That Time of the Year

I will be away for the next couple of weeks, but will return in the New Year.

In the meantime,

Soup Of The Evening

My freezer is full of jars containing the liquid essence of long-gone hens.  There are also many plastic tubs full of the pureed prolific members of the cucurbit family--pumpkin and her sister squashes:  acorn, butternut, and delicata.

It being, for the moment, slightly wintry outside, with enough snow on the ground to make it look less like late October, I made for supper my famous (to me) Curried Cream of Cucurbit soup, so simple that it qualifies as home-grown fast-food.  Here's how to make it:  into the blender dump a quart of hen broth and a couple of cups of squash or pumpkin, two tablespoons of butter and two of flour.  Salt, pepper, and some hot curry powder.  A splash of sherry or brandy.  Then blend, heat, and eat.

The result lives up perfectly (except for the color, of course.  But you can make this soup with green veg, too, omitting the curry powder) to the lines by Lewis Carroll:

Beautiful Soup, so rich and green,
Waiting in a hot tureen!
Who for such dainties would not stoop?
Soup of the evening, Beautiful Soup!

                                                                                                                           

Wood Woes

The wood piles in people's yards around here are to die for.  When I drive down the road, it's not the Christmas decorations that draw my eye, but the wood piles stretching majestically across the frosted lawns with a minimalist beauty all their own.  No matter how long the pile, it is the same height all across, and the end pieces are arranged in a cross-wise pattern that ensures that the vertical edge of the pile is perpendicular to the ground.  From the front, the best piles are as regular and textured as honeycomb.

This fall my husband and I had an especially abundant supply of wood to lug from the side of the garage where it had been drying to the front porch.  While he did the lugging, I took charge of the stacking.  How hard can it be to stack wood, you say?  Not very, I thought, at least at first.  I figured that to keep the pile from collapsing, I needed to stack the end pieces of each layer at right angles to the rest, and I tried my best to do that.  But it wasn't until the last log was in place that I stepped back and was horrified:  while the pile looked more or less o.k. from the front, its profile was a disaster--logs stacked at perilous angles to each other, precarious diagonals giving an unfortunate dynamic feel to a structure that I had wanted to be restful and symmetrical. 

Dejectedly, I pointed out the pile to my husband.  "What's wrong with it?" he said, wiping his brow.

"It's the first thing people see when they drive up to the house, and it screams flatlander," I wailed.

The wood pile failure was an esthetic one, but it was followed by a second, functional one.  Most of the wood that I stacked came from a big tree that fell across our driveway in a storm a couple of years ago.  We had it cut and split, and gave the logs a long time to dry.  That dry wood burns better is one of the two things I know about firewood.  The other one is that you shouldn't burn pine because it gunks up the chimney.

Other than that, I thought, all non-pine wood was pretty much the same.  How wrong I was became apparent the first time I built a fire with the home-grown logs, in the expectation of a warm evening cozily reading Iris Murdoch.  Although they were light as balsa wood, they took a long time and prodigious quantities of paper to start burning, and had to be continually coddled and encouraged to keep from dying out.  Imagine my dismay when I realized that, even after an hour of my nursing the fire--while Iris sprawled, unread, face-down on the sofa--the stove was producing very little heat.

That's when the memory came winging to me of some apple tree trimmings I burned in the fireplace once back in Maryland, and how blindingly white-hot  those flames had been.  (They had smelled good, too.)   I have no idea what kind of non-pine it was that fell across our driveway, but it obviously wasn't much good for keeping one warm.

Clearly it's time for me to stop winging it in this matter of fire wood.  Next year I'm getting a firewood mentor, a Vermonter or near-Vermonter who will tutor me in the fine points of choosing wood, and  stacking it.  And when I have a North-country-worthy wood pile of my own, I'll take a picture of it, and post it on this blog.

Hibernation Hesitation

Coatless and sockless in the four o'clock dusk, picking kale in the garden, I almost stepped on a woolly bear caterpillar that was crossing my path at a pretty good clip.  By now it should have been curled under a thick padding of leaves, safely tucked against the rigors of winter.

We do a lot of tucking here in the fall.  The hens get a thick bedding of hay to keep their skinny feet warm.  The garden gets a nice duvet of compost.  The young apple trees get hard plastic socks around their trunks to guard against the rabbits.  The climbing roses get a layer of mulch hay around their feet, while the lavender is surrounded by a wall of hay that reaches halfway up the plants.  The rosemary bush and the scented and zonal geraniums have been indoors by a sunny window for weeks.

