,
an unconsoling mantra,

but the trees are still blazing.
One is a bright and yellow flame,
a spark struck against its own black bark
and the slate-grey sky.

I set down the sledgehammer,
push the rain out of my eyes.
Take another swing.

2009-10-19T13:35:00.002-04:00

Last night I made the first batch of winter-soup-made-from-summer-scratch. It may not really be winter, but it was 27 degrees last night so I think that's close enough. This is one of my go-to soups for as long as the ingredients hold out, and it's always extra-pleasing because not only is it colorful and delicious, but we've grown almost everything ourselves. The basic gist is this:

From the root cellar: onion, garlic, potato, carrot, and celeriac. From the freezer: tomato sauce and chicken stock. From the pantry: black beans, canned corn, zucchini and red pepper relish. From the string hanging in front of the window: dried peppers. From the counter: the last tomatillos. From the garden: chard.

Do the onions and in butter or bacon fat or oil. Cumin and turmeric and a little cinnamon are nice, even if you didn't grow them. Add the other cellar veggies and the tomatillos and dried peppers, all chopped in to spoonable bits. (I like to follow Deborah Madison's advice and have the soup water simmering separately with all my trimmings while I do the rest to make a little mini-stock, especially if I don't actually have any in the freezer.)

Add the tomato sauce and stock, and simmer until the potatoes are about done. Oh, and soak the beans the night before and cook them separately. Then dump in the corn and its juice and the relish and its juice and the beans. When everything is warmed through and the potatoes are all cooked, add the chard, chopped up.

Later on I'll add dried tomatillos instead of fresh, and kale instead of chard. Chives are nice to snip on top if you've got some. Chorizo would be a good addition, too, I think. We didn't grow any of that, but there's a turkey farm nearby that does. And some cheddar or sour cream on top wouldn't be amiss, either.

Yum! Hope you all are staying warm, too.

2009-10-11T10:09:00.002-04:00

It's looking like a hard frost for tonight - between 33 and 28 degrees, depending on whose forecast you believe. Then another on Tuesday night, maybe even colder.

On Tuesday night, we'll be out in the woods somewhere as part of a three-day backpacking trip to celebrate our anniversary tomorrow. (!) So today, before we leave, I have to gather up all the last remains of the peppers and tomatillos, and also try and wrangle a warmer sleeping bag than the one I've got.

And then into the woods! The hills are bright with their copper and gold and the deep red and the tawn and bronze. I haven't been backpacking even for a night in maybe two years, and I can't wait. Horray for fall!

2009-10-04T08:20:00.002-04:00

This rain smells like autumn. This rain smells of leaf-fall, mulch-mud, wood-fire, and, though impossible, the sea. Even after the rain stops, the air hangs thick with mist and promise. When it clears, just for a moment, the hills across the valley shine in their sudden finery of copper and gold. Even where the leaves cling to their green, it is not the same green as it had been.

We hike in the promise-mist. Scraps of gold and copper litter the trail. Above us, the canopy of leaves still green, but not the green it had been. A tired green, an ending green, even though vibrant still against the mist-bright sky. Even though green and no color else, the shades of fall can be sensed somehow in those leaves. Green that is really gold. Green that is really red, orange, fallen, trampled and turned already back to earth.

Back at home, the kitten waits. She comes running, mewing, full of wiggle and purr. When I look at her, the bottom drops out of my heart. How can anything be so tiny? She is sweet and fierce and fearless, except she fears the road. When she tires of destroying paper bags and stuffed mice, she will climb the full length of my body to balance easily on my shoulder and purr and purr and purr. She will curl in the crook of my arm while I'm reading, and purr and purr and purr. She will wallow in the space between J and I, so thoroughly asleep that we can move her when one of us gets up and she does not wake, but continues to purr and purr and purr. How can anything be so small, so soft, so very tiny? The bottom drops out of my heart, and love pours out, and I am steeped, I am soaked, I am suffused with love and love and love.

2009-09-28T15:15:00.002-04:00

Oh, man. And you thought I was crazy about chickens?

2009-09-24T16:53:00.002-04:00

On Thursday you will park in Lot A. On Friday, will NOT park in Lot A; you will be turned aside or ticketed if you try. On Friday, you will park in the muddy field behind the gym.

On Thursday you will iron a shirt for what feels like the first time in your life, even though of course it isn't. You will think suddenly of ironing your wedding dress, which was almost a year ago now, and was the last time you held an iron.

On Thursday you will forget and remember your schedule so many times that the very forgetting and remembering begin to feel comfortable. The schedule is written on a scrap of paper tucked inside the new, fancy calendar book that you bought for this new job, and which does also have things written in it. Still, you somehow prefer, almost viscerally, to write things on handy scraps of paper and stick them in the front pocket.

You will accidentally iron in nearly as many wrinkles as you iron out, and you with think - not for the first time - that this is one of the downsides of women's liberation. You thought that also when your husband's grandmother sent you the set of silverware and a beautiful box to put it in and you did not know how the silver was meant to fit in the box.

Surely, fifty or a hundred years ago, you would know by now how to do such things as iron a shirt and care for silver.

On Thursday you will park in Lot A. You will fall asleep alone in a hotel room, sleep alone for the first time since you-can't-remember-when. Since long before the last time you held an iron. You will arrive to your destinations precisely on time, even though you tried to schedule yourself an extra fifteen or twenty minutes on either side of everything.

You will speak in a high, sweet voice that is not entirely your own, and you will try very hard to speak the truth when someone asks you a question you can't answer.

You will walk down the halls of high schools and universities and wonder if they can tell that you are not one of them. That they seem impossibly young. That you fill a space in the universe that an adult might fill.

Fifty or a hundred years ago, you would surely have children of your own by now, or be a spinster aunt by now, your younger siblings well into child-rearing themselves. It is one of the upsides of women's liberation, you think, that there are no spinsters anymore. Still, on Thursday night, when the event is over and you are hungry, you will not walk down the streets of this college town, alone.

On Friday, you will park in the muddy lot behind the gym, try not to get mud on your nice and professional clothes. On Thursday, you will park in Lot A.

2009-09-20T11:07:00.002-04:00

September flipped her switch, and the season slid into an almost strangely smooth transition. The last two weeks of August, hot and muggy and miserable, and then switch, those cool nights and bright days. And now, two days out from equinox, the first frost. Right on time.

Last night we filled the kitchen with armloads of garden salvage: all the basil, all the ripe tomatillos and peppers. The cilantro, lemon balm, and mint. (Our tomatoes were long blighted and gone.) A gallon and a half of salsa verde to can, cups of pesto to freeze in ice cube trays, and the bundles of herbs to dry for mid-winter teas.

We covered the pepper plants, for this first frost was only light, and they may ripen a few more fruits before the next. Then, probably, we will pull them out whole and hang them to dry.

I still never bought the bushel of corn I meant to can. It's likely too late, now. The pear tree needs to be picked, and the potatoes dug. The seasons will spin quickly from here out: soon a hard frost, then hard freeze, then winter.

But the sun shines alluring outside, slanting already into afternoon. Get it while it lasts.

2009-09-18T20:50:00.002-04:00

It's like September flipped a switch. All the unsettledness of the unsummery summer: gone. And in its place, the perfect early autumn weather of cool nights, clear skies, warm and sunny afternoons with that strangely September light that says get it while it lasts.

2009-09-06T19:55:00.002-04:00

We make a good team
of mules.

2009-09-03T15:03:00.004-04:00

We spent much of the summer trying to secure ourselves some farmland for next season; I don't think I mentioned that much here. (I don't think I mentioned much of anything here, this summer, and the overwhelmingness of that search is part of why.)

One place we looked at was in New Hampshire, which turned out to be the deal-breaking blow against its otherwise near-perfectness. The near-perfectness included some good garden space, established orchard and berries, pastureland and run-in shelter, a sugarbush and well-kept sugaring house, a barn with a pottery studio and two - two! - woodworking shops, a blacksmith's shop full of old horse implements, a pond, a truck, and a woodlot. All for free -- or rather, all in exchange for our work to keep it up.

It should be some measure of our love for Vermont (and its state-run comprehensive no-cost-to-us health care program) that we aren't there right now, picking apples and looking into baby Clydesdales instead of baby tractors.

The other strike against it was that we'd be living in a one-room log cabin without electricity or running water, half an hour from the nearest country store and even farther from anywhere that might sell -- much less serve -- a good Belgian beer. The electricity I figured we could deal with alright, with a woodstove and some lamps. The outhouse across the field, however, while inconvenient but alright in the summer... well, let's just say I didn't relish the thought of February mornings.

So the short of it is that we're staying here, in our current house just minutes out of town, planning to work land ten minutes away, and I like this house and it's good land and a good arrangement and I can't stop thinking about that cabin.

At the time, and in previous conversations we've had about where and how we want to farm, I said that I do not want to be so far away from the world. Do not want to be so far from town that we go only once a week at best. I want internet access. I want to be able to get take-out on a whim. Want a hot shower on demand. Etc.

And I'll stick by that part about the shower. But the rest, I'm not so sure. For about three days that place in New Hampshire was at the top of our list, New Hampshire or no, and in that time I tried to imagine as fully as I could what it would be like to live there.

I have a good imagination.

And here's what I saw: It could be crushingly lonely. We knew there were a few couples approximately our age in the area, and if we didn't get along, we'd be likely to be alone a lot of the time. But if we did get along? I saw evenings by the woodstove with home-brewed beer and a lot of stringed instruments. I saw giant pancake breakfasts in the sugarhouse. I saw the little cabin stuffed with books, its cold cellar stuffed with a winter's worth of food. I saw an attached shed we could turn into a sauna and perhaps solve that shower problem altogether.

I still saw harrowing February mornings in the outhouse. But I also saw us farming full-time, or near to it -- and since I've been working six days a week off-farm lately, that seemed pretty appealing indeed.

But it isn't the specifics of that place I meant to write about. It's the yearning for the back-of-beyond, which surprised me and hasn't let me go. I think it is the same part of me that wanted to be a monk, or almost the same. To be apart from this society that so often leaves me alienated and drained. But this isn't renunciation, exactly. This is reclamation. In a movie we watched last night, a character said, "Everyone makes their own fun; otherwise, it's entertainment." I want to reduce the entertainment in my life and increase the fun. I want to practice my guitar or play cards instead of watching a movie. I want to cook even when I'd rather get take-out. I want horses instead of tractors. I want to create community, real interdependent and self-reliant community, instead of just knowing some people I can drink a beer with on Friday nights.

And I know, of course I know, that you don't have to be fifty miles out in the woods to live that life. We are building community here, and that's a large part of why we decided to stay. And just because town's right here doesn't mean I have to go. I could be planting spinach instead of writing this, right now. But the body is weak, and the spirit sometimes is weak as well, even when willing. On Wednesday I harvested for the CSA, filled big baskets to overflowing with good vegetables that we grew, and that night we got Chinese food because we were too exhausted to cook. And that's okay, but it's also a little ridiculous and sad. And householders can reach enlightenment too, of course, but everyone agrees its easier if you're a monk.

