Resurrection

There are few things I like better than practicing subtractive sculpture on the plant kingdom.  So when the snow finally melted last week I picked up my pruning weapons--secateurs, curved folding saw, and long-handled clippers--and set out to whip my fruit trees into shape.

Normally I do this in March, but this has been a long and cruel winter.  The four apple trees and the espaliered apricot had clearly had enough, however, and decided to ignore the frigid temperatures and pay attention to the sunlight, which has been glorious, and get on with things.  The sap was running and they were full of buds, especially the apricot which is crucified against the south wall of the house.

I was amazed at how much the apple trees had grown.  If it weren't for my determination to keep them short enough to be tended by me without a ladder, they'd be fifteen feet high by now.  I hope that their new owners will appreciate picking those 13 oz. mega-apples without even having to stand on tiptoe.

Like the fruit trees, the bluebirds had had enough, and decided to forgo the courtship rituals and proceed with their nest building.  This is their third year in the little nest box by the back porch.  So far this season the male has not attacked our windows.  I'm hoping that he is finally mature enough to know which battles are worth fighting, and which are not.  I'm also hoping that a pair of bluebirds nesting right by the window will prove a selling point for our house.

All winter long I worried about the little potted fig tree that I'd bought on a hot day last summer.  The label said it could withstand temperatures down to -10F, but I was sweating through a Vermont summer that left no doubt in anybody's mind about the realities of climate change, so I didn't worry too much about below-zero nights.

By October the little tree had dropped all its leaves, although a few mummified figs, born too late to ripen, still clung to its branches.  I wrapped the tree in burlap as best I could, set it in a sheltered corner, and retreated indoors.  The snows came and came, and the temperature dropped so low that one of the hens' combs froze and fell off.  The snow weighed down the burlap and made big gaping holes in it.  I didn't think the little tree had a prayer of surviving the worst winter in decades.

After I was done pruning the other day, I unwrapped the fig and peered at it closely.  Its long skinny trunk was still upright, with a few stick-like branches projecting from it.  But it was uniformly gray and dry and dead-looking, with no sign of buds anywhere.  What had I been thinking, trying to grow figs in Vermont?


Figuring that I didn't have much to lose, I took my pruning shears and with the blade made a tiny scratch near the bottom of the trunk--and lo, there was green beneath the gray!  Bright, moist, live, figgy green!  Against all odds, the little tree had made it.

Best of all, unlike my old friends the apple trees and the espaliered apricot and the bluebirds, all of whom I will have to leave behind when we move away in June, I will bundle the brave little fig tree in the car along with Wolfie and Bisou, and take it with me to our new home.

Life Flashes

They say that when you're drowning, your entire life flashes by.  But that's not the only time this happens.  It also happens while you're downsizing.

A dozen times every day I disinter some long-ignored object that brings up a whole chunk of my life, and I have to ask myself, does this picture I painted, this article I wrote deserve to be kept, or thrown out?  You can see that  downsizing is a lot like drowning, only worse, because you have to pass judgment on every bit.

The books--forty-eight boxfuls--were the first to go .  As I parted with my beloved parasitology textbook I asked myself, what have I retained about the life-cycle of the tapeworm, the loa-loa worm, the blood fluke?  Little more than the ability to predict, when I found Wolfie and Bisou snacking on a dead rabbit, that they would get a case of Taenia, which they did.

And what about the stacks of French novels and plays and essays that I not only read but taught?  I can barely remember who wrote Madame Bovary.  Surely the tide of text that washed over my brain year in and year out left some residue--a starfish or a striped shell or a piece of sea glass?  Some days all I can find are old plastic shopping bags.  Other days the sand is bare.

The art paraphernalia took me some time to sort through.  The dried-out paint tubes, the half-filled sketch books, the dusty mallets and chisels. The framed pictures that fill my closet.  The stone heads that adorn my woods. Now it's almost all gone.  Whew!