Vermonters (and Vermonter wannabes such as I) tuck themselves behind massive stacks of wood that will feed the stove until late April.  Every driveway is outlined with four-foot markers warning the snow plows away from the grass.  And the shrub-proud among us (not I) put out A-shaped wooden contraptions to keep their plantings from being dismembered by avalanches dropping from the roof.

In a word, Vermont is tucked and ready for winter.  But, as that 15th-century rake Villon put it, Ou sont les neiges d'antan?  (Where are the snows of yesteryear?).  Sure, we've had a couple of snows already, but they have promptly disappeared in the next day's 60F high.  Reader, it's kind of hot here.

I'm worried about the lavender, sweltering under its thick coat of hay.  I'm worried about the yellow butterflies that flitted across the driveway yesterday, worried about the geese flying in indecisive circles overhead--to stay, to go?  I'm worried about the frogs, who tucked themselves into the gunk at the bottom of the pond on the first cold night, and can be seen clinging to the disintegrating lily pads in the weirdly warm noon sun.  I'm worried about the woolly bears--will they be able to rush to shelter when the real cold suddenly arrives?  And I'm wondering about their cousins, the brown bears.  Are they in their dens by now or are they making sleepy, ill-tempered sorties, hunting for the last berries?  Is it safe to fill the bird feeder?

People in the village store say, "enjoy this weird weather."  Others say, "we're gonna pay for it later."  And I wonder, who are the optimists, who the pessimists?  Me, I hope we do pay for it.  I hope I get to wear my new super-warm-yet-light-as-a-feather winter coat that is hanging in the closet with the tags still attached.  I hope the cold kills the ticks.  I hope a thick coat of snow both shelters my plants and leaches nitrogen into their roots.  I hope the harshness of winter keeps those who would move here for frivolous reasons away.  I hope another season of relative isolation teaches me to endure, to bend with the winds, to find sustenance within myself.

In case you're wondering--that caterpillar in the garden?  It wore a wide brownish-orange belt around its middle:  a sure sign of a mild winter.

Q Is For Quandary

Step into my clogs for a moment, and consider the situation.

You live in a place where the winters are long, and to mitigate cabin fever for yourself and your friends, you have organized a salon that meets during the non-gardening season.

 One Sunday a month people come to your house, shake the snow off their boots, and settle in for an afternoon of wine and talk.  Each time one of you speaks informally about work that you feel passionately about--sheep herding, art, writing, politics, early music, bee-keeping.  And for a while, as you sit together, the weather seems more clement, the season less dark. 

The salon, about to start its fourth season, has not bombed:  by now, the mailing list has grown to twenty.  Not all twenty, of course, come to any given salon.  But they could.  And because your living room can reasonably seat only a dozen at most, and people listen best when they're sitting down, you worry every month that there won't be enough room.

Clearly, you have to find a way to limit attendance.  But it has to be a kind and gentle way:  these are your friends and neighbors, whom you wouldn't for the world offend or depress, especially in this tiny community, especially in winter.  Various ways of doing this have been suggested to you.  The most promising is to close "admission" after twelve people have said they're coming.  If one of these must later cancel, his seat can be announced to the group that didn't make it, again on a first-come, first-served basis.  This seems fair enough, but you worry about how the ones who don't get in may feel. 

The first salon is scheduled for October 30.  What do you do?

The More Things Change...

A doe has hidden her fawn in the front field.   If I drag my chaise longue close to the wren house and sit quietly, I can hear the babies peeping inside while their parents dash from the wren house to the apple tree, from the apple tree to the woods and back again, bearing take-out which the father announces with a song that seems far too loud for his tiny throat.  Our front porch is again besmirched with phoebe poop.  The thrifty phoebes first built their nest there three years ago, and they aren't about to make a new one while this one is still perfectly good.  Yesterday I saw that it is crammed full of chicks.