So next year won't be perfect. But I have a clearer sense of what perfect might look like, and I think it's farther out of town than I'd originally thought.

2009-09-02T14:49:00.002-04:00

Bounty.

(How is it, though, that 30 pounds of tomatoes yield barely a gallon and a half of sauce?)

2009-08-29T09:29:00.002-04:00

Wednesday was the last day of summer. We knew it at the time, but Thursday made it clear. Today the sky is full of rain and chill and I wish already that we had a woodstove.

There might be more heat and sun left for us this year, but fall has brushed off her skirts and stepped up to the stage. The first leaves are turning, the pumpkins are orange, the melons are doomed.

We're circling in on our plans for next year. We bought a baby tractor last week - a BCS, ten years old, but in good shape and for a steal - along with tiller, brush hog, mower and snowblowing attachments. We've got an arrangement set up to use an acre of land just down the road, and we're trying to figure out the best way to prepare it - a farmer friend of ours suggested a moldboard plow, which surprised me, as I thought they'd mostly fallen out of favor. But he's a good farmer on similar soil, so maybe he's right. We're going to solicit a few other opinions before we get going, but the pasture needs to be mowed firstly no matter what (but the mower needs to be fixed up a bit before that).

We've been a little overwhelmed of late with trying to sort out all the pieces we need for next year, and this year's garden has been a bit neglected as a result. The onions and winter squash need to be pulled soon, and we need to find somewhere to keep them. Ditto potatoes. I meant to plant fall peas, but now I think it's too late. The straw we mulched the pathways with was full of poison parsnip seeds. The fall carrots never really germinated and we never really noticed. Late blight finally got us, and we spent much of Wednesday pulling out tomatoes. But altogether I think we did a fine job this season, and while I'm not exactly looking forward to the frost, I might be just a little bit relieved that fall is here, even though it means I have to hunt through all the closets to find my wool hat.

2009-08-25T13:25:00.003-04:00

Things chickens like:

cornbread
tomatoes
Japanese beetles
dust baths
grasshoppers
flies
shade
standing on things
making chicken noises
playing keep-away
Colorado potato beetles
bacon
yogurt
cucumbers
rusty nails
broken glass
pieces of baling twine
earthworms
excavating the lawn
the nest box in the middle
apples
strawberries
anything another chicken has

Things chickens do not like:

cucumber beetles
cucumber skins
carrots
oranges
being caught
three-striped potato beetles
tall grass
olives
the electric fence
the nest box on the far left
hot weather

Things I like about chickens:

eggs
chickens catching grasshoppers
chickens trying to catch flies
chicken stampede
chicken noises
eggs
chickens snoring at night
feeding chickens cornbread
eggs

Things I do not like about chickens:

Sometimes they die.
Sometimes I can't remember if the fence is on or not and I have to get up out of bed and go check.
Plus, it's always on when that happens.

2009-08-15T16:49:00.002-04:00

(O, what.
What now?
What next?)

Comes summer,
finally, astride her
horse of light and heat.
Comes heat.

(But still we know nothing of the future.)

Comes the filling
of my plea.

But still I cannot string
even these words together
to make song.

(So, what?
What now?
What next?)

Comes heat, pulling from us
all our energy and wet.

(But what will we do?)

Comes summer, sudden,
brimming with fruit,
turning us squint-eyed and sweaty,
and just in time.

But the answers come alone
if at all. (If at all.)

2009-08-10T09:38:00.002-04:00

It was June all through July,
and now August is wearing September,
it seems. There has not been one night
too hot to sleep through.
Not one day that demanded a jump in the pond.

And winter's coming.

2009-07-29T16:16:00.002-04:00

Heat. Heat
like the full month of July stuffing itself
into these few final days. We wilt, melt all along the sidewalk,
ice cream in hand. The babies crying. The girls
with their eyeliner smudged, everyone sticky
and swatting at flies.

Then the temperature drops,
suddenly,
and the wind rises
and lifts all our chins
and turns us all as sure as weathervanes,
the whole street paused, swung 'round
and tilted
west towards the onrushing clouds,
the first spattering drops of rain.

2009-07-18T13:39:00.002-04:00

The rain!

Long-time readers and real-life friends will know my obsession with rain. For anyone just tuning in: I'm obsessed with rain. I love rain. When I moved to Vermont, the only thing I didn't like about that snow was that it wasn't rain.

Well, it's been raining a lot lately. Raining so much that I'm sick of it. Me! Rain! That's like saying I'm sick of pickles, or good chocolate, or reading. But it's rained every day for what feels like as long as I can remember. Two months, maybe? Since May? With perhaps a week's worth of not-raining days spread out all through that time.

Also, I've found that taking up farming has greatly reduced my fascination with huge, violent thunderstorms. Especially those featuring lightning and hail.

Despite the rain, our little farm looks gorgeous. The carrots are sizing up, the kale is hip-high and beautiful, cucumbers are flinging themselves everywhichway off the vines, we've got a little trickle of peas still coming along, and it's time to start stealing potatoes. We've been eating out of the garden more and more and more lately. The first batch of dilly beans has been finished and promptly consumed - we have two five-gallon buckets going now. Which is good, because I love me some dilly beans. It'll take more than five gallons before I'm sick of them.

2009-06-29T12:30:00.002-04:00

the thrumming is back,
the hummingbird trapped
in the cage of my ribbones,
sipping the honey of my veins.

it says: love.

it beats its wings inside me.

my family is scattered as pollen,
and i red-eyed, sniffling,
blown about by the wind.
best friends all out of reach.

a hummingbird not bound
by a poor girl's body
can fly across the Gulf of Mexico,
flaps its wings in figure-eights,
flashes in the sun.

this one hovers. this one hums,
sips honey, traces infinity
across my chest cavity with each wingbeat.
keeps beating,
across the bright and barren reaches
- i have not seen my family in six months,
and will not for months to come -
keeps beating.

it says: love.

2009-06-22T11:07:00.002-04:00

After a lazy morning yesterday--let the chickens out, water the seedlings, have some breakfast, read a bit--my sister-in-law B and I decided to go for a hike. We're both slightly injured at the moment, a bad hip on her side and a trick knee on mine, so we opted to avoid our usual (and mountainous) trails. The little town we live in has a trail that circles it, of which J and I have hiked one small section, and we decided to do the whole thing, as it's mostly flat and we're curious. J thought it was ten miles, but I thought it was seven, and we left at ten with two apples and a bottle of water.

The trail crosses the road not far from our house, so that's where we started. The map gave mileage only for trail sections, and that inconsistently. We do some math, decide we'll be back around two. Across a wide field, then into the woods. It's been rainy and wet for the past week or so, and the trail had gathered a slick coating of mud. B and I slipped and sloshed and bemoaned our muddy shoes. We crossed the highway, and back into the woods.

Up a hill, around and about. Birds everywhere, water and mud everywhere. After a while, the trail deposited us back into town. We checked the map with some surprise - we hadn't gotten nearly so far as we expected. A quick detour to the co-op for another bottle of water and some energy bars, and the churchbells chiming noon. Yellow signs directing us west out of town. Soon we're back in the woods.

The morning started cool and misty, perfect for a hike. But the day gathered heat, the moisture in the air turning sticky. We kept walking. The trail wound through sloshy wetland, up little rocky hills, and back down. At the next crossing, the map showed us that we still hadn't gotten that far. We revised our estimate to a four o'clock return.

At four o'clock we were still some five miles out. Our earlier boisterous conversation had grown progressively more intimate, but now we go for long periods of quiet, all focus on just walking. I broke into my emergency stash of beef jerky, tucked away in my backpack in case I'm stuck out overnight unexpectedly; we'd long since eaten the apples and the energy bars. My knee chanting why why why and my muddy, blistered feet joined in. The dancing green canopy around us has become a blur. We talk intermittently - of love, spirit, change, and how tired we are - and we do not stop walking.

In the last leg, the trail split. The sign says "long way" with one arrow and "short way" with another. We actually pause a moment, considering, then take off on the short path with a burst of slightly hysterical laughter.

The trail, as it turns out, is 16 miles long. When we got home, we ate and ate and stretched and whined. B eventually summoned the energy to go get us a movie. Today I'm aching, but the knee is happier than I expected. And we finished the whole damn thing, which at mile 14 I was not certain we would do. And it though it took quite a lot longer than we'd planned, was a better way than most to spend a day.

2009-06-12T16:26:00.002-04:00

Here is the truth about farm animals: they die.

It is the truth about all animals, of course, and all life. But it is one of the strings in the long, strange chord of husbandry that the animals you care for will die, sometimes when you choose them to but often before, and you will be faced with the task of calculating the value of their lives.

I love my chickens more than they warrant, but when one fell sick, we did not rush her to the bird specialist in Shelburne. I coddle and cuddle my chickens, feed them from my fingers and tuck them into their coop at night, but they are not pets. They are livestock. We are runnning a farm.

We consulted with the state veterniarian, on whose advice we gave her Pedialyte out of an eyedropper every hour, and enticed her with cornbread mush. Twice a day I cleaned the fly-infested shit off of her back feathers. I moved her convalescent milk-crate nest around the yard to keep her in the shade and in sight of the rest of the flock -- a chicken alone can die of loneliness. At night we put her in a pet carrier on the porch to protect her from marauding weasels, skunks, and foxes, and to keep her from circling the electric fence, trying to find a way into the roost.

But she was not a pet. She cost us $12 and produced five eggs a week; at $3 a dozen she had just about paid herself off when she stopped laying last Friday. A visit to the vet costs as much as a visit to the doctor, and to take her in would have wiped out all our egg money and then some. Besides which -- or actually, because of which -- chicken diagnostics are almost entirely based on necropsy. People run blood tests on cows and sheep, because individually they're expensive and valuable. Chickens are cheap -- we bought full-grown pullets, but chicks are only a dollar or two -- and the loss of five eggs a week minor in comparison to a vet bill. Cheaper and easier to whack whichever one is the sickest and ship her off to the extension service to be examined there.

But still I love them. So I sat in the buggy dusk with the eyedropper of Pedialyte and baby asprin, and I smashed whole colonies of fly eggs stuck to her feathers. She was my third-favorite chicken.

I still haven't come fully to peace with this husbandry thing, the deal we make with our livestock -- I will care for you, raise you, clean up your shit and feed you good food, and I will take your eggs/milk/fleece/meat for myself, and in the end you will die. The deal we make with ourselves, because they of course do not and cannot agree to it. I think my chickens are happy. All the evidence of my senses and my knowledge of animal behavior leads me to think they are happy. Sometimes they want to keep their eggs, even though we have no rooster, and I take them anyway. I don't know how long we'll keep these hens. Their egg production will drop off after a year or so, and most commercial hens get the axe around then. We got dual purpose breeds -- eggs and meat -- on purpose.

