My Mother Says...(continued)

They wanted me to sew! my mother says, but all I wanted to do was read novels.  I hid them under my mattress, and I read them at night.

Didn't your parents see the light in your room?

No, because I didn't turn it on.  I used to kneel by the window, with the book propped on the sill, and read by the street light.  I read many novels that way, and that is why I went to law school.

Because of the novels?

Because of the novels.  I read about lawyers defending poor people against injustice, and I decided I wanted to be like them.  So I went to the University of Valencia to learn to be a lawyer.  Valencia was only a four-hour drive away, but in those days--before the Civil War--it was like going to America.

I still cannot believe that my mother let me go.  I was seventeen, and girls from my village did not leave home except to be married.  But as I've told you, my mother was different.  She was not afraid of what people would say, and even though like most girls of her generation she had no more than a grammar-school education, she was smart.

My mother's mother, my mother says, referring to her grandmother, died young, and left four children behind.  Her husband worried that a new wife would make the children unhappy, so he never married again.  Instead, my mother, who was the oldest girl--about twelve when her mother died--took care of the family.  At one point, when she was about fourteen, she did go away to school, but she cried because she was homesick, and her brothers and sisters cried because they missed her, so finally her father hitched up the wagon and went to fetch her home.

When she was eighteen, a spirited, pretty girl, she met my father, who was from a different village and  had just finished veterinary school in Zaragoza.  This seemed very exotic to her, plus he was handsome, so she married him.  When they came back from the honeymoon to their new house, they found her little brother and sisters already installed there.

 My father was a wonderful veterinarian, very progressive, and the peasants trusted him and loved him.  But he was terrible with money.  He couldn't bear to ask people for what they owed him.  In addition to his practice, my parents owned quite a bit of land which was farmed by sharecroppers, so we should have been well off.  But everybody, the peasants whose mules he cured and the sharecroppers who farmed his land, found it easy to get around Senyor Boque.  They were very good at finding excuses--a child was sick, the harvest had been poor--and he always said "Fine, fine.  Don't worry about it."

I'll explain later how this soft-heartedness of my father's may have saved us all in the worst days of the Civil War, my mother continues, but in the meantime there he was, with a wife and four children and a couple of maids to take care of, and perennially short of cash.  And that is when my mother--remember, she had very little education--decided to take things into her own hands.

She became his administrator, secretary and accountant, keeping track of visits paid and medications administered, payments received and monies owed.  When people didn't pay, she told him not to treat their animals, but, my mother says, softening her voice, he used to sneak out and take care of them anyway. 

She was fair but tough on the sharecroppers, too.  On the day when the wheat was put into sacks and weighed, she was there, making sure everything was fair and square...while my father took off  on a on a pretense to look at the fields, but really so he could avoid any disagreements that might arise.

And so, because of her work and determination, we began to have more money.  But she paid the price.  Everybody in the village said that Senyor Boque was a saint.  "La Senyora Boque, on the other hand...."  Still, she did what she had to do.

(To be continued)

Rainy Sunday At The Farmers' Market

At the nearby farmers' market there is a little old couple--actually, they are probably my age, but never mind--who sell potatoes.  Tiny red ones the size of meatballs;  deep indigo ones bursting with phyto-nutrients; and waxy, buttery, elegant fingerlings.

Most of the vendors at the market sell more than a single product.  Especially at this time of year, the vegetable farmers sell everything from chard to pumpkins;  the meat sellers offer squash;  and even the potter sets out a basket of garlic next to her mugs.  But not the potato couple.  They only sell potatoes.

In a crowd of vendors most of whom look like graduate students who ditched their dissertations to go back to the land, the potato couple are old-time farmers.  They've been growing potatoes for so long that they've come to resemble their product, short and squat and a little lumpy.  She deals with the public and he deals with the truck and the tent and the crates.  She refers to him not by name or as "my husband," but as "He," as in,"He planted a lot of Dutch Creams last spring."