At the moment, I'm working on the mountain of implements left behind by the other great fantasy that ruled my life, the earth mother myth.  There's the goat milking stand that my husband made;  the cheese press (ditto);  the heat lamp for the day-old chicks. All those morning chores, those barn cleanings, those births and deaths--where did they go?

This all sounds a little melancholy, but I am not in the least bitter or disappointed. I would say that I am mostly surprised.  Surprised that all that effort and striving, those years and years of cramming and pushing should have led up to...this:  me, getting ready to move with my spouse and my dogs to a retirement community, with one small truckload of worldly goods.

It seems disproportionate somehow, the work and the strain.  It's as if I'd spent my entire life preparing, and now I'm having some kind of graduation and I'm not even sure what I majored in, let alone what kind of work I'm fit for.

"Leap!" a yoga teacher once told me, "And a net will appear."  I have always liked a good leap.  Now, as the waves crash around me and the taste of salt is in my mouth, I trust that the net is on its way.

Haying Time

This cool, dry, sunny weather is perfect for haying, and our neighbor farmer cut our fields yesterday.  He did this with the help of several large machines and the village librarian (could I ask for more than to live in a place where the librarian hays my field?). It was done quickly and efficiently--no fat peasants snoozing under trees at midday--and today the red-tailed hawk spent the morning circling above the field, whistling at his luck. 

I shooed Bisou away from a mouse, neatly sliced in half by the mower, that she found on the driveway.  Haying is not a vegetarian operation, and those big, fast machines wreak much havoc among the small, furry and defenceless.  Gone are the days when Robert Burns had the leisure to apologize to a field mouse "for turning her up in her nest with his plough."  But every year, when the big machines rumble up our driveway, I call to mind Burns's expression of regrets:

I'm truly sorry man's dominion
Has broken Nature's social union,
An' justifies that ill opinion
Which makes thee startle
At me, thy poor, earth born companion
An' fellow mortal!

In this post-solstice season, after the warmest twelve months on record, we would do well to remember that we are earth born companions and fellow mortals of even the lowest, most timorous beastie, that our fates hang together, and that we should do all in our power to preserve "Nature's social union."
On a more cheerful note, driving down Route 30 yesterday I saw a man mowing the verge...with a pair of Belgians.  Is there anything more gorgeous, majestic and at the same time strangely cuddly than those honey-colored giants with their blond manes and tails?

I'm sure the horse-drawn mower had sharp blades, but I hope it was slow enough to give the wee sleekit beasties time, if not to save their nests, at least to save their skins. 

Sustainable Entertainment

The first meeting of the Cabin Fever Abatement Salon took place yesterday afternoon, while the sun shone brightly on the new snow.  A young woman, the farm manager at that pearl of West Pawlet, Consider Bardwell Farm, told the touching, often sad but ultimately victorious story of her father, a fifth-generation farmer, and his struggles to continue working on the land.  It was clear as she spoke that in her own case the farming vocation has not, as so often happens, skipped a generation.

Afterwards, I sat by the fire rewarding myself with some leftover hummus and a glass of wine, and thought about those seventeenth-century Parisian ladies who, sick of rowdy parties where drunken noblemen got into fights, spat on the floor, and abused the servants, invented a kinder, gentler entertainment:  the salon. 

It should have been called not the salon but the chambre a coucher--the bedroom--for that was where the gatherings were held.  The hostess lay on her bed (I never could find out whether she got under the covers), which was on a slightly elevated platform.  The space between the bed and the wall, technically known as the ruelle, or little street, was occupied on one side by the servants standing ready to pour more of that exotic delicacy, le cafe, and on the other by her friends.  Depending on the degree of their favor with the hostess, some friends sat on chairs, others on mere stools.