I don't know. I know that they're all going to die whether I do anything about it or not. I know that my body demands that I eat meat, and that raising some part of it myself seems the best and most responsible course of action. I know that my chickens come running in a ridiculous stampede when I approach and then follow me around the yard, and that I love them, and that their eggs are the most delicious I've ever had. Is it fair to them? It seems fair to me, on the shit-shoveling and fence-moving side, but they can't tell me what they think. And we didn't take our sick chicken to the vet, and she did die. Was that fair? I don't know. What do you think?

2009-05-26T14:54:00.002-04:00

Poems have been knocking. I've been busy. I sometimes blame him for the times when I do not write, as though he has ever - even once - discouraged me or treated my writing with dismissal. As though I have ever, even once, asserted it as a priority to him in word or deed. Or to myself.

So the poems knock, and I do not answer. I feed the chickens, water the garden, go to work to roll out dough and count money, and come home smelling of fried. The poems stand outside for a while, peering in the window. One or two even try the handle of the door, but it is locked.

The reminder I set myself pops up on the screen: Qarrtsiluni chapbook due 5/30; finish revisions. But I have not begun revisions, even though when I first heard of the contest, the little voice in my heart said, quite clearly, Yes.

Old poems sit patienty in their files and folders, and they do not begrudge me their unfinishedness. They watch me with their single eyes when I have failed to provide them with a second. They watch me with their humpbacked bodies, their blurred and questionable outlines, their occasionally open wounds. One or two sit glowing and their glow fading, and they watch me with their young and perfect bodies and their sad eyes.

Some few have lived their purposes and fully: have been read by the only eyes that matter. Others were complete in the writing and few of either of these have I kept. It would be like keeping a candle or a star that has finished burning. And of course, none of them are mine in the first place.

Still, they come to my door, the door of my heart (the door of that great and four-chambered room, where the paint never dries). They knock (alive or dead, alive or dead?), but I do not answer. They leave me fragments of leaves and flowers, the calling cards of my poems, which all begin outside.

At night I unbolt the door, collect these scraps and read them. Some I can barely decipher, and others cover whole strips of bark, unfurling as I read.

I mow the grass more slowly than others, perhaps,
because I must pause for each rustle and hop,
cup its cold owner in my warm hands and take it
to the marshy spot on the edge of the lawn
-
the lilac blazes--
-
I dreamt you did not love me
and in the dream, I was glad
-
Here, the river-smell of desert --
at home, the mountain-smell of rain
-
as each moon passes, the yearning also
waxes and wanes. the old woman in the desert tells me
i am a baby myself. she appraises my hips and breasts,
both small, though she says nothing of that aloud.
she tells me i have time and enough of it.
but her eyes too are bright with longing,
bright as the round, full moon.
-
I walk the dirt road between field and field,
birds splashing up from the grass
with each footstep
-
& so we step wearily
into that well-trod track,
begin winding the heavy winch,
so heavy because it must close
both our doors at once. we take turns.
he pushes with accusation
and I silence. we make a good team
of mules.

Some I recognize as the arms or legs, the new horizons of my patient waiting-room of poems. I look up quickly out the window, as one does when recieving an unlooked-for letter from a dear friend, as though they might be somehow drawn to the writing by virtue of my reading it, and appear like magic, smiling.

When the propane tank exploded,
it sailed through the pickup and fifty yards up the hill.
They say the neighborhood shook
for whole seconds, so long that the birds stalled
on their branches and the women wiped their hands
and came outside to look.

By then the house was gone.

But the window only reflects my face back to me, and there is no poetry there.

2009-05-13T15:30:00.002-04:00

I was wrong about the bird-tree, which sits between our house and our landlady's, hung with feeders. It is not a crabapple; it is a lilac. What do I know of winter trees?

Besides which, I am not so good at being meticulous. Botany and baking are generally the only arenas in which I can be bothered to note all the details, and even then, I tend to throw in more lemon than the recipe calls for. Tend to know my plants by heart, not by the book.

But it becomes clear that if we are going to have a business--and, especially, if we are going to have a business together--I will have to find more attention in my personal budget. I forget to plug in the chicken fence; I forget to water the seedlings; I spend the day searching for a dress to wear to an upcoming wedding and by the time I get around to making that phone call I'm supposed to make, the store is closed. He--botanist because he loves things in order and loves to order them--cannot understand the skittering of my mind. I've not been sitting, of course, and that does much to exacerbate things: my mind always skitters, always has, but at least when I'm sitting I know it. These days I don't notice until he's lost his temper.

But it is spring. The lilac tree will be confused with nothing, now. Its branches are alive with color: cardinals and goldfinches, orioles and bluejays, red-winged blackbirds, jeweled hummingbirds, and the post-modern black-and-white of an assortment of woodpeckers. Bald eagles send the chickens scrambling for their coop; the tulips have almost passed and the big lillies starting to take their places. A fortnight still until last frost, and we have tomato plants with two sets of flowers, ready to go three weeks ago into the greenhouse we decided not to build this year. Rhubarb. Ramps. Peas and potatoes in the ground. Full leaf-out here on the valley floor. Green. Green green green, the earth stepping out into Oz from the dreary Kansas of winter. It's all going to be okay. Spring is here.

2009-04-28T17:59:00.002-04:00

Spring thrums. The vibration wakes me in the night: not rain, not wind, just a sudden jolt of life, a pulse that lifts me out of bed to watch the window, where the lights of passing cars on the highway strobe softly across the trees. In the morning, the foreground has gone green, all the field and marsh and willows, green. The mountains loom bare still, streaked with snow even, still. The birds sing louder than the highway can growl, but not louder than the fly slapping herself against the windowpane.

2009-04-23T15:18:00.002-04:00

Spring lunges like a child in rainboots towards a puddle. The dark reflection of the sky shatters; something within us breaks. We turn our gazes upwards, towards the wind, towards that scent and stir of movement. One tree bursts into full and indecent bloom, while those around it merely blush. Tiny flowers peek up at us through the ribcage of a roadkilled deer, picked quite clean once the snow released it.

2009-04-07T15:13:00.002-04:00

Turn off the radio,
and let the frogs chorus you home.

Turn off the radio;
I can tell you the news: the news is death,
it is greed, and it is hunger.
Turn off the radio. Open the windows,
and the frog-song will rise
in waves as you pass each marshy place.
Open the windows,
and breathe the woodsmoke,
banked against tonight's hard frost.
Open the windows,
and breathe the cold fresh air.
Turn off the radio.
Listen to the stars.

2009-04-06T14:01:00.001-04:00

Spring on the windowsill, if not yet outside.

2009-04-02T10:59:00.003-04:00

He says,
Do you really want babies
but got chickens instead?
after I get up to check on them
in the middle of the night,
and after I take a hundred pictures
and even a video of them doing nothing
except being chickens, and I coo and call them darlings,

And so what if he's right?
This is no time for having babies -
the economy and the environment,
the end of the world as we know it, besides
which, we're broke and we fight too much -
it's a perfect time to keep chickens.

And so what if I love them
more than they warrant.

That's what humans do.

2009-04-01T15:31:00.003-04:00

I started writing this morning, about the cloudy sky and the warmish weather, and the short memory of my body that now insists on warmth and gets sulky when the cold wind blows. But I want to tell you about my house.

The windowsills in our living-room are painted a soft lavender-blue, almost precisely the color of the mountains which sit distant, behind the white barn with its faded silo, behind the bare-yellow willows and the patchwork buffs of field and marsh. In the bright sun and leaf of summer the striking coincidence of color will be lost, but I love it now. For all my sulky yearnings, now is when Vermont makes my favorite weather, the blustery and overcast days, the rain-loud nights. This cloud-stained light that drapes everything in gloomy romance. I love it.

I love that our windows face either the mountains, or the woods. A state highway runs by not a quarter-mile from us, parallel with our street, but a happy arrangement of trees and barns and silos blocks it from view. On the other side, "woods" might be a bit of a generosity, but the scene nonetheless consists of trees and brush and nothing else. From one kitchen window we look straight at the landlady's house, and she at ours. But a chokecherry and several bird-feeders intervene, and hers is a nice house and it's only the one window.

I love that this whole house is ours. This is the first time I've lived somewhere with no shared walls. Of course, I share them all with J, but that's another matter. We can practice guitar and banjo late into the night if we wish, vacuum at early hours if the inspiration strikes. It's lovely.

Also, we have chickens. I love the chickens. They're learning to come when called, and when they do come, it's usually as a chicken stampede. I love the chicken stampede: fat waddly bodies going asfastastheycan, wings flapping for emphasis, trying to maneuver around each other to all get there first. Earthworms have begun to appear, and watching the chickens discover the earthworms provided a solid half-hour of high entertainment. (Even better than watching them discover the electric fence.) They're so damn domestic, all clucky and scratching about, and us with a fridge full of eggs.

It's a good house. It's a good home. Finally, we've got a home.

2009-03-26T07:16:00.002-04:00

At six-thirty, there was light enough to feed the chickens by, and a salmon stain spreading at the edge of the east. The morning smelled like a day that intended to be warm. Two more of the chickens suffered to let me touch them, and the boldest one nearly knocked the compost container straight out of my hands with her enthusiasm. They all take on the same squatting stance when I pet them - all the ones that will be petted - and I wonder if they think me some sort of giant rooster.

The sun broke over the hills just after seven, and suddenly the world was awash in gilt. The birds made chorus and that beguiling morning-smell increased. You will think me a fool, standing there in my knit hat and steaming breath, but it smelled like summer, like a cool summer morning promising heat to come.

Within minutes, the light became just morning light, pale and lovely, no longer charged with gold. A pair of downy woodpeckers came to investigate the feeder, and doves searched the ground for fallen treasure. The morning smelled of dirt and earth, frost, and chickens. I went back inside.

2009-03-25T14:28:00.003-04:00

The sound of an engine outside, stuttering, stalling. Then it passes.

I cannot get warm. I follow the sun from window to window, curled like a cat and wrapped in two of his sweaters.

My body craves protein and fat. Fuck vegetables. Their time will come. Give me beef stew and bacon and eggs and ice cream and chili. I want dairy, meat, and broth, though beans and nuts will do. Potatoes are okay, too.

The engine again outside. So loud. So cold.

Hot chocolate. Cookies. Lasagne. Sleep.

2009-03-24T13:40:00.002-04:00

As promised:

2009-03-23T20:13:00.002-04:00

The wind is so cold. I close up all the vents in the coop, rig up a door made of foam insulation to cover the screen door currently in place, duct-tape all the seams, throw a tarp over the top for one more meager layer of insulation. The wind takes the tarp right off, sends it snapping at the end of its line, sends the chickens scurrying in terror from the noise. My fingers become clumsy and cannot work the cord to tie it back down, but the cord has been snapped anyway. I cut a new length, hold a flame to the end to sear the frayed edge together. The flame will not stay lit, even with my whole body hunched around it, crouched low, cradling the damn lighter close to my belly. My numb hands can barely operate the child-resistant mechanism. Finally I can keep the flame burning long enough for it to do its job; not until I am back inside do I realize I've burnt my fingers.

