Days When the Good is Not Far-Fetched

 It is oddly quiet around the farmstead, save for the gusting winds that portend chillier changes to come; a kind of suspended animation.  The garden is cleared of its spent vines and bushes; the tomato cages stored away.  The chicken yard is fully winterized, with the more capacious waterers replaced by the smaller heated ones plugged in and ready; runs wrapped with tarps and sided with straw; windows closed and secured.  The chickens, themselves - only yesterday, it seems, pathetic and threadbare with their molting - have replumed with warm resplendence.  Beyond our humble address, democracy, too, is holding its breath; waiting for the recent election to be clarified and settled.  In a pandemic-frozen world a vaccine is nearing release, but not yet.  "Suspended animation," indeed.

All is ready.  We are waiting for what surely will arrive any day.  But precisely which day is beyond our sight.  The belly is swollen, but thus far only false contractions.  The election will get resolved.  The virus will eventually be quieted.  Winter will descend and grip us.  But today the forecast predicts 50-degrees.
.  

We aren't usually this prepared.  Winter more commonly catches us distracted with other busyness.  Last year the garden had to wait until the new spring to be cleared of its autumn detritus.  More than once I have winterized the coops as the snow flurried.  But whether by uncharacteristic discipline, fewer distractions, or more time on our hands, this year has been different.  Yesterday we even trimmed down bushes and hedges that sometimes go years without shaping.  

Ready, and waiting.

It's hardly Purgatory.  We are incredibly privileged.  There is no tacit condemnation awaiting ached-for redemption.  It's a blessing, really, to be nestled in a taffy-like autumn that is stretching into uncharacteristic reaches of November.  It's just...different.  We have more experience with frenzy, with rushing, with "Just in Time" - if not a little past that.  But we could get used to it.

Already our personal roots have begun to reach into deeper soil, stretching into corners of the soul usually undiscovered until January's darkness or February's existential ache.  With less exhaustion and more stillness, our reading is already meatier, our prayers loamier and more considered, our conversations more expansive with equal parts analysis and imagination.  We are settling in - into the changing season, into the comfort of the glowing hearth, into the interior environs of a home we love, and into the evocations of the Word that pronounced day and night, creeping, swimming and flying things, flowering trees and fruiting plants...

...and even humans...

..."very good."

Despite the world's seemingly endless and concerted efforts to contradict that assessment, just now - at least here on the farmstead, poised in suspended animation
- it is easy to believe.  

Soil Work Yet To Be Done

When we first settled on this land we came to call “Taproot Garden,” we knew nothing about soil.  We had read some things; heard some lectures; come to understand something of the architecture of it.  But we hadn’t explored it, dug around in any of it; we hadn’t scooped up a handful and examined the character of it beneath our eyes and between our fingers.  Moreover, we were deluded.  We live in Iowa, the apex of fertility.  This is the land where things grow.  We had no idea that this was only occasionally true.  

 

I don’t mean “occasionally” to suggest the vicissitudes of time, although that, too, can be true.  Given the almost fiendish undulations of flooding and drought, of the mischievous late freeze (or early) and the intervening storm, sometimes things grow and sometimes they don’t.

 

No, by “occasionally” I was thinking geographically rather than temporally.  Iowa does indeed have fertile soil; it just doesn’t have it everywhere.  Take Taproot Garden as Exhibit A.  The U.S. Geological Soil Survey classifies our property as “highly erodible.”  The very feature that keeps this land above the flood plain puts our topsoil at risk.  We enjoy a higher elevation, with a domed landscape.  Rain washes the soil downhill.  Shortly after moving here we acquired soil maps from the County Extension office that indicated wild and multiple fluctuations in types and character.  There is some good soil here; it’s just located here and there, interrupted by wide bands of less promising…dirt.  Having moved here with the intention of producing a garden, I arrived fueled with the naïve assumption that the matter was as simple as sowing a few rows of seeds.  The land itself quickly disabused me of this ignorance.

 

We learned that there would be work to do, not simply using the soil but building it, first.  There would be compost to add, microbial activity to encourage, organic content to develop, fertility to build and restore.  And it would not happen overnight.  

 

We just completed our 9^th garden season here – a season cut short by early frosts and snow.  We didn’t really mind, because it has been a busy season – harvesting and preserving - and we were happy to slow the pace.  We will eat well throughout the winter and subsequent spring.  The in-gathering has been abundant.  Which is to say that these years spent encouraging the soil are bearing fruit.  Literally.  Of course, there is more to do.  Soil, after all, is a living thing that, like the rest of us, needs care and feeding and loving attention.  It is a partnership.  A reciprocity.  If we want good things to emerge from this garden we have to invest good things in exchange.  

 

Constantly.

Intentionally.

Intelligently.

Faithfully.

 

I ponder these things on this election eve, acknowledging that the same is true of democracy, community, culture.  Regardless of who prevails at the ballot box, there will be work to do.  There are fertile corners and bands in this American soil in which good things grow.  But there is heavy clay, as well, in which good seeds struggle to find purchase.  Erosion has taken a heavy toll on our life together, fecundity washed away by turbulent acrimony and the misguided presumption of permanence.  

And then, of course, there is the poison.  God, there has been so much poison spilled!   We have deluded ourselves into thinking it actually aided or protected or cleared the way for better things, but the evidence is increasingly clear.  Poison does what it always does:  it kills.  We have been denuded, defoliated, deadened.

 

Now remains what always remains:  the slow, determined rehabilitation of the soil.  The soil which is "us."

 

Whoever wins.

Whichever “side” prevails.

 

Compost.  Spades.  Determined will.  The sweat equity beneath anything of promise.  We have work to do.  

 

If we want anything nourishing to grow.  

One thing is certainly true:  we have plenty of accumulated manure piled around to help us get started.