When the Days Begin to Lengthen...

"When the days begin to lengthen, the cold begins to strengthen," Laura Ingalls' Pa used to say, and this year is proving him right.  We're having the kind of winter that I moved to Vermont to experience--a no-nonsense season of deep snow, sub-zero days, and clear light glinting off red barns.

Every year, the day after the solstice I insist that I can already tell a difference--the days are getting longer.  Spring is just around the corner.  The holidays are past, the Christmas flu is but a fading memory, and peace descends upon the earth.  The garden is asleep under its white frozen duvet.  The freezer is full of veggies that I planted and weeded and watered and harvested all summer long.  The dogs, when it's below zero and the wind is blowing, are content with just a short walk.

There's really not that much to do, other than talk to the houseplants as I mist them and refill their humidifier, and work on the long-neglected piece of needlepoint that I bought a year ago.  The snow plow cleared our driveway before dawn today, but the north wind has playfully drifted the snow back onto it, so the long-postponed trip to the dump will have to be re-postponed.  And shoveling the front walk can wait until the temperature climbs into the 20s.  In the chilly sun porch the goldfish are in semi-hibernation, and take their own sweet time coming to the surface at feeding time.

It's a lovely, slow, empty time of year.  The hens, who feel about the solstice the way I do, have started laying again.  But if I wait until the evening to collect the eggs, I find them cracked and frozen in the nest.  Eggs are wondrous things, however, with amazing powers of survival.  After I bring them into the warm house, the cracks seal themselves again somehow, and disappear without a trace.

Post-Solstice Slump

Counting the days until September...

Saint John's Eve

My Catalan childhood was rich in ritual, mostly Catholic but enlivened by tinges of paganism. Those tinges were especially evident at the summer solstice, known to me at the time only as Saint John's Eve.

We spent the long summers at my grandparents' farm, and on this night I was allowed to stay up until well after dark, when the fogueres de Sant Joan, the Saint John's bonfires, were lit. There were also fireworks, made all the more exciting by my great-aunt, who used to scream helplessly after every bang.  How, in those tinder-dry summers,  the entire Mediterranean coast did not go up in flames was surely due to the intervention of Saint John himself.

Saint John's Eve had its own special dessert, the coca de Sant Joan, a large rectangular pancake-like bread coated with marzipan and studded with pine nuts and candied fruit.  But the best part was the foguera, and staying up in the dark to watch my  mother and father hold hands and jump over the flames.  I wonder now if they knew that they were enacting an ancient fertility ritual?  After much cautioning by the assembled grandparents, aunts, uncles and older cousins  I was allowed to jump over some embers, then given a slice of coca, a sip of wine, and sent to bed.

Over the coming weeks, the New England landscape will change from the tender greens and barely-there yellows, pinks and violets of spring to the bolder shades of echinacea and black-eyed susans, the rusty pinks of sedums.  It is the time of tomatoes, eggplants and peppers, sunflowers and zucchini.

I, like the lettuces, tend to go into a decline.  I can almost feel the earth's axis shift away from the sun, and my vitality ebbs a little every day, keeping pace with the light.

Tonight I did not light a fire, but I did go out to the edge of the field and watch the sun set in the red sky. The deep Vermont greens all around me didn't look at all like the muted olive tones of my childhood landscapes.  Of all those relatives who cautioned me not to fall into the foguera, few are still alive, much less able to leap laughing over the flames.  And if that espadrille-shod, coca-stuffed, watched-over child still exists, she is hidden deep inside me.

But the sun is still the same.

Goats In Mourning

Sorry to write about dark stuff in this merry season, but today is the darkest day of the year, at least in our hemisphere, so here goes.

Yesterday, the baby goats left. They went to a wonderful farm, willowmoonfarm.com, and I was fortunate to be able to place them. They were almost three months old, and more than ready to be weaned. They were taking up valuable space, drinking milk they didn't really need. They needed to go, and I rejoiced that they did.

My two remaining goats, Blossom and Virginia Slim, are anything but pleased. Blossom is the babies' mother, and I know for a fact that she was trying to wean them; I'd seen her hunkered down in a corner of the shed, hoping they couldn't get to her udder. Virginia Slim was more of a wet nurse. She's a domineering goat, but when the kids were born she could not resist them, and when they were a couple of days old I caught them nursing from her, while she stood patiently and nosed their rear-ends, just like a mother goat would.

The minute we loaded the kids into the truck, Blossom and Virginia S. began screaming, “Where are you going with those babies!” When we returned five hours later, they were still screaming. I milked them both and gave them grain, and hoped that a good night's sleep would calm them down.

Not a bit of it. This morning they greeted me with anguished cries “What did you do with the babies?” Milking and a bowl of grain didn't make a dent in their distress. “What are we going to do now that our babies are gone?” they kept saying, over and over, in a strange throaty bleating. No mother who has just deposited her first born at college could have been more upset.