We are surrounded by nativity scenes, by budding, hatching, birthing, blooming.  How can this fertile, speeded-up landscape be the same that seemed so dead just six weeks ago?  I know intellectually that the pond where a frog is pizzicatoing was so deeply covered in snow that the dogs and I walked over it routinely, but I cannot hear the crunch of my feet, or feel the cold on my face.  The tree branches that alone interrupted the universal whiteness have disappeared under masses of foliage.  I stretch out my typing hand and it comes back redolent of mint, chamomile and thyme.  No matter how I try, I cannot reenter winter.  As Francois Villon said not quite a millenium ago, where are the snows of yesteryear?

It seems to me that we are a species designed for permanence but thrust by mistake into a world of change.  How else do you explain our longing for eternal spring, eternal youth, eternal love?  Yet, at the same time, I know that by summer's end, wearied of the garden, I will long for the killing frost, for the first fire in the wood stove, the first snow.  Maybe what our species was designed for is discontent.

A Snowstorm Is Coming...

...but I'm not upset, although most people around here are. We're supposed to be well into the lamb part of March by now, and instead, we're stuck in the lion's maw. Fleetingly, the temperature climbs up to 40F, maybe 43F at high noon, then dips into the teens at night. The fish pond is still a block of ice, and the heated waterer for the hens is going day and night. Still, as far as I'm concerned, it's spring. The hens know it, too: I'm getting four eggs a day, instead of two.

Forget the temperature; look at the light. It's six p.m. right now, and bright blessed daylight outside. The mornings are less traumatic, too. In winter I wake up like Quasimodo, hunched and blinking and prey to existential despair. These days, the light from our east-facing window hits my lidded retinas well before seven, and I wake and doze and mumble to Wolfie to lie back down, and when the alarm finally rings I have grass and peepers, not Jean-Paul Sartre, on my mind.

But now, to (almost) everyone's despair, there's a blizzard forecast for Friday. Several inches of snow. Impassable roads for a while. Same old, same old. Except that we're close enough to gardening season that I can easily look on this as a last respite before chores to come. A time to fold laundry, finish a clay piece, do some writing, practice the G sharp on the recorder, make blueberry bread with the last of last summer's blueberries. Also pay a medical bill, check out some friend-recommended websites, clean out my in-box, finish that crocheted poncho.

Unfortunately, temperatures in the 40s are forecast for Saturday, by which time I won't be even halfway through my list. Winter of 2011, hear my lonesome plea: won't you stay a little longer?

Winter Bunny

This is our resident bunny.  He (she?) lives a fraught existence, between the backyard where three dogs who would love to tear him to pieces occasionally roam, and the front field, the domain of the fox who has his (her?) den at the bottom of the hill.

In the daytime, when the birds are at the feeder in front of the house, he gleans their leftovers, impervious to the madly barking dogs behind the window.  And he knows that the fox won't dare come this close to the house in broad daylight.

At night, after the dogs have gone to bed, he roams the dog-saturated backyard, into which the fox never wanders, and eats...what?  Well, during our absence in December he chewed up the three glorious climbing roses that I had planted the summer before to cover the side of the chicken coop.  It will be a miracle if the roots survive under the snow.  I had never thought to fence off the bushes in the fall.

However, I did think to protect the trunks of the little apple trees by wrapping a spiral of thick plastic around them.  I had read that once a rabbit "rings" the trunk, the tree is done for.  But now that the snow is firm and packed a couple of feet deep, the rabbit has been stretching up on his hind feet and nibbling the bark off the lower branches.  I have dug deep wells in the snow around the tree, and am hoping that that will keep him away.

But I'm wondering what he'll think of next.  I feel about this bunny the way I feel about the fox who occasionally carries off one of my hens:  I hate what he does, but part of me roots for him, wishes him fortitude and perseverance, cleverness and luck enough to last out the winter.

Pumpkin Bread

When the temperature outside is below zero, it becomes morally imperative to make something that requires turning on the oven.  Yesterday afternoon was the ideal time for making pumpkin bread.
 
I made it with something called "cheese pumpkin."  The skin of a cheese pumpkin is a lovely pale pinkish beige, and the pulp is supposed to be especially good for pies.  I did not grow this pumpkin myself, but bartered it with a friend for a big bag of my Swiss chard.  I had done the initial slaughtering and processing of the pumpkin--if you've ever cut and cored a pumpkin, you know what I mean--back in the fall, and had baked and frozen the pulp.