At six o'clock, before my frantic ministrations, the thermometer sensor read 26 degrees in the coop. At 20 degrees they start getting frostbite on their combs and toes. I tried to smear Bag Balm on all the ones with large combs, which is supposed to protect them, but the one who looks the most like she might have gotten frostbitten already just would not be caught. After twenty minutes, much squawking, a few wing-punches to the face, and bashing my skull on the corner of the roost, I gave up. She can stick her head under her wing.

Now, at eight-thirty, the roost is at thirty degrees. Outdoors the temperature is 23. Tonight is supposed to be the really last cold night for a while, with a low of 18. I think they'll be warm enough. I hope so.

2009-03-18T19:03:00.002-04:00

A raw day. Not cold, particularly--in the high 40s all afternoon--but windy and rainy and in some ways more uncomfortable to be out in than the below-freezing temperatures we had last month.

Maybe only because my expectations have shifted: last month we still had two feet of snow on the ground and I put on the full winter gear to walk down to the mailbox. This last week, however, it's been sunny and in the sixties and I walked around with no long underwear and no hat. At one point I wished I had sandals on. So even this moderate cold comes as a shock. (Don't get your hopes up, remember?) I am loath to dig that long underwear back out. And one does not wear one's down coat in Vermont once the temperatures have breached 40.

I found myself wanting to turn the heat up this evening--to turn it up past where we set it during all that real cold. I put a sweater on instead--I'd shed that habit as well during our extravagant week of warmth--and started a new pot of tea.

Don't trust March.

2009-03-16T21:48:00.001-04:00

I'd forgotten that in Vermont, one ought not to trust Google Maps to know which roads are really roads. I've seen more than one sign that says, "If you are following OnStar, MapQuest, or Google directions to get to [town on other side of mountains], don't. It will be very aggravating and very expensive to rescue you."

But I'd forgotten that. So when the road turned to dirt (by which, this being March, I mean mud), I kept going. It'd been dry for a week; how bad could it be? I had good tires and a manual transmission.

Anticlimactically, it wasn't that bad. I only hit a few bronco ruts--the kind where the road takes you for a ride--and it had been dry, so the mud wasn't deep enough to stick in. After a little while, however, I began to think I might have missed my turn. So I found a dryish spot to stop, and pulled out the Gazetteer. I had missed my turn, I discovered, and I also discovered that this was probably due to the fact that my turn consisted of one of those roads that they print with a little dotted line. A class 4 road--and, as it turned out, one that hadn't been plowed all winter.

So I turned around in somebody's muddy driveway, slip-slopped back down the hill, and mapped my way there like I should have done in the first place. Ah! A road over, drawn with a good thick solid line. This proper pass over the mountain had a sign that said, "Snow Tires Required," but it had at least been plowed, and I have snow tires.

The rest of the drive went, if not smoothly, then at least without event. I got to the farm a little late nonetheles, but nobody seemed much to mind. The two topless kids peered at me over their quesadillas, all big eyes and curly hair, while their mother made me a cup of tea. "I'd make you coffee," she said, "but he's the one who makes coffee. I'm afraid I don't know how!" I assured her that tea would be delightful (which it was) and after a few minutes of visiting and tea-sipping, we headed down to the chickens.

Chickens everywhere. Perched on fenceposts and parked cars, scratching in the snow and muddy sod, scurrying out of the way just in time as we drive by. He had separated my chickens--we'd decided to buy fifteen-week-old pullets rather than day-old chicks--so they were in a smaller pen inside the greenhouse where they all roosted for the winter. We'd had three warm days in a row, and with the sides still down, the greenhouse was getting a bit... overpowering. We worked fast: he reached into the pen, snagged a chicken, and handed it to me, and then I stuffed it in a crate. We only had one escapee, a little Silver Spangled Hamburg who we had to finally catch with a net. We got ten birds in one big dog crate, and three each in a cat carrier and a wax box which had previously contained cabbage. Except we put four in the cat carrier and only nine in the crate, or maybe it was ten after all, so that when I got them home and unloaded them it turned out we had one extra.

J noticed this, and then we spent the next forty minutes counting them. Have you ever tried to count chickens? Ours at least are several different kinds, so you can count the black-and-white-ones (six), the plain brown ones (four), the brown-and-black ones (two), the brown-and-gold ones (two), the white one (one), and the little black one (one). See? Sixteen. But the next time you count, there are five brown ones and six black-and-white. Seventeen. Or four brown but only one brown-and-gold. Sixteen. Or five brown and everybody else in line. See? Seventeen! Eventually, we decided we were 90 percent sure that we had five brown instead of four and seventeen altogether instead of sixteen.

When I called the farmer, he insisted that he'd only hatched four brown ones, and we couldn't possibly have five. So maybe we don't. This weekend we're going to clip their wings back before we put them on pasture, and we can count them then as they go out the door.

[pictures forthcoming, I promise!]

2009-03-12T14:39:00.002-04:00

Spring spring spring spring.

But I know it's just a trick. All the snow melts away and the birds come out everywhere, and it gets warm for a few days, and my little heart says spring spring spring spring. And then BAM! it's going to go right back to brr brr brr and snow snow snow and mud mud mud. This may only be my third winter, but I know that much. Don't trust March. Don't get your hopes up. Don't let the teapot go cold.

2009-03-10T09:58:00.000-04:00

Thaw. The hem of the snowline slides back, revealing the mountains' muscular curves. The fields sigh softly underfoot, and suddenly birdsong fills the morning.

Of course it doesn't last. Probably there is a good foot of snow still between us and real spring. The temperature drops steadily all day, the wind rising. North slopes freeze into a hard and treacherous, beautiful sheen. It'll be sugaring time soon, time for seedlings and chicks.

We walked the snow-crusted edges of our yard, plotting the garden to be. We have yet to see the soil, much less gauge or test it, but we can reckon the play of light and shadow, and our hopes would fill at least half of any glass. Each week we make the trek over the mountain to J's mom's basement, where we gather the trappings of our lives. The essentials we have carried with us for months: long underwear, toothbrushes, pillows, our favorite cooking pots and books. The rest we collect in order of need: first come more cooking pots and pans, the teapot, and books. Some favorite pictures make it into the first load, along with the banjo, the mat for the front door, my favorite red chair. The next round brings some more clothes, the kitchen details (dish rack, utensil tray, potholders), the vacuum. Our station wagon holds a surprisingly large load: the kitchen table and chairs, and our coffee table fit in there too.

Rabi at wockerjabby wrote recently and eloquently about wanting things, about buying them as a result of want, rather than need. The list of things I want for my new home keeps growing: a doormat outside, a full-length mirror, a loveseat, some artwork for the kitchen, curtains, a mudroom bench. Do I need any of these things? No. Our house was functional before our first stuff-gathering trip. We had a small dinner party last night, and while it would have been nice to have had more seating, people have sat on the floor since forever and it's really not so bad. Several of those items would be useful - the bench especially, and the doormat - but they still aren't necessary. Like Rabi, I'm opposed to wanton consumerism on principle; like her, I would have been highly unlikely to buy any of those things new; and like her, the real reason I haven't bought them is that we can't afford them.

I feel torn here. It is important to me that my house be warm and inviting and a pleasant place to be. Right now we're putting out a lot of expense for the farming operation, and spending more on mirrors and curtains doesn't make sense. But if we did have the money, I'd have mirrors and curtains, even though I don't need them (all the windows in question face the forest).

If consumption is the answer to our economic problems, I'm not sure I understand the question. All the solutions that emphasize more lending, more borrowing, and--therefore--more debt seem to be ignoring the first rule of holes: stop digging.

2009-02-25T09:03:00.002-05:00

In college, I took a class called Opening the Creative Mind. The class involved a lot of silly exercises and attempts to connect us with our "source" and our "muse" and our childhoods, which were supposed to have been full of carefree creative energy to which we could return.

We were encouraged to revisit the joy of climbing trees, of playing, of freedom from others' opinions and ideas. "Become your eight-year-old self," the teacher crooned, "and let that self guide you to unfettered creative delight."

Look: My eight-year-old self had an ulcer. My eight-year-old self carried a little bottle of mint-flavored Mylanta in her backpack to take before every meal. My eight-year-old self was seriously stressed out.

I did not climb trees. I was afraid to hang upside down on the monkey bars. I was a clumsy, shy kid who started reading at age three and from then on preferred reading to most human company. I had a few close friends, and enough social skill to avoid being much picked on, but I was not exactly what you'd call unfettered.

My childhood wasn't unhappy; don't get me wrong. I remember lunch hours filled with elaborate and wonderful make-believe--underwater explorers, settlers on the prairie, or Native Americans, the perennial favorite, always preparing for an impending winter--and I read a lot of books and loved them. Like I said, I wasn't picked on, though I certainly felt well outside the realm of cool even then. Thinking back, I have no idea what my classmates thought of me. I can remember no particular cruelties paid me, with the exception of a pair of boys who used to hassle my best friend and I, and trapped us once behind the obstacle course wall for a kiss.

In Opening the Creative Mind, I recall nothing said of work or habit. We spoke of flow and inspiration and how the great masters thought that God worked through them; we did not talk about how hard they worked.

So I started reading early. Started talking earlier still--before I could walk--started counting and multiplying and writing long before those things were taught in school. Before I was in school. In first grade we had a number of the day, and we sat in a circle and tried to think of ways to make that number: 4-1=3. 2+1=3. 1+2=3. And I said: 6÷2=3. -2+5=3. In second grade we each had a bookworm, a segmented insect made of construction paper, and for each book you read, you got another colored circle to add to the body of the worm. Books over a certain length garnered two circles. They hung on the back wall by the cubbies. Mine reached the floor early in the year, full of segments for the Lord of the Rings and Anne of Green Gables.

So people told me I was smart. People were proud of me because I was smart. I could barely ride a bike, I couldn't catch a ball, I wasn't pretty, but I was smart.

(Mom, I know you think I was pretty.)

At eight, I wasn't doing poorly in school, but I was worried. I was worried because for the first time, some things I was being asked to do required effort. I remember the first word I got wrong on a spelling quiz. (It was "probably" which I spelled "probly" because I that's what people actually say.) I had long ago conflated my grades with my intelligence and my intelligence with at least a portion of my worth; at eight, or maybe a little before, those grades no longer always came effortlessly. Smart meant effortless. I hadn't had to work to be smart before--do you see?--and now I did. So maybe I wasn't smart after all.