As the drafty palaces and spartan furniture of the 17th century gave way to the cozier interiors and welcoming armchairs of the 18th, the gatherings moved from the bedroom to the salon proper.  Eventually, the in-home salon was replaced by the more democratic coffeehouse around the corner.  But the custom of living room  entertainments persisted until the early 20th century.  The young lady playing the piano for her parents' dinner guests;  the fledgeling poet reciting in a tremulous voice;  the returning traveler astounding the company with stories of naked savages--all are examples of the human talent for making entertainment out of home-grown resources.

Then, with the advent of radio, the movies, television, and the shopping mall, people stopped looking to themselves and their friends for entertainment, and the salon was no more.

Now that foes both natural and man-made assail us on every side, self-reliance--that grandmotherly virtue--is once again looking like a good idea, even an attractive one.  Some people are growing their own vegetables;  some are making their own soap.  Some discover that within their friends and neighbors lie rich deposits of wit, adventurousness, quirkiness and passion, just waiting to be exploited.  And the quaint old salon, updated as locally-grown, sustainable entertainment, makes its long-deserved comeback.

R Is For Rustic

I remember exactly when I fell in love with the rustic life.  I was eight years old.  It was summer and I was reading under the pear tree next to my grandparents' well, into which two bottles of wine had been lowered in a bucket, to cool before lunch.  The book was Heidi, by Johanna Spyri.

I was at the point where Heidi, after a long, hot climb up the mountain, arrives at her grandfather's hut and scopes out the place:  the wooden bench by the front door for gazing down into the valley;  the tall, dark, whispering firs behind the hut;  the shed for the white goat and the brown goat.

 Indoors there is the spacious, almost bare room with the big fireplace and the iron kettle hanging over the logs;  the cupboard in which Grandfather keeps his folded clothes, his bedding, and, on a separate shelf, a loaf of bread, a hunk of cheese, and Heidi's wooden bowl.  How neat and convenient, I thought, to have everything you need--clothes and food--in a single cupboard.  Almost everything in the hut is made of wood--the table, Grandfather's chair and stool, as well as the new stool, just Heidi's size, that he makes for her. 

There is a loft in the cabin filled with sweet-smelling hay for the goats, and that is the spot that Heidi picks for her bed.  She piles up hay for a mattress and Grandfather spreads a heavy sheet of homespun over it.  There was a hayloft, too, just behind my grandparents' house, above the stables.  My grandmother would take me there sometimes to show me a litter of newborn kittens (before she drowned them, something that was kept from me at the time).  I would have liked to make my bed up there, like Heidi, but knew better than to even ask.

For dinner Grandfather toasts some cheese (it must have been Raclette) over the fire and spreads it on bread.  He milks one of the goats right into the wooden bowl and hands it to Heidi to drink.  Heidi thinks it's the best meal she's ever had.

Before the chapter was over I had fallen in love with the cheese, the wooden bowl, the homespun sheet, and the little stool, not to mention the goats.  I envied Heidi for being allowed to go barefoot, to follow the goats up into the Alpine meadows, to sleep on top of real hay.  But I also had what I now recognize as a strong aesthetic response to the grandfather's domestic interior:  simple, uncluttered, with a single object for every need and a place for every object.  And I loved the wooden furniture and the wooden bowl, and the heavy sheet of homespun.

Many years later, I read in The Mother Earth News an article on how to make a wooden spoon.  Although no wooden spoon is mentioned in Heidi, I recognized it right away as a Heidi-type object:  simple, functional, made of wood.  I borrowed a whittling knife from my husband, got myself some wood, and for several nights sat at the kitchen table, making spoons.

As it turned out, a spoon's simple aspect is deceptive.  There is nothing straightforward about its design.  The three spoons I produced before my wrists gave out had handles that were too short and bowls too deep and narrow to be of any use.  Nevertheless, I sanded them carefully, oiled them until they shone,  gave one to each of my daughters, and kept one for myself.  Today, my spoon sits in a place of honor on the sideboard, useless but revered, and occasionally re-oiled, by me.  And every time I pick it up, I think of Heidi, and her wooden bowl, and those goats.