My recipe was for pumpkin muffins, but I tend to double or quadruple recipes when I bake, and making four dozen muffins--greasing the cups, pouring the batter, then prying the finished muffins out of the cups without breaking off the tops, putting them carefully on cooling racks, and so on--seemed overly labor-intensive.  I decided to make pumpkin bread instead, with the same recipe but a longer baking time and lower temperature.

Unlike what I suspect is the case with most people, I cook less in winter than in summer.  In summer I spend endless hours cutting and blanching and freezing stuff.  In winter I go to the basement freezer, pull out a bag of beans or broccoli or whatever, add a whisper of  animal protein and some rice or pasta, and that's dinner.

Cooking is not like riding a bicycle--you do tend to get rusty.  Thus I was disconcerted when our snow-plow guy called as I was adding baking powder to the dry ingredients and when I got off the phone I couldn't remember whether I'd put in one or two teaspoons.  And just before I added the liquid ingredients to the dry, I thought the latter looked rather skimpy.  Sure enough, I'd forgotten to put in the sugar.

Despite these narrowly-averted disasters, the four loaves came out lovely, firm and moist and much easier to deal with than 48 muffins would have been.  We had a slice of pumpkin bread with dinner, along with soup made with barley from the store, broccoli from last year's garden, and chicken stock from one of our former laying hens (R.I.P.).

And we survived another day of winter.

The Horns Of Winter

It's cold and sunny here today, but the weather forecast for tomorrow says that a storm coming from the south is going to combine with something else, resulting in a "nor'easter" that may drop as much as sixteen inches of snow on southern Vermont.

Or not.  The anticipated blizzard may dwindle to a couple of flurries, leaving school children disappointed (it takes a major, major storm around here for schools to even delay opening), commuters relieved, and some of us embarrassed.

Several times each winter the same situation arises:  a snow storm is forecast for a day when I have plans to be away from home.  Do I cancel my plans or do I ignore the weather and go about my business as if I were in, say, Atlanta?  Although I am a lot braver about driving on snowy roads than I was when we first moved here, my daring does not approach that of my spouse, who will blithely drive into the teeth of a blizzard.   
The easiest thing would be to wait for the event to be cancelled, thus relieving me of all responsibility.  But in Vermont cancellations tend to come, if at all, at the last minute, by which time one may be risking life and limb on the road.

Tomorrow morning, right when the blizzard is expected to hit, I'm supposed to drive half an hour to the first of a series of figure drawing sessions.  This being a small community, it's important to show up for stuff, to encourage the organizers so they'll keep things going.  On the other hand, if one gets oneself killed on the road, the community shrinks even more.

So--should I go to figure drawing tomorrow, or should I stay home?  Either way, the potential for embarrassment is considerable.  If I stay in, and we just get a couple of flakes, I will look foolish not only to others but to myself.  But I'll also look foolish if I set out in the car and end up in a ditch and have to be rescued by strangers.  This is what I mean by the horns of winter.

While I wait for developments, I check the online forecast frequently.  I also use my personal forecasting method:  the number of birds at the feeder.  In my experience, if the weather is clear and calm but the feeder is mobbed, a storm is on the way.

I just looked and saw:  a male cardinal, half a dozen chickadees, a flock of juncos, and a tiny nuthatch--a respectable showing, but not what I would call a mob.  My guess is we won't get much snow.

In Which The Gardener Gets A Reprieve

Not once since I embarked on my vegetable-growing career decades ago--not in Alabama, North Carolina, or Maryland--have I worked in the garden in January.  But yesterday, in Vermont, I did.

Every year, in March, I go out and plant spinach in the snow, which guarantees me an early crop of greens that snatch us back from the brink of beriberi.  As I pick the delicious but none-too-abundant leaves, I promise myself that this time I will not neglect to put compost on the spinach beds at the end of gardening season.  And every fall, sick of garden tasks, curled up by the stove, reading a book, I tell myself that it's o.k. to have early spinach that is less than lush, as long as I have some spinach.  By the end of November the ground freezes solid, the gate  into the chicken yard where I store the compost freezes shut, and the whole question of fertilizing garden beds becomes moot.

Yesterday, however, out of nowhere, the sun came out;  the temperature rose into the 40s;  and the knee-deep snow melted down to a mushy couple of inches.  In some places I could actually see the compost that, having filled the two bins to overflowing, I had dumped on a corner of the chicken yard.  I tried the gate and, sure enough, I was able to work it open.