These are normally almost silent goats. But boy, they aren't silent now. They are in mourning. They are weeping and wailing. They look at me insistently, as if I have the answer.

Which I do, of course. The answer is: “We who own you and take care of you are not vegans. We are not even vegetarians. Therefore, we need you to have babies every year so we can get milk and cheese. Your daughters, if they are lucky, will go on to have babies and make milk for other people. Your sons...let's not talk about what happens to boy goats. Either way, for the rest of your lives you will be separated prematurely from your children, because I cannot take care of more than a couple of goats. If we were brave and honest, we would slaughter your kids right here, and eat them, but we aren't, so we hand them over to others—the girls for milk, the boys for food. Please try to get used to this arrangement, because it's all that I can offer.”

It is night, and the goats are quiet now. I hope they are keeping each other warm. I hope they are not too unhappy. How long does it take a mother to get used to her children's absence? Tomorrow I will give Blossom and Virginia S. a good brushing. What else can I do?

Impaled On The Horns Of The Blizzard

It's been snowing for a while here. Two, three days—I've lost count. Yesterday a friend in the grip of cabin fever invited us for brunch today. And in the heat of the moment, my own cabin-fevered brain made me say “Yes! Of course! Wouldn't miss it for the world!” all the while pushing aside the knowledge that a second, fiercer storm was headed this way.

This morning when I went to feed the chickens, I opened their outside door and it was slammed back in my face by a gust that left me covered with snow. I quickly closed the door and turned on the lights, something I wouldn't think of doing in less dire conditions. Let the chickens enjoy a day out of the wind.

Back in the house, my husband was taking a shower, in preparation for the brunch. As far as he's concerned, weather is never a reason to stay home.

I looked out the window. The snow was flying horizontally. I looked into the dogs' trusting eyes. They had no idea that I was thinking of abandoning them to set off in a blizzard, perhaps not to return for days. On the one horn, I hadn't been anywhere for quite a while, and badly needed human conversation and stimulation. Brunch would give us just the right respite before getting snowed in again. On the other horn, I could see us getting stuck out there somewhere, unable to get back at feeding time, or even disappearing into a snow drift in our attempts to reach home.

By now I was feeling totally impaled. I knew that there was no happy solution to this dilemma. Either we went to the brunch and I spent the entire time fretting about the fate of our abandoned animals, or we stayed home and I spent the entire day wishing we'd gone, and feeling bad for depriving Ed of his outing.

In the end, the animals won. I called my friend and expressed heartfelt regrets. Ed , scrubbed clean for the occasion, did not: 1. berate me for having animals (the animals in our household being entirely my idea), or 2. mock me for being a Vermonter unworthy of the name (our move to Vermont being entirely my idea, at least at first). This is the kind of thing that keeps a marriage going for a long, long time.

But I stayed stuck on the second horn for a while, the cabin-fever horn, the when-will-I-see-another-living-human-being (let alone a friend) horn. Then I reminded myself of the imminent arrival of Christmas and dedicated the afternoon to the arcane craft of making sachets.

This was a good summer for herbs, and I spent hour upon hour harvesting, drying, storing and labeling. A sachet is a little cloth bag filled with potpourri. For my potpourri I blended lavender blossoms, rose petals, scented geranium leaves, and mint. Not having a heavy-duty fixative such as orris root at hand, I used a handful of dried orange peel and rosemary leaves. Then I sprinkled lavender oil over everything, and mixed it in with my hands. It smelled divine, and so did my hands.

The only problem is that potpourri is supposed to be left to ripen, like a smelly cheese, for a number of weeks, and I only remembered to make it when the snow started falling a few days ago. I can't see why the stuff can't continue to ripen inside the little cloth bags, however. And besides, who is going to turn down a sachet?

When the sachets were done, I took the dogs into the front field for a while. The snow was up to their shoulders, and the only way they could travel was by porpoise-like leaps. Looking at them in the snow makes me wonder if there is some kind of dog-intoxicant in the stuff. They played and jumped and bumped and snarled and eventually Lexi decided she'd had enough, and headed back to the house, with Wolfie following. But by the time they got there, I was still at the bottom of the hill. Wolfie couldn't see me, so he charged back down to check on me, and then realized he couldn't see Lexi. He ran back to the house, where she was waiting, but I was still out of sight, trudging through knee-deep snow. He ran down until he could see me and instantly turned to look for Lexi. But he couldn't see her, so he ran back...

I finally arrived, rubbed them dry with a towel, and let them into the house, where they dropped to the floor like two sacks of potatoes and went to sleep.

Happy solstice, everyone!

My story “Death of a Wheelbarrow” came out (with a different title) in the Washington Post last month. You can find it at:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/23/AR2008112301800.html