I imagine their farm, a no-nonsense place north of here.  No Araucana hens laying colored eggs in charming coops, no mache or endive sprouting year-round under glass.  Just potatoes, and maybe an old dog, and the two of them at the kitchen table with the TV on now that the children are gone.  And on Sundays, the trek to the farmers' market to sell to summer people and flatlanders and leaf-peepers who park their SUVs by the side of the highway and carry their purchases in New Yorker totes.

Last week when I went to the market the heavens suddenly opened and the rain came down in torrents.  Tents flapped and leaked;  people could hardly hear each other speak for the noise of the water; and the Indian summer day suddenly turned cold.  The potato couple's tent was at the bottom of the field.  He had strewn a bale of hay in front of the potato table, but I nevertheless sank down to my ankles in mud.  She was doing her best with customer relations, but I could tell that she wanted to go home.

How much longer, I wondered, will they be able to do this--planting and weeding and harvesting and storing the potatoes, plus the endless round of farmers' markets?  Do they have any help at the farm?  Do they have savings, a pension?  

Except for the wealthy, buying produce at the farmers' market is a moral gesture.  Yes, the food is usually better than what you find at the supermarket, but it is a lot more expensive. It doesn't make immediate financial sense, but buying from these small local farmers is an act of faith and hope in, and charity towards, the community.  Vermont, which  has the lowest rates of church attendance in the country, leads the nation in the proportion of food that people buy locally, and even on that rainy Sunday the parking lot was full and cars were lined up by the side of the road.

This is good news for the potato couple, and for the young families with their college degrees, their  home-schooled children, and their dreams of raising food sustainably.  But given the perennially shaky economy, I wonder how long Vermonters will be able to continue to support their farmers.

For as long as possible, though, those of us who can would do well to spend part of our Sunday buying garlic from the potter, some soup bones from the meat lady, and a couple of pounds of tiny red potatoes from the potato couple.  There are, after all, many ways of attending church.

Chicken Fence

Those of you who follow the complications of my simple life may recall that several years ago I tried to disguise the ugly wire fence around my hen yard.  My idea was to thread sticks through the spaces in the wire net so as to hide the wire and achieve the rustic look of a wattle fence:  http://mygreenvermont.blogspot.com/search?q=wattle+fence

The wattle fence was a dramatic failure, because after the first winter the sticks started to disintegrate, and also because Wolfie discovered the pleasure of pulling out the remaining ones and carrying them around the yard.  Worst of all, the weight of the sticks pulled the wire out of shape, so that it sagged and looked even worse than it had in its pre-wattle stage.

My next attempt at disguise was to plant four Leyland cypresses in front of the side of the fence that is visible from the patio.  But last fall was a bad season for wild apples in Vermont, with the result that hungry deer came much closer to people's houses than they normally do.  Our deer came all the way into the yard and chewed those little cypresses almost to extinction.

My urge to improve the look of the fence was complicated by my wish to avoid a suburban look--as with the pre-made fences at Home Depot and Lowe's--as well as the industrial farm look offered by the manufacturers of serious livestock fencing.  I wanted a custom-made fence--nothing fancy, just sturdy and functional and non-sagging.

But good fence builders don't grow on trees, and it took me the better part of five years to find mine, via a friend whose sheep he shears.

A fence builder who shears sheep?  Yes, and who farms his family's land and keeps cows, chickens, sheep and meat goats.  And who, with his wife, home-schools their passel of kids.  You need to have more than one string to your bow if you want to farm in Vermont.

The fence builder showed up at the appointed hour, backing his truck and big trailer all the way up our perilous driveway.  He was accompanied by one of his kids, who helped get rid of the last sticks still clinging to the old wattle fence.  He came again the next morning, with two kids, worked some more, and left behind this marvel of a fence:

 

Now whenever I look outside I rejoice at the perpendicularity of the posts, the tautness of the wire, and the overall neatness--even the elegance--of my hen yard fence.  The fence runs all the way around the back of the shed, so you cannot see its full glory.  But you get the idea.