It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and I seized it.

I got a shovel and a big tub (the gate wouldn't open wide enough for the wheelbarrow), filled it with compost, carried it to the garden and dumped it into the first spinach-destined bed, then filled it again and dumped it into the second bed.  I gave a few desultory digs with the shovel to see if I could work the stuff into the soil, but couldn't make a dent--the soil was still frozen hard.  Come spinach-planting time in March, the little seeds will have to find their own way through layers of snow and compost to a bit of dirt to burrow into.

I spread the compost as best I could, then put away the shovel and the tub, and bid them adieu until spring.  As I did so, a cloud obscured the sun, a cold wind picked up, and the chickadees, who had been chirping while I worked, fell silent.

This morning the gate to the chicken yard is frozen shut, the compost is covered in ice crystals, and we're in the depths of winter once again.

The Woods In Snow

Celebrated the end of deer-hunting season by taking the dogs out for a walk in the woods behind the house today.

Over the last couple of days the weather has changed wildly, from frosty and snow-covered to a tropical 50F in which all the snow melted, then back today to frigid and a fresh three inches of snow on the ground.  I knew that Bisou would get ice balls all over her coat if I took her to the woods, but I also knew that she would have a nervous breakdown if I left her behind, so I let her come along with Wolfie and Lexi.

The woods looked properly Frostian, dark and deep and full of snow.  There were no animal tracks on the ground--no rabbits, squirrels or turkeys.  The deer that survived the hunting were hunkering deep in their winter yards.

Old arthritic Lexi, whom I've always suspected of having Husky blood, and who was feeling the effects of her recent acupuncture session, trotted along looking spry.  Wolfie looked like a black paper silhouette pasted on all the whiteness.  Bisou barreled along up to her shoulders in snow, oblivious to the ice balls forming on her coat.  Every once in a while, to ensure that they didn't forget me, I would call the dogs and give them each a slice of string cheese, then let them take off again.


Being in the woods, just a hundred yards from my back door, is like being on a different planet.  Around the house, even in the dead of winter, there is always noise--hens cackling or pecking at the floor of the shed, chickadees chirping and fluttering around the feeder, the clothes dryer humming inside.  But in the snow-filled woods, the silence is about as absolute as I'm likely to experience in this lifetime.

Back inside the house, the Shepherds were dry in two seconds, but Bisou was another story.  She was decorated like a Christmas tree, white balls hanging from every one of her long feathers.  I brushed and shook off as many as I could, but the ones in her armpits had turned to solid ice.
 
I took her into the bathroom, closed the door, plugged in the diffuser and turned it on low.  Nothing much gets to Bisou, not even the cleaning lady's super-powered vacuum cleaner, but she had never come in contact with hair-drying appliances before, and she hid behind the bath towels hanging from the rack.
I sat on the floor and periodically waved the diffuser in her direction.  Eventually, she realized that this was a good thing, a vanquisher of ice balls, and came out from behind the towels.

When she was dry I went into my study and stretched out on the bed and Bisou hopped up and curled against me and I covered us both with our special dog-hair-covered fleece throw and we had a nap.

Mulch Hay

Got six bales of mulch hay today, a kind of vegetable duvet that I plan to apportion to various living beings around here, i to make their winter more comfortable.

A couple of bales will go around the feet of the climbing roses I planted last summer against the chicken-shed wall.  Climbing roses are supposed to be tough.  But this will be my roses' first winter, and their name, "New Dawn," makes them sound so young and fragile that I'm going to give them a nice thick mulch this year.

I will also mulch the seven lavender bushes growing against the stone wall in front of the house.  Not only did they survive last winter, but they produced an amazing crop of blossoms right through the middle of November.  Some of their flowers, which I picked and dried in early summer, are now inside the scented "eye pillow" that helps me go to sleep at night.
  
I believe that the lavender's survival was due not only to the warmth of the sun that the stone wall captured and retained, but to the excellent snow cover we got last winter.  Unfortunately, since  thanks to global warming, even in Vermont we can't count on heavy snows,  my lavender bushes will need hay to protect them if the snow is scarce.

Most of the hay, however, will go to the chickens.  Now that the goats are gone, my six hens have almost 130 square feet of coop space.  While that guarantees against the evils of overcrowding--hysteria, depression, and cannibalism--six birds hardly generate enough heat to warm up that much space.