I recently read a great article about praise and self-esteem. The article claims that a child praised for her intelligence will tend to have a lower self-esteem and a lower chance of future success than one praised for her hard work. Because you can't control smart. And once you've been seen to have such a prized and elusive quality, you are constantly in danger of losing it. Any failure negates it.

So at eight, I self-identified as a smart kid. I was in the special after-school program for smart kids, in the advanced math class. But I felt--not consciously, but quite clearly just the same--that a) smart meant effortless and b) that I was going to be found out. Sure, homework often was easy, but not always. And sometimes I failed. (Failure meant anything other than an A.) Deep down I knew I was just masquerading as a smart kid, and that eventually I would encounter a problem that couldn't be solved easily, and I would have to work at it, and everyone would see that I had to work at it, and they would know I wasn't really smart. (And then no one would love me.)

Until I read that article, I had never really identified those feelings. Or that the whole thing plays out over again with the idea of creativity. I used to write and paint and draw, and people said I was creative, and I thought that creativity came from some magical source and that if I had to work at it, I wasn't really creative. So I would sit with paint and pencils and wait for inspiration to strike, for creativity to descend. Which sometimes worked, but mostly did not. And I began to feel that maybe I wasn't so creative after all. I stopped painting, stopped drawing. Stopped writing stories. Stopped writing mostly altogether.

Occasionally, I took an art class, and always I surprised myself with the work I produced, even without that evasive muse. Not phenomenal, but consistent, and pretty good. But then the class would end, and without the pressure of having to create, I would slip back into passive mode, waiting.

In my writing group last night, we briefly discussed Malcom Gladwell's book Outliers, and the now-mildly-famous idea of 10,000 hours: that it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert at something. Or, put differently, that 10,000 hours will make you an expert at anything.

Someone in the group asked if it was a self-help book, and I scoffed. A self-help book would tell you that it takes ten minutes a day for six months. 10,000 hours is two hours a day for thirteen years; nobody's got time for that kind of commitment. But think about it: no mention made of talent, or inspiration, or intelligence. Nothing innate or elusive, nothing handed down from God. Just work. Just lots and lots of practice, lots and lots and lots of work. The only popular cultural affirmation of that idea I can think of is Edison's quote about genius and the ratios of perspiration to inspiration. But still: the lightbulb did not become a symbol of a strong work ethic.

Much can be (and is) made of special formulae and materials for successful writing. A room of one's own and a Moleskine and a MacBook, all of that. But I think that all successful writers share only one common habit: They write. They put their hours in.

I still self-identify as smart and creative, and I still have that slippery feeling that eventually I'll be found out as fraud in both arenas. What I am only beginning to believe about myself is that I am a hard worker. And that hard work suggests growth, not defeat.

2009-02-23T14:20:00.002-05:00

Yesterday we moved into our house.

Wait, let me rephrase: yesterday, we moved into our house!

Also: my brother came home safe and sound. Thanks to everyone who sent us their thoughts and good wishes. I think I want to ask him to write something here about his adventure. What do you all think?

2009-02-11T07:56:00.003-05:00

I woke up this morning thinking of my brother. He'd emailed me the latest draft of his life plan earlier in the week; he said he signed up for classes at the community college and was really hoping to land a good job he'd interviewed for. Previously, he'd been trying to sell his car to fund a trip to Europe, but had been struggling hard over the balance of exploration and freedom versus stability and responsibility. Had been trying to decide what path would greater serve his life and his conflicting needs for exploration, freedom, stability, and responsibility. My response to his email had been, No Europe, then?

I woke this morning thinking of that response, of his struggle, and regretting my flippancy.

How to know when you're on the right path, or off of it? How to know which glows with the promise of satisfaction, and which sparkles with fairy-lights and fool's gold? And, god, the urgency of it. The feeling of your life unreeling, a river passing inexorably by while you who should be master and conductor flail about, muddying the water. The feeling of your power lurking, waiting, knowing that if only you could find the right goal at which to aim yourself, you would be unstoppable. The feeling of that power being wasted.

Yesterday I finished reading The Red Tent by Anita Diamant. It is a re-telling of the Biblical story of Dinah, whose father was Jacob and whose brothers murdered a whole city in its sleep. The story focuses on Dinah, on women, on giving them the voices that the Bible gives only to men. We follow Dinah and her mother and aunts through the daily movements of their lives: gardening, weaving, baking bread and brewing beer. Giving birth and raising children.

Perhaps because I have found that I love the tasks of a country housewife - gardening, baking, packing crocks of vegetables to preserve, darning socks and hanging laundry on the line - something of that life appealed to me. I do not think that I could be happy in a world where I may not speak if a man is in the room, a world bounded by my hearth and my husband's goodwill, no. Not now. But if I was raised to it?

Years ago I worked for a few long days with a pair of Hopi elders. In the frosted sunrise they told us a story about the place of men and women in the world. Though not the same as a Caananite's as imagined by Anita Diamant, a traditional Hopi woman's life has similar boundaries, and those boundaries are similarly clear. Each task in the running of a life has its proscribed author: Men do the farming, women the cooking. Always. At the time, and before I'd learned my country-housewife ways, I felt a dim yearning towards the structure they described.

What would it be to know your place in the world? To know it from birth, to be taught its mastery by your mother and your mother's mother, to have a clear passage from girlhood to womanhood marked by corn pollen and a revelation of secrets, or by scented oil and the earthen figure of a goddess? To spend your life in one place that you know, in the company of a tribe of family and friends. To have no one ask you, ever, what you "do" or what you want to be when you grow up.

We have gained in exploration and freedom, there is no doubt. I love science, calculus, and mechanics, in addition to the darning of socks; do not mistake me. My husband has the stated wish of being a stay-at-home dad when that time comes, and he loves baking and the tending of soil as well as I do. When we argue we are on equal terms. Nor do I wish to disrespect those men and women constrained to lives that do not suit them, lives that may even crush them, whether that constraint be by veil or poverty, ignorance, tradition, or force.

But The Red Tent was wildly popular amongst women friends I had in college, and I still do not know my place in the world.

But this is about my brother. My brother who recently awoke to the infinite possibilties of this life and was, I think, utterly overwhelmed. And of course; it is impossible to be sure that you are choosing your toothpaste correctly with so many choices. How is a person supposed to choose a life? And not just any life, but a life of spiritual significance, of generosity, of uprightness and passion. How? How do you know which choice is the right one, how do you know which path to take? How do you cope with the crushing feeling that you are wasting time, precious time, that you should be doing something amazing by now, that you should be doing something by now that is more than working this crappy job, but what? But what and how? And oh, what if you make a mistake? What if you should have gone to Europe?

From the great height of my twenty-five years, some of that sense of urgency has waned. I have found the right path, for now, and I no longer worry that it must be the only path I ever tread. I have lost my terror of choosing wrongly, though perhaps that has something to do with the incredible relief at having chosen. I have a goal. I am unstoppable.

My mother and father and I tried to guide my brother's searching. He wanted to be independent of my parents and their finances; he wanted to renounce; he wanted to travel, to follow the tug of spirit that had been calling him; he wanted to stay home, save money, and work hard; he wanted I am sure more than he told any of us and perhaps more than he understood himself.

Here is something I have learned: There is a sense amongst at least some people in this culture that when the "right" path is found, it will lay itself at your feet with all hinderences removed. You will glide down it with effortless happiness and this is how you will know that you have chosen rightly.

Perhaps this is so; I do not believe it. My goal has made me unstoppable because I will work until I achieve it, and I know I have chosen rightly because the work - right now I have a job on-call at the bottling plant, moving cardboard boxes from one conveyer belt to another for nine hours a day - because the work is hard and stupid and worth it.

I suggested that my brother get a job with the National Parks or something similar, get out of the house and into the wilds where lives the only spirit my family has ever acknowledged; and make some damn money while he's at it, rather than stay suckling at my parents' financial teat. (Full disclosure: my parents still pay my health insurance and phone bill; my self-righteousness is unearned.)

I don't know what they suggested to him. I don't know what conversations he had with friends or my sister or God (by all accounts he's been talking often lately with God). I don't know if any of what I've written here actually applies to how he feels or felt. But he has chosen something.

Yesterday my brother disappeared. Left a note - written with an old family code so that there could be no mistaking his hand - and all his belongings save a backpack and some clothes. He's on a journey. I am proud of him and afraid for him, glad that he has found a direction and sad that he did it in such a way as to scare my poor parents half to death. There is a long tradition of young men taking a walkabout, a vision quest, or a road trip to seek out the lives they want to lead. I am curious to see what he finds. I think there is a crucial difference between comfort and safety, and I think even that safety is mostly an illusion we prop up with fear. Still, I hope he is safe. And I hope he finds something.

2009-02-09T10:35:00.000-05:00

What I Learned in the Zen Monastery

1.
Sex is not power. Except
that it can be. If you want it,
if you take it. Sex is powerful,
no denying that. I learned
how it had been a weapon, a thing to wield,
how I had wielded it, what damage I had done. I learned that
I did not know what to do with my hands
when I set that weapon down.

I learned to walk without the weight it,
to meet new people without the shield of it.
Learned new reflexes that did not reach for it.

(It is only later
that I am learning that perhaps not all power
corrupts. That perhaps there is a place
for swinging my hips.)

2.
Mindfulness is no-such-thing.
Even after two hours a day - even
after sixteen hours a day of zazen,
even after I had touched my true heart and the open center of oneness,
had constructed and deconstructed the ten thousand dreams of self,
wept for a full week,
walked for a whole day alone,
sat once for an hour without moving a hair,

I still forgot my water-bottle every time I set it down.

3.
Love is power. Not power-over,
not power-from. Not even power-to.
Power like sunlight is power,
like truth is. Love is not what we think it is.
Love is hard, like a cocoon is hard,
like truth is, but harder. Because love is truth,
and more than truth, for truth at least
has a beginning and an end.
Love, once loosed from the cage
we strive so hard to keep it in
(For to what end do we fill our lives
with comfort and distraction,
but that of keeping love at bay?)
- once loose, well.

Just look what happened to Siddhartha:
poisoned on his own goodwill.
Power like that can't help but destroy.
(The caterpillar does not grow wings.)
Power like that, it can't be controlled.
(The caterpillar dies, don't you see?
All that which is caterpillar, dies.)
Once loose, power like that, power like love,
it isn't what you think. You can't turn it off.
No picking and choosing,
remember? It doesn't matter
if the coffee is sewage or saintly. Don't you see?
If your life is blessed or bothersome.
You have to love it just the same.

I didn't learn how to love, not really.
I still have an appetite for leaves.

2009-02-05T10:29:00.002-05:00

While J works eight and nine and eleven-hour shifts at his new job, I'm supposed to be finding employment of my own. I'm trying, don't get me wrong, but the options are few; at any rate, I've only been able to consume two or three hours of each day with the pursuit. When I was house-hunting as well, I managed to make it nearly a full-time occupation, what with the going to see of apartments and the having of only one car and so therefore walking for goodly distances to get to said apartments.