And just look at the girls, pecking at the dirt, safe from ermines, weasels, fisher cats, raccoons, foxes, feral dogs, coydogs,  wolf-dog hybrids, coyotes, bears and mountain lions. They are as happy as I am.

Why I Live In Vermont

Some of you have asked how I ended up in Vermont.  Here is a piece I wrote a while ago about the process that led me here, entitled "Magnetic North":                                                                      

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.

The Impeded Stream

I stumbled into a treasure chest of quotes by Wendell Berry a while ago, and at times like these I want to sing little songs of praise and gratitude to the internet. Here is one jewel I just pulled out:

"It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work and when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings."

Nietzsche said something along the same lines, "What doesn't kill you makes you strong." But I prefer Berry, "The impeded stream is the one that sings." Such an optimist, that man. You have to be an optimist to devote your life to a cause that is only now--when Berry is in his mid-seventies--beginning to attract attention.

God knows he must have been baffled and impeded plenty of times on his way to becoming the guru of the sustainability movement. How alone he must have felt in the 1980s, when the back-to-the-land moment had been pushed firmly underground, it seemed for good. But he called himself a farmer and an academic, and persisted in reconciling the two. What must his colleagues have said at department meetings, I wonder, when they heard not only that he was plowing, but was plowing with horses? I, who attempted to achieve a similar synthesis (the "farmer" part on a 1 1/2 acre property), found the opposing pressures and the sense of moral isolation too much to bear, and eventually gave up the farming part.

And now people are thinking earthy thoughts again, and farmers markets are cool, and I have finally come to rest in a place where when you confess that you keep chickens the response is "what kind?" And I'm so glad that Berry's stream kept singing through all those baffling, impeding years.

Haying Season

This endlessly rainy summer, we had started to worry that our fields were turning into woodland before our very eyes. The goldenrod was shoulder-high, the queen anne's lace luxuriant, the grass so tall that it was a chore to walk through it. But we're having a week of cool, sunny weather, and the farmer who hays for us, or one of his minions, came over in a big tractor with an enclosed cab, dragging a mower the size of a Cadillac, and in one morning the grass was cut and drying in the sun.

I was glad to see the job done, but the Robert Burns poem “To A Mouse, On Turning Her Up In Her Nest With The Plough” kept running through my head. You remember how it goes,

“Wee sleekit, cowrin, tim'rous beastie,

Oh, what a panic's in thy breastie!”

I figured that most of the birthing and nesting and nursing was done for the year, but still, there must have been many a panicked breastie as the tractor dealt death across our land.

Gone are the days when a farmer-poet could stop and apologize to a mouse for disturbing her nest. Though I am not a contemporary of Burns, I can remember in Spain mowing being done with scythes, lines of men advancing slowly across a field, swinging their blades. It was graceful, it was quiet except for the swishing of the scythes, and it gave the field-dwelling creatures plenty of time to get away.

Not so on our meadows. When the clattering machinery left for the day, the vultures arrived—six, seven of them, calm and stately--and alighted in the middle of the big field. Something must have died there, because they spent quite a while on the spot. That evening I took Wolfie out to the general area, and he sniffed around but didn't find anything. The vultures had done their work.

The next day the tractor came back, dragging a different machine to bale the hay into big, squat cylinders. Now our formerly disheveled fields look like their hair's been put up in rollers. It is all very civilized, and beautiful in its way. Our grandchildren will look back with nostalgia on this method of haying, back in the good old days, when there were still vultures.

Lugging Stones

To soften the severe facade of our New England house, I made a couple of wavy-bordered flower beds. One of them is next to the driveway, and last winter the snow plow scraped off quite a bit of the precious mulch that I had put down.

To keep this from happening again, and to give the bed more definition, I decided to border it with stones. I wasn't thinking about a stone wall, mind you--just a row of stones laid side by side that would clearly say “flower bed” on side, and “driveway” on the other.

This being New England, I reasoned, nothing would be easier than to find just the right kind of stones for my project. After all, it was this region's rocky soil that made farmers throw up their hands and flee West, leaving behind miles of stone walls made from the rocks they had dug out of their fields.