The answer is a nice, deep, dry, crunchy bed of hay.  Something they can scratch around in, peck at, poop on.  Something to keep their skinny chicken feet away from that freezing-cold plywood floor.  Something to spread on the garden next spring.

And something to keep me, as I snuggle under my duvet at night, from fretting about my six girls while the wind howls outside.

Sun Squirreling

These days I'm storing up sunshine like a squirrel stores nuts.  I don't know that I can really store sunshine (maybe in the form of Vitamin D?), but at least I can store up the memory of it.  On second thought, forget that.  I know that it is impossible, on a sleety January day, to recall how it feels to sit in the warm sun.

Regardless, I sat outside on the sunny patio stripping lavender for a while this morning.  I have quite a harvest this year.  My plants, which I placed up against the stone wall in front of the house, made it through their first Vermont winter, thanks no doubt to being snuggled under a thick duvet of snow, their backs against the sun-warmed stones.

Normally, I don't strip lavender, but roughly chop the stems and throw the whole thing into potpourri.  This year, however, I want to make lavender-filled eye pillows, and the stems might feel a little rough against the eyelids of my loved ones--not to mention my own eyelids--so I'm having to separate the blossoms from the stems.  It's a slow, repetitive task, but if you're olfactorily fixated like me, you don't mind it.

While I worked, Wolfie and Bisou passed the stick du jour back and forth to each other.  The bird feeder was right behind me, so I could hear the flutterings of the chickadees as they landed and took off, and also the bulletins they sent out (i.e., tweets) as to their location and activities.  "Just arrived at feeder for lunch," "Dropped a seed!" "Stopped on chicken-house roof to check dog locations," and on and on. 

Replace the flaming maples with gnarled olive trees and the chickadees with hoopoes  (you can see them here) but keep the sun, the cobalt sky and the scent of lavender, and I could have been somewhere on the foothills of the Pyrenees. 
  
Then a chilly breeze came up, and I came back to Vermont.  I gathered up my lavender, called the dogs, and went inside.

Hens In Summer

About this time every year I let a few zucchini grow to a hefty size. Some of these I cut up and freeze to make into zucchini bread later, when the gardening frenzy is over, for my winter breakfasts. Others I slice in half lengthwise and serve to the hens.

I did that today, and they all came running. The three Buff Orpingtons, the crones of the flock, who've had zucchini before, dove in right away. The young hens--two New Hampshire Reds and one Barred Rock--didn't quite know what to make of the thick green slabs, and every time they approached one of the B.O.s chased them away. I guess there's a food hierarchy in the flock, but it doesn't seem to apply to sleeping arrangements--at night they all snuggle up together on their roost, in no particular order.

I noticed that the B.O.s, who looked like shiny pale golden balls in early summer, are starting to look a bit scruffy. This is their second summer, and they are probably ready to go into a molt. That means they'll go around losing their feathers, looking pathetic and not laying eggs for a while.

The young trio, on the other hand, after a summer gorging on grass and bugs, are reaching their prime. Chickens really can be things of beauty. The two R.I.R.s are a rich chestnut all over, with a couple of iridescent blue feathers in their tails. And the Barred Rock, with her black and white horizontal stripes and her bright red comb makes me think of the typical apache outfit--a striped black and white sweater and a bright red bandanna around the neck. All the chicken needs to complete the look is a Gauloise hanging from her beak. All three are bright-eyed and, yes, bushy tailed, and laying little brown hard-shelled eggs. They will be in full production by the time the B.O.s start molting, which bodes well for our winter omelettes.

How many times have I mentioned winter in this post? The year has turned, and as you drive on the roads around here you can see people getting serious about their wood piles. July isn't even over yet, but the tips of the top branches of the maple in our side yard are already starting to redden. The roadsides are lined with Queen Anne's Lace, the tall gray-green spears of mullein, cobalt blue wild asters and goldenrod. The worst of the heat seems to be over.

I try to spend every possible minute of these last long days outside, storing up sunlight for the coming winter.

Brrrrr!

It was so cold today, and with such a bitter wind, that even the dogs didn't want to be outside. It was a waste of a sunny day, too--bright and sparkly, and I should have been out with my face to the sun, getting my share of Vitamin D and dopamine, but I just couldn't. Too darn cold.