But now we've found a house, but we aren't there yet so I can't spend my time making it beautiful and cozy and perfect and home; and I don't have a job. It's the perfect time to be doing some serious writing, but I seem to have misplaced my muse.

I want to take advantage of the time I have until I actually do get a job (which hopefully won't be long). So I'm asking for some help. What should I write about right now? Is there something you've always wanted to know about me or farming or fritattas? Some subject you can't believe I've never covered, or one I mentioned in passing that piqued your interest? A pet monomania that you need each person in the world to be somehow involved in? I promise to write at least something about every (not-completely-awful) suggestion I get.

2009-02-03T07:36:00.000-05:00

So far, every time I've been looking for a place to live, as soon as I've found the right place, I know it. (There is a possible exception for Philadelphia, but I did know the right roommate as soon as I met her, so that counts for something.)

In Prescott, the very first place I looked at was the one. It hadn't even been listed officially, if I remember correctly - just pure luck that I found it. We looked at five or six more apartments, just to be sure, but came right back to the first one. We'd had a number of failed attempts before we found our house in Burlington, but almost as soon as we stepped in the door we knew it was ours.

So as I've been apartment hunting over the past week, I've been (mostly unconsciously) waiting for that same thing to happen. And I've seen a lot of places in the past week, several of which were quite nice. But none of them were home. (Several of which were not quite nice and emphatically not home.)

We had two appointments on Sunday. One was for a three-bedroom with garage (our grouchy diesel makes that a priority) about 20 minutes out of town, in our price range; the other a two-bedroom without garage, five minutes out of town, on the extreme outside edge of our price range but with a garden space. The first was emphatically not nice, and not home: no light, no counterspace, really no kitchen space, generally dingy and all three bedrooms too small to fit our bed in. We left discouraged, and I made a call for a second appointment with one of the nice-but-not-home apartments, because at least it was nice.

But then we got to the second place. And - it was perfect. Just enough space for the two of us, a gas range (hard to find in this neck of the woods), good windows, a workshop area for J's homebrew and other projects, and garden space - an acre's worth! And we can get chickens! And we can get pets if we want! And the landlady has a policy of deducting $100 off the rent in May so you can buy flower and vegetable seeds! And she suggested we could barter landscaping/building a woodfired bread oven/other awesome projects for rent. And the place just felt good.

Home.

(We don't get to move in 'til March, but once we do I'll finally have somewhere to put all that nesting energy!)

2009-01-30T13:53:00.001-05:00

I made this list of reasons I love Vermont months and months ago, but never published it:

1. No billboards. I always forget this until we go somewhere else, and I remember how very much I hate billboards.
2. Even the greasiest diners serve real maple syrup, and you don't have to ask for it specially.
3. It's an uppity sort of place. Nobody pays attention to us, but/and we do shit like indict the president anyway. And threaten to secede, and sort of mean it.
4. Bacon.
5. Wherever you are in the state, you can get to a hiking trail within half an hour. If you don't require a trail and are willing to do some benign trespassing, you can usually get to woods within five minutes.
6. The best ice cream in the world. Really. And I don't mean Ben & Jerry's, either.
7. If you are on a dirt road, every person who drives by will wave; every person you pass walking on a dirt road will say hello.

I would like now to add:

8. Total strangers help push your car up the hill when it snows twelve inches in five hours and the plow skips your street and then,
9. Other total strangers let you park in their driveway overnight when it becomes obvious that even with the help of two high-school Nordic-ski-team boys and their mother, the car is not going to make it all the way, and then,
10. When you go back to get your car in the morning, the total stranger will have shoveled it clear and scraped off the windows.

2009-01-26T13:23:00.003-05:00

So J got a job, and we're moving one more time but maybe (hopefully!) for the last time for a while. And this time really moving, all our stuff rounded back up, and some yet-to-be-determined house made our very own. For at least a whole year, dammit.

My job is to find us somewhere to live, and then also to find myself a job. But so far our plan is going according to, um, plan. If that surprising trend continues, by this time next week, we'll (hopefully!) be moved in somewhere and both gainfully employed.

Stability! Steady income! O, the (hopeful) joy!

2009-01-23T23:27:00.002-05:00

When the moment came,
I found I had to carefully unbind my fingers
from the cynicism to which they clung,
had to check hard the impulse to ridicule my own misting eyes.

That part of me was sure he would be shot,
sure that the moment itself
was some sort of farce, was impossible,
would be taken from me.

But a poet read a poem, if badly,
in a moment of honor, and no-one was shot.
(Yet I still can't shake that eight-year habit
of recoiling from impending doom.)

And he can't change everything.
I know that. But he said torture, and
condemned it, and that's worth something.
Even if by now the hope doesn't come naturally,

it still comes. That's worth something.

2009-01-20T15:46:00.002-05:00

In Vermont, thick snow muffles the ugly earth. Too much time in cities; too many hours full of billboards and bare ground and the droning monotony of the road. Two of my dear friends married each other last week in Philadelphia, and the wedding itself was very lovely and the visiting of an old life was nostalgic and fun, and I was glad and honored to be there. But the city sits poorly with me, at least as poorly as it did five years ago when I called it home. I've always been a small-town girl, and I am a country girl as well now: roads of more than two lanes in each direction make me anxious. Places where I cannot see the both sky and the ground make me anxious. A lack of trees makes me anxious if not supplanted by open space (the desert does not make me anxious).

So it is with relief that we have returned to Vermont, where billboards are outlawed and several state highways are actually rutted dirt roads. Where snow glitters sweetly in the sunlight, glitters faintly in the shadows of branches, in the marks left by passing critters. We spent several hours over mediocre beer in a brewpub in west Philly crafting a plan for our next several months, and while this plan brings us no immediate stability, it does grant definition to the instability we face. And we are home now, in this place we love, and there is snow enough to sled on and a new president who uses the word science with respect. Hope is in the air.

2009-01-14T11:21:00.001-05:00

The clear, cold sun against the sidewalks of Asheville, North Carolina reminds me strangely of somewhere else, somewhere I know far better than this town in which I've spent perhaps six days over the course of five years. Philadelphia? Prescott? Burlington? Perhaps it's the black man shuffling past with his hood up over his ears, hands in coat pockets. Perhaps it's something about the smell of the bus grumbling as it passes. Maybe just the feel of barely-iced cement slipping slightly under my feet. I don't know what it is, but it makes me feel content, somehow.

Yesterday, after a week on the road again, J finally got sick. This is the worst part of traveling, for us: one or both of us nearly always gets sick. I think because we are blessed to eat so well most of the time, the transition into road-food - ramen and Subway and cheap fish and chips in dingy truck-stop restaurants, bags of chips and packages of candy and soda that we occasionally can't resist, coffee for breakfast five mornings out of six - our bodies revolt. So far I only feel sluggish and greasy, but J was up all night with a sour stomach, even though last night we had good fish and chips for dinner, at one of our favorite pubs.

It's a small tradition of ours, the day-long layover in Asheville. Slightly out of our way, strictly speaking, but it seems to be worthwhile. Both of us nearly went to Warren Wilson instead of Prescott College (I half-joked last night that I only made the decision as I did because he had already done so and fate left me no choice. In fact, I had been planning to go to Warren Wilson, visited both schools almost perfunctorily, having thought I'd made up my mind, and continued thinking my mind made up in favor of WW until almost the moment I signed the papers saying I'd go to Prescott.) and we both have a quiet and almost completely unexplored love of the Smoky Mountains. Or perhaps only I do; at any rate, something draws us here and something comforts us when we arrive. Despite the late-night saga of J's stomach, I think we both feel more rested this morning than in many past.

And despite even that, we are weary. Last night he moaned to me, hands on his belly, "I want to go home." And I nodded and did not say what we both knew: that we have no home to return to, for now. It is time and past time for us to go home, to cook for ourselves again, to sleep on our own pillows. But for now, we are resigned to the comforts of a lovely town and a bottle of extra-strength Tums, and the knowledge that we will make a home, somewhere, soon.

2008-12-26T13:29:00.001-05:00

On the morning after the longest night, we were on the road an hour before dawn. We'd awakened after only a few hours of sleep, cramped and cold, in the car. We'd been driving for three days, had tried to push through the night, but the night was long. It got the best of us. He was driving last, so I didn't know where we were until morning, when I stumbled into the rest stop itself to brush my teeth and saw the pseudo-adobe. Ah. New Mexico.

We reached Albuquerque just as the light began to rise; we were through the city and into the open desert in time for the dawn cloud-show of scarlet, sandstone and pearl. In the west, low clouds darkened the turquoise sky, and the early light burnished the edges of the far-off snow-deep mesas, so that the horizon was set like a stone in a Navajo bracelet.

I named the plants as we passed through New Mexico and into Arizona, greeting them as the friends they are: Hello, juniper. Hello, atriplex. Hello, rabbitbrush and mesquite. And ocatillo! So nice to see you all. Some names I had trouble remembering, though my mind's hands could still feel the texture and character of the plant: this one soft and leathery, this one brittle, watch those spines. Later this game kept me awake; by then, whichever of us wasn't driving was almost always asleep.

Snow started falling as we ate lunch in Flagstaff, and had gotten ahead of the plows on I-4o by the time we were back on the road. A fleet of giant trucks with Texas plates speeded past me, following each other too close and smug with their four-wheel-drive. I kept my distance, and secretly hoped to see them piled in a snowdrift later on. Once out of the mountains, the snow became rain with only the briefest interval of sleet, then slackened altogether.

Night came upon us before we reached Needles, and I could no longer see my plant friends to name them. I drove through Needles, to Barstow, then slept as he took us over Tehachapi and its forest of dancing arms. I slept until we reached 101, then shook myself awake for the familiar last leg to home. Bursts of rain escorted me through the fields of America's lettuce and artichoke and strawberries, invisible and infinite in the darkness. We arrived finally in the wee hours, smelling of car and slept-in clothes, and stepped into my parents' waiting arms. Then fell, insensate, into the waiting bed. Then slept like the dead.

Then woke, impossibly, at six-thirty, because the sun came up and we're farmers or stupid or something.

Merry Christmas!

2008-12-17T08:21:00.002-05:00

I'm supposed to be packing. We've gotten four inches of snow since midnight, with no indication of a slowing. I'm on my second cup of coffee (with eggnog for creamer, but unspiked as this is after all still eight AM, though maybe the next cup will be since I'm not evidently getting anything done anyway), still in pajamas and slippers; my last day of work was Monday, and I've been supposed to be packing since then.

We're leaving tomorrow for J's mom's, in whose basement resides still the bulk of our worldly possessions (what isn't in my folks' garage, J's dad's basement, or a storage unit in California). Then on Friday striking out towards California, with the goal of a December 23rd arrival.

So I really ought to be packing. Fortunately, we're pretty compact these days; a pile of books already in their milkcrate-cum-bookcase, one dresser and one closet full of clothes, bathroom supplies, dutch oven, some jars of jam and sauce and pickles in the pantry. Everything else still in boxes in said basement.