Two such stone walls, well past their prime, border our property. In spots the rocks are so scattered that only the rusted remains of barbed wire proclaim that here is a boundary. Still, I revere these walls, and will not touch them. They are the closest thing this country has to the dolmens and menhirs that so casually adorn the woods and vineyards of my native Catalonia. To remove even a single stone would make me feel like a grave robber, a desecrator of ancient things, a creep.

With all this reverence in mind, I stood up from where I'd been working on the flower bed and looked around for stones. I wanted medium-size ones—not so big I couldn't carry them, and not so small that the snow plow would run over them.

I took a little walk, Wolfie panting beside me. There were all kinds of pebbles on the driveway, and the field was exploding with dandelions, but there wasn't a decent-size stone in sight. From some places in the driveway, I could glimpse the crumbling stone wall through the trees. But I turned my face away. I would not touch it.

It occurred to me that if the farmer who originally worked this land had to clear the fields, the place where the small field abuts the woods might hold some promise. I tore through a maze of sticker bushes and, sure enough, there were the stones. They were gorgeous, big and mossy and bursting with presence, the kind of “focal point” that my landscaper in Maryland used to charge hundreds of dollars to bring into my yard.

But these boulders were way too big for me to even think of carrying them to the flower bed. Still, where there are big stones there might be small ones, and I grabbed a stick and dug around under the old leaves and, sure enough, there was a crop of smaller rocks huddling by the big ones, like chicks under a hen.

These user-friendly stones may have looked small, but they were heavy--I'd say about 30 pounds on average. That's a lot of pounds to carry out of the woods, across the lawn and the driveway, to the flower bed, over and over and over again.

Still, I dug and carried, Wolfie following along and dragging small dead trees out of the woods in a show of empathy. And as I lugged my stones to the flower bed, I thought about the farmer and his horses, sweating and panting, urgently dragging boulders out of the fields, so the grass would grow and the sheep would graze and the family would have meat to eat, and the wife would have wool to card and spin, before they gave it all up and went West.

Farmer's Patter

A.M. chores: "Hello, hens, goats and Charlemagne. How was your night? Did you keep each other warm? Here's your grain, Blossom and Alsiki, my little princesses. Eat nicely and don't upset the dish while I open your door. Look! The sun is out! I want you to get some rays later on, when it's warmer. Sunlight is good for goats. Here, I'll scrape the ice off the steps so you can get out.

O.k., hens, here I come with your breakfast. Yessir, mash soaked in hot milk! Nothing's too good for my girls. Charlemagne, the frostbite on your comb is looking better this morning. I'm going to open your little trap door and I want you all to go outside later, you hear? You've been cooped up too long. Any eggs yet? Guess not

Here's some clean water with apple cider vinegar. Drink up, everybody!

Oh, you sweet goats, you've finished all your grain. Now you get some petting. I know, Alsiki, we must touch noses. Blossom, please leave off nibbling my sleeve. Here, I'll stroke you too. I know you love it, though you pretend not to. Yessss, good old belly rubs.

All right everybody, I have to go take a shower. Be nice to each other, and I'll see you later."

P.M. chores: "It's me again. And how was your day? Did you evil little goats get into the chicken coop again? Here's your evening grain to eat while I gather the eggs.

What! Only one egg? Ladies, there are seven of you. What is going on? The days are getting longer and sure, it's cold, but what about that hot breakfast I gave you? Never mind, you'll do better tomorrow. Buffy, stop knocking Red off the roost. You've got water, you've got food, and I've shut your trap door to keep out the evil night creatures. Charlemagne, you're in charge. Sleep well and keep each other warm.

Here, goats of my heart, is some hay to get you through the night. And let me give you your bedtime strokings. Ahhhh, isn't it nice to be warm little goats on a soft bed of hay, tummies full, door shut tight against coyotes? O.k., one more kiss. Snuggle up now, and I'll see you in the morning."

Disgusting, you say? You should hear how I talk to my dogs.