Instead, I made a fire in the stove, in the morning. Normally I don't light the wood stove until late afternoon, more for psychological comfort than for heavy-duty heating. I am ashamed to admit, that even in the midst of these wooded hills, we heat mostly with oil, and only slightly with wood.

But this morning, despite the thermostat, which was supposed to keep the house at an even 66F, it felt cold, so I made a fire. Am I the only one who finds it especially hard to keep a fire going on cold, windy days? I ended up spending most of the day crouched in front of the stove, reviving the flames. It was hard to get anything done. Every time I turned my back, the fire would die.

I dearly wanted to go down to my carving room in the basement and work on my little piece of slate. But the fire would surely go out in my absence, and what if Bisou needed to go outside? I toyed with the idea of spreading a sheet on the living room floor, in front of the stove, in view of the dogs, and doing my carving there, but recognized just in time the insanity of this.

So I spent the day feeding the fire and going outside with Bisou when she needed it, and reading the autobiography of Rumer Godden. At one point I dozed off, but heard Bisou whining by the door--not something I can afford to ignore--and that was the end of my nap.

I find this kind of day especially trying. Tending fire, making soup for dinner, dealing with the animals--it just doesn't seem enough. It seems like a waste, and it leaves me feeling restless and dissatisfied.

And at the same time I realize that it may be my life's work to come to accept and feel pleasure in a day spent tending the stove, and dealing with the dogs.

January Meltdown

The technical term, I know, is "January thaw." But what's happened here today goes beyond that. In less than 24 hours, the landscape has gone from pristine white to horrid brown. The skies have opened and let down tropical--well, almost--downpours. Weird warm winds have blown and the snow has disappeared, replaced by mud. Dirt roads and driveways (the majority of Vermont's roads are dirt, and we're fighting to keep them that way) have become brown rivers. And below it all is that stubborn layer of ice, growing thinner but no less treacherous by the minute.

Our backyard is one of Dante's circles of Hell. You think I exaggerate? Picture mud, and dirty snow, and places where the water is up to your ankles, and deadly hidden ice, and a winter's worth of dog poop.

The hens went outside for the first time in months today. When I gather the eggs tonight they will be smeared with mud from the hens' feet.

If this were March, we could look forward to warm sunshine, and less snow, and the end of mud season. But that is a long way away.

The good news is that tomorrow it will freeze again, hardening the mud so it doesn't get tracked all over the house, and it will snow, covering up the dog poop and other yuckies. Mud season without the consolations of spring is an abomination, and I for one will welcome the return of winter.

Snail Update

Back in December, I wrote here about what I should tell my grandson, when he came for Christmas, about the pet snail that he had left behind on his summer visit to Vermont. He had mentioned to his mother that he was looking forward to seeing his snail again, and I was wondering whether I should tell him what I believed was the truth, that the snail was long gone, done in by the snow and sub-zero temperatures; or invent a pious story about the snail waiting patiently under the leaves in the yard for summer and his next visit.

A number of you voiced your opinions as to how this should be handled, and one of you suggested that I simply find out what does happen to snails in winter. So I did a cursory web search--I was busy wrapping presents and didn't have much time--and found out that some snails live for four years. "That must be in Florida," I muttered, and googled "Vermont snails." And behold, the life span of some Vermont snails is two years. That means that those fragile, soft-bodied, slimy creatures make it through two whole winters under snow and ice. But how? Do they burrow under the earth somehow (and how do you burrow when your head is the consistency of jello)? Do they hide under leaves? The websites were silent on these points.

At any rate, when my grandson inquired about his snail, I was able to tell him with a clear conscience that the snail was outside somewhere, waiting for spring. "But why," the boy inquired, "didn't you keep him in the house?" And here I did make something up. "Because," I said, pointing to the fire burning in the wood stove, "the heat would have dried him up."

My next dilemma will be, when my grandson visits in the summer and wants to see his snail again, whether to pick up an understudy from under a spinach plant and tell him he's the one, or to tell him the truth.

Nature red in tooth and claw--snails gobbled up by chickadees, bunnies carried off by hawks, a hundred Haitis in every square foot of field and woods--how can I bring myself to paint her as such to my grandchildren, when I have trouble seeing her that way myself?