If the weather mellows at least a little, we'll be heading to Burlington this afternoon for a farewell drinks-and-pizza with the folks from J's work and some Christmas shopping. My family has instituted a strict one present per person per person rule this year, so the shopping is less strenuous than it might be, and we're mostly done - J, in fact, is I think completely done - but I still have a few items on my list.

I don't want to pack because I don't want to leave. We've got little itty bitty tendrily roots here, and when we leave California next month we don't know where we're going. I've moved - I counted yesterday - seventeen times since 2001. Seventeen! (And that includes three years in which I stayed put for the whole year. Try that math.)

Ages ago I realized that the romantic nomadic life does not, in fact, suit me: I want a comfortable bed surrounded by books, and a properly-equipped kitchen with lots of cast-iron pans, and some place to spread out all my crafty artsy things where I don't have to put them away when I'm done with them. Not wanting that life doesn't seem to have stopped me from having it, however, but each time I grow a little wearier of the whole process.

I am weary of it now. Looking forward to seeing my family, yes. Looking forward to living out of a suitcase for the indefinite future, no. We're hoping that in the early part of next year we'll move, again, but this time move everything out of all the basements and garages and storage units and suitcases and keep them all in one place. With us, in one place. And stay in one place. For a time we can measure in years, with an emphasis on the plural. And maybe never have to pack again.

2008-12-11T14:22:00.002-05:00

The cold snap has abated somewhat, though they're warning of a nor'easter heading this way: up to twelve inches of snow tonight, if we're lucky, and several inches of sleet and ice if we aren't. But that's okay. It's winter now. This is supposed to happen.

Last year I made a calendar, but I had to leave out November and December. I know them now: woodsmoke and wool. Perhaps they would be central heating and polar-tec in some other state, or some other life, but not here and mine. I'm so glad that wool is making a comeback; I much prefer it - in terms of aesthetics, ethics and comfort - to synthetics. And the good woodsmoke smell has wrapped all around us these days, from our own house and the neighbors on each side. Even driving down the interstate, an occasional whiff will drift in and fill the car with homeyness.

2008-12-09T08:37:00.002-05:00

The cold fell like a hammer: sudden and crushing. Last week the temperatures hovered around thirty; plenty chilly, don't get me wrong, but not really cold. On Sunday we went Christmas-tree hunting in the state forest, where you can get a permit for $5, and we looked around under the stands for the little firs and hemlocks that crowded together and would likely never find the sun. It was 30 degrees, or twenty-five. We wore long underwear and scarves and gloves, and crunched through the crust of frozen snow.

Then Sunday night the wind picked up, and the cloudcover cleared, and the temperature dropped. From thirty down and down to zero, and down more. If you count the windchill - which your body will count even if you do not - it dropped to twenty below. Which below means below zero, which is already thirty-two degrees below freezing in our silly little system.

By morning, the wind had slackened some and the mercury risen to six degrees. With the woodstove banked all night it had dropped only to fifty-some in the house (warmer in the living room, much colder in the back bedroom where we sleep with the door closed to avoid cats dancing on our heads at four AM). Our car - a diesel - started only with much grumbling and indignation. Cold enough to freeze the hairs in your nose, which is personally my favorite test of really cold.

Waiting for my bus home from work in the afternoon - the grumbly diesel being with J in Burlington - I stamped my feet and wrapped my scarf around my nose and shivered so hard my back hurt, and it brought a strange memory to mind: at the Gorge in Big Sur, perched on a high rock in the wind, afraid to jump and unwilling to back down, and so standing there embarrassed, arms wrapped tightly about myself, shivering until my knees literally knocked and my back cramped.

I was so distracted by the cold and the memory and the stomping and the shivering that I almost missed the bus when it came. The driver leaned her head out the window and said, Honey, if you're getting in, get in, but I'm closing the door. It's too damn cold out.

2008-11-29T13:37:00.006-05:00

Darkness comes so much earlier than I am prepared for that I know it must be winter. The leaves have turned to mud, then frozen; last weekend ice sheeted a bridge so that I crept across it in first gear, with no attention to spare for the dozens of cars collected along the guardrail. Sunlight has taken on a miraculous quality, the sky turned pale and cold. My poor California blood grows sluggish and the haul out of bed in the morning harder even than usual.

In New England tradition, we warm ourselves thrice over with wood - in the chopping, the hauling, and finally the burning. J is sharpening the chain-saw now, and will soon be waiting on my writerly self to get cutting. Just as soon as I finish my Thanksgiving leftovers, I'll dig out my work gloves and Carhartts and join him. Chopping wood goes right up there with the rest of the SADS remedie s, to which I also would like to add sledding and tea. [link via Cassandra Pages]

2008-11-16T12:35:00.000-05:00

2008-11-11T12:52:00.002-05:00

So we've moved. It is the fifth or sixth time this year; I've lost count. Almost a full year since we've had lodging in our own names, save our week in a little flat in Montreal.

We are both home-loving people, with strong nesting tendencies. We both love travel but from a home base, a safe place to return to. This untethered drifting wears. Despite the continued generosity of friends and family, for which we are grateful, we are yearning for a home of our own.

I am yearning. Lately I have been spending inordinate time on home-decorating sites and with magazines, hoarding images of the house I want to create, building it from electrons and air in lieu of the wood, stone and work that lie presently out of reach.

The chill weather only makes it worse. I want to be burrowing! Soon, says the quiet voice inside. Soon enough.

2008-11-03T16:33:00.002-05:00

We're moving again. This time we'll be in one place for almost two months; don't ask me what we're doing after that, because I don't know.

We're moving again to somewhere without internet access (though we'll have a cell service this time, so we won't be cut off from the world completely). I'll miss you, internet. But I'll probably get more done.

2008-11-01T12:26:00.002-04:00

We had a lovely honeymoon in Montréal: quiet, indulgent, with very few plans and plenty of time. We caught up on our sleep and snuggles from the wedding madness, reacquainted ourselves with each others' faces (almost alarming how little we actually saw each other over the wedding weekend itself), and had the most outrageous and delicious dinner of our lives.

We visited the Botanical Gardens, and spent the entire afternoon amongst the trees and flowers. In the evening, we visited their lantern display, which was beautiful but insanely crowded.

On our final day, we met Beth and J., in front of the beautiful Anglican church (with a mall underneath!), and walked to Chinatown for a fabulous dim sum lunch. The restaurant had a twenty-minute wait, and inside was full of bustle and the cheerful impatience of the cart-bearers, crying their wares - noodles, noodles! shrimps, shrimps! - and giving each table about two full seconds to respond before shooting off towards new customers to ignore. Still, we somehow managed to fill our bellies with delicious food and the hour with good conversation. How lovely to finally meet in person someone whom I've been following and admiring so long online.

All in all, a perfect week.

2008-10-28T11:42:00.002-04:00

I think of spring as a tumbling, a box tumbling down a hill with its contents bouncing out, one at a time: the colored haze on the trees, sugaring time, then the trout lilies, the robins, mud, frogs - it starts slow but builds - fiddleheads and ramps, green grass, red-wing blackbirds, rhubarb, asparagus, daffodils, warmth - each tumbling one after the other, arriving in the landscape with a gasp and a quiet thump. The tumbling slows as summer comes on - strawberries, peas, fireflies - and finally the little box comes to rest at the bottom of deep summer, in static green, cool ponds, and bounty.

Fall begins as subtly as spring, with a hint of color on the hills that can't be seen straight-on. But it doesn't bounce. It just - well - falls. One day you wake up and summer is over. The trees do their flamedance, and then it is finished, it is now, when everything has gone umber and sepia, darkened silver and still shot with gold - the aspens that are the first to gain their green and the last to let go their leaves, still shining - the cornfields half-stubbled, half-skeletons, and the heart wrings itself dry in anticipation of winter.

A dry thing doesn't freeze. The heart must keep carefully dry at this time of year, keep its toes out of the puddles of memory, keep its eyes on the horizon of now. Fall is no time for meloncholy, despite the invitation in every leaf. Keep boyoued on joy, keep fattened on love. Fall is the best time to get married: bright, grounded, aflame.

2008-10-26T12:22:00.000-04:00

Hi!

Still married!

Horray!

2008-10-19T19:21:00.001-04:00

Yup, we're in a porta-potty.

Courtesy of my dad.

2008-10-17T15:11:00.003-04:00

Already it seems so long ago. What I remember most is his face all screwed up trying not to cry, the wind tugging at my veil, soft autumn sunlight.

All morning I'd felt as though I'd be sick - in a good way! - but once I started walking down the aisle, grass and fallen leaves, it was pure peace, pure joy. At sunrise I'd sat and searched my heart for a moment of hesitation, and found none. Only a feeling like expanding wings, a feeling like sky. Then there we were, with the wind and the sunlight and friends and family, and his face all screwed up trying not to cry.

In all, it was perfect. If I had anything to change, I'd add a few dear friends who were unable to come; otherwise, banal as it may be, I must say perfect.

We'll be heading up to Montreal in a few days for our honeymoon; maybe I'll be able to give a better recounting when we get back. And thank you, everyone, for your kind wishes and congratulations - you all are wonderful.

2008-10-15T08:28:00.005-04:00

(yay!)

2008-10-06T20:30:00.006-04:00

I can't remember what the tragedy was, exactly, but it was tragedy that brought me back to him, finally. It was living in the city, my edges raw, and the news story of one more death, one more murder, one more piece of universe based on hatred, and I picked up the phone and said yes to love.

This is a funny time to be getting married. The world as we know it is ending. It feels hyperbolic
to say, but I think it's true: the ice caps, the markets, the end of cheap oil. Who knows what the world to follow will be like. A good part of the money we thought we were going to buy land with has disappeared. At the moment we have no jobs and no solid prospects and no plan that extends beyond January. But the cliché is true: at least we'll have each other.

For the rest of our lives.

Together.

(HOLY CRAP!)

2008-10-04T21:16:00.001-04:00

Um, I'm getting married in a week.

...

...

HOLY CRAP!

2008-09-23T15:44:00.003-04:00

2008-09-23T15:11:00.001-04:00

The nights have turned cold, with broad mornings that slip directly into afternoon, skipping midday altogether. The sun is warm, but breezes and shadows both chill. Butchering time.

At nine o'clock the butcher and his wife arrive in a rumbling truck, backing the trailer carefully into the barnyard. Inside, he has everything laid out: the line of killing cones, an aluminum trashcan of hot water over a propane burner, the plucking machine, two sinks mounted on the wall with a tub beneath to catch the guts. Feet and necks go into one bucket; hearts and livers in another. Outside, we have a tank of ice water, a roll of plastic bags.

