The
attraction began in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1959. I was a freshman in high school, newly
arrived in the U.S. and drowning in a river of southern English. I would grasp at words as they floated past,
but could not reconcile the currents that engulfed me with anything in the Primer Curso de Ingles that had been my
sole preparation for school in the Deep South.
It
was a Catholic high school, so miracles and visitations were not unheard
of. Mine came in the shape of a freckled
girl whose family had just moved to town, and the miracle was that the first
time she opened her mouth in class I understood everything she said. Her words were as clear and precise as if she
had clicked them out on a typewriter.
She did not stretch her vowels out like taffy, and though she spoke
faster than the southern kids, I could tell exactly where each word began, and
where it ended. I could follow her train
of thought. It wasn't that different
from mine.
She
took me home with her one afternoon and her mother,
her father and even her little sister all sounded the same. No drawn-out diphthongs, no languid
cadences. Here was an entire family whom
I could understand.
My
friend and her parents were from Massachusetts, which I learned was in New England. I thought that someday I would like to live
in a place where everybody spoke like that.
Graduate
school took me out of the Deep South, all the way to North Carolina. By the time I arrived in Maryland in the 1970s, language had ceased to be an issue: I was not only dreaming, but even counting in English.
The
back-to-the-land movement was in full swing then, and I was determined to
achieve self-sufficiency in the acre and a half that surrounded our house. I had an ambitious vegetable garden with an
asparagus bed, and twenty-seven fruit trees.
For protein there were a dozen laying hens, and two Roman-nosed Nubian
dairy goats who looked vaguely like Barbra Streisand.
As
I had never grown a tomato, pruned an apple tree or milked a goat, I did a lot
of research at the local library. This
consisted mostly of reading back issues of Organic
Gardening and The Mother Earth News,
and I noticed that many of the articles and letters to the editor came from New
England. The writers alluded to sugaring
in the spring, and to goats coming into heat as the trees began to turn in the
fall. They advised readers to be
vigilant about frozen water buckets in winter, and to keep a stack of old
blankets handy for covering tender veggies in case of September frosts.
September
frosts! As I sweltered in the heat of
the interminable Chesapeake Bay summer, the fantasy of living in a land where
gardens snuggled under blankets, water buckets froze solid, and roadsides were
free of that tropical menace, the kudzu vine, became more and more compelling.
The library also had a shelf
dedicated to books about country living.
These were more lyrical than practical, and I read them with the same
passion with which as a child I had read about Heidi and her goats. It was there that I first found Noel Perrin,
Louise Dickinson Rich, Scott and Helen Nearing.
In the children's section I discovered the illustrations by Tasha
Tudor. I had read Thoreau years earlier,
but the life he described seemed impossible to translate into the twentieth
century. The writers on the country
living shelf, however, were very much
alive, and they had one thing in
common: they all lived in New England.
In
the 1980s, as the Maryland countryside succumbed to suburbia, I had to give up
my little homestead. But at the least
provocation I would launch into nostalgic stories about the hens I had kept and
the goats I had known. “What do you
mean, you kept hens for eggs,” people would say. “Don't you need a rooster for that?” The reactions when I mentioned my elegant
Nubian does were so predictable and so dispiriting, having to do with tin cans
and foul smells, that I soon dropped
livestock from my repertoire of party conversations. Would I ever live where I didn't have to
explain or excuse the things I really cared about?
It
took almost four decades—about as long as it took the people of Israel to get
to Canaan--but I finally made it to a place where the roadways are free of
kudzu (and, because this is Vermont, of billboards as well), and MacMansions
are few. Where a near neighbor makes
world-class cheese with her goats' milk.
Where, when I tell people I keep hens, they ask “what kind?”
Yesterday,
in yoga class, the woman who usually sits on my right was late because one of her sheep had gotten loose.
After final meditation, while we were rolling up our mats, the woman who
sits on my left gave her a short lecture on the best kinds of livestock
fencing. As I was walking out, the
instructor confided that she is thinking about keeping bees--her gesture
towards saving the planet.
From
where I sit at the computer, I can see my hens pecking and scratching at the newly-green grass. In the garden, the spinach is up but growing
slowly because of the cold spring. The
apple trees are in bloom, but I have a stack of blankets ready, since a hard
frost is predicted for tonight.
The
farmer who hays our field dropped by on a chilly, sunny day last week to
discuss plans for the coming summer. He
complained about the rising costs of diesel fuel, and told me his philosophy on
breeding cows—he prefers to wait until they are two years old, when their
pelvises are fully developed, because it makes for easier births.
“You know,” he said, finally getting around
to the real topic, “this field of yours really
needs manuring. I hope you don't
mind. It'll stink badly for a couple of
days, but that won't last.”
His
speech was as crisp and clear as the Vermont air, and I could understand every
word he said.