Trollope And Snow

When I find a writer I like I always hope it's somebody with a large opus, so I can dive in and swim around in the stuff and not come up for air for a long, long time. With Trollope, I've hit the jackpot.

I first read his Palliser novels ten years ago, followed by the Barsetshire series. Then at the book sale at our local library last month I found Phineas Finn (one of the Palliser series) in paperback for a dollar. I stuck it in a pile of books during Christmas, and pulled it out after our guests were gone, just as it began to snow. I found that I loved that novel even better than the first time I read it. It was a brick-sized tome, but the snow lasted three days, and Trollope saw me through it.

Then we had a clear day or two, and another snow was forecast. I had a bunch of books to read, but no more Trollope. I rushed to the local bookstore, and they had a single book by Trollope on their shelves. (What are people reading these days, anyway?)

Luckily, it was one I hadn't read, The Way We Live Now, and even thicker than Phineas Finn. I clasped it to my breast and rushed home as the first flakes began to fall. The storm went on for days, but the book outlasted it. I'm only half way through it.

There is no end to the man's inventiveness. There are love intrigues, money intrigues, political intrigues. The last two are not my favorite reading topics, but I'll take anything from Trollope, who makes me empathize with his financiers and understand his politicians by shining the clear light of his intelligence over each one. His women are nuanced--unlike Dickens's icons--fully formed and human. There are salt-of-the-earth heroes whom I find irresistible.

But my favorites are his dithering young lords, forever in need of money, forever in search of an heiress--any heiress-- who will provide it. They have the oddest notions of honor--it's o.k. to owe money to tradesmen, but disgraceful to expect a fellow club member to pay a gambling debt. They are so clueless and so bumbling, that I'm sure that P.G. Wodehouse was thinking of them when he created Bertie Wooster and his cohorts at the Drones Club.

Trollope is smart and he is kind, and that's about the best thing I can say about anybody.


If there is a heaven, do writers go there? And in that heaven, are there peepholes through which they can watch us reading their books? I hope so. And I hope that Trollope knows how glad I am that he wrote every day of his life (nulla dies sine linea was his advice to writers) and how grateful I am for his company this winter.

Critters In The Cold

I knew by how heavy the sliding door felt this morning as I let the dogs out that it was extra cold. Eight below zero, by our front porch thermometer.

While the water for my tea was heating in the microwave I put on socks, my barn jacket, gloves and a hat over my usual morning chore outfit--my pajamas. I filled a bucket with water and ventured into the attached garage, picking my way over the accumulated chunks of muddy ice that have been falling off the bottom of our car and are waiting for the temperature to, someday, rise above freezing.

As you all know by now, our goat and chicken shed is attached to the garage, so I do not have to trek through the elements to feed my critters. This morning the goats greeted me with loud cries. Was something wrong? Had they starved during the night? Were they cold? Had the coyotes scratched at their door? I checked the hay feeder, which was far from empty. Their heated water bucket was still half full. And in their long, fuzzy winter coats they looked like plump matrons in fur coats. What was all the fuss about?

While they ate their sweet grain, I checked under Virginia Slim's tail. Aha! She was in heat--that's why she was yelling. "There's nothing I can do about that particular need of yours right now, my dear" I said to her. "You'll just have to try to think of other things until it's over."

Next door, the hens were just waking up. The droppings under their roosts have been freezing almost as soon as they emerge during the night, forming Himalayan peaks that are as rock solid as the real thing. Looking at that piled-up manure, I could just see the tomato plants that it will nourish in my 2011 garden (chicken manure needs to age for a year before it is used ). When you're doing chores in sub-zero weather, it is important to take the long view of things.

The hens were cheerful enough, even though they would not venture out into the deep snow. I made sure their feeder was full and then threw a handful of sunflower seeds onto their bedding, to give them a sense of purpose.

My fingers were stiff inside the gloves by the time I went back to the house to feed the dogs. As I doled out the kibble and the home-cooked mush I filled their bowls a bit more than usual, thinking that if I had to go out into sub-zero weather every time I went to the bathroom, I would need some extra calories too.

And as I drank my tea I reflected that all over these hills people with red noses and freezing fingers were trudging with buckets of water and pails of grain to keep the critters fed and comfortable, to check that all is in order, and to keep things going, morning chores and evening chores, through another winter.