We've dragged the chicken tractor - the coop which we've been moving every other day, all over the side-hill below the barn - as close as we can get it to the barnyard. We bring the chickens, three at a time. They work quickly, methodically. We talk about the season, the rain, the drought, the frost, except when the plucking machine roars to life, which is my cue anyway to get another three. There is surprisingly little mess. They tell us they've slaughtered seventeen thousand birds this year, so far. He's coming up now on seventy, supposes he'll keep working 'till he's eighty but it'd be nice to find an apprentice, someone to follow. Nobody else in the state doing this kind of work; if there's meat to be slaughtered, he says, they've been there.

It's a good living, he says: seventeen thousand chickens at two-fifty a head, just do the math. Not even considering all the beefers, the hogs and in the spring there's lamb.

Each time I go back into the coop, the chickens sit calmly, stupidly, staring at the feed troughs that we left outside. I don't feel badly for them. I catch them fast, and once they're upside-down they quiet. Mostly they don't even flutter when I hand them across to the butcher's wife. Ten seconds later their heads are in a bucket. Chickens aren't especially expressive, and of course there's no way to really know, but I don't see anything I'd call suffering.

The butcher says they've seen a lot of new business this year, a lot of new kinds of folk raising their own meat. Especially chickens, easy to care for, easy to kill: the gateway livestock. Lots of doctors, lawyer-types, state police. Not just farmers and back-to-the-landers, not anymore. Themselves, they grow mostly what they eat, trade slaughtering for vegetables at a farm down the way. The kids don't want that life, though. Maybe one of the grandkids will.

At the end there are four birds left. I'll do two and two, she says. It's cruel to leave one alone.

2008-09-14T16:12:00.002-04:00

The wedding is eating my brain, even though I promised myself it wouldn't.

Sorry.

(But I'm going to wear cowboy boots! Yee-haw!)

2008-09-09T13:27:00.002-04:00

And it was suddenly autumn. We all knew it, though nobody knew quite why. It was something in the light, something in the air. No room for doubt. The chipmunks stopped to watch us, their cheeks stuffed full. The loon cried her wildsong as she passed over the field. The sun set into gathering clouds. There were geese in the distance. The leaves started to fall.

2008-09-07T14:17:00.002-04:00

The end is nigh. Today came in on little grey feet, a soft drizzle and a pot of chicken soup. We'll be bringing in the potatoes and winter squash next week; the onions are already in the greenhouse to cure. It's a heavy season, the last of the harvest. We have a digger, a machine to pull the potatoes out of the ground - and we've got about seven thousand pounds of potatoes, so thank god. We'll still have to haul them into and out of the truck, one fifty-pound crate at a time, but at least we don't have to pull them out of the ground. The trees are starting to turn. We pulled our wool blanket out and added it to the down. After weeks of dry and hot and sun - the rain stopped just in time for a drought - it feels like fall.

We're getting married in 35 days.

Last night with my arm around him and my belly against his back, I thought about his little old man body and my little old woman body, the bodies we'll have in fifty years. Imagined our knotted bones and paper skin here where today we are youth and health and strength. Will we still be bickering over unwashed dishes and doors left open? Will we still see into each other's secret hearts? We are fifty years and thirty-five days away from our golden anniversary. I wonder what we'll do to celebrate.

2008-08-24T10:41:00.002-04:00

The upper field really isn't more than half civilized. Each piece of plowed and cultivated land elbows meadow that grows up past my waist. The potato patch backs almost directly into the woods. In this field, we most strongly feel how tenuous and perhaps illusory is our grasp on control. As we dig potatoes, a constant stream of wildlife issues from the hills: newts and efts, crickets and beetles, toads and snakes, snakes eating toads, toads eating crickets, once even a nest of tiny mice tucked in amist the German butterballs, and their parents bounding away into the grass. The weeds are weediest here, the view breathtaking. We do our best to stay focused on the task at hand: dig potatoes. But I find myself communing with the newts, staring out into the woods, whistling back at the birds. (Also slapping mosquitoes and cursing deerflies.) On the way back down the hill, there are blackberries to gather and chickens to feed, and frogs splishing into the pond when we finally get there, dirty and tired. And happy. Still happy.

2008-08-18T08:29:00.002-04:00

My laptop almost died, but was saved. The rain has stopped, for now. We went to a wedding celebration, and it was beautiful and I drank too much. We're buying a car. I'm exhausted. That's the news.

2008-08-02T16:56:00.002-04:00

We're living in a little camper on the edge of a big wood. This farm is nestled against the wild heart of Vermont; from the potato field you can follow a dirt double-track into the forest, and not come back out for a week if you so choose. Follow the road the other way, and you pass our camper perched on the edge of a hill just before you come to the greenhouses, the barn, and the rural road we set on.

The wild is pressed upon us. In the morning we hear a hundred birds, at night the chorus of a thousand frogs. Chipmunks scatter across the roof, vines curl against the windows. And always, there are the bugs.

Spiders fling their webs across the doorway, set up shop in most every corner. Their shops run a profit: our screens are shot through with holes, one wall soft with rain, and creepy-crawlies creep and crawl all through our little house. The spiderwebs are mostly full. At night, moths and mosquitoes buzz around the lights, and in the morning I wake with new bites itching. A family of ants live in the walls somewhere and march their solemn lines across most every surface. Every so often a group of them go winged and flutter madly against the windows with the ladybugs, gnats, horseflies, and swallowtails.

The lines between civilization and - what else is there? the rest of the world? - are blurred. I bring piles of dirt and straw in with me. I jump in the pond more often than the shower. I have a mammal's body and an animal's dreams, full of sweat and blood. It is a good life.

2008-07-27T09:17:00.001-04:00

Even now, I don't quite believe in summer. I haven't yet learned to trust these seasons; I was sure this year that spring would never come. Now, of course, I struggle to envision this land beneath its winter snow, to picture the bright trees barebranched, the pond a solid block. But I also don't trust the sun to stay and keep its promises, to bring all these fruits to ripening, to warm our souls enough to last through the winter.

But the green is overbearing now. Some part of me longs for the sere yellow hills of home, though they be ashen now, or the long hot vista of a creosote flat. I long for autumn, and fear it, and fear the winter, these brash seasons with no sense of moderation. I feel sodden, overwhelmed: won't it dry out, a little? Slow down? Isn't it time for a rest?

2008-07-21T14:56:00.000-04:00

Not hell. Not fate.

Just fire. No brimstone here,
no retribution. Just fire.

Lightning-lit, cigarrette-embered,
or campfire poorly banked. Don't matter.
Don't you see? It's the way of things.
Tinder burns. Wood burns. Grass burns.
Houses burn. Rabbits in their burrows,
fledgelings in their nests, horses in their barns -
even people, given flame enough, and stubbornness.

There will be those who cite
the hand of god: punishment
dealt against the gays, against the heathens,
against the liberals and their fancy cars.
Just as a hurricane was sent to punish
poverty and good jazz music.
Just as floods were sent to punish corn.

Even the insurance calls them
Acts of God.

They are the acts of people
who built houses too close to the river,
who built houses too deep in the canyons,
who built houses on the faith that the levees
and the dykes would hold,
that forest fires could be prevented,
who moved into a house of sand,
straightened all the pictures,
dusted all the corners,
closed the door on the sea and said:
there. Doesn't that look better?

And when the tide came,
it was no punishment, not even for a hubris
such as ours. It was only the tide.

2008-07-15T20:51:00.000-04:00

Tomatoes!

2008-07-07T21:07:00.000-04:00

Smokey the Bear
is on the rack;
his tongue split
as a snake's.

Like any traitor,
he won't confess,
insists that he loves this country,
that he had no idea,

that he meant well.
He looks smaller without his hat,
fear in his eyes,
flames at his feet.

2008-06-30T12:19:00.001-04:00

Two days of sun, finally. The fields finally dried out enough that we could get in them without mucking things up, so we spent all day hoeing yesterday, and all day today. At lunch today I noticed little baby callus nubbins growing on the ridges of my hands.

There's no denying it: I've got middle-class hands. They're soft, and not very strong. I can stick them in some mighty hot water, after so many years of steaming milk and scalding myself with espresso, but aside from that they don't take much abuse. I've been fascinated with their slow transformation.

The first day of mucking I got blisters. The second day the blisters sloughed off and left a raw patch beneath each middle finger, right where my heart-line arcs to meet my life-line, unless I've got those backwards. There are little calluses there now; those were first calluses I've had since I my dedicated monkey-bar days in elementary school, aside from the tips of my left fingers from guitar. They've since been joined by a few more, under my first and ring fingers and on my palms. All tiny baby nubbins still.

I will confess to being inordinately pleased by those calluses.

The whole body is gradually changing. Darkening, hardening. The pattern of skin lines on my fingers is etched in dirt that can't be scrubbed off. I've got a wicked farmer's tan (which should look smashing with my wedding dress). I can carry the 50 pound bag of potting soil that in April I had to drag to the greenhouse. There are muscles emerging that haven't been seen since my days of competitive swimming in high school: triceps, abs, glutes. Hunger keeps pace with me all day in the field, and no matter how much I eat it will only abate for a little while. Beneath my baseball cap I am acquiring a sunburnt squint and a sense of satisfaction. I'm beginning to look like a farmer.

2008-06-28T15:17:00.001-04:00

My heart is burning.

2008-06-24T10:21:00.001-04:00

It woke us in the night. Far off at first, so far that only the flashing flashing flashing of the lightning came through, no thunder rumble to follow. But soon we could hear it, feel it in our chests and blood. Soon it came close.

Half awake, half blinded by the flashing flashing lightning, I half-dreamt that I saw him, tree-legged, splay-armed, stalking. I could see him in the woods above us, tangle-haired, grin-toothed, circling. Soon he came closer. The lightning herded him, goaded him, a beacon compelling him to follow, a siren light lashed tight to his heart and blood. It pulled me, too, pulled me upright in bed, naked body flashing flashing flashing when the lightning lit. I watched him in my mind, his tree-legs crashing, his endless yearning following every strike. Once he almost caught her, his footsteps so close so loud he must have been right on top of her, reaching his moss-hands, his barnacle-hands, his storm-hands out to touch her, finally, to hold that gleaming burning brightness, and I wondered why she chose just here to let him find her, just here above my half-wild head my half-wild heart where the darkness shook and shook with his running steps,

but she got away. She slipped away from him again, and then her brightness flash flash flashed far ahead of him, and he followed, he followed as he always must, she ran as she must, and soon his rumble passed out of hearing and my trembling self fell back into the pillows, fell back, finally, into the broad silence of sleep.

2008-06-22T09:20:00.002-04:00

if you stand here you will compact the soil.
you will crush the earthworms.
you will crush the roots.
if you eat only fruit fallen freely from the bough
you steal it from the deer who starve all winter.

you steal it from the earthworms.
there is no innocence.

still -

i am hungry. this body works
for its living. it demands payment.

there is fresh sourdough bread
and dried dead potato beetle
on my hands. the bitter taste